Some convergence in recent reading has me thinking about politics and governance. Apt in the UK now (though whenever is it not?), although we feel very far away from anything even functional, let alone actually good that serves people at large.
Bit of a scrapbook post, this one, mostly collating interesting quotes.
# 3 Design Principles for Protopian Governance is a good read. Particularly:
Governance is the capacity of humans to weave their individual streams-of-action into coordinated wholes, so that actions form chains that are coordinated across time and space, in a manner increasing the likelihood of desirable results and decreasing the likelihood of undesirable results.
...
Governance includes the coordination of human communicative actions that determine which results are desirable and undesirable.
My friend, the philosopher Magnus Vinding, suggests in his new book, Reasoned Politics, that “politics” has two layers: a values layer (establishing what we want and why) and an empirical layer (establishing what is true about getting where we want, so as to inform policy and action). I think that works well: governance, in a comprehensive sense, is about coordinated actions, including establishing the values from which we govern and agree to be governed.
I also keep finding myself referring back to Hannah Nicklin's definition of politics (from Writing for Games):
This is a commonly used way to distinguish between ‘big P’ political systems (voting, writing to your representative in government, attending a rally) and ‘small p’ politics (the interplay of power and actions between people and communities).
(emphasis mine)
I think both of these throw into focus (for me, at least) how wonky and useless our definition of 'politics' tends to be. It tends to collapse primarily into the big-P version. Another definition I read somewhere once:
Politics is what we do to try to keep from killing one another.
This is one of the reasons it sounds so ridiculous when people accuse others of 'making something political' or 'bringing politics into games'. It just fundamentally misunderstands... well, a lot of things. But largely what politics is and is for and why it's not something undesirable.
The '3 Design Principles' post also touches on sortition, which James Bridle talks about in Ways of Being. That's the sort of thing that, in principle, gives me stronger hopes for the future. But I don't see a clear path of how we get from here to there. Another quote, this one from Bridle:
Any technological question at sufficient scale becomes one of politics.
And two other bites for you:
New Deep Narratives: we need new stories of what it means to be human
Why we need a public internet and how to get one
If this post has a point, and I'm not sure that it does: it's to keep thinking about and imagining alternatives to where we are, and to remember that our reality is not inevitable.