 Thank you everyone for joining us this evening. We especially appreciate it considering how damn nice the weather is outside. My name is Johnny. I'm from Opus independence, the social enterprise behind the festival of debate. This year's festival program started on the 13th of April and is in its current final days until the end of this week. This year includes over 70 events, 150 speakers and working with over 50 partners. The festival looks to explore the entangled ecological economic and political crises we collectively face. There are no easy answers. We hope that the festival creates a space to explore and hold complexity and uncertainty and brings together a community of people to make change where they are. All of you sat here or nearby. Most of our events, as you will know, are free at the point of access anything that we do events that we do need to charge for we attempt to keep prices as low as possible. If you would like to support the festival in your own position to do so you can do so at the festival of debate.com website where you probably found this event. We're going to run for about an hour and a half today. And if you aren't aware and haven't been to the showroom before where you came in through the double doors and saw the welcome desk. The toilet is actually around the back of that. There's just a door with a series of toilets disabled toilet there. No fire alarm planned. No national alert noise coming up on your phone. So if there is a noise that does mean something's probably wrong. Or as you came in, or there's another fire exit there. Someone will probably tell us if we need to go through that one because that means we have to walk through the whole of the workstation so probably that one. And if both of those are blocked, there is another third one hidden behind the curtains here as well so we can easily get out, but I will hand over to the stage for the wonderful evening that you're about to enjoy. Thank you so much. Thank you, Johnny. I don't know whether to stand up or to sit sit down here I don't know. Stand up why not. Thank you Johnny for the intro. Welcome to this my society event hybrid event, a better future mapping the journey to democracy 2043. I'm Zareno, I'm going to be your host for this evening. And in a moment I'll be introducing the wonderful panelists beside me. I wanted to welcome everybody here who's joined us in the showroom in Sheffield, and also to the audience online who everybody can actually see thanks to a screen that's behind us hello to the audience online amazing thank you for joining us on zoom. We are all here tonight to imagine a beautiful future, the democracy we could all be living things go right over the next couple of decades. And so let's try and keep our cynicism aside for one evening and dream a little. There'll be a couple of opportunities this afternoon for you all to contribute your thoughts and headlines from the future and questions and comments. So, listen to what we're about to say and maybe have a think about the democracy you'd all like to see in 20 years time. And Johnny's actually done some of the housekeeping for me and already which is brilliant. And we've already given out some programs in the room and they've been linked shared in the chat on the zoom with some information about tonight how you can comment through the link, which we'll explain later, and some information about the panelists tonight, and also how we're expecting everyone here to behave. Speaking of which, we're aware democracy is a topic close to many of our hearts, and we might all have different visions of a better future and a better tomorrow. But one thing that's not up for debate tonight is anyone's right to be. So to be themselves, to be respected and to be safe. So tonight's about positive visions of democracy 20 years from now and the steps we can take and going to need to take to get there. So I hope you'll take that to heart and help us make this a supportive and positive space for everyone. And soon I'll be handing over to our panel, but first I wanted to explain a little bit about what brought us here. So my society, the UK charity began in 2003, when a group of people started thinking seriously about how the internet could address the democratic problems of the time. And they built some services which you may know and may even have used, like theyworkforyou.com, which shows you what is happening in parliament, and whatdotheyknow.com, which lets people request information out of public institutions. So that was 2003. Twenty years later, we wanted to take a look at where we've come from and maybe where we should be headed. So tonight's event forms part of a year long program, our 20th anniversary year, in which we're gathering stories of democracy and civic power from the many diverse users of all of our services, from experts and friends of my society, and also from people like you who've turned up to this event. So we want input from you during this event and that's going to feed into the shape of my society in years to come. Questions like what could democracy look like in 20 years time and how might we better address the democratic problems of today and be more adaptable to the problems and opportunities of tomorrow. So joining us tonight to answer those questions are five fascinating panellists. Louise Crowe, she, her is the CEO of my society. She's been with the charity for almost 20 years, helping to build some of the UK's most well known digital democratic services and enabling tens of millions of citizens to engage with their representatives and institutions every year. Emma Gean, she, her is an author, artist and activist focused on creating a better and more empathetic world through the power of creativity. Over 2021 and 22, she was involved in the creation of the world's first community climate action plan co produced by disabled people for disabled people in Bristol. Joy Green, who's joining us via the medium of zoom on the stool on the stage, is a systemic futurist, previously principal futurist at the Forum for the Future. Joy is no stranger to applying visions of the future as a tool for meaningful systems change. She now works with organisations of all shapes and sizes to identify and navigate the strategic challenges on their horizon. Imi Kaur, she, her was a founding director of Impact Hub Birmingham, an amazing sort of town hall for the 21st century, and went on to co found Civic Square, which imagines and builds civic infrastructure for the neighbourhoods of the future. And finally, Dr Kim Foll, she brings a decades of experience working with a range of grassroots organisations and activist groups. Most recently as founder of Geeks for Social Change, a dynamic tech studio creating tools and processes for community liberation. So thank you very much everybody for joining me. And I think without further ado, probably on to Louise to kick us off with your vision of democracy. Right, here we go. So the first thing I want to say is that I think democracy is about more than just kind of voting every four or five years and whatever the latest political scandal is. I think there's quite a deep question here, which is the question of how are we in all our differences going to live together. And that's maybe the deepest question that we have as kind of shared question. So what we're doing here tonight is important. I think the second thing I would say is there's no such thing as perfect when you're talking about messy human systems. But I don't think we can afford to be complacent. As we heard in the intro, the next 20 years are going to be years of change, years of challenge. So we have to respond to the climate crisis and that's going to mean really changing our whole economy and moving away from fossil fuels. We can see today that we have rapid changes in the way countries relate to each other. We're going to need to respond to more of that. And at the same time, we've got problems like inequality that are going to last longer than an electoral cycle. So I think we're going to need a better democracy in 2043. I think we're actually going to need a better democracy to get to 2043 in good shape. So onto the shopping list. On my list would certainly be a kind of rich democracy where people participate. So at the moment we have quite a central political system in the UK, more central than anywhere else in Europe. I think a democracy where people feel involved and feel able to be part of decisions at all different levels would be a real improvement. It would feel more like something people are part of rather than something that gets done to them. I think that doesn't just have to happen through government or local government could be about schools, workplaces, unions, online spaces. So I'm a technologist, I'm particularly interested in how we make decisions together about what we want our online spaces to look like. Second thing, I think if you want that broad culture of everyone feeling like they can be part of decisions, you need to lower the barriers to entry. So second thing on my shopping list, I'm going to say is probably universal practical civic education. So we pride ourselves in being a kind of early democracy in the UK, but we're not very good at teaching people how to participate in that democracy. So if everybody coming out through school knew how to vote, where to vote, who they could vote for, how to decide who to vote for, how to get stuff fixed in their local community or changed. I think that would be a huge enabler over the course of 20 years of the kind of change that we want to see. I think it would also help with one of the problems. If you ask people today about how they feel about democracy, a big issue is having politicians that you can trust. And I think if you had broad civic education, you'd see more people going into politics from different backgrounds and with different life experience. And that would help with that question of trust as well. I think that's quite a difficult one because it's about appropriate trust. You don't want to trust politicians when they're not doing the right thing when they're not doing what they said they would do, or when they're actually breaking the rules. So you kind of need information to understand what's going on a level of transparency to understand what they're doing and a level of accountability sort of consequences if they do break the rules. On the other hand, if nobody trusts any politician, you can't get anything done that's completely corrosive. So I think there is an information problem there, but I think there's also a problem of our political culture. And I'm going to go controversial now early because this is a festival of debate. I think we need less debate, but I think instead we need more deliberation. So what the difference is to me debate is about two sides. One side gets to be right. The other side gets proved wrong. It's kind of winner takes all. I think deliberation is more about recognizing that we have things that we all agree on and trying to figure out what they are and come together in a spirit of actually solving common problems. Last thing I would say on my shopping list again coming back to my background as a technologist. We should be using digital tools to support all of this. One of the big questions for technology is what problems do you try to solve? And I think this question of how do we all live together? How do we make decisions? How do we include people? Is one of the most important questions we have? And so we should be using digital tools to answer that question. Amazing. Thank you very much. And for being on time as well. Fantastic. Already lots to think about there, but I'm going to move us on very quickly to our next speaker, Emma. Yeah, I was really happy when I heard that we were starting with visions because I think one of the problems that faces current democracy is a lack of one. In fact, I think there's kind of most of society suffers from this. I spent the last few years co-creating your community climate action plan by and for disabled people. And one of the most common things people told me in those conversations was your dreaming. And I understand this. It can be kind of painful to hope. And there's kind of an ease to giving into the story that nothing can change when your experience has been that things don't. And especially when modern storytelling tends to confuse like this idea of like darkness and selfishness with realism. But I think this is like a real problem when the stories we tell about the world and ourselves play a huge role in sort of shaping the possibilities of what those can be. So what stories should be told about and in in 2043. There isn't time to go into this particular idea fully, but I think John Alexander was right when he says we need to stop seeing ourselves as consumers and start thinking about ourselves as citizens and members of communities. So our democracy of 2043 people understand that their power and meaning comes from, you know, engaging the community mutual aid collective action, not what you do or don't buy. So going on to like broader society. I think all of the presenters from what I've heard in advance probably be talking a lot bad a lot but if the world continues on its current course then climate change and nature loss could mean that by 2043 we have societal collapse. I think there are lots of stories and ideas that are at this problem, but I think the main ones are narratives that the value different types of life, knowledge and people to allow them to be abused so that wealth can be created for a small group of people and growing increasingly smaller. So I think 2043 its core will value and careful all forms of life for a successful just transition. I've been thinking about this a lot lately as a part of a group of people from disadvantaged communities writing a just transition declaration for Bristol. So recently the terms become a bit of a business buzzword and it's even used by companies like Shell, but it has like radical roots in the union movement and working class back and black and ethnic minority communities. And I think our YouTube in future, these groups will have kept hold of the radical nature of the idea to challenge power. What we realized early on our work around this is that for transition and in case anybody sure what that kind of means it's like changing our lives and places so they're good for the planet. To be truly just can't be like a one size fits all 2043 isn't going to look homogenous all across the world. But it kind of will follow a set of principles and similar values. So to touch on the ones I think are most relevant. I think 2043 transition will have centered on the needs ideas and knowledge of disadvantaged groups in all of its work, instead of like a top down politics plans will be co created with communities and the people who most likely to be negatively impacted. I think this is going to communities also need to be supported and able to make their own plans and projects. And you know when transition is going to like change every part of our lives top down politics won't work. Everyone needs to be part of shaping the changes in their own circle of influence. So what top down power does need to do is make the big changes said acting ways are good for the planet are like the easy way for everyone. So instead of like punishing people for not taking the actions that are expensive difficult or even possible for them which is often the case right now. And I think also that kind of big picture work as well as that will leave people to work on themselves. So we come from an unjust society and that leaves its mark on all of us. So I think a healthier democracy means you're all going to have to work on that unfairness in our thinking in action. But finally coming back to the beginning. We have a vision. I think current British democracy sort of offers us a choice between one party that's sort of trading on the narrative of fear and another that sets their identity on being a little less bad than the other one. So working on this I did you can't be attacked for you stand for if you don't actually stand for anything. But what if the stories we tell about ourselves are kind of shape who we are and what is having no story make us. So to survive the coming decades we're going to really need powerful visions as the awful ago in said hard times are coming when we've been wanting voices you can see alternatives how we live now we live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable but then so did the divine right of Kings. So perhaps the people I talked to for my project work wrong. I was being a dreamer. But if society is cut to survive the coming decades. And I think we all need to start dreaming. I love that idea. Thank you very much Emma more dreaming, which which is a perfect way of handing to our next speaker who's joy in the in the thing we'll just turn on the speaker so we can actually hear joy. Over to you what's your what was your vision for 2043 be great well I can hear myself on on on the thing but that's all right. So really glad to hear what the others have said because I would definitely agree with everything that's been said so far. And I mean so thinking about 2043 so as a futurist or do a lot of thinking about sort of trends and the rest of it and it's really clear we need the democracy enjoy we've lost your audio in the room. Volumes gone down maybe. Can you hear me. Yeah we can now yeah sorry about that. Okay. Yeah so we're going to need a democracy that is really resilient that can deal well and fairly with stresses shocks and the unknown because you know that is what we're looking at happening over the next couple of decades. We need to be really skilled in repair and regeneration and thriving and challenging circumstances and our democracy as a support us in that. I mean I quite often use this metaphor that the next couple of decades, they're going to feel a bit like white water rapids. And we've had these sharpening crises from in the climate and ecology, and also the structure from tech, you already seen that come in that's probably going to accelerate. And the old sort of socialized business that we have now is a bit like one of those old kind of missus to be riverboats you know gigantic paddle steamer with a captain and small crew and lots of passengers. And that's really great for calm waters, but it's really not great for rapids, you know you need something much more responsive but it's nimble, locally directed, more like a few kiosks or rafts that can navigate together down the river, but can also respond really definitely and quickly to localize rocks and eddies without the send a message captain you can you can actually don't need them like management. And you can actually solve problems locally. And so that would translate to real participation, so not just, you know that you get to vote every couple of years but actually, you get to make decisions you get to actually decide where the budget goes. You know we really have experiments in this really budgeting and decision making in many places like against Barcelona, Puerto Allegro. And so these these examples already exist we do know how to do this, actually. And that we need is not just having the tools, but they need to be accessible. And the political culture itself I'd love to see it be pluralist and interested in actually in bridging divides and finding what people have in common at the moment you know it's, you know we have an intentionally intentionally in the political culture, but it is possible to have to use tech do this in Taiwan they have a platform that helps divergent views, understand each other come to common solutions and so like that that's a different route that I'd like to really see in our democracy. There's a much better representation at higher and national levels. You know using methods like sortition. I think that the assemblies actually reflect the population reflect the diversity of views. And, and also, the recognition that democracy is relational. And it really is a center life, and the needs of people and planets. I really love to see in 20 years time actual representation of them more than human in our democracy. That means representatives speak to the needs of the trees, the rivers, ecosystems, actually in the heart of our decision making, not just objects and telling because really, really need for this to be healthy and clean we need insects and birds we need, you know we need this stuff to be recovering. And so in that needs to be actually integrated into our decision making properly. But also, the human relationships in democracy needs to be recognized because people really need connection and meaning that was a big lesson for me from the pandemic I think for all of us that like we need connection we need to be connected and we need to be atomized actually stunts an important part of being human we need to feel heard need to feel part of something bigger, healthy collective action is something that really is invigorating. And so I'd really like to see this kind of this more felt and an emotional side of democracy recognized and grounded and integrated. And I think it's actually a blind spot that is often exploited and weaponized, quite frankly, but it doesn't have to be like that, like we can actually recognize that like you know the feeling side is an important part of democracy. And that means that the way that that we use technology. It's going to be really enabling and not overwhelming. So there's something around. I'd like to see if using technology and a really human centered for in 2043. Because of the tendency when powerful technology comes in to make people adjust themselves to the technology, rather than have the tool to serve the people. And I really like to see that actually, you know, things like AI that we see coming in that we have to adjust ourselves. We have to sorry artists you can't you know you just can't make money anymore from your from your art. Because again, people are expecting us to adjust to the technology that shouldn't be that's actually it should be serving us, not the other way around and there's something really interesting around the accountability and oversight of powerful technology. And what happens when it fails it should fail gracefully so I think I really see resilient democracy that use technology wisely in a human centered way and and and and also if the technology, you know, can it also work in analog, if it really has to. Because you might have situations where you know we won't have to suddenly go, you know, the systems are down, can we still run things in analog. So I'd like to see that in 2043. I'm over time. I don't want to stop there but there's one last metaphor very quickly. That's the natural world democracy can also be thought of as a patchwork of forest garden, which are very biodiverse. They're not manicured that they're messy, but they can cope with these they can cope with shocks because you have a strong you know my feeling lots of seeds from the plants and so that needs, you know, quick regrowth and regeneration even when something like forest fire, you get regeneration and repair and I like how democracy to be more like that. Really brilliant. Thank you very much, Joy. I love the idea of democracy as like a biodiverse ecosystem itself. Over to me next I think what's your vision for democracy in 2043. Thank you very much. Thanks to all the other speakers as well for their thoughts. I guess like I want to start by saying I am an incredibly hopeful person. It might not sound it from what I'm about to say, but what I'm about to say is in the spirit of what I think helps me to build up that muscle of hope. One of the key strands of our work at Civic Square is the dream matter, the imagination, the ability to work way beyond the systems that we currently are working. So I promise you I'm not trying to break the rules of the event. I'm really interested in when we think about, like so we're talking about and we're talking about climate breakdown and ecological crises and social and political crises and like it's coming off the tongues of everyone now isn't it? Like there's probably not an event you can go to in the social sector or not just like throwing these these things around or like really actively also working on them. But I was just I thought I'd start with a little moment when I think about like what democracy might look like in 2043. I'm just looking at the likes of the IPCC or the CCC, which is a climate change committee, the independent body that gives advice to the government that doesn't listen. And they said that themselves just to be clear. But recently they they do like an annual report right and every year they say how our preparedness since they've started this process has improved or hasn't. And the 2023 report had like 63 major risks to the UK over the next 20 years with eight that we absolutely have to deal with like very quickly. And I'm just going to give you a sense of what these are because I think it's like quite important to like dig in. And this is without even going into the IPCC right so you can imagine this still comes from like a fairly self involved colonial perspective like the risks to the UK. And it talks about I won't go into detail of all of them but I do in a couple. The top eight that we should deal with like in the next two years involve the risk to freshwater habitats, the soil health, and that's everything you can think about that comes with soil health risk to our natural carbon stores, our crops, our livestock, our trees, risk to the supply of food, goods and vital services, climate related collapse of supply chains, failure to the power system for both people and the economy, risks to human health while being productivity due to a number of factors including increased risk of exposure to heat and homes, flash floods, droughts, water shortages, food shortages, air quality, noise pollution, multiple risks to the UK from climate change impact overseas, read all the kind of things into that last one that you'd like to. And so, like when we're talking about some of this right we're talking and that's without even going into a planetary and global perspective and all that the IPCC tell us. We're talking about some like really fundamental like crises right and I think other speakers have spoken to it. We're talking about civil unrest, we're talking about many acts of self termination of a very particular drive to horde wealth and resource, we're talking about resourcefuls, we're talking about material shortages, we're talking about all sorts of different things. So, within that frame, there's not many things that you could say, hey well we've been through this all before, so we know exactly what to do. We could pick on things, we could pick on global south populations who have had lives destroyed, you could look at partition, you could look at the transatlantic slave trade, you could look at the way worlds were rebuilt and how world building happened within that. You could look at things like the war in the UK right, like an imperial example and how we rebuilt after that. And I guess for me one of the critical things I'm really interested in when we talk about democracy and what that might look like in this moment is taking an example of what for example the community libraries were to the industrial shift from a more technical economy to a more industrial economy to a more industrial economy. A more technical one or from a rebuilding of the country right. When we built the NHS we had this like national vision, you could say like we know there's a national legislative vision and we need to do all these things. We then invested in infrastructure and we built a stack of infrastructure which did all sorts of things. But it was a big imaginative question, what if people had access to health, create point of need rather than whether they could pay. 30 or 40 years before that we were talking about this, oh please finish, okay, I'll just finish this sentence then. 30 or 40 years before this happened we were really talking about the Treadgar Medical Aid Society and others were showing examples of a world completely like one we couldn't imagine in 20, 30 years later for a number of different things we ended up seeing the NHS. When we built the NHS we built a full stack of things like I said but we built the neighbourhood GP, we built the democratic access to knowledge, tools, health at the neighbourhood scale so that people could at an unprecedented scale participate in the societal transition. So they could rebuild the country, rebuild the economy and productivity and so when I think of democracy I think of the power to create the agency, literacy, access to knowledge, tools and spaces to do that and I think within that lots of things are true, all sorts of positive visions and tech and all sorts of things but the scale of change, crisis and transition that is coming will require a scale of democratising the access to participate in that, in a scale we've not yet understood. And I think that is going to be so critical because pragmatically you pick any challenge retrofit, we can't do it, we haven't got the material budgets, we can't do it fast enough, we won't be able to move quick enough, we're too centralised. And so from our high streets to all over the place we are going to have to democratise the access to those things and I think if we do that well then I think in 2043 all over we will start to see a thriving participatory and perhaps a democracy that has been able to ever absolutely utter crisis as well. Brilliant, thank you very much. I can already tell we would happily feel like multiple evenings with these discussions but I wanted to try and get at least five minutes from everybody and then we'll have a chance to get something from the audience and then another chat and then some back and forth. But finally Kim, your vision of democracy in 2043. Hello, so yeah I kind of asked to go last because I'm coming at this from a slightly different perspective. So just a little bit of background for me. I think a lot of what I do now with my studio Geeks of Social Change is based on sort of the life I've had to here. So I really kind of like grew up in this activist movement in Leeds, Nottingham Manchester around kind of movements like queer mutiny and lady fast and then being involved in like climate protest and kind of living in this sort of radical participatory world that was great in some ways and awful in other ways but basically was this very sort of DIY aesthetic, DIY culture where you just kind of got on with doing things and having a nice time. And then on the side of that at the time I also just did websites with small groups and I went off to the PhD and then at the end of it I was I kind of came out of that with sort of a real understanding of these three completely different spheres being kind of academia what's going on the ground in in kind of community land and also like in kind of the tech world and I think that's let me see a lot of the intersections that aren't always kind of obvious to people. So I think, you know, I grew up under first the Tories and then you labor pretty soon after I grew up under section 28, which I think messed up a lot of my life in many ways. I think I think if you asked me most of my life I kind of would have said I was a socialist. But these last few years I really just sort of started to find the concept of the state itself and what it represents a really difficult concept. So I think for me democracy is one of those words that it kind of sounds good. But it's kind of vague in this real way that neoliberalism has where we'll find these really vague concepts that haven't got clear edges and put them there and make them sound good. And now we have all these things that are kind of like, you know, the democracy sector or this or that and I never really know what people are talking about. And I think it's easy to say that, you know, our democracy is going to be better. But what if what we actually have now is working exactly as intended as a way to kind of like pacify people and to act in this kind of counter-revolutionary way that's constantly shutting down this kind of like radical tradition that exists if there aren't sort of systems in the state kind of oppressing it. I mean a real example of this recently has been, you know, the government's putting through lots of really ridiculous anti-trans legislation. And then there's like a petition that was going around asking them please can they not. And I think this thing to me is so frustrating and it sort of still shows this belief that fundamentally the state can be transformed in something liberatory. And I think especially anyone who's ever dealt with the public sector for any length of time, there's always this sense that, oh yeah, change that will be in six to 18 months. We've got a project plan. We've just got a new officer. We've just got a new strategy. It's got these far overarching things. And after working for 20 years and hearing this for about the tenth time now, I'm just convinced it's never coming. And if there was change, it will be now. So like, you know, I've done, did I miss a sign or are you just, okay. So, you know, an example of a real neighborhood project I did. We did this project called Tapas TV dinners with a local community pub. And it just came around because we had these really strong ties. But essentially like I knew how to make a database. They had a kitchen that wasn't being used. They had lots of customers who needed food. There was a local community project that was like gleaning food that was going on pick from farms. And in the space of like a couple of months we got it together to deliver free meals to people locally. At the start we were promised some funding from the council and housing association. So we started making huge plans and then after a while it just turned out that this wasn't going to be a thing. They weren't going to give us any money. They were going to be really rude about it. But you know that that scheme is probably now delivered about 10,000 meals to people's doors and still not had a penny of public funding. And at some point you just start to realize like maybe there is no good counter and perhaps like if we just didn't have this from the start we'd be in a better situation. So I think a lot of people on this panel actually has spoken about the power of mutual aid networks. But I think for me there's something really key to this which is like categorically different from the rest which is mutual aid is a refusal to be governed. And I think there's always kind of this idea that what we need is sort of like a structure to kind of tell us what to do or to manage or to be involved in or to kind of make decisions with. And I think fundamentally this comes down to, which I think is quite tangible to do on the groundwork, the difference in people are actually doing things and then the people who want to manage you doing the thing, right? So for me fundamentally I am really not interested in these kind of EDI, Equality, Diversity and Inclusion things anymore really. I think they're fine. I think there's place for plurality of tactics here. But I think fundamentally a lot of these schemes are about institutionalizing people into systems which aren't designed for them. They're not designed to do good things. They're designed to oppress people and keep them down. And I think at the start you were saying we need to reduce the barriers to entry and I'm like the barriers to entry of what? And I'm always coming at this from the other way around where I think there is just this work on the ground. People do look after themselves in their communities and actually we need to make more space for that and make more space to kind of build this friendship between us. I'm going to skip that card, but basically there's a really good book about this called Joyful Militancy which I suggest everyone reads and I'll just give you a quick quote from it. And they say, Joyful Militancy is a fierce commitment to emergent forms of life in the cracks of empire and the values, responsibilities and questions that sustain them. And they've written a whole book about this but I think this is really important. Like the work that I'm always doing that makes the most difference is in a crack. Sometimes it's illegal, sometimes it's unlawful, sometimes you're just being told no. And it's that area that I root most of my stuff so I just think that's fundamentally incompatible with the way democracy works now. Thank you. Amazing. Thank you very much. I can't even attempt to summarize that we've had like Joyful Militancy and democracy as a self healing ecosystem and all sorts. I think it's probably time to get some thoughts from the audience in person and on Zoom. And we wanted to ask you a question, a technique we sometimes use is this kind of headlines from the future. Like what, you wake up in 2043, 20 years into the future and you turn on the news, what headline would make you realize that you're now living in an improved democracy. And if you want to contribute some ideas for headlines, we're going to give people some time to think about this and feel free to have a chat with the people who are sat next to you. Or maybe it looks like there's already been loads of chat in the Zoom on the side. But there's a thing we're using called Slido and you can take a shot of the QR code or just go to slido.com and enter that numeric code to be able to get in. And my colleagues are sharing the link in the chat on Zoom as well. And feel free to submit a couple of ideas like what sort of headlines and we'll go through a couple of them and maybe that might inspire some of the thoughts from the panellists to how we might reach those kind of headlines. What would signal to you that you're now living in an improved democracy? We'll give you about five minutes to have a think about it. And if anybody can't get the Slido working or would rather write on pen and paper, we can sort that out for you as well. Five minutes starting about now, maybe with some plinky plonky music in the background to aid our thinking. So what if there's no TV and no news? How would that feel? It's from the side of the stage that there have been many ideas on the Slido. So maybe we should switch to Slido and have a look at which headlines people have been suggesting. We'll go through a few of them. What have we got here? Feel free for the people on the stage to point out any particularly like, I like Yorkshire People's Assembly devolves power to communities. I think it would be interesting. Maybe a question for later is how we're actually going to reach some of these. So it would be interesting to know how something like that could work. What else have we got? We made it. Parliament announces last recess as Citizen Tech takes over. Interesting. A piece in the Gaza Strip. Okay. Fabulous. Lovely. Can we scroll down? What are some of the... Let's go back. Can you scroll down? I love how many people just want the railways to work. Please. And you weren't even on the My Society WhatsApp group that was complaining about all the trains getting hit. It nearly didn't all make it. This is our 20 year goal. Communities and citizens are taking back power from their government to corporations through influencing policies and practices in the UK. This is a very long headline, but I quite like it. It's not the sun. It's not the sun. Amazing. And community, world and people are the most common words that have come up in everybody's contributions, which is really interesting. Maybe we'll come back to those or new ideas. Oh, more nationalization. Why stuff at the trains? Let's go for water and electricity. We'll probably come back to those in the Q&A in a moment. I'm kind of interested. So we've heard from the panel some of these visions of maybe what democracy could look like in 20 years. We've had some of your headlines. Thank you, everybody online in the room for supplying those. I guess the question is, if those are our visions of the future, what needs to happen now to make those possible? What are the steps, if we're on this white water raft, as Joy was saying, what are the bumps in the road and the rocks in the path that we're going to have to navigate around? And how do we do that? Over to our speakers again, maybe starting with Kim. Sure. I was actually going to pick up on the tech thing because I run a tech studio, but I hate tech and almost everyone who works in tech hates tech. Maybe you don't, but I think technology, the etymology of it, is something like, I always forget exactly, but it's like systemic treatment of an art practice or technique. So actually what technology is about is about systemizing something. And usually what that means in practice is making some things easier and some things harder, right? So I think people, when they think of tech, they tend to think of an app on their phone, but actually like it's something much, much longer and more, it's a sort of the arc of history really is like these things that have been made easier. And right now, the people with the power to make things easier are like big tech rights of these big five tech companies. And the things that they've made easy are basically, you know, increasing surveillance, increasing monopoly, these kind of big data hubs. And now we're at the point where we've got, you know, chat GPTs on everyone's. I'm kind of a bit sick of talking about it, but I can't resist as everyone else does. It's kind of like that without going into details, it's only tech that can be built by these big five companies with the massive computing power. And so I think for me, like a lot of the work we do is just trying to get people to imagine what they want to be a bit easier, right? So some of the things we're working on, it's like, what does it mean? What would it look like to live in a neighborhood where you feel able to talk to your immediate neighbors, where you feel able to see a bit of like scrubby brownfield site and take it over, where you feel able to set up a community food program, right? I think we've all the places where that's felt possible. Usually like more in a city kind of from where I am. And then we've all the places where that feels impossible, usually like where your parents live. And you know, I'm from like Tory suburbia. So, and I think there's a real feeling that sometimes you live in a place that has that energy. And I'm really interested how we kind of like get to that and how we make people feel able to take action and come together. Because I think fundamentally what the internet has made it very easy to do is meet people with the exact same super hyper niche interest as you. And perhaps this event is part of that, right? Like we're all democracy nerds, we're all here because we think that's kind of cool. But actually like I barely talked to my neighbors and I think this massive centralization of tech has meant that the local has really suffered and we need to get back to talking to people who we just live near in a way that's not this out, lives outside of this system. So I don't know if I really answered the question, but I just wanted to speak to tech a bit because it's like, when I say tech, I think it's always good to think about what is it we're trying to make easier here, you know? Yeah, I'm sure Amy is going to have some thoughts on on neighborhoods and people talking to the people who live near them. Maybe over to you, Amy. Yeah, so I think building on what I was saying, I think the scale of the home street and neighborhood is going to be really critical. And I think it's important to understand that in an interdependent way to communities like I'm part of so many communities. And when I sometimes wonder when people say, you know what we need to do, we need to get out to communities and I'm like, are you part of a community? Like I get where they have their role. I get how they use like interdependently with people excluded from the dominant system, we need to get there. But I think that what I'm interested in this space of what we've learned from the pandemic and what we've known is a critical part of this is that home street and neighborhood layer. And not to infantilize it as a layer that just does the participation of like picking up the litter or sweeping the snow or reducing isolation. All incredibly important things, but infantilizes the role of that layer as if there's just going to be palliative care, right? Whilst the big important people somewhere, I don't know where this somewhere is, is deals with the bigger challenges. And I think you start to see this future all over the place. We codify it into three types of work when we talk about we need plurality, we're going to need everything. Well, we are kind of going to need lots of things, but we aren't going to need anything, everything. We are going to need to hospice old ideas, break down things that no mat no longer are fit for purpose and compost them and we can think of loads of great analogies for that. But we sort of codify it into three layers of work, which we talk about as matters, types of work, the dark, the dream and the everyday. The dark matter is the systems, rules, codes, norms under the surface that drive everything. Dark Matter Labs and many others and the River Don project here is a good example, like dealing with that. Land ownership, stewardship, the land contract, finance, governance, rules, codes, norms, contracts, the stuff under the surface that drives everything. The reason why you can't just get a unit on your high street and start doing something. And if you do, after two years, a landlord will take it back and say, hey, thanks for increasing the value of everything. Can you get none of that value back? Move on, right? Thanks for making it cool for the big guns to come in. The stuff under the surface that when you're like, why can't I take over that piece of land? Why can't I? Why can't I? Why can't I? There's a lot of people doing this work really, really well and tech is a huge part of how we democratise the tools. An example, Open Systems Lab, Plan X, all about transforming the planning system to be more fit for purpose. Then we talk about the dream matter, the imagination, the ability to cultivate that radical imagination to be able to imagine futures way beyond the ones and the paradigms that we're currently in. That's a particularly important one for the economic system, being able to imagine stories beyond growth and what they might look like when the existing one has such a tight hold on us, even the most radical of us have to participate in it. And then the everyday, which is how that manifests in the everyday. And so I would say that there are examples of this now coming all over the place where people are demonstrating those futures in Sheffield. You've got loads of them. People start from different places. I'll name check a few things that I think you should go and check out. The River Don project is a really cool idea about looking at the rights of nature and what we and you guys are doing that here. So I don't need to tell you about that. Somebody else can. Things like We Can Make in Bristol that took small sites, looked at community land trusts, used modern methods of construction and a micro factory in the neighbourhood and people who were in overcrowded houses and on council waiting lists utilised small sites in their existing neighbourhood, built their own homes, designed them and now they've created the tech platform for this, the patterns for this. The technologies for this, the policy recommendations. So these demonstrations of the future all over the place. And I've put some things at the front that you can take back to show you a little bit more about how much is going on. And I love this piece because the Good News of B16 is a paper where we got people to imagine their headlines in the neighbourhood and how we might get there. So yeah, I just think like really think about that scale and orientate towards the projects that are working in those different layers and in feeling embracing that complexity and being liberated by the scale of what we need to do. Thank you very much, Jimmy. Joy, could I come to you next maybe any further thoughts on how we actually achieve some of the things the panel and yourself have been talking about? Yeah, and again, I'm really interested and glad to hear what you guys have been talking about and that really fits with what I've been talking about too. And I think there's something interesting around the different shifts that are needed. Some are happening quickly and some actually take a bit longer and there's something interesting around the shift of political culture that you need. So if you're going to get to a very radically different participatory future, at the moment I'd say maybe about 10 or 5% of the population in the UK are probably ready for that future. And the rest, we're going to put it as a forum, giving people different ideas about what the future of that is going to be. A lot of people like the idea of living in the morning Singapore type of society where things are done for them and they can sort of be consulted. If you want to shift to a much more participatory culture, you need time for people to be able to shift into that space of capacity to actually do it. And I think there's something around, that's probably a generational shift. I don't expect it to happen overnight, but you would start actually with getting that relationship going now with the young in schools because young people naturally actually do that that sort of that energy of like wanting to get things done wanting to do stuff that is a very young energy. And that's how you get people used to it because otherwise the people come to it later in life. It's, it's a burden, people are like what you want me to like make the decisions can't someone else do that. And so, so there's something about how do you build up the engagement muscles that actually we can use them collectively, because at the moment most of our muscles are actually quite tiny in that respect. But I think also, you are seeing an era that have made it work I think it's like Gents and Taiwan and Barcelona, they have found ways to get more people involved and they have a lot of really useful lessons to learn from in terms of like any family to get all people involved. The different strategies you have to bring in so I think it's something really important about looking at what is already working in the experiments are going well, and bringing more of that here in the and also in the UK actually stuff is happening here. I think that's really been outlined so they're learning from what is happening. And, and, but, but, but not sort of expecting it to change overnight it's like how do you build in the kind of like the long game, basically. And there's nothing around the culture that that also requires a culture that has more time for life. That's rat race business, much more grounding in the local this sort of keeps coming around, and people do want this. And it was like there were those polls in the pandemic people really, really quite amazing polls, he was saying a one equality, I think one of the local connection, people having this sense of relief of not having to sort of like live a crazy life. You know, until actually like you know then we went, we had too much of like just being with us in our room because you saw me the connection but there's something around. How do you bring in. And again, it's the racist ideas around you know we can't live in an exponential growth world. So, how do you have a participation participation democracy that still maintains the elements of represents democracy that work well something's had to happen someone said, you do need some stuff to happen at the higher level that you know that you need you need all those levels working and integrated and so that that is a long term project, but also getting representation at those levels is a long term project. And then with the technology, I think just just to mention I know I hate to much activity as well, but, but it is really important to manage this transition. Well, and to make sure it's human centered because I think there's something around. People say we should democratize it through open sourcing, but given the power and a bleakness of this technology. It's not that answer is is too simple, but we need we need a much more complex answers that that's that question is not as simple as an open source that you have to think about it more deeply. But it is crucial, but it doesn't just sit in the hands and give a few unaccountable companies, you know that that does come on we can't allow that to happen, and we have to really get on onto the question. And also around how what technology does to to relationships and how that enables a relational. So we talked before about the platforms that help their version reason to understand each other, and tools to support empathy and connection. It's really interesting work with AI systems using it to communicate with animals and deep understanding that systems that source obviously you know all really helpful. It's something I think important to be aware of with regards to like emotional AI that we're seeing coming in very fast. I think that's something we need to be really careful of in a democracy because that is fundamentally very open to minute views. Because you know what the AI doesn't feel just simulate it's fundamentally can make psychopathic. It's something around being careful how we use emotional AI and getting and getting ahead of that now, before it gets entangled into everything and entangled in our demographic processes. And so, I just, I want to say just as a closing up that I think that all places at my society have a really, really important role in this transition right now, actually, that creating and holding this human centered, truly possible path through a community centered approach that could also hold the tech and make it practically possible because otherwise, you know, there is a risk we just get the Silicon Valley. You know, all those aversion comes in and instead of your beautiful post ecosystem, you get like, it's a big automated, you know, like a factory farm instead. Amazing. Thank you very much, Joy. Emma, perhaps. Yeah, I think a lot of what I'd have to say is kind of repeating what other people said so I won't kind of go on too long, but I think just kind of adding to all of that. Very much agree with I don't think there's like one solution I think it's going to take working on every different level. So that's from kind of like traditional politics. Kind of working on kind of just a more inclusive democracy breaking down barriers I mean just talking from perspective of my own community only five MPs currently identified disabled so that's 0.2% to incentive the population of disabled people you know what's going on there. And I think kind of breaking down there's kind of barriers going to take kind of coalitions of this is one two streets working together of just kind of joining up how all of these different kind of systemic injustices and climate change are all connected and instead of working these pockets trying to work out how we can pull resources and sort of change the system as a kind of collective. We talked a lot about community. I guess I want to sort of add to that I think just the power of stories we tell about changing all this in terms of what what is possible is often kind of defined by kind of what what we believe could be possible or what stories we tell about things and I always find that that start of that the pandemic period was really interesting in terms of like how much how much infusion than there was just every corner about wanting to work in this way I wanted to care for the community. And I always I always find Rebecca so in its book, a paradise but and help help really powerful about. So what Rebecca talks about actually if you look at what happens after disaster. It's not the kind of Hollywood story of like you know, humans tearing each other apart or like you know steam from each other looting or raping. Actually, there's this kind of weird sense of joy and connection and meaning that kind of comes and people joining together afterwards and actually that's where you get the kind of mutual care and that kind of thing. So what almost like so this, you had that weird period is emerging with the pandemic and then the kind of stories that the kind of coming from down from the government to shut that down and kind of like. So I think there's this a real power of the stories we tell about ourselves and our possibilities for kind of opening this and making all of what's possible come to life. And I guess finally I wanted to say kind of I think kind of touching on what you were talking about kind of like the legality and law breaking stuff I think there's like a huge potential for protest here and like you know, everything that we have in democracy that we value kind of came from breaking the law at first. And I think I, you know, there's all sorts of concerns around the new protest laws. I think there's an amulet of like, all this is going to happen, partly through pop down, going through the edition roots also just people just going out and doing it. You know, I think there's an awful lot. We need a lot more as well as the kind of no protest that we get from groups like sort of XR but like a kind of yes protest of people starting to create that future and realizing that we can just go and do it. Fantastic. I like that. Thank you for finding us out maybe Louise, a difficult, a difficult question to find answers to possible job. I think this has been a fantastic discussion because we've spanned evolution to revolution and when I was thinking about what is going to stop us from getting to where we need to go and I agree with the other panelists it's got to happen lots of different levels. It's an experimental culture of trying things seeing what works we see the seeds of where we need to go in the present and it's things like considering broadening out how we make decisions who gets to be included. I think that's an applied throw in joys already thrown in a load of really interesting ones is the Commission for Future Generations in Wales a very institutional approach but say actually citizens of the future get to be considered along with citizens of the present so all of those kind of indications of where we need to go. I had my final point I think the thing that stops us is when power can't tolerate protests so the history of evolution and revolution of decision making has always been of challenges coming from outside the system in whatever form and a system that can't tolerate descent from power can't evolve. I think we need a little bit of that kind of friction and get the evolution and the revolution going together. I can see Kim you want to ask a question. I was just going to say we'll we'll pass to the audience and take some questions as well from online and but maybe you can start us off if you were about to come back on that point. Yeah, I guess I was just going to take an opportunity to say D for the police. Given there's a chance. But yeah, I'll give you a great example right like where I live in Manchester which is the second most deprived of authority in the country. They did a huge they got they've got this new chief inspector and he says that there's no systemic racism anywhere and the rainbow laces threatened officers impartiality he's awful. They love him so much that they got did a 10 pound per household council tax raise is supposedly a one off percept. It's just bonkers and they did a public vote on their consultancy platform and 80% voted against it and they did it anyway, and they and they're renewing it so now basically like every household in Manchester is funding more police in an area that's just got some of the most, you know, like Moss side next to where I live 50% of kids that live in poverty. And all I can think of when I see that amount is if they can so easily raise money for more cops. Like, if I can think of a million uses that will go to better and especially in somewhere that's been abandoned so much by central government so I think like it is all linked and it is like they are the people there to stop you doing things physically you find that out depends how close you kind of get to this edge I think whether it's through bureaucracy, or through someone physically with, you know, a truncheon, or whether it's through your, you know, money or some other means there's so many ways the State House to kind of stop you from acting so yeah. Yeah. Thank you. We're doing a weird dance with all the microphones here so we've got a roaming Mike now who's able to to go out into the audience, but I know there's been a lot of questions in the zoom chat I don't know whether any comments or questions immediately that we wanted to pick up or anybody got any comments or questions in the audience. All right, any, any thoughts from the people in the room at the moment as to what you've heard or any things that you would like to see in 2043 that haven't been mentioned. I can see a question here. Hi. Hi. Thanks for this it's been good. Thank you, all of you. I really enjoy all the concepts we've talked about today and I agree with most of them particularly the more distributed democratic functions the neighborhood role of that the critical Commons piece. And I could even imagine the kind of interface between them that kind of makes sense. I can almost see the coherence piece I guess the thing that I've not heard mentioned today which I'm interested to hear responses about are are really around the kind of abolition of states as a concept that perhaps might be necessary if we're going to progress democratic democracy forward. In fact actually I'll just stop there so I'm interested in that concept and how you see that. Interesting conversation I know from like a tech history perspective like the idea of cyberspace as like the alternate place for this kind of and it hasn't really worked out like that I don't think I think we've, we still. Oh yeah. Any thoughts from the panel on the role of states and. Yeah, I'm against them. I can speak to that. Also, I in the work that we've been doing with new economic thinking I think like the real critical intersection between the people planet ecological social story is this is this space that there is no. When I talk about layers like the home street and neighborhood or the city or the region or the nation state these are like constructs we have created that do that are in complete kind of contradiction to how our interdependence and I need to move resources with the impact we've had and you could go back over history over and over again and look at the way in which the construct of those layers has created particularly created severe impact right like and we can go back to the most recent history of that of British colonization but you can go over over over in history and look at the impact of a lot of that and and so like I have like two views I work really closely with. I work with a localization called dark matter labs which which really look at what the planetary futures look like right which are is that ability to imagine worlds beyond the one we're currently in and simultaneously of which the construct of the nation state is very very different right and arguably needs to move in a completely different direction and then I look at what's happening right now and I think that it's really interesting if I'm honest that the fewer or is towards. The fascist decisions that are being made by this government are we're really kind of reactionary to what's happening, but I think that this is absolutely the first signs that this country understands what is coming with. The climate and ecological crisis and the impact it's had on the rest of the world because it is starting to close down and make things impossible in as many ways as possible is putting up its walls. And so this is weird thing right when people talk about like all of that's being ignored but I think a lot of this is is a repeat or a rerun or a 2020 version of entrenching the nation state entrenching that protectionist isolationist colonial resource war thing except it also isn't going to work in the same way now right. And so at the heart of it because of because of that planetary independence because of resources because of so much else. And so I'm just going to leave it there, which is that this is why I think that there's a layer of some of this that we have to engage in that is quite different to one that is like hope not rooted in like. Shit what's happening and that's if that's only 20 years away, like what battles are we fighting and how because history is about to repeat itself. But but at a scale that we can't imagine because it's the not same sort of challenges so I'm just going to put that there because I think, you know, these are the sorts of challenges that we need to be opening up these conversations about more quickly. And they are rooted not necessarily in just immediate hope they're actually rooted in like, oh shit why is why is a lot of this happening. And what are we, what are we in and what we can fix it in as well. I think Joey would like to come in on this one as well. Yeah, joy. Have you got a point hold on let us turn you on in a second. There we go. Yeah, and I think it's a really interesting question in terms of the sort of what happens if the state is there with the state is absent. Because you've just seen where people, I don't have people never know what's happening in northern Syria so there was, you know, horrendous civil war in Syria, effectively the north of the country is stateless. But the Kurds have been doing very interesting things in that stateless space. And they've been conducting basically experiments in eco feminist anarchism that's called municipalism and they're doing a pretty good job of it really actually today. So you can get in very devastated. I think that's the point about sort of a record illness thing about, you know, it's not that when you have the category that everyone starts, you know, trying to eat each other's children, the opposite often happens. If enough if the right conditions are in place I think it's something interesting also about what are the ideas are lying around when there's a crisis, because they're the ones that tend to get picked up and run with as well so that being strategic in terms of what ideas we want lying around. If we do encounter a crisis here in the UK, what we want people to be able to sort of like start working with there is there isn't talk out there, but for using minutes to build, you know, really actually be able to start these in very tough circumstances. There's something around isn't that you can do this without a state. But if you do have a state, like the state does bring, you know, when you're young the state is this whole type of thing but when you're old have a family, the state will say it's very useful so there's something around how do we, you know, if you can work with the state on the whole I think that's probably more resilient. There are ways to do it without the state. Yes, and that's exactly that the redone model is based on the work of Murray Bookchin, but also, people in, in, in Europe, so in Barcelona, they are taken with this means of this approach and bring it to the city level so you can also start to bring it at the city level and use it there without having to have a revolution. And that's another way that can come in is sort of like at the local level and then spread out from there. So I think that's something interesting about, you know, there's not, there's not a binary. Great. Thanks, Joy. We've got a question from online. Yeah, from Owen, who says he'd like to ask all the panel, what makes you the most optimistic that we can reach positive change. I think we've already heard a few examples of like where this sort of stuff is already happening. Maybe that's, you could expand on some of those. Yeah, so I guess what makes me optimistic is those examples, right, like we are starting to have demonstration of these stories like Joy Joy said, you know, it is the ideas on the table that you pick up when crisis hits. And the amount of work at many different scales that is happening, gives me a great everyday hope. Obviously our work gives me hope because we're based in a neighborhood and we're not, we're just trying to build the ideas. We're not trying to talk about them or write reports or whatever we're trying to literally build them with people where they are. But the thing that gives me two sets of like more deep hope. One is that that link to that point that you said, which is that we're going to learn that actually our capacities are going to be about natural and geographical, as opposed to like arbitrary constructs. These these are going to change. They're going to change everything. And I think that's really interesting and important because we are not more powerful than nature at all. And that's interesting. Secondly, linked right back to my first point about the industrial, the different transitions we've had, even the most like. Like, what's the word like the most the colonial secretary of Birmingham, Joseph Chamberlain, right, or the Quakers, the Cadbury's and all of all of this. They, even in the most imperial, like bad examples, they had to start changing the way everything happened and build new public goods, because the economy could no longer function. It wasn't a moral story. Right. I know I come from that place. I'm sure this parallel comes from this place, but the the NHS had to come because we need to rebuild the country can't rebuild the country with sick people. The factory owners started to build better quality housing, a train line from Birmingham to Wales. So the workers go on holidays. They started to the weekend came about like that workers rights came about like this green space, clean air in the cities because they were industrial smog. What happened was, industry had to start acting first, because things stopped functioning. And we are so on that direction, right. And this actually like late stage capitalism as a much as it this is a really privileged thing to say, and and has many challenges with it. The fact that things are buckling so much gives me great hope, because once that buckle happens, it is those ideas that Joy said that are already on the table. The four day working week, the reduction, the degrowth of our material consumption, that the ideas that are all there will start to come up. We can make and their housing in our West. And that gives me great hope. So I would say, if you if you were in the global north and as a fairly privileged person, you had been given a 10 or 15 year warning of seeing what the global south have been going for. We should be throwing everything we possibly have into building those ideas and demonstrating them, because we have the privilege to do that and we're complicit in in some of that. And we've got to remember that in a much greater scale than just our own, our own piece this gives me great hope, because I think we're just on the cusp of things breaking through in a really interesting way. I'll let you to go last because I don't think I am optimistic actually. I think the only like little shred that I have is that actually a lot of the times you see people working together the most to like back up on what you said are after crisis when everything breaks down and the system goes away. You do see stuff emerging out of that but actually like, I'm really concerned about the rise of the far right. I'm really concerned we're going to start seeing situations like happening in Greece where there's kind of like white people in your food banks or whatever. I think that's going to be a real thing we need to be prepared for. If there's any hope there I would say that very consistently opinion polls say that people are in favor of re nationalization. They are in favor of trans rights. They are in favor of other liberal political issues, but I just feel like the way that capitalism and power is going right now is just on a real tear and I can't see any end in my lifetime, especially given the best thing we have to look forward to is Labour government. So hopefully you two can say something more positive or indeed joy. I don't know whether whether joy. What gives you hope. Get you speak. There we go. Go ahead. I mean, I think the thing that gives me hope is, you know, is the fact that so much is happening across several everywhere and and across the world actually. So it's not it's not just in the UK and there's a lot of learning between sort of different different projects. But also the other thing that gives me hope is almost like a systems insight, which is that like that you never the trend always bends. And so so whenever you kind of feel like things are really stuck like they're never going to change, things then do change. And you do everything is that exponential that everything I stopped accelerating they do stop there's always limits and shifts and and and when and because our systems are sort of like they're being pushed to their limits. I mean, some strange emerging that are probably going to happen, but I think there's that that sort of feeling that things. I think a lot is going to change. But this is a very creative fruitful moment to be alive. But I think it's also where you put engine attention when I was very important and that that's, that's something for everyone, I think here to consider that like, if you give energy to the to the to the negative to think about by the negative. I think that's the best of it, because there is so much in the realm of the positive to give your engine attention to and that actually builds it more. So Louise, any final thoughts. I guess I'm sort of between the different views really I think there's an old saying about. I can't remember where it's from about sometimes the water has to get up to your thighs before you can swim. I think there's an element of optimism and that things are going to be so bad I sort of see two paths really one which is incredibly dystopian one which is, you know, we're going to work on climate change and social justice and democracy because they're all tied up they've all got the same roots in the same story and if we fight that story then all of those things can be unraveled at once. And I think for some time in the UK if you've had a certain amount of privilege you could kind of believe in this idea that like all things are fair and they're working and they'll just keep on going on that way and you can kind of get back to this kind of middle ground sort of sensible neoliberalism and I think that idea is going to fall apart very quickly in the next I think it's falling apart now. And I think in a sense it it's I've always say it's you should kind of like even if you're not disabled you should pay what's happening to pay attention to what's happening to disabled people because that's how a system will treat you if they know they can get away with it and I kind of see see that's emerging right now with like the cost of living crisis and I think even kind of like people who buffeted by quite a lot of privilege like the middle class and that kind of thing are being bit by it and I think they're going to have to wake up soon I wouldn't like place any bets on them waking up or not but like I think there's a strong chance that people will because they realize that they have to and it's going to be a fight because I think in the UK there's so much politics is entangled with big money and like you know so much for fossil structures like ensured by the city of London there's going to be an awful lot of kind of like really top down kind of money against that kind of grassroots uprising but ultimately if if everyone gets behind it the kind of top down power is never more powerful than the grassroots if everyone wakes up and everyone plays their part and I think that that's the hope for me is I can kind of see the stirrings of that. I don't know whether you have any final thoughts? Sure just quickly I mean we've had a lot of kind of name checking for Rebecca Solnit on this panel and I've come back to my favorite quote of hers which is hope isn't a lottery ticket that you can sit on the sofa clutching feeling lucky we're not in that situation now hope is the axe that you have to use to break down the door in an emergency so it's that idea that hope is action at whatever level you're taking it and whatever kind of world within the worlds we live in that you're in it's to see all the problems that we have and try different things to come to solutions. Thank you very much I realized we're already almost right out of time. I see there's been some more conversation happening online as well and I just wanted to thank everybody for for turning up today and for tuning in and for contributing your headlines and thoughts we're going to try and synthesize some of the ideas that come out of this and try and share that and as I mentioned this is just like part of our our year long kind of thinking about repowering democracy and and the space of technology in that the role of communities and all those different layers we've been talking about tonight of where that kind of as you say that action can actually happen. And if you want to follow what we're going to be publishing and talking about beyond tonight. And there's some details there we go amazing. We're going to have a blog series that will be about all these sorts of topics and as I mentioned kind of sharing really good examples of how people have used some of, for instance, my society's tools to to get information out or to form community campaigns or to to be that annoying axe that is breaking down walls and institutions. So we're going to be sharing those on social media and on our on our blog so you're welcome to scan the QR code and sign up or there'll be links in the in the zoom chat as well. I just wanted to finally thank all of our speakers tonight, our panelists Louise, Emma, Joy, Amy and Kim and our audience for your thoughtful input and we'll be sure to factor all of that into our future plans. Thank you to Johnny Douglas and his colleagues at the Festival of Debate and our wonderful sign language interpreter. And finally my colleagues, Gemma and myth and Sean who's been handling stuff online as well. And they put a huge amount of effort into into organizing this and we've tried to make it as accessible as possible to everybody. And we'll make sure to publish this as I say online, a summary of it and the recording hopefully too so. Thank you for coming. And, yes, stay in touch. And hopefully we can, we can see some of these actions actually take place in the next couple of years to get us to 2043. Thank you everybody.