Citizens: Why the Key to Fixing Everything is All of Us

acknowledging the Citizen in ourselves is often easier said than done. It bucks the prevailing wisdom that would have us believe that humans are lazy, greedy, self-centred, and apathetic; that we can’t be trusted to do anything but mess things up further. It risks being judged naïve or unrealistic. And once embraced, the Citizen also mandates that

What difference would it make for Patagonia to fully embrace the Citizen Story? Rather than selling products that make people- as-Consumers the gentlest possible destroyers, the company would be equipping people-as-Citizens to be the human embodiment of the beautiful nourishing presence of the Earth that was its founding inspiration. That would be

In 2013 Rick Falkvinge, the Pirates founder, released his book Swarmwise: the Tactical Manual to Changing the World (for free, via a Creative Commons license, part of the Open Source movement), which immediately acquired cult status among the ‘digerati’ of Europe.

Reen’s story opens the door out of the house of anything we might think of as politics, and into the big wide world where we can see Citizens working away at the edges to change pretty much every aspect of society. In any other sector or industry or even organisation, be it a public institution, a charity or NGO, or even a business, I could have fo

Each might seem to embody a ‘type,’ a common label: Activist, perhaps, for Immy, or Aid Worker; Hacker-Entrepreneur for Bianca; Community Leader for Kennedy; Victim-Survivor for Reen; and Anarchist, perhaps, for Billy. I’d like to reframe these five people as practitioners of the Citizen Story: my emblematic Citizens. They are the force that makes

What we’re realising together is that all the ever-louder cries for freedom and justice are entangled. They’re all part of the same revolution.

Anti-pirate propaganda was a deliberate effort to undermine the legitimacy of a renewed threat to royal power. In reality, pirate ships were more often than not places rich with Citizen innovation.

Citizenship is human nature: an intrinsic inclination, always bubbling, often suppressed, never wholly conquered, and now at a moment of huge opportunity.

One of the ways that we know a place or a domain qualifies as ‘home’ is that it shapes us as much as we shape it.

This beautiful promise - that all we really need to do is buy better stuff and get others to do the same, and any outstanding problems would be fixed - has sustained the Consumer Story far longer than it might otherwise have lasted.