This has led some to feel that the moment of opportunity for a new story has passed, that the portal has closed. I don’t agree with that. The Consumer Story is fundamentally broken. The trigger might be this pandemic or another, the onset of the climate emergency or the next banking collapse, surges in energy from Black Lives Matter or Extinction R

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Before any game B theorising is possible, we need to meditate deeply on why progressive movements so often fail. We actually do need grand narratives and utopian visions, to articulate a ‘promise land’ or a ‘city on the hill’. But evolution is a slow and messy process.

This may be the ultimate historical lesson of the Great Stink: that radical long-term planning can be kickstarted by a crisis. It is the essence not of cathedral thinking but what I think of as ‘sewer thinking’. Sometimes nothing but a crisis can shake dominant actors and institutions out of their slumber. It’s a lesson absolutely understood by act

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