A Politics of Interconnection

It is sometimes easiest to view each other through a lens of difference than to find our islands of commonality. To articulate where we are opposed rather than to share our narratives of common need or truth.

In our hyper connected world, our socially collaborative technologies have accelerated both the pace and reach of our connection, and also the politics of our disconnection. We find it easier to find an enemy than to find common humanity, and where an enemy is lacking, there is no shortage of people willing to create one.

When we have come to view politics as a domain of ‘winners’ and ‘losers’, we have lost something of the nature of democracy , which is the idea of a responsibility as well as a right.

And if we define our victories, or losses, as total, then we omit our power of togetherness, even through disconnection.

Many of the challenges we face today cannot be solved in isolation, and yet we are unable to find unity and true connection. But may be we do not need to.

The history of humanity is one of boundaries: both the natural, in our rivers, mountains and seas, and in our social context, our wealth, education, and communities. We have learned to overcome nature: our technologies of communication and transport have rendered distance and even language as obsolete in terms of separation. And yet our social divisions – in terms of both pace and scale – have simply grown broader.

But that which technology has accelerated, it can also heal, or change.

A few years ago I spent a hopeful week in Canada , exploring the impacts of collaborative technologies on our models of democracy, considering how they enabled us to invest more synchronously in our most pressing societal challenges, and form communities of interest and purpose to act synchronously, to invest our ideas and surplus in common goals.

This was thoughtful and reflective work: taking the model of democracy that we were familiar with, and consider how it may evolve.

And that potential is still there.

But to engage in a politics of interconnection , we may more fully need to engage in the pain of separation.

A politics of disconnection is one that is rooted in difference, denial, and unity through separation from the ‘other’.

A politics of interconnection does not deny this, but states that we cannot stand in silence and apart: we need a middle space, and ability to remain connected, into and through our differences. Not spaces of judgement and colonisation, but rather of respectful difference and open dialogue.

Whilst we can rarely accuse humans of being entirely logical, there are common root causes of our action. When people are apart, when we are separated by ideology and bile, it is perhaps because our structural realities are different. We each speak from a mountain, but separated by a valley. When we come to see ‘different’ as ‘idiotic’, or ‘alternatives’ as simply ‘wrong’, we entrench our separation.

We all act for a reason, and that reason is not simply our brilliance: we are each a product of (and filtered through) our social and cultural experience and reality. People truly are different, because they are shaped differently.

I have been fortune to travel in many different communities, cultures, and spaces, and was reminded of an experience close to home, but in a landscape of difference.

I remember working with a community, deeply impoverished, post industrial landscape, high levels of innumeracy and illiteracy, with shop fronts boarded up, no bus service, and high levels of teenage pregnancy. And recognising starkly that we shared one country, but almost no reality. And furthermore, that I would never, ever, have walked in their community had I not been invited there, had I not been welcomed into a space where I would not ‘belong’, but was a welcome stranger. I simply would not know their reality, and hence have had no chance to truly understand how – and why – we are different.

To thrive, we do not need to be together, but neither can we be fully apart .

We cannot form a coherent society unless we can hold dialogues of difference with as much commitment as dialogues of common purpose and consent.

To disagree well is not to concede ground, but rather to at least recognise that we are standing in the same landscape.

Sometimes our perspectives, timeframes, or intent are simply misaligned. It all reminds me a little of the children: much of their action is in the ‘now’, and much of our parenting has a focus on longer term development. Sometimes we each miss the point of the other.

There is nothing wrong with an aspect of politics that embraces the disconnect, but for shared progress – and we need shared progress – we also need to inhabit a politics of interconnection.

Above and around our differences – not to resolve them, but even to recognise that when we are apart, we can still collaborate in certain ways, and at the very least, we can be in dialogue.

Convening spaces for disconnected dialogue is powerful: I once ran a whole series of community sessions in a divided community, where we used space as part of the dialogue, including space where you could go to show support, and space where you could go when you were too angry to speak. It did not ‘solve’ problems, by magic, but it allowed us to visualise, and externalise, some of what was bubbling inside. To make the implicit reality we all carry more visible in a shared space.

Democracy is a negotiated phenomenon. If we simply shout into silence, or silence each other, we fail at it.