I’ve recently written four essays, The Big Deal (#thebigdeal) which combine to paint a new picture of the current state of the world and a future picture showing how grass roots political power can achieve what current models of governance, including government, cannot do alone. This work is partly a critique and expansion on the British government’s Big Society concept, but it also draws heavily on my own experience in futures, complexity science and engineering for the bottom billion. It is an attempt to model the world in a new way; a way which reveals otherwise hidden paths to achieve change.

If you are interested in this model, the best order to read the posts in is

• Reawakening the Enlightenment – Democracy has failed to deliver solutions to the environment and human rights. We need to reawaken a deeper instinct for liberty to proceed.
• The Synthesis – Government and governance have hit hard limits: evolution, complexity, urgency, unity are beyond its scope.
• The Only Way Out Is UP – We are still an earthbound species because during the 20th century we put the plutonium in the wrong end of the rockets – as warheads, not engines. We can fix this.
• The Beautiful World – Stable, safe global change using a new political model: voluntary cooperation in harmony with progressive incumbents to solve the problems which feed repressive incumbents. This may be a believable model for network culture to create change in the world, and describes a superset of the Free Software movement’s approach.

The articles are substantial, around 3000 words each. Please start with The Synthesis if you want the direct stuff first. The background work which lead to this package is a collaborative futures book project I’m curating called The Future We Deserve.

(Vinay Gupta was featured in a Guardian video about the Big Society)