Dave Winer writes “we all feel disempowered“:

… people who feel disempowered figure there’s nothing they can do, no one would listen to me anyway, so I’ll just go on doing what I do. I know I feel that way.

He’s talking in the context of the US political landscape, but it applies in general too. Part of the solution he suggests is to

Invest in local news. And btw, I have a lot more to invest than money.

Two things stand out for me.

One is, that we’ve come accustomed to view everything through the lens of individualism. Yes, we’ve gained much from individualism, but by now we’ve also landed in a false dichotomy. The false dichotomy is the presumption that you need to solve something as an individual, or if you individually can’t then all is lost. It puts all responsibility for any change on the individual, while it is clear no-one can change the world on their own. It pitches individuals against society as a whole, but ignores the intermediate level: groups with agency.

The second false dichotomy is the choice between either the (hyper)local or the global. You remove litter from your street, or you set out to save the ozone layer. Here again there’s a bridge possible between those two extremes, the (hyper)local and the global. Where you do something useful locally that also has some impact on a global issue. Or where you translate a global issue to how it manifests locally and solves a local need. You can worry about global fossil fuel use and with a cooperative in your area generate green energy. You can run your own parts of a global infrastructure, while basically only looking to create a local service. It is not either local or global. It can be local action, leveraging the opportunities global connection brings, or to mitigate the fall-out of global issues. It can be global, as scaling of local efforts.

Local / global, individual / society aren’t opposites, they’re layers. Complexity resides in that layeredness. To help deal with complexity the intermediate levels between the individual and the masses, bridging the local and the global (note: the national level is not that bridge) is what counts. The false dichotomies, and the narratives they are used in, obscure that, and create disempowerment that way.

Disempowerment is a kind of despair. The answer to despair isn’t hope but action. Networked agency, looks at groups in context to solve their own issues, in the full awareness of the global networks that surrounds us. Group action in its own context, overlapping into other contexts, layered into global context, like Russian dolls.