I recall my father, when he was my age (and when I was still just a boy), saying that memory plays games with you as you get older: the events of two decades previous seem almost impossibly distant, but at the same time feel like they happened just days ago.
I would like to claim that I argued with him, though it would be untrue: I was not an argumentative child. I believe I remember feeling some sort of doubt, though—feeling that my twelve-year-old’s experience of time, a sort of endless Now bracketed by an equally fuzzy past and future, was surely the standard model, and that my father was experiencing something reserved only for the incredibly ancient or eccentric (or both). Now, as I face my own fifth decade, I wish he were still here, so that we could compare notes—so that I could tell him how right he was.
I remember my father as always being tired in those years. Indeed, that’s how I remember most adults being during the late Twenties—tired but, as the decade drew toward its end, more confident, or at least less anxious. It is the blessing and the curse of the children of any revolution that they should live in what were (according to a quote from some Scottish novelist that my mother had written out in old-fashioned calligraphy and hung on the wall in our living room) “the early days of a better nation”. A blessing because, of course, you will come of age into a kinder, better world: this world of regrowth and rewilding, this planet of peace and shared resources, that we are so privileged to live in! But a curse as well, because you will never fully understand the preceding world that your world is kinder and better than, no matter how much you are educated about it.
That understanding does at least grow with age; perhaps it has something to do with the dual experience of time that my father once described, and which I now find myself recognising. I was lucky, too, in that I was confronted with it early on—not because it changed the sort of person I was, but rather because it made me realise what sort of person I was, what I should be. In other words, it was my early encounter with a born diverger that pointed me toward being a converger.
I first met Malik Darwish in 2030, while we were both doing our plikt at the old Filborna landfill outside of Helsingborg. Talk about early days of a better nation! I understood little of the changes that had unfolded through the previous five years, having been too preoccupied with the business of being a teenager—and, I suspect, having been somewhat protected from it all by my parents, who were devoted foot-soldiers of the Conviviality, but who also believed in letting children work things out for themselves. Certainly the school curriculum had not yet caught up with the upheavals of the mid-Twenties, with the result that I didn’t give much thought to the world beyond the schoolyard until my sixteenth birthday was looming. At the same age, my sister—a few years older—had advanced from högstadiet to gymnasiet. My cohort, however, was the first to face the new plikt—no longer a necessarily military duty to the nation, as it had been before, but also no longer an optional one.
As noted before, I was not an argumentative child, and it never occurred to me to question this year-long interruption in the traditional arc of a young Swede’s life. My assignment papers arrived in the mail from the AI systems of the recently reformed Arbetsförmedlingen, informing me that I would be working to retrieve usable materials from an old landfill site, and I simply accepted it.
Malik, by contrast, when assigned the same duty, did not simply accept it.
Two things should be made clear at this point. Firstly, in case anyone encountering this story might mistakenly assume that things at the beginning of the Conviviality were worse than they actually were, I should explain that we were not being sent out on the old landfill with sacks and shovels, like the child labourers that still existed elsewhere in the world! Most of the excavation, extraction and sorting of the useful materials was handled by machines, in a large and well-ventilated building erected for the purpose. Some of us—those with a less technical turn of mind, I suppose—were assigned to acts of discernment too subtle for the machines: testing things in order to identify which particular speciality steel they had been made of, for instance. This was vital work (so we were made to understand) as part of the big push to get the national carbon budget deep into negative territory. Reusing steel, rather than smelting fresh from ore, had a far lighter footprint, but the various types of steel—of which there were a staggering number!—could not necessarily be mixed together: hence the barrage of chemical and magnetic assays and tests we were taught to run through with any object over a certain mass.
The second thing I must make clear is that when I say Malik did not simply accept his assignment, I do not mean that he shirked or avoided it—quite to the contrary. Being much more technically minded than me or my fellow athletes and artists on the assaying lines, Malik was among the smaller group who were assigned to help the adult mechanics to manage and maintain the excavators and sorting machines. We sorters thought of them as something of an elite, though we soon learned not to say so—or at least not to use that word. The Conviviality would not have elites in it, we were told, kindly but firmly, and what we were given to do was no more or less important than what Malik and his peers were doing. Certainly it was no more dangerous; certainly we were all compensated the same; certainly none of the maintainers ever lorded it over us sorters in any way that I can recall. We just knew—as children unerringly know, and perhaps have always known, for as long as there have been humans to raise them—that some tasks are more demanding, more specialised, more magical than others.
Malik was a magician. I felt then that he could have made those machines sing and dance, if he’d decided he wanted to. I strongly suspect some of the adult mechanics felt much the same way. He became central to their daily work within weeks of his arrival.
He also spent a great deal of time protesting against his assignment to the site in the first place.
To spend one’s leisure time sat among your peers and colleagues, discussing the way your society works: we did not understand, we children of the plikt, that this was a fairly new thing for Swedes. Or, perhaps more accurately, that it was a very old thing now brought back to currency—a practice that even the adults in charge of us, who established it in us by example, had retrieved from a period somewhere in the middle of the previous century, which they themselves hadn’t actually experienced first-hand. To debate, and to debate forthrightly, with no censure or shaming for the suggestion of unpopular or even contradictory positions: to us, it seemed that this was simply what one did on one’s lunch break! Whether deliberately or not, we were being trained into the habits of the Conviviality, and thus discovering the roles we would take in it—the roles, not the jobs.
Though I would not have used the term at the time, I discovered in those debates that I was an instinctive converger: always a little distressed and anxious in the presence of disagreement, then as now, I sought connection and compromise between conflicting positions. I do this passing well: I have played the role of converger in local councils and small associations for most of my life, and I must assume that repeated invitations indicate that my efforts are well thought of. And of course, I have played the role of diverger and facilitator as well: everyone gets a turn in every role, by choice as much as by necessity. But that’s how we learn where our strongest tendency lies—and for me, it lies in converging.
I harbour no illusions, however, that I am a great converger. Few of us are given to be great at anything, but those who are, if provided with an environment in which to develop their gift, can raise the abilities of others with whom they come into contact. I believe very strongly that much, perhaps all, of my limited talent as a converger was sparked through exposure to the staggering power of Malik Darwish as a diverger.
As I have already said, Malik worked hard, never shirked—but he was relentless in his assault on the assumptions, both tacit and explicit, that powered the early days of the Conviviality. He was particularly furious about the way in which the plikt had been implemented, and the case of his own circumstances as the point of a wedge that he intended, right from the start, to smash the set-up as it stood.
Perhaps he had realised, as others (myself included) had not, that one of the architects of the plikt system worked among us. Petter Eksten had been a political scientist in the Teens and early Twenties, before joining and reshaping the party that first proposed and then implemented the Conviviality; it was as a party operator and firebrand debater that he developed and pushed the new plikt from theory to project to policy. After the miracle of the emergency election in ‘29, however, Petter renounced any role which would have suggested a continuation of his direct political influence over the party or the nation, volunteered for the urgent work of materials reclamation, and wound up working alongside us at Filborna. He never mentioned his previous role, and neither did his adult peers, though it was obvious to us youngsters that he was held in great esteem by them. But he was no shrinking violet, either, frequently beginning the lunchtime debates in the sorting-center canteen—and not infrequently ending them, also.
In the terms now common to the Conviviality, we would likely have understood Petter Eksten as a diverger: determined and passionate in his advocacy of a particular vision. That determination, passion and vision were what enabled him to transform his party, and after that the nation. We tend to think of divergers as advocates for change, and Petter had been exactly that—but confronted by the equal determination, passion and vision of Malik, he (and we) were given a powerful demonstration of how a diverger can find themselves in defence of the status quo. Or, to use the old twentieth century terms, as Petter sometimes did: a diverger can be a progressive in some contexts, and a conservative in others.
For the less gifted and more convergence-oriented such as myself, it seemed like Petter and Malik identified each other almost immediately as worthy, urgent opponents. We had hardly been on site for two weeks before Malik stood up at the beginning of a lunch break and requested that he be allowed to propose a topic for discussion. He was quickly granted the assent he sought, and went straight for the heart of the issue: “The new plikt is a fine idea ruined by thoughtless implementation”, he proclaimed.
For reasons now obvious, Petter rose immediately to the bait. “What is wrong with the implementation?” he asked.
“The algorithmic assignment of individuals to a given duty is wasteful both of the abilities of the individuals, and the opportunities that the plikt presents for the development thereof. Furthermore, it uses a largely discredited technology to provide a veneer of rationality to the process, whose true function is that of marketing the policy to less radical citizens. Given the results are likely no better than truly random sortition, this risks discrediting the policy as well as weakening the broader project of decreasing our reliance on inscrutable systems of decision-making.”
Malik had of course been nurturing that opening thesis for a long time, perhaps a full year. For his part, Petter had presumably caught wind of Malik’s discontent—which, after all, he had not been at all shy of sharing with anyone and everyone—and used his greater experience as a debater to get Malik onto the territory of his personal connection to the question, and thus to a far less formal and verbose discursive style. But if Petter thought Malik would be more easily defeated on that territory and in that style, he was sorely mistaken.
“What is it that you don’t understand?”
“Why this?” Malik replied, gesturing around the sorting center. “Why me?”
“Why not this? Why not you?”
“Because none of this is my fault! This pit full of valuable materials, thrown away by a people blissfully unaware of the privilege it represented… I didn’t make this mess. My parents didn’t make it, either. They came to this country to escape a genocidal dictator. They came here to work, and were made to do the jobs that no one who was born here wanted to do, and were treated like criminals by press and politicians alike. Why should I be made to do the same, when there are many other tasks to be done, to which my skills and talents are far better suited?”
“Oh, so you think you’re better than this, then?”
“No! Actually, wait a minute—yes. Yes, I do think I’m better than this. I know it, in fact.”
“Perhaps that’s exactly why you were assigned this job for your plikt.”
“What, as some sort of moral corrective? An algorithm decides that a human being represented by a cell in a database has ideas beyond their station, and prescribes them a course in humility? That’s the sort of grandstanding that we used to decry when it was being done by priests or politicians—but now we’re fine with it, because it’s being done by a machine?”
“Sure, why not? The machine’s decision is objective, untainted by emotion.”
This was Petter’s first major misstep in the debate, and arguably one he never recovered from. For as is now well known, Malik had since the age of seven or eight been teaching himself many styles of computer programming, and had followed closely the achievements and controversies of the field throughout the turbulent Twenties. He was unusual, in other words, in his capacity to critique the use of automated and computational systems from the position of someone who actually understood their capacities and limitations.
I will not reproduce his response to Petter here, not least because it can be found in foundational texts from the fields of computer science and rhetoric alike—and justly so. I will say that I felt that debate shift that day in a way that was quite literally physical, and I know for a fact that many others there that day felt the same thing, because it is all we talked about for days afterward.
Some discussed the substance of the argument, which centered on the necessity that any process of reasoning in a truly democratic society must be explicable in everyday language by the person responsible for the decision that the reasoning is intended to justify: that, more simply, a computer is not and cannot ever be a person, and must therefore never be be assigned the responsibility for choices that affect the lives of persons. (I am given to understand that this point retains some controversy even now, two decades after Malik made it, but that his foundational claim still stands as something close to common sense throughout the Conviviality.)
Others among us, meanwhile, discussed the spectacle of the debate, the social drama of it, that physical sense of movement I already mentioned, and the look on Petter’s face as it occurred: a combination of shocked affront and immense respect which I have never seen repeated on another face, and likely never will. Others still discussed Malik himself, in the manner universal to teenagers in any place or era—suffice it to say, he need never have slept alone again!
It took much of the rest of that year for the details to be worked out, but the basic case for the reform of the plikt toward a system that incorporated both quantified assessments of the volunteer’s ability and qualified discussions of their preference and interest was surely won in those first few weeks, through a process which—for those of us fortunate enough to witness it—felt like some sort of idealised Olympian contest, a clash of titans. Much to his credit, Petter did more than concede defeat: he was converted to, and became a fierce campaigner for, Malik’s proposed reforms.
After our plikt year, Malik underwent his meteoric and well-documented rise in the political scene, which was followed by his sudden departure from the party system. Looking back, it’s still incredible to see how much was achieved in that urgent, dynamic decade: here in Sweden, it was the resocialisation of housing and the refactoring of the economy toward non-financial notions of growth that took the focus, but the declaration of the planetary commons was also crucial, even if it took much longer to actually enact the idea.
It’s also hard to believe that Malik has been as long out of the party-political scene as he was in it, but the archives tell me it is surely so: for ten years now, he has travelled the nation, training up young divergers, and occasionally taking a position on issues he cares greatly for. He has become a model, in a way—an incarnate ideal of the diverger tendency. I read that he does not much like that role: not because it implies responsibility, but because it smacks of exactly the elitism that the Conviviality has always claimed to be defending against.
Reading his essays, listening to his talks on the subject in recent years, I find myself wanting to tell him that he’s right, but also that he should try to be forgiving of a society which, in witnessing the work of a once-in-a-lifetime talent, is forced to confront a contradiction which might have been presented to it in far less constructive ways.
Such is the instinct of the converger tendency! If only I had the abilities to match it. But I know that others do, and that there are also great conveners who will bring them together around the great questions of our age, no less pressing than those we faced twenty years ago.
In the meantime, I seek out those little corners of the world where a smaller, less powerful push toward agreement might be needed, and do my best to move them. To know that there is a place for all of us to do the work to which we are suited is a gift that this society we call the Conviviality gives itself every day—and it does so through the individual gifts that we each give to it, and thus to each other.
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Source Scenario
Future 4 - Punk 2.0
In 2050, in Southern Sweden, we live in a society of enhanced self-governance and multi-dimensional growth, as opposed to top-down hierarchies and simplified economic development.
The infrastructures we have re-invented for ourselves are many of the same we had back in the 2020s. Yet, they allow us to contribute in a way that is meaningful for everyone, collectively and individually.
In the multikernel City of Skåne, we employ multi-dimensional metrics – Convivial Currencies – that allow us to capture and exchange value in human- and planet-friendly ways. Trust and Re-growth (rather than de-growth) are the new paradigms for improvement and their implementation is a common subject of debate.
The Affordable Housing we surround ourselves with leaves no one behind in creating a home for themselves. Like with other private resources we maximise utilisation through sharing, driving down the cost of living.
Planetary commons like Energy & Water & Air are not taken for granted and are regulated as Human Rights and distributed to benefit everyone. We have merged infrastructures for Food production and Healthcare so that no one needs to become ill in order to live healthy.
The platforms for Data Infrastructures are clear and continuously iterated on at the EU level, to allow innovation on fair and relevant terms. To get there was not a straight road and involved integration in between the real world and the digital.
Overarching all infrastructures are a common set of sustainable values and morals – a Punk Manifesto you might say – that allows us to jointly develop our world as well as Functions of Questioning, Reducing, Keeping and Developing our infrastructures. An infrastructure of continuous optimisation of resources is a central function.
Our world is cooperatively populated by care-takers, users, providers, decision makers and enablers – all roles represented in each and every citizen. We maintain a Punk Dynamic by moving in and out of the roles as Divergers (suggesting alternatives), Convergers (suggesting consensus) and Facilitators (suggesting collaboration). We still have emotions, feelings and dreams and still grapple with the polycrisis, yet with new roles there is a resilience in how we face our fears and challenges. Together, we are quick and decisive although there is division among us. All of us must invest a total of one year of civil service during our lives to ensure everyone contributes to society with constructive intentions. Contributions are guided by AI, to ensure efforts are guided towards the right societal needs and the right people to contribute. This guidance is mandatory for all.
Compared to life in the 20s, we benefit greatly from a stronger Sense of Community, Responsibility and Belonging. Our society caters for local and individual needs. It offers the freedom to be who you are without a multitude of diagnoses.
How did we get here? Well, we got tired of just delivering and started to form relations instead. The heroes and villains along the way were ourselves, a different struggle to face oneself than we saw in history. We discovered new ways to appreciate life that previously wasn’t possible or that we just didn’t know we were actually longing for since forever.
