Alternatives to the polycrisis are being built by the intelligence of small networks of people working together, out of view of the hypernormalized media that forms our simulated public space. The ISRF is one such network, and the London team had a great time talking about what our friends and Fellows have been doing over the last year at the Foundation’s annual Academic Advisory Board meeting in Amsterdam at the end of May.

We had two sessions led by board members themselves. One was on culture and creative methods; the other was on the current state of heterodox economics. These are both core research areas for the ISRF.

The Foundation came into being in part through epic, collective dissatisfaction with the failure of mainstream, model-based economics both before and after the global financial crisis, joined to a desire to build a fully functioning alternative. At the same time, many of our Fellows study unexpected forms of embedded creativity, often tied to specific and distinctive communities. Both panels asked after the health of local theorising in the face of dominant paradigms.

I am always interested, and more than a bit worried, about local creativity in economics, music, politics, and everything else. We live in an age of opaque and non-consensual platform media bound to the will to global communication dominance, lionised by masses of followers as the only solution to our problems. I’m struck by how easy it is to feel that the great intelligence of each small network is trapped in its own Faraday cage installed by the current communications system, so their thoughts can’t escape. It’s an ongoing daily labour to avoid a pessimistic sense that, in our current knowledge system, emergent ideas and culture are doomed.

Paradoxically, I also have the opposite feeling, which is that the features of the polycrisis are surprisingly easy to name—along with potential solutions. This was the third advisory board meeting that I kicked off with a discussion of major trends over the year since we’d last met face-to-face, paired with rejoinders implicit or explicit in ISRF research.

Here were this year’s six:

No one in Britain needs elaboration of the first factor shaping life over the past 12 months. The British university’s fiscal crisis is also a knowledge crisis for the wider society. Young people are being disserved with an increasingly diluted product, in spite of the heroic efforts of staff. Society misses out on an unknown share of public knowledge that goes uncreated. Everyone misses a public culture of interest in new ideas coming from campuses, not to mention excited encounters as part of the normal life of a society with popular access to many universities.

No one anywhere needs an explanation of the second or the third factors. The Trump regime is dismantling key structures of the US state, economy, and knowledge system. Whatever the outcomes, large chunks of the US global infrastructure are going offline or being reworked into torpedoes.

Fourth is “AI,” which, to stick with the military metaphor, has become a MIRV missile, a Multiple Independently Targetable Reentry Vehicle that goes in several different directions at once. One direction is towards AI slop that is ruining culture and making people dumber. Another direction is a perpetual valorisation of capital machine, as governments and corporations try to plow ever greater amounts of money into it. A third is towards mass, mandatory corporate adoption of AI tools in a global productivity speed-up, eagerly imitated by the UK government. A fourth is toward increasing public revulsion. Ted Gioia, reviewing a KMPG study entitled “Trust, attitudes and use of artificial intelligence,” notes the starkly negative public response to AI on nearly all fronts, and concludes, “This is a peculiar situation, no? We’re talking about the biggest investment in the history of technology. And the public hates it.” But the AI band plays on, funded by the richest piper-payers in world history.

The fifth factor is the near consensus that all power lies with the right, every crisis moves people further to the right, all the Starmers will imitate the right, all the falconers speak the falcon language of the right, all the anger will be hoovered up by the right. This view is wrong, but it has demobilised many anti-fascist and anti-right-wing people, has pushed the centre from welfare to warfare, and orphaned original research that goes in completely different directions.

The sixth also needs no explanation. The post-2015 commitment to respectable decarbonisation policy has been tossed out of the pram. The priority is power for a planet of AI server farms plus petrostates wealthy enough to own all the world’s Division One football clubs, each in its own NEOM stadium.

We spent about two minutes on that side of the table. We spent much of the rest of the two days on the other—ISRF’s developing parts of a comprehensive response. Here’s the other half of the graphic. The black text identifies some key responses in which we’re not involved. The orange ones are one-sentence titles of some of our sponsored research. Note that, with the exception of (6), these are my shorthand summations and don’t necessarily reflect the terms of any of the researchers on relevant projects.

I’ll be writing about these projects in the coming months. In each case, we’re looking for missing pieces that we can help build, however small or discrete. Response (2), “Bloc-based construction of a new international economic order” seems like a lot, and yet, at our workshop this month following up on the Decolonisation lecture series with Gresham College, we’ll identify a couple of elements for development.

For (4), we are having our second workshop early next month on the topic of reframing and redesigning AI, which we’re looking to build into a multi-phase collaborative project. (6) is an ongoing project with a monthly seminar underway. I’ve written about this in a previous Director’s Note.

Finally, there are our responses to the perceived lack of democratic initiatives and energy. The ISRF fellowship is a diverse mobilisation on this front. Many if not most of our Fellows study imaginative modes of self-organised systems on the margins of macrostructures that aren’t working well for them. I find this research a continuous inspiration. We’re going to do everything we can to multiply its effects.