New beginnings
New ideas, new website, new commitment.
Dear subscribers,
It’s been a while! Not far off a year, in fact. Normally that would mean life has been taking me in a different direction from the things I like to write about, but not so this time. Quite the opposite – I’ve been on a deep dive into new ideas that I’m pretty excited about. So much so that I’ve decided to make a much bigger commitment to this work.
This post is a low-key announcement to my small group of subscribers about the start of something. A restart and a new name for this substack, a new website, and lots of other good things to come. My intention is to post much more frequently. I even plan to start a YouTube channel – embrace the cringe!
For a long time I’ve had a strong belief, as I know many of you do, that the way out of the mess we are ever more embroiled in will be to change the way we organise ourselves. And the most important questions about organising, often overlooked or undervalued, are questions about power.
In particular, I’ve been exploring the idea that when we talk about power we conflate two very different things at our great peril. I’ve been calling these two kinds of power dominion and potency. My deep dive began when I realised I was still making a similar mistake: the thing I’ve been getting at with the word dominion is itself better understood as two different things. When it comes to organising, there are not two kinds of power but three. I call them story power, machine power and – the new name of this substack – living power.
The number three immediately caught my attention. When the same thing shows up in three forms it suggests a very important pattern. A pattern, if you’ll forgive the grandiosity, that seems to pervade our universe, from atoms to galaxies, from music to meditation. It turns out the structure of power, and indeed the history of power, fits this pattern very well, and the insights started tumbling one after the other.
Happiest of all, there is a predictive power to this way of seeing things, and it points in a very hopeful direction. I think we could all use a bit more hope right now, so I’ve decided to double down on this work. The big idea is that power, if we learn a new way to organise it, will start to flow away from coercive structures and towards community. I believe we will start to see community power of a kind that is completely alien to us. Think of the most powerful community you have known and multiply it by a thousand. Think of a world where communities are more powerful than corporations. Think of a world where companies that see themselves as a container for community radically outperform the more primitive kind we know today.
That sounds more than a little fanciful. Of course I have no idea if it will come to pass. I do think there are very solid intellectual reasons for such radical optimism. At the very least I can share those reasons. I’d like to do more if the opportunity arises, but one step at a time.
As a start I’ve managed to condense the core ideas into a reasonably short article which is the next post, coming in a day or two. If you’re impatient, it’s already published on the new website Powerful Communities.
I’m looking forward to sharing more with you all!
🐘
p.s. as this is the third name this substack has had, I’ve switched to a more stable online home: writing.tomlocke.com.