Subject, Consumer, or Citizen: Three Post-Covid Futures
By: Jon Alexander
Tags: Consumerism, Society, Future, Coronavirus, Agency

Like all of us I suspect, I’m currently feeling a wild mix of emotions, from fear for the wellbeing of friends and loved ones, to anxiety about our work and the business we’ve built, to concern and indeed guilt when I think of the many people facing lockdown in situations far worse than mine; and alongside those immediate personal responses an intense collision of hope and fear for our collective future. This piece, really written with and by the whole team, is an initial attempt to draw on the thinking and work we at New Citizenship Project have done over the last five years to make sense, partly to ground our own work in this time, and partly with an ambition to offer something that can help the people we have worked with over the years to do the same. We would love to hear any thoughts, comments and ideas it provokes.

The Crucible

The great paradox of this moment is that our society is moving slower, yet at the same time changing faster and more fundamentally, than it has for decades. All of us are adapting, and this is just the beginning. This is still the time, first and foremost, to keep our businesses afloat, our children educated, and our relatives looked after. But in an only slightly broader view, this is also a time of tremendous and urgent importance. This moment is a crucible from which our society, economy and politics — and more importantly all of the organisations, large and small, that make those up — will emerge as different beasts.

At the New Citizenship Project, we have a particular way of seeing this challenge. Since 2015, we have been working from the understanding that in the broad historical moment of the early 21st century, we are entering the era of the Citizen: a time when people, dissatisfied with being mere Consumers, increasingly yearn for agency and control over what matters to them, and where authentic participation based on agency and purpose holds the key to a brighter future. These are ideas that have earned a platform and stimulated change at organisations from The Guardian to the Co-op to the European Central Bank.

Now, with Covid-19, the historical moment has ceased to be broad, and become immediate. In this context, our purpose here is to offer our underlying framework, in the hope it might be helpful in three ways:

as a lens to help make sense of what is happening;

of what is happening; as a way of framing the deep choice that we now face collectively; and

the deep choice that we now face collectively; and as an invitation to step into the agency we all have — even now — to shape the future.

The Citizen Shift

Five years ago, we published a report called This Is The #CitizenShift, laying out the core ideas that continue to underpin all our work.

Our argument was that there are broad historical moments when the dominant moral story of our society changes. At the start of the 20th century and for centuries before, we were Subjects: the right thing to do was to keep our heads down, do our duty and be content with our lot, while the God-given few led society forward. Through two world wars, this story collapsed. In the decades that followed, we became Consumers: the right thing to do was to look out for ourselves, to choose the best deal from those that were offered, to produce whatever people would consume, because if we did the best society would result.

Our report argued that, in the 21st century, we are now living through another moment of collapse and rebirth: a shift from Consumer to Citizen. Now, the right thing for us to do is to get involved, to step into our own power to shape the world for the better, and to open up opportunities to do so for others. The flaws of the Consumer story have been badly exposed by the financial crisis and the climate emergency, and the digital era has created new spaces for participation that we can use to replace it with the Citizen story.

Subject Consumer Citizen: Quickfire Concepts — from This Is The #CitizenShift

The urgency of Now

This understanding frames our mission at the New Citizenship Project: working with organisations of all shapes and sizes to help them build and inhabit the Citizen story. We support and challenge the organisations we work with to name and recognise Consumer logic in what they do, and to adopt new behaviours and structures which channel people’s ideas, energy and resources (to use the language of our friends at Lincolnshire Coop), not just sell them stuff.

As we have been doing this work, we have been thinking and learning about how the big societal change will happen: how the Citizen will move from an emergent possibility to become the new dominant story.

With Covid-19, two things have changed in our view.

First, this just got very real: the historical moment is no longer broad, but immediate.

Second, it has become clear that the step forward into the Citizen story cannot be taken for granted: the dominant story will be contested, and there is no guarantee this story will win.

This, then, is how we understand what is happening right now. We are living through a contest between these three deep stories. All three are present and alive in this moment. One will emerge as dominant, and which it is will dramatically shape our collective future.

Three possible futures

The Consumer story could be restored. This is what “back to normal” would mean. It would be a little like the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash. Some part of all of us wants this very badly: our commutes, our coffees, our crises put back where they were so we can “open back up” and pick up where we left off. And there will be powerful interests and an awful lot of money put into making this happen for us: a recent piece by Julio Vincent Gambuto brings this to life with a powerful prediction of the “ultimate gaslighting”, as billions of pounds are spent persuading us to pretend that nothing ever happened.

The Subject story is also making a very big comeback. We are already seeing not only the accentuation of already appalling levels of inequality, but also near-universal acceptance — even embrace — of radically reduced civil liberties. If there is a part of us that wants to go back to normal, there is another that is reassured by the idea that someone else is in charge. This is a story that has a clear path to develop, build and take over. There is significant potential for mass surveillance programmes to come into operation and be framed as essential to the lightening of lockdown, tracking people in order to track the virus. Hungary and Israel have already been described as the first “virus dictatorships”; it is all too plausible that others could follow.

The huge opportunity, though, is to make this the moment when we choose to step forward together into the Citizen story. We are already seeing the myriad ways that people, communities and organisations are reclaiming agency and finding purpose within the present moment, despite the restriction of individual freedoms. Mutual Aid groups and hyperlocal self-organising units have sprung up everywhere. Businesses and suppliers are coming together rather than simply competing. Some central government departments and more local authorities (though not all) are making interventions that seek to sustain, channel and develop agency, not just treat people as self-interested individuals to be policed or “nudged” into compliance. There is a part of us that is deeper and more fundamental, and has been more starved, that is nourished by this, a part we feel when we look across the fence, clap the NHS, and act for someone we do not know. This too could grow. This does not just have to be a nice side effect; it could be the beginning of the new story.

These are the three ways forward from here. To be brutally frank, two will simply result in continual and cascading failure, for organisations of all types and for humanity as a whole. If we return to the Consumer story, we will be back to square one on the challenges of climate and inequality (and more) that this story has arguably created, having eaten time we do not have. In short order, we will be back in crisis. The Subject story is even worse, restoring the standing challenges but with the addition of the kind of cover-ups and conspiracies that will hamper progress and slow change even more. In short order, we will be back in crisis. Both scenarios are seductive, because they’re familiar, but they won’t work.

The Citizen story is the only one that actually works. But it is the most difficult, because it is unfamiliar: we are still early on in the imagining and shaping of a Citizen society. The institutions and processes are not “off the peg”. We have work to do. All of us.

The agency we all have

There is of course much in this moment that sits in the hands of national governments, more than has been the case for decades. But to leave that statement to stand bare and unexamined is to walk the path to the Subject story, or at best the Consumer. The Citizen story by contrast adds two important qualifications: first, that government in a democracy is, in principle, government by Citizens — i.e. all of us are involved — not government of Citizens; and second, that the space for government is defined by wider society — the communities we live in, and the organisations we work for. With this understanding, we restore our agency, our power to shape the future, both individually and collectively.

In this view, indeed, the bigger truth is that no government can make the Citizen story happen for us. It will require communities across the country and the world, and organisations from across sectors to lead into new ways of thinking and operating — and it will require this to be driven by individuals who have the courage to think and act differently, learning more from their peers and fellow Citizens in other sectors than from the previously established norms of their own worlds.

This has to some extent always been the case, but it is so much more true in times of flux and uncertainty. Careers, reputations, and legacies will be made in the coming months, many of them apparently from nowhere. Organisations of all sectors will reorient dramatically. That is what it means for society to reshape. This is a huge moment of opportunity for us all, individually and collectively.

There are no answers yet as to exactly how to do this. As a starting point, then, here are three levels of questions we offer you to ask yourself, and that we are asking ourselves.

As an individual Citizen…

How can you find and build agency in your own life in this moment, even through small actions? How can you recognise in yourself when you are being treated as a Subject or a Consumer? How can you call this out when it happens? How can you recognise when you yourself act towards others as Citizens, creating opportunities for them to express their agency?

As a Citizen of a local community…

How can you find a level of connection to the place where you are that works for you? How can you make a contribution that you can sustain and that is right for you? How can you develop your understanding of where power lies locally — what councils and authorities are there? How are they operating and treating people locally? How can you help or perhaps challenge them to do it better?

As a Citizen of your organisation/employer…

How do you understand the purpose of your organisation? What is it really there in the world to do, and what could it be? How could your organisation operate differently in order to create more space for people to find their agency, and share in its purpose, not just transact? How could your organisation involve people more directly and actively? How could you start or build something in this moment, even something small, that could grow?

Ultimately, all these questions stem from one that is deeper and more fundamental:

What would you do in this time if you truly believed in yourself and in those around you?

This is happening

We want to close for now by saying that we see the people we have worked with over the years leaning into this already, and indeed we have got this far with our understanding by watching you.

We’re already inspired by Kirklees Council with their approach to partnering with and supporting community organisations rather than attempting to either replace or manage them (see Community Response Kirklees); the Guardian working with readers and communities through initiatives like Anywhere But Westminster to understand the true impact of the virus; the Co-op seeking to put its member participation platform in service of community support; and perhaps most of all by the University of Bath Students’ Union (The SU Bath) for the energy, commitment and all-round Citizenship -small and big ‘C’ - of their officers, staff and members (not least in their work with Bath and North East Somerset Third Sector Group, another organisation we hugely admire).

Over the last five years, we’ve built a business out of both celebrating and supporting organisations of all sectors to build the Citizen story. In the coming weeks, we’re going to be looking for more examples like this to celebrate, organisations reframing and reinventing their relationships with people to build and distribute agency, and talking to the people who are doing it; and if we can help you be part of it, we’re here.

This is a crucial time, a difficult time, and a dangerous time. But it is a time when the Citizen Shift is very much on the cards.