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Citizen Infrastructure

Parallel polis

What do you do when the system you’re up against can’t be reasoned with or negotiated with in good faith? The Czech dissident Václav Havel, writing under a totalising regime in the 1970s, gave one answer: build a parallel polis — a parallel public life of prefigurative, horizontal relationships that model how the world should be. It lets you speak the truth without being instantly co-opted, and it plants the seeds of a different order.

”Double down on the social, leave the -ism”

Section titled “”Double down on the social, leave the -ism””

David Bollier takes this as a strategy for the present. Rather than spending all one’s energy confronting the state — writing to a representative who has no idea how to fix the problem — he puts the majority of his effort into building mutual aid, social connection, and care at the local, “cellular” level. As he puts it: double down on the social, and leave the -ism behind.

This isn’t ostrich-in-the-sand quietism. Keep protest and resistance when they’re called for — but keep them separate from the slow work of building a relational, horizontal order, because that order is where regeneration actually begins. In an authoritarian moment it’s also what keeps a person from “turning to stone.”

Why the commons scrambles the usual sides

Section titled “Why the commons scrambles the usual sides”

A parallel polis built around the commons has an unusual feature: it doesn’t fit the political spectrum. There’s something in it for almost everyone — conservatives (it’s about real community), libertarians (room for individual initiative), progressives (it tackles inequality), liberals (it addresses injustice). That’s part of why Bollier thinks it can build a wider front than any single movement, scrambling the tired ideological battle lines and getting down to the interpersonal, local level we’ll need anyway to face climate change.

You can see the parallel polis in action in the Stories — from neighbourhood mutual aid after disaster to care banked between neighbours — and it rests on the inner OntoShift.

A parallel polis in code

Section titled “A parallel polis in code”

Taiwan’s g0v (“gov-zero”) is a digital version of the same idea. Rather than only petitioning the government to fix its websites, volunteers build shadow versions — change the o in a .gov.tw address to a 0 and you reach a more open, forkable counterpart delivering the same public information, but lower-friction and remixable. Because the code is open and freely licensed, the government can simply adopt the better version back — which is how Taiwan’s privacy-preserving contact-tracing and its vTaiwan consultations began. A horizontal alternative built alongside the state, not against it.

Sources

Section titled “Sources”