With, 1.5 degrees of warming already passed, and 2.0 degrees appearing to be inevitable, the controlling institutions of today are increasingly proving to be largely incapable of dealing with the age of the Anthropocene. Not because of some specific anthropocene related problem. But because of a far more general problem of prioritising minority control of resources, by decoupling those often most affected by decisions from participating in those decisions. In short, we have a serious problem of a lack of democracy. And this isn't some abstract problem. It's causing huge harm to most people already, and climate change is just making things significantly worse. Kings and lords could get away with not giving a crap about democracy without risking the continued existence of humanity. Today, that is not possible. That is what it means to be in the age of the anthropocene.

Focusing in on climate change, the problem is often framed as an economic requirement for constant high growth, in a finite planet. Why that economic requirement exists in the first place is often skipped over though. In short, that economic requirement does appear to result from a need to prioritise minority control of resources, at the expense of democracy. To this end, management of the commons has largely been organised by a process of enclosure and control by large centralised collectives interacting through market exchange. Collectives that alienate responsibility by shifting control to an often disconnected ownership, who in turn delegate decision making to a narrowly selected managerial class. This is the modern limited liability corporation. On top of this, the process of organisation that decides who can enclose what, when -- the "representative democracy" -- is itself an institution built around delegating responsibility to an additional managerial class of elected officials, or "enlightened statsmen" as James Madison said. Through all of this, it's extremely difficult to determine who's actually accountable for anything. Not in terms of just needing to find someone to blame. But in terms of the actual account of who did what when, who wants what and how, and any inter-relation between those factors. A very good problem to have when you're just trying to build as many data centers as possible to build the next greatest big data AI model to try and make heads and tails of the institutions built around unaccountability building the AI data centers. A very bad problem to have when we're rapidly depleting the commons we rely on and a bit more insitutional ability for such accounting would go a hell of a long way towards being able to take that into account. To make matters worse, the mechanism by which the managerial class is selected -- and why they become an entrenched class, and not just a role -- tends to be one that selects a particular kind of personality, specifically NOT representative of the broader population. A charmer, a conman, a cynical opportunist, and that's just the representative democracy side of things. "representation" then becomes an outcome of slogans, and who has the better propaganda campaign, over a meaningful statistical meaning of representation.

Naturally, such a system does allow for very impressive economic growth, as it allows people and groups to fund and back ventures that would otherwise

be far too risky to themselves. In a very novel and infantile economic system -- the roots of these institutions -- such a priority could perhaps be justified. Today, in the age of the Anthropocene, all this actually achieves is to disconnect critical responsibility and feedback from decision making. Instead, only allowing it to interface indirectly through a nearly impenetrable veil of propaganda. Or rely on extremely resource intensive polling campaigns and big data systems to try and make heads or tails of anything. Think about how nearly all of your political participation is mediated through social and legacy media, election campaigns, advertising slogans, polling etc; while the vast majority of your actual daily experience and expertise -- your local community, your job -- is nearly perfectly devoid of any political participation. It creates a situation of the blind leading the blind. The managerial class is blinded because they are disconnected from the realities of 99 percent of humans; the 99 percent of humans are blinded because they cannot participate in the decision making machinery.

That is why we as an association see the primary solution to the climate crisis -- as well as just giving back dignity and soul to countless alienated individuals -- as being increasing democracy. That is, a reconstruction of institutions that place responsibility and control back into the hands of the individuals and community most affected by those decisions; a re-connection of economic and political decision making with the critical responsibility and feedback it has been largely disconnected from for well over a century in the name of profit driven growth; a doing away with the institutions of propaganda that have been the primary mode of interface between decision making and the alienated masses.

We are also an institution strongly focused on aligning our means and ends. In this sense, it is not seen as sufficient to simply speak the same language and use the same software as other groups with shared goals. The language we speak, the software we utilise, the institutions we organise around must also be well aligned with our goals. If we aim to produce decentralised and localised democratic control, the institutions we inhabit must also perpetuate decentralised and localised democratic control. The means creates the ends. This means, for example, avoiding organising movements that are attempting to create decentralised and localised control entirely around platforms like discord and facebook that are built around centralised and non-local control. We don't have to abandon them; that would reduce reach. But we must aim to transition away from them, and work in parallel with better institutions. This is a major motivation for exploring emerging technology just like reticulum.