In this conversation I connected with Jon Alexander who is the author of a new book called Citizens.
Jon started his career working in the advertising industry, selling some of the world's biggest brands, and winning plenty of awards along the way. Then he realised he was caught up in a story he didn't believe in: The Consumer Story.
So in 2014, Jon co-founded the New Citizenship Project. Their mission was to figure out how to use their skills not just to sell stuff to Consumers, but to involve people in the decisions that affect their lives as Citizens, working with the likes of the Co-op, Body Shop, National Trust, BBC, and European Central Bank.
In this conversation we talked about:
- A brief history of humanity from people as subjects to consumers to citizens.
- How the citizen story is different to some of the progressive stories and ideas that have preceded it?
- How the pandemic has shifted the role and power of people, governments and corporations?
- How we can’t have paradigm shift without a paradigm to shift to.
- The story of vTaiwan and Taiwan in 2014.
- The idea of social acupuncture.
So I started out by asking him, what is the citizen story, and why is it important right now? Enjoy!
https://www.jonalexander.net/
https://www.newcitizenship.org.uk/
https://www.weareliminal.co/
http://www.participatorycity.org/
https://anchor.fm/weareliminal/episodes/004-Participatory-Cities---Tessy-Britton-e57bok
https://info.vtaiwan.tw/
Please Note: In this conversation we talked about several examples including Participatory Cities (of which I am a trustee) and Tessy Britton (who I interviewed way back in episode 4 of this podcast) - links above. Also Jon and I were introduced recently thanks to Francine Bennet so many thanks to Fran for the introduction.