In Conversation

Manda: Hey people, welcome to Accidental Gods, to the podcast where we believe that another world is still possible and that if we all work together, there is still time to lay the foundations for a future that we would be proud to leave to the generations that come after us. I’m Manda Scott, your host and fellow traveller in this journey into possibility, and it is axiomatic of this podcast that stories are what matter. They are what got us to where we are, for good or ill. And stories of a different potential, thrutopian stories, that show us how we can get from where we are to where we need to be are what will change our world. We are a storied species. Everything we do arises from the stories we tell ourselves and each other, about ourselves and each other, and our relationship with our communities of place and purpose and passion, in which I include the living web of life. So often what we’re seeking when we build these stories is respect. And it may be imagined respect to people who are long dead, or it may be the respect of the people who are around us whose opinions matter to us. But we want the pride of knowing that we have contributed to things that we care about. And yet, even so, our legacy media, what Debs Grayson calls in the podcast you’re about to hear, our status quo media, is owned and run by billionaires for billionaires.

Manda: And the stories they promote are the ones designed to keep us all in line. By accident or design, we end up living in media echo chambers, where we speak to each other about things that we believe, and we have no connection to the bubbles around us. So how do we bridge the gaps? How do we create a media ecosystem, a commons that works for the people, by the people? That grows stories of agency and empowerment, motivation and direction in and by and from our communities. This week’s guest spends most of her time thinking about these things, engaging with other people who are thinking about these things. Debs Grayson is a facilitator, a researcher, and an organiser living in Sheffield. She works for Opus Independents along with James Lock, who was on the podcast a couple of weeks ago. Here she spends most of her time developing relatable, accessible metrics to track progress towards the Sheffield City Goals. But she also works on the People’s Newsroom Initiative, which is a project now housed within Opus, which focuses on journalism. On the innovation of what journalism is, on how we can create a different kind of journalism that stewards stories instead of claiming ownership, instead of creating hierarchies. They have been working on reimagining journalism as a storytelling commons, creating collective practices of sharing and weaving together stories that can support a just climate transition and all that goes with it.

Manda: As you’ll hear, Debs had a background in media research and campaigning for transformed media systems. Previously, she worked for the Media Reform Coalition, running the BBC And Beyond campaign. And if you listen to this podcast at all, you’ll know I’m not a great fan of the BBC, and anyone who can think beyond it is thinking good thoughts. In this case, the campaign was explicitly developing ideas of a media commons. Now, alongside her role at Opus, she’s working with the independent press regulator Impress on projects, including presenting Dis/Mis, a podcast on dis and misinformation and how we can build a trustworthy media. So there is nobody I can imagine who would be better to talk to at this moment, when our media ecosystems are becoming so fractured, so fragmented, so tribal and so unfit for purpose. How do we create something that actually works to get the stories out there of communities functioning as genuine, generative, emergent commons? This is what we need, so this is what we’ll talk about. So people of the podcast, please do welcome Debs Grayson of Opus, the People’s Newsroom Initiative and so much more.

Manda: Debs, welcome to the Accidental Gods podcast. How are you and where are you on this sunny spring morning?

Debs: I am feeling well and feeling quite Monday morning-y, but I’m feeling very grateful for the amount of sunshine that we’ve had in the last week. I’m here in Sheffield and it has been bright sunshine for over a week. But also a little bit perturbed. My parents live in South Wales and they also have had bright sunshine for over a week, and they even had a wildfire on the nearby mountain the other day.

Manda: Whoa.

Debs: So maybe some parts of the country aren’t actually meant to be this dry in April. Yeah, I don’t know about you, but I definitely feel a lot of tension around my relationship with weather, and this desire for good weather, whatever that means at different times of year. And then sometimes you get it and you’re like, hmm, is this okay?

Manda: Yeah. April, showers are a thing, and yet they’re not. Exactly that. My apprentice was here this morning (hi Lou!), and she was here two weeks ago, because we’ve both been teaching and we haven’t had rain since she was last here. And in April that’s not usual at all. So it’s beautiful. And I love the sun, but a bit of rain would be useful. So yes, exactly that. So in the context of the meta crisis and everything that is moving into a very dynamic tension around the world, you have a manifesto as part of what you’re doing with Opus. Would you like to read it to us and then we’ll work from there?

Debs: Yeah. So this is something that we’ve drafted as part of the People’s Newsroom Initiative and this is part of what we’re talking about as a just transition for storytelling. So it says: We are seeking a just transition for storytelling that moves from stories of what is, the status quo, to stories of what has been, what is, and what could come. From stories for information alone to stories for knowledge, sense making, and connection. From stories that present and drive homogeneity to stories that reflect and cultivate plurality. From stories that control, punish, shame and exclude, to stories that invite us into collective participation, governance and transformative justice. From stories that demonise, isolate and divide us, to stories that reflect us, connect us and equip us to act. From stories for generating, protecting and hoarding wealth, to stories as generators and distributors of shared resources and wealth for all people. To do so, we need to shift how we create. To move from storytelling as products, to be broadcast and consumed, to story sharing a process that invites us into co-creation. From presenting stories as new and the final word or record, to creating stories as ongoing drafts. From story creation that is extractive, immediate and overproduced, to story creation treated with care and intention for the betterment of our communities. From creators and journalists as gatekeepers and power holders, to creators and journalists as facilitators and stewards that shift power so everyone can be part of the story. From creators and journalists as detached or dispassionate, to creators and journalists as part of the story, actively and intentionally recognising place and source.

Manda: Wow. Gosh, we could spend the entire podcast just unpicking that. So I have this in front of me and and it’s in an Excel file. And I was watching Lou play with the Excel file this morning, because my brain goes into whiteout whenever anyone presents me with a spreadsheet. And I’m really curious because this is an act of storytelling in itself. It’s an act of creation. And genuinely, I am curious about how someone who is a wordsmith builds their words in an Excel file. How does that happen?

Debs: I mean, I didn’t build the Excel file. So I work with Megan Lucero and Shirish Kulkarni, who founded the People’s Newsroom Initiative, and this was the way that Megan was able to arrange her thoughts. I guess this was a synthesis of a lot of different things that we’d been talking about, a lot of different conversations, and she was just trying to kind of boil things down. Sometimes when we talk about what it is that we’re trying to create, the significance of it, especially for those of us that have been kind of working in this space for a long time, you can kind of lose the significance of it. And actually just contrasting it with what currently exists with the current model, really highlights how far we need to go. But also what a difference it would make if this kind of transition was made.

Manda: Yes. Totally. And right at the start, a kind of preamble to the manifesto, where we are and where we want to be, we are failing to meet basic human needs while also exceeding ecological limits. And we want to be meeting a social foundation for human prosperity and holding us within our ecological ceiling. And I’m talking to Bill Plotkin later on today, so I’ve been thinking a lot about his work within an animist perspective, where we not only want to be within our ecological ceiling, but we want to be evolving, almost rediscovering our capacity to be an integral part of the web of life. And I wonder, was that part of the conversation? Or is is this a step on the way? If we have human prosperity within an ecological ceiling, that’s a bridging point to being an integral part of the web, where prosperity is the human and the more than human world. Is that a thing? Or would that be something that I focus on more than you?

Debs: I think that that is definitely, I mean the way that we talk about this is as a storytelling commons, and I think within the language and thinking of the commons, that is exactly about being part of the web of life. Sort of understanding our role within the ecology, which is that humans have historically played this particular kind of stewardship role. When it has been performed correctly, has been to the benefit of the wider ecology, rather than something which extracts and is in competition with the kind of wealth and resources around you. I suppose there’s always a challenge. I mean, shall we talk more about Commons and Commoning?

Manda: I would love to talk more about Commons. Yes, let’s. Because this is something the concept of this podcast is predicated on, the concept of a commons, but we don’t talk about it often. So for those for whom this is a new phrase, can you just give us an overview of what a commons is? And let’s talk about knowledge commons because that’s really vital.

Debs: Yeah. So I guess a common shorthand way of describing or thinking about what a commons is, is some kind of collective resource that is owned and governed through collective processes. But it is quite hard to put into words. In some ways it’s very intuitive, because it is how humans lived for most of our history. And in some ways it’s something that we’re so unable to practice, for most of us that are living in the global north, people living in urban environments. That there’s always this feeling of but that couldn’t possibly work. And so even kind of talking about it as a resource or a thing. So an obvious thing would be a piece of land. It’s sort of taking attention away from the true act of the commons, which is this process, it’s this relationship that people have to the world around them, and this role of stewardship and care and sort of deep understanding of the web of relationships that you are part of. So it’s kind of how do we take care of this piece of land so that it feeds and nourishes us, but so that it also feeds and nourishes the worms and the birds, because they also nourish us ultimately. There’s a really great quote from Silvia Federici, which I come back to a lot. So Silvia Federici is a feminist academic who has written a lot about the Commons, and she has this quote, I’ll sort of paraphrase it, but she says something like: When you talk to people that live in the Commons, they will say you can’t talk about the Commons, let alone theorise the commons. It’s something that you have to live.

Manda: You have to live it.

Debs: You have to live it. And then she’s like: And yet words are necessary, especially for people who are not able to live it out in their lives. There is this role for like describing and talking about this thing that we’re trying to be in the work of imagining. And there’s something as well about how we do participate in commons all the time.

Manda: We’re breathing air as a commons. I think that’s the bottom line one, that that’s one of the ones that people don’t argue about. Nobody’s yet suggesting that we privatise the air. So it’s there. Sorry, carry on.

Debs: Yeah. And also language. Language is a commons. Another way of describing the commons is that it’s a different form of social organisation, compared to the state or the market. So it’s a way of doing things which is much more kind of co-created and collectively governed, and doesn’t have the same kind of system of punishments and exclusion that the state and the market have. And so with language, we kind of know that there are state forces at play, like there are libel laws or whatever. But most of the time, in the context of chatting to people, that’s not what you’re thinking about. You also know that you kind of can commodify your language. You can write a book or make a really popular podcast that you can put adverts on. But the majority of speech is not existing in that space. And instead there’s these forms of, when you’re deciding what you are or aren’t going to say, whether you’re going to insult someone or whether you’re going to use certain language that is offensive, the framework that you’re using is not that of is the state going to fine me? Or is this going to impede my ability to make money in the market? It’s a much more social relationship of like, is this person going to think badly of me? What’s that going to do to my social status in the groups that I’m part of? And that is really the work of Commoning, this much more embedded cultural way of working out how to live together.

Debs: And I think the other really useful thing about talking about language as a commons, precisely because in contexts like the UK, there are not that many opportunities to actually meet your daily material needs through commoning. Mostly you’re relying on buying things in the shop, or maybe on things being provided by the state. There are these kind of groups and organisations that are trying to create opportunities in different places, like Hastings Commons or Cooperation Hull. But when you’re creating something from the start, you kind of have to formalise it. You’re going to have to have basically a kind of constitution. You’re going to have to have these formal rules that determine how people are going to work together and live together. But when you have a kind of a mature, living, breathing commons, actually it mostly doesn’t exist in the form of these rules. It actually exists as a culture. It’s not something that you talk about, it’s something that you live, right?

Manda: Yes.

Debs: And again, with language, you can see the difference in that. If you you can learn a language through its formal rules, you can learn the grammar. But we also all know that when you’re at that stage of learning a language, you’re not really using it properly. Whereas if you want to really be inside a language, you sort of need to learn more like a child does. Just by kind of repeating and copying.

Manda: By osmosis in a way.

Debs: Exactly. And we also know that in that shift from knowing it as a set of formal rules, to embodying it as a culture, new things become possible with language. Like, it’s very difficult to tell jokes in a language where you’re reaching for every word. You can’t really write poetry in a language where you don’t have that embodied sense of it. And so when when I’m trying to imagine how we move towards a way of living, which is much more based on commons and commoning, how we’re meeting our basic material needs through those mechanisms, there’s a piece of it which you can sort of say, well, this is how we might organise housing. And these might be the rules. And yet if we were actually doing it properly, it wouldn’t be that easy to describe. It would actually be a felt sense of like, well, this house is too big for me now. So I should probably give it up and move somewhere else and let a bigger family move into this space. It would not be something that you were being forced or massively punished over, but something that just felt like the right thing to do and that you saw also being mirrored around you a set of practices that are just like the norm.

Manda: Yes. Can we talk a little bit, just to give people a sense of the theoretical basis of commoning, about the difference between the concept of the tragedy of the commons and Elinor Ostrom’s view of the Commons? Can you speak to that?

Debs: Well, when we’re coming to this question of stories and storytelling, I mean, the tragedy of the Commons is an incredibly powerful story.

Manda: Myth. It’s a powerful myth, shall we say.

Debs: Yeah. It’s this paper from the 60s and this person basically saying, if you had commons, it gives this imaginary thing of like there’s a piece of land and there’s some sheep on it, and then people start pursuing their own individual interest. And so then they put more and more sheep on it and then it’s overgrazed and now it’s no use to anyone. So his argument is it would be better if you’d kind of parcelled it up into individually owned pieces of land, and then people would feel more responsibility, he thinks, if there was private ownership rather than this kind of collective thing.

Debs: Firstly, he’s not describing a commons. That’s not what he’s describing. Like an absolute free for all is not a commons. A commons is a set of agreements and social practices about how you’re going to do a thing. And I think there is something very important about commons being about the long term. They are about something being sustained and reproduced and something that is then available for future generations to continue with these practices. So you would discover within a generation that this doesn’t work and you would do something else. It’s also worth saying, I can’t remember the name. What was the name of the author?

Manda: Hardin. It was 1968, the tragedy of the Commons. Garrett Hardin. And it was pure neoliberalism. It was based on the concept that communities don’t function. Because a commons is the embodied functioning of a community that works, I would say.

Debs: Exactly. And also, Garrett Hardin was massively racist. And one of the other examples that he gives, I think in a different paper, is that he literally gives the example of people overloading a boat. He draws this image of like the white Western world being overloaded by people from the global south climbing on this boat and then it drowning everybody. And so therefore the thing that you have to do is put up the bulwarks and make sure that people don’t get on. Yeah, it was extremely racist.

Manda: And isn’t that a familiar trope? But then Elinor Ostrom came along. And to give the current dominant narrative its due, she did win the Nobel Prize, the economic equivalent of the Nobel Prize, for her paper on governing the Commons, which showed that that Hardin had been completely wrong. Do you want to talk to that?

Debs: Yeah. Well, what Elinor Ostrom did was she actually went and did some research on some actual commons, rather than just making up a story in her head and saying, because I as a selfish individualist cannot imagine this thing ever working, therefore it’s impossible. And yeah, she went and studied lots of places around the world and showed how these were actually better ways of sustaining resources than the model of private property. Because people were actually looking at this thing within this long term lens of sustainability, whereas within private property, you’re actually only looking at it within the framework of when this thing is of value to you as a commodity. So it actually kind of really turned the thing on its head.

Manda: Yeah. So I think what’s really important about Elinor’s work, and she did it in 2010 so it was a long gap between Hardin and his racist neoliberal ‘communities don’t exist’. And Elinor Ostrom going, yeah, I think they do, actually and getting published with it. And she said that ‘Commons need to have clearly defined boundaries’; that rules should fit local circumstances. And I think now, 15 years on, what we would say is rules are created by the local circumstances. It’s not that there’s any ‘should’. The point of a commons is that it evolves out of the interaction between the communities of the human and the more than human worlds. She says ‘participatory decision making is vital’. And I think now we would say participatory decision making is an essential. It’s not that it’s vital, to be imposed, it’s an emergent property of a functioning commons. That ‘the commons must be monitored’ – and again, we would say the commons are being continuously monitored by the web of relationships within them. And that ‘sanctions for those who abuse the Commons should be graduated’. Again, she’s talking from within a neoliberal frame, trying to frame how commons works.

Manda: And I’m remembering the Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and Wengrow, which I quote a lot on this podcast. And particularly they studied native tribes in America, and for most of the year they would be a mix of a semi agrarian and mostly nomadic foraging, hunting. But occasionally they’d come together, big, big, big accumulations of people. And some of them didn’t like each other very much. And a group of a band from one tribe of the young men would be the peacekeepers for that season. And they would also be the clowns. And they had the graduated sanctions up to and including we will kill you if you are really, really breaking the rules we have agreed for this convocation. And the next year it would be a different band, so that nobody ever got to accumulate power. And I think that sense of everybody here knows how we live together. And if you choose to step out of line, we will tell you that you’ve stepped out of line, and we will give you plenty of chance of opportunity to come back into line. And not to come back into line because these are rigid rules that we are imposing on you, but come back into line because that’s how we flow harmoniously together.

Manda: And then the next one that she says is ‘conflict resolution should be easily accessible’, which is that we all know what works for all of us. So if things become sticky, we all have the social and emotional and energetic resilience and resources to come together and work out what’s gone wrong and to fix it. And then ‘Commons work best when nested within larger networks’, which is exactly what we’re saying about it’s an emergent property of a functioning community between the human and the more than human world. And the fact that she had to phrase it in a way that still sounds horribly top down, I think she wouldn’t have got her Nobel Prize if she’d phrased it in emergent language, because the people who hand out Nobel Prizes would just not have got it. And I wonder now we’re in 2025, we’re 15 years on from that arising, are you seeing commons arising in any of the worlds that you’re in? The media world or the language world or the world of what you’re creating with Opus in Sheffield? Are you seeing functioning commons that have the resources and the resilience for people to allow an emergence in the moment of something that works for everybody?

Debs: I mean, no, not in any kind of full form. But I do think that there are these sort of green shoots, these attempts to practice something and at least open up the imaginative space which is needed. There’s a block around the idea of this thing cannot be possible. And you kind of end up in this vicious cycle of because the thing only really exists as an embodied practice, and then you don’t have the opportunities for the embodied practice, so it feels more and more impossible. But then for example, with social media, obviously these are companies owned by some of the richest and most corrupt corporations on the planet. And yet there also is this other side to them which shows that people really want to and desire participating in media. And actually, when you create opportunities for people to freely collaborate with each other, that is mostly what they will do. And in a way, you’re seeing the artificiality of enclosure. Many of the enclosures that we live with are so long standing, especially in a place like the UK, that they have sort of faded into the background. They just seem like the way things are. And what you have with enclosures is basically the capture of a commons or co-option of a commons, either by the state or by the market. And obviously enclosures of land are the most visible and obvious kind. And you had the mass expulsion of the peasantry from the land across England and Scotland. So in England first and then in Scotland more recently. And it’s interesting that culturally in Scotland there’s a much stronger story about that.

Manda: That’s true.

Debs: Something that people learn about in school, that they talk about. It’s actually a cultural memory, which it is not in England. Like it’s not at all something which is present if you grow up here.

Manda: Right. Because I grew up in Scotland, I didn’t know that. We have the narrative that the English did it to us, and I support Scotland, and England is the enemy. Then when you come down to England you realise they don’t see Scotland like that; it’s just an irrelevant place north of the border that nobody cares about. And so I guess in England you couldn’t have a narrative of somebody else did it to us, because it’s the people who set the narratives who did it to us, and they won’t let that narrative arise. Would that be fair?

Debs: Yeah. I mean, it’s been a project of many hundreds of years to sort of beat the resistance out of…

Manda: Oh, the Romans did it, and then the Normans did it again. It’s thousands of years.

Debs: Yeah. Which is also where I would say, if I’m looking for examples of where we go, I may well not start here. We’re right in the heart of the empire and I think there are useful things that we can do, but the transition has to happen everywhere, so of course, you know, start where you are. But I also think that a big part of what we need to do is be looking much more to places in the world where they are less dislocated from an experience of communitarian existence.

Manda: Right. Where the enclosures and the colonisation happened more recently than 2000 years ago when Rome arrived in the UK.

Debs: Yeah.

Manda: What I’m finding really interesting, particularly, I want to move back to language in a minute, is watching the US. Where, for instance, we’re recording this the Monday after the April 5th amazing everybody out on the streets. And in Utah I noticed floating past on social media, I was teaching this weekend, I didn’t see much, but there was the biggest trans flag there has ever been, in a city or in a state where they have just banned as far as I understand it, any use of pronouns that are not both pronouns and they’re bringing stuff through the Senate and the Congress that bans people from changing their names. And what’s really interesting is Ted Cruz is running this and his name is not Ted Cruz. So if he gets the law that he wants, he’s going to have to go back to calling himself something, I think it’s Anthony. But anyway, they obviously haven’t thought through the implications of this, and I have no doubt that their laws will only apply to other people and not to themselves. But they are actually trying to even enclose language in ways that it hasn’t been enclosed until now. And that’s a really hard thing to do. I don’t think you can legislate the enclosure of language to that extent. Well, we’re about to find out.

Debs: Well, yeah. And then what you start seeing is these very interesting sort of cultural exchanges, as you saw with the attempt to shut down TikTok and then people going on Red Note and actually this weird moment when North American people and Chinese people were interacting. And there’s a lot to learn from the way that people communicate in a context like China, where they’ve obviously had a long period of a lot of repression around language, and all of the ways that they…

Manda: They’ve circumvented these.

Debs: Exactly. And I think particularly as things become more authoritarian here in the UK, there is a lot to learn from other places where this has been their reality for much longer. How do you continue to try and  build and invest in and believe in alternatives while the dominant forces around you are so are so opposed to even the smallest attempt to do things differently.

Manda: Yeah. And what happens when the AI can sift through everything that you have ever written on social media in milliseconds, and pick up tag words that you may have used 15 years ago, and then you’re arrested and disappeared. I mean it seems to me we’re now at a crisis point of do we want to inhabit an intelligent, emotionally resilient, resourced commons of all kinds? It’s not just Polanyi’s land, labour and capital anymore, it’s also language and relationship and our capacity to have agency in our own lives. And there is an entity of a hybrid between the state and capital that now wants to reduce that massively, and I don’t think it’s possible. I don’t think you can create that much control in a hyper complex system. But we’re going to find out. And I’m also remembering Iran a few years ago where the young people were on top of the houses shouting ‘God is great!’, because that was the one thing the mullahs could not clamp down on, and everybody knew that this was their way of taking agency. It was very interesting to watch. So let’s talk about language commons, because we exist in a world where the use of language by those who control various forms of the media is very deliberate.

Manda: I have been watching the use of the passive tense in what Israel is doing to Palestine for 18 months now, and it’s not an accident. The newspaper editors know exactly what that does at a linguistic level And and everything’s spinning out from there. I watched in the US over the weekend how the media conglomerates said there were maybe a few thousand people out in the streets, and those of us watching, you only had to watch your Facebook feed to know that there were actual millions and they were lying. And it was the same when Corbyn was in the UK and and I would be watching on my Facebook feed where they’d have a rally in Liverpool and they’d hired a hall for 500 people and at least ten times that many people turned out, and they had to just open it up. And the BBC would be watching the stragglers coming from the station, and it would look like there were half a dozen desultory people with flags, and it was wholly untrue and absolute propaganda. And how do we get to a point where we are sharing language and stories that are emerging in the moment, that feel to us to be real? This seems to me absolutely critical to where we are at the moment. This is the water in which you swim. Where does it take you?

Debs: Yeah. I mean, what’s interesting in what you’re describing there, what you’re saying is that the legacy media, or what Sharif likes to call the status quo media, is the source of misrepresentation. And you’re actually on your social media platform seeing something that to you seems more true and more real and more accurate. Which is the complete opposite of the story about dis and mis-information, which is being propagated mostly by the legacy and status quo media. Which is that they are the source of credible, reliable knowledge and information and it is through social media platforms that you are just seeing, like your echo chamber or just seeing lies and fake news. Which is not to say that there won’t be, you know, that’s your corner of Facebook, right?

Manda: Absolutely. Yes.

Debs: That’s seeing these things. And there will be these other corners which are seeing something else. I think there’s something here on a more philosophical level about worldviews and paradigms. I’ve been thinking about this recently in relation to this idea of taking the red pill, which is obviously a metaphor taken from The Matrix.

Manda: Which has evolved a lot recently.

Debs: It has evolved a lot recently. But it’s basically the idea that you’ve been seeing the world through one particular lens, and actually that is steeped in lies. And that one day you have basically a moment, like Paul on the road to Damascus, you have a moment of conversion; the scales fall from your eyes, and then you realise that actually the world functions completely differently. The red pill metaphor is used about a right wing conversion, but it’s kind of a mirror of what is meant by ‘woke’, right? Which is again, this idea that you’ve grown up and been socialised in a world that constructs difference. Woke is particularly used around racial consciousness, so you’ve kind of accepted or understood the way that the world functions and now you’ve come to understand that actually there are these long historical oppressive forces which have created the world as it is. And the thing about shifting paradigm like that is that suddenly there’s no shared framework for understanding what is happening, between what you could call the status quo world, the Woke world and the red pill world. And what I find interesting is that often when people are talking about this sort of fracturing of knowledge systems, which often is people coming from the status quo world, are very, very concerned about this thing.

Debs: They will talk about this as if this has never happened before, as if this is the result of social media, as if the internet has somehow caused this fracturing. Whereas I think there’s maybe another way of looking at it, which is that throughout human history there have been profoundly different ways of looking at and understanding and perceiving the world. And that there have been these vastly different paradigms for conceiving of even what the world is made up of. What are the forces in it, what is acting at any one time? And particularly with the dawns of civilisations and the hoarding of power, which is  different to when you’ve got different tribal groups, where the power is more dispersed. When you start to get these concentrations of power, then obviously these different paradigms start to conflict in new ways and they start to be the basis of wars. It becomes more and more impossible to imagine how you can share a world with people that have these different paradigms. And then you could trace it and say that there was this point in the 19th, 20th centuries, with the spread of European empire and with the emergence of a particular idea of a scientific method; when there was an idea held by the main power holders within the global system that there was a single paradigm, there was a single way of knowing. Which also coincides with a period when, and this is Jeremy Gilbert’s argument, where he says often people are trying to sort of return to this idea of how things worked in the 1950s. A level of class solidarity that existed there. A level of cultural homogeneity, the way that political parties worked.

Debs: But actually, this is a point when probably this is the most similar that any large group of people had ever been to each other in the whole of human history. Because this was when you had Fordism, you had a kind of homogeneous consumer culture that meant you had millions of people wearing exactly the same clothes, driving exactly the same cars, living in identical houses. This level of homogeneity had never existed. And then, of course, it it broke apart and became a more plural and diverse culture again. And people were like, well, how has that happened? Why are we no longer the same? It’s like, because we were never the same. That was the real anomaly.

Manda: And it emerged out of a global war. And you wore what you wore because that’s what there was. It wasn’t because you chose all to look the same, it’s because until two years ago, we were building bombs and tanks, and now you want a new skirt? That’s the skirt you’ve got. Use it.

Debs: Yeah. Like a combination of mass consumer capitalism with actually quite restricted forms of resources. And if you map that onto knowledge as well, in some ways I think it’s much, much more logical to think that different groups of people would see the world in vastly different ways. And really struggle to have a basis on which to say this is my knowledge and this is your knowledge, and where do they meet? Than it is to assume that there’s a single way of knowing that everyone should be part of, and then the people that are outside of that are  essentially crazy. Like they must have some kind of madness.

Manda: Or we just don’t give them a voice. You know, if we’re looking at the 50s, the BBC was it. There weren’t other channels and the BBC was considered to be true, because it told us it was true. And the fact that the BBC had been absolutely implicit in breaking the 1926 general strike. I mean, all of those things, it was raw propaganda being promoted as truth. I remember reading in Natasha Pulley and her brilliant Half Life of Valerie K, and the Russian character says, the difference between us and you is we know our state propaganda is propaganda. We know that it’s lying to us. And you all believe it. It was very, very clever propaganda. So the propaganda told us that there was a single source of truth and anyone who dissented just was not given a voice. And I suppose the difference with social media is you and I can do podcasts and put them out there, and so now we have a voice that 30, 40 years ago, we’d have been xeroxing bits of paper and handing them out to our friends and hoping they didn’t just light the fire with them.

Debs: Well, yeah, exactly. That mid-20th century moment of homogeneity, exactly like you’re saying, was also a time of media institutions that were the most centralised and most homogenous and most controlled than they had ever been, really. There had never been a previous time when millions of people could watch the coronation all at the same time or watch the moon landings all at the same time. And again, when people are now saying, oh, you’ve got this fracturing, people are all engaging with different things at different moments, and there’s this lack of unity. And you’re like, but surely it’s much more logical that billions of people around the world would want to do different things at different times?

Manda: Yeah,and have different stories in their communities. Because what’s relevant in the middle of Australia is probably not relevant in the middle of Sheffield, up to a point. So yes, yes it does.

Debs: But then we come within that back to this question of but then how do we live together?

Manda: Yes. How do we establish sufficient cohesion of our views that we can actually hold a conversation? Because I would really struggle to hold a rational conversation, I think, with someone completely on the Andrew Tate side or of the Trumpian side, they exist in a different reality. It’s really hard to hold conversations, I am finding. And we need to. So how do we do it? How do we establish shared realities again?

Debs: Yeah. And I suppose this is where to talk a bit more about the kind of work that I’ve been doing over the last few years, and the kind of thinking around it.

Manda: Let’s do that. Yes.

Debs: So I actually met Shirish and Megan, who set up the People’s Newsroom, through my previous job. I was running a campaign called The BBC and Beyond as part of the Media Reform Coalition, which is based out of Goldsmiths University. And the campaign starting point was how do we have a conversation about the future of the BBC? And how do we have a conversation about the future of the BBC that doesn’t just sort of fall into these pre-established ruts of a kind of liberal defence of the BBC, or corporate ‘you need to destroy the BBC’, or a more radical left, like it’s completely hopeless and irredeemable. So in that campaign, we were trying to start the conversation from a different point and say, what kind of media do we actually want? What kind of media system could we imagine that would be able to support democracy and enable democracy and democratic media for democracy. And initially we were calling that public media, but then we shifted to talking about a media commons. So again, coming back to these questions of commoning, it’s like, what if our media institutions were sort of co-created? Co-governed. They weren’t these kind of top down institutions, they were things where you could actually have some say. There’s the question of accountability, like you’ve said something that’s been harmful; how are they held to account? But then there’s these previous questions which are more about agenda setting. How do you actually get to say that there are stories out there which are not being told, and the source of misrepresentation?

Debs: It’s not just that there’s lots of stories which associate Muslims with terrorists, for example. It’s also that there’s a massive lack of stories that just talk about Muslims being regular people living normal lives. And so then thinking about if we had an ecology of different types of media organisations that were all connected together and had shared forms of governance, what would we imagine the role of the BBC being in that? So we’ve already done some visioning and then obviously a transformed BBC would be a massive asset to this kind of ecology, because it does have a really irreplaceable infrastructure in terms of the scale and the reach. The fact that it does programming in Scots Gaelic. The fact that it has a specific remit to serve really underserved communities, and that there’s a local BBC radio station covering every part of the UK. What if those things were held more in community hands? And obviously, in lots of ways it’s dreaming big. There is no real indication that anyone in charge of the BBC has any interest in doing any of this, but it was at least trying to open up a space for a different kind of conversation about how we could take these resources, which really should be held collectively and should be governed collectively and not just fall into well, either you say we have to keep it as it is and protect it as it is, or we’re basically going to go down a Rupert Murdoch way and destroy it.

Manda: Yeah, privatise it and then turn it into Fox News.

Debs: Yeah. So that was kind of the initial thinking around Media Commons and media commoning. Meanwhile, Megan and Shirish had set up the People’s Newsroom Initiative, and that initially was held in quite a traditional journalistic space. It was initially housed in the Bureau of Investigative journalism. And they were experimenting with some really interesting forms of participatory journalism. For example, they did this Deliveroo investigation with it, in partnership with the Daily Mirror and ITV, and they did a whole participatory process, bringing together people that were in different kinds of precarious work and then coming up with an investigation. They wanted to figure out what the hourly pay of Deliveroo riders was, because they were all being paid different amounts. And they had some workers who were trained up to be journalists on this project and gathered that data, and they were able to prove that they were paying less than the minimum wage. And what was really significant about that was it was showing that there isn’t this necessary divide, where you’re either doing rigorous investigations or you’re doing participatory journalism. You can be doing both at the same time. But also that this was the only way to know what was happening, because if you were just a journalist who was outside of that community and coming and saying, can you share your data with me? There’s no way that enough people would trust you and hand their data over. So it’s a good way of speaking back to a certain idea of journalism, like it needs to be objective and detached and dispassionate. And how can you be a real journalist if you’ve got an agenda or if you’re kind of invested in a particular outcome? But if that’s your model, then you’re actually just saying that there’s a whole world of knowledge that you can’t access.

Manda: And you probably don’t care about.

Debs: Yeah, exactly. And it can only be accessed through deep, trusting relationships, which means that you have to be invested, you have to be involved. They were also thinking about creating back end infrastructure for people to open up newsrooms, like community newsrooms in different places. Who wants to open one up in their town? Thinking could we provide web services or legal support or that infrastructure that poses a barrier. But actually, when they were running pilots on this, they ran a pilot in Swansea. They did a project in with people of colour in Swansea, creating a newsroom. Actually for those people, it’s such a leap for me to imagine that journalism would be a solution to anything in my life. Journalism is actually a problem. Journalism is a source of misrepresentation, of harm, it’s traumatic. Yeah, they were sort of understanding that there’s a huge distance that needs to be travelled for lots of people before they would even be able to see this as something that could be of benefit to their life, let alone a thing that they would want to do themselves.

Manda: Okay. Something that you need to give time to when you’re already incredibly busy. Why would you bother because you can’t see the benefit? How did they get around that?

Debs: Well, I’m not super up on the details of the Swansea project, but I think with the Swansea project, what they ended up doing was actually holding a lot of spaces that were much more about kind of healing. It was much more about sharing experiences and acknowledging the harm that had been done by media previously.

Manda: Right.

Debs: And in terms of The People’s Newsroom, I think it was part of their transition out of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and ending up being housed at Opus. And recognising that even talking about the work that we’re doing within the frame of journalism or the newsroom, it immediately puts people in a different kind of headspace. Whereas actually if what we’re attaching it to is just transition, it’s how can this kind of work and this kind of institutional resource be transitioning itself to becoming exactly what we’re describing in the manifesto at the beginning. Something which is supporting us to act as commoners and to common both our stories and also to get to the stage where we can actually be commoning our shared resources. Essentially, how does it play the role of enabling a functioning community?

Manda: Right. So it becomes an emergent property of community that is alive and living and fulfilling all of the many, many varied roles that community fills. Because it does seem to me humanity is a storied species. Everything that we do from making breakfast to moving house, finding partners, whatever, going on holiday, getting a new job. All of our big events in our lives tend to arise from the stories we tell ourselves and each other about ourselves and each other. We build the images in our head and then we try to make them happen. And generally speaking, the images are of a world where we’re better than we are at the moment. And so story is so vital. The fact that we can get to a point where people feel that storytelling and story sharing is a separate thing is horrifying, actually. But you’re building it back at opus. And so what I’m really, really curious about is where is that taking us? You’re probably at the leading edge of evolving a storytelling commons. So The People’s Newsroom is now an integral part of opus. It’s endeavouring to be part of an emerging community that is functioning as a community. How is that working on the ground?

Debs: So last year we were running a kind of learning cohort, and this wasn’t specifically based in Sheffield. So Opus and Now Then, which is the magazine that Opus runs, were part of this cohort. But it was also Greater Govanhill, which is a community magazine based in Glasgow. It was Civic Square from Birmingham and Maia who were also based in Birmingham. And then a couple of Welsh organisations; National Theatre Wales, an organisation called EYST, and also Am Cymru, which is a really interesting cultural platform for Welsh culture. Am is very interesting because it’s actually a co-created commoned distribution platform.

Manda: Distributing stuff or distributing ideas?

Debs: Distributing ideas. So it’s a platform for Welsh cultural content. And it launched just before the pandemic and then ended up sort of blowing up because all of the cultural organisations…

Manda: Everyone was at home.

Debs: Exactly. And all of the cultural organisations couldn’t be doing live events, so they were suddenly like, we need a home for digital content. But it’s been designed, it has these forms of collective governance and a particular focus as well on marginalised communities within Wales. And that has informed some of the ways that the platform is structured. For example, an organisation will have a specific page and they were asked to not enable comments. Because, for example, they had some Roma organisations on there and they said whenever we are in an online space where people can talk back to us, all we get is a huge amount of hate. And it’s an evolving process. They’re thinking could there be other ways that they enable people to talk back or engage? But I just think there’s something really significant in there, of like it’s not just the production of the content, but actually literally, how do you want to distribute it? How do you want to view it? How do you want people to engage with it? And how are you centring people who are often deeply harmed by the structures that we have? Rather than, for example, the way that YouTube is set up or even iPlayer is set up, which is all about maximising engagement. Or even the fact that on Am Cymru, rather than just having similar things underneath, they’ll have a section called Unrelated Content. So you can sort of jump between different pages. And they’ve said that actually this function of serendipity is one of the things that people really like about it.

Manda: And in the background, there’s some kind of random number generator or a pseudo random number generator who’s bringing in stuff that is actually genuinely at random.

Debs: Yeah, I suppose they’re sort of charting the common pathways, and then they’re also identifying uncommon pathways. So yeah, Am was part of the cohort. And I suppose it was a kind of peer learning space where we were trying to sort of explore these ideas of storytelling commoning in relation to what these groups and organisations were already doing. And we’re producing some resources now and encapsulating some of the lessons. So for example, one of the important things is not focusing on the story as this product, but instead the story of the story, this ongoing process. Which includes the things which happen before you write an article or produce a magazine or whatever, but also the things that happen afterwards. And so Greater Govanhill were able to talk a lot about their practice and they do this community magazine and they bring people together to decide what the theme is going to be. And they’ve managed to move to a stage where basically everything in the magazine is written by members of the community, none of it is written by the journalists. They’ve really managed to move to this kind of stewarding role. But then they make the magazine and then they do kind of impact mapping and think about what has been the outcome of this thing going out into the world. So for example, they did a topic which was around fly tipping and really playing a convening role of community members and councillors and trying to come up with some collective solutions to this problem. So they’re not just seeing it as like, oh, you write an article and you put it out there, but actually…

Manda: Right, it’s a part of the community. It’s an emerging process.

Debs: Yeah.

Manda: Fantastic. Did the fly tipping change?

Debs: I think it did. Yeah. And then with Civic Square for example, they talked a lot about the work that they’ve done there on the neighbourhood doughnut in Ladywood in Birmingham, where they’re based. So this is obviously kind of drawing on Kate Raworth’s work on doughnut economics and Civic Square have created a doughnut. So it’s kind of showing these different forms of resources and what the impact of the neighbourhood is on these different areas. I suppose you can link in the show notes.

Manda: Oh, I want to talk to them!

Debs: Yes, definitely. And what was really interesting about that was how using doughnut economics as a framing story for their work and it becoming a really accessible way for lots of different types of people to get their head around what it might mean to live within an ecological ceiling, while having human flourishing and creating. That’s really not what you would think of as journalism.

Manda: Right, right, right. And yet it is the stories that we want to amplify.

Debs: Exactly. And actually, it’s doing some of that work of creating a shared paradigm, a shared knowledge base and a shared way of thinking about what would be a good and ethical way to live together. And also a way of being able to see your own participation in it, because it’s happening at the neighbourhood level. This isn’t just like global abstract questions of like, oh, we’re exceeding CO2 and this many millions of tons.

Manda: Right. Which gives agency.

Debs: Exactly.

Manda: You can do this in your in your area. And it’s dismantling the dominant paradigm by providing the alternatives; doing the Buckminster Fuller thing of create the other system that makes the old one obsolete. You don’t need to fight the old one, you just need to build the one that works better and show people that it’s working better. And they will abandon the old one without even remembering that that’s what they did. And it’s working, I hope.

Debs: Yeah. I mean, in terms of building a social infrastructure in that part of Birmingham, the times that I’ve been down to visit Civic Square, it’s a real cross-community space. People will come, bring their kids, there’s all sorts of different routes into the work. But then people are coming into a space where there are these quite sophisticated and academic economic arguments, but they’re just being presented as like beautiful pictures on the walls. And how does it become part of a culture? How does it become just sort of a normal thing that people would talk about, in the way that they would talk about their favourite music or the football or something

Debs: And in terms of thinking about storytelling commoning, the lesson that we really took from that is this thing about stories needing to be rooted in place. It’s not about telling abstract stories about the nation. Obviously there does need to be a way of of forming connections, but the bigger picture is made up of joining together lots of little pictures rather than going to Westminster and being like…

Manda: Of being top down.

Debs: Exactly. This is about supporting the work of transition, which means that there actually needs to be a real deep understanding of what the environmental impact of our lives is. And that the transition also can be imagined and practised within an urban space. I think that’s also really important.

Manda: Right. And it can build communities that are more alive than the deadening impact of neoliberalism. That seems to me, building the futures that are attractive is really important. Because the narrative of you’re all going to have to go and live in a straw bale hut on the west edge of Wales and be totally off grid or we all die, is not viable to people who live in Birmingham. So you have to build one that goes, hey guys, this could be much better, and this is what it looks like. So we are beginning to evolve a ground up ecosystem of storytelling and story stewarding and stories becoming an integral part of the emerging commons. I live in a world where the time frame for moving the bus from the edge of the cliff is quite short, and that we need a top down as well. And that if we could find a way to influence the narrative gatekeepers, because some of them exist in a Trumpian world where they want total control, but a lot of them are people who just basically want to keep their jobs. And they keep their jobs by saying the same things they said last year, next year. And how could we connect with them and offer them an understanding of the bottom up narratives that are happening? An understanding of what it looks like in Birmingham when you have the doughnut. Because most of them did PPE at Oxford. They actually have no clue that another world exists. Have you any sense that it’s possible to create a top down change, and to meet in the middle with the bottom up change?

Debs: By a top down change you mean top down within those media institutions?

Manda: Talking to the producers and the publishers and the executives who commission the stories. Which is to say the television and the media, newspaper editors, book publishers, industry executives. I have a vision of gathering them all together somewhere for about three days and going guys, here, look, this is what’s happening. You need to be telling these stories because those stories are not helpful. And them all going, yes! And going out and the world being a different place. It doesn’t hurt to dream, but I wonder where your dreams take you? Do you think a bottom up will garner enough change in time?

Debs: My sense of it is that actually people that are currently very invested in the media institutions that we have may well be the worst leaders for a storytelling transition. Because exactly this move of People’s Newsroom out of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism into Opus, is kind of saying that the solutions are actually probably not going to be called journalism. The institutions may not be called a newsroom. And that there’s more to learn and draw on and understand from other kinds of community action and organising, and the forms of intuitive storytelling and sharing which are always happening in those spaces. And it’s more about learning from and harnessing and shaping and stewarding those kinds of practices, than it is about trying to find some meeting point between people who still fundamentally think that there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with the way that journalism or culture is being constructed. But you do see organisations and initiatives of people who were trained in that world who have now left that world.

Manda: OK. Who have taken a different coloured pill and the scales have fallen from their eyes.

Debs: And they’re trying to influence from the outside. And to me, it’s of significance that the people that seem to really get it tend to say, I actually can’t remain within this institution and try and influence it from within. I actually need to move outside and be trying to exercise a different kind of influence. There’s one other example that I wanted to give around storytelling commoning and green shoots and institutions which are setting up, which is to talk about Impress the independent press regulator, who I’ve been doing some work with. That’s who I did the Dis/Mis podcast with. And Impress have got quite an interesting history. They came out of the Leveson inquiry into phone hacking, if you remember that.

Manda: Yes, but half of our listeners are not in the UK. So give us a little brief on that because it won’t mean anything to them.

Debs: So the phone hacking scandal was a big scandal in the 2000’s in the UK. There was mass criminality being…

Manda: It was wholly corrupt, basically, and still is.

Debs: Yeah. The major newspapers were all hacking celebrity’s phones, hacking the royal family, but also hacking the phones of victims of crime. And this is how they were garnering stories and publishing them. And the story really broke in the UK when it was revealed that they had hacked the phone of Milly Dowler, who was a schoolgirl who was murdered.

Manda: They’d hacked it and wiped the texts so that her mother thought she was still alive. It was utterly unconscionable.

Debs: So this was in 2011, I think 2012. Anyway, so the hacking scandal had been sort of brewing, and then it really broke. And then there was a big inquiry called the Leveson Inquiry, and it was investigating what had happened. It wasn’t criminal proceedings, but it was a sort of fact finding mission. And one of the outcomes of that was that Leveson recommended a new regulator for the press in the UK, because there had been a clear, massive failing of what was then the Press Complaints Commission. And he created a kind of framework for how a regulator should work, and also created these legal backstops. There’s quite a lot of detail in here that’s not really worth going into because that stuff has now been repealed. But he designed a regulator and Impress was created to meet those requirements. And initially the idea was that it would become a state regulator. There were these sort of carrots on sticks that were supposed to come into force if the big players joined the regulator, but they never joined. The carrots and sticks never came into force. They created their own.

Manda: Utterly toothless equivalent.

Debs: Utterly toothless. So Impress never became the thing that it was imagined to be, but then it has become something else and something really quite interesting. Which is that it’s also coincided with a flourishing of new independent news outlets in the UK. And a lot of those press outlets have joined Impress. So Impress has become a sort of infrastructure body, a way of those organisations being kind of connected to each other alongside other bodies like the Independent Media Association and the Independent Community News Network. But what Impress does is it provides this form of accountability which doesn’t go via the state. And they have a co-created code which they revisit through lots of different mechanisms every couple of years. And it’s a code which is created by the outlets who are members, and it’s also created by the wider public. They have lots of guidance and advice on how to cover lots of sensitive issues, including ethical ways to report on children or on people who are homeless or people with different disabilities or whatever. The thing that’s interesting about it to me is about this question of the virtuous community. It’s kind of about the commons.

Manda: It is a commons, isn’t it? Because it’s self-regulating and it changes and it evolves and it has graduated sanctions. It has everything that Elinor Ostrom said a commons should have.

Debs: Exactly and precisely because the big bad faith actors never joined, they’ve actually been able to focus not on this question of punishment, but on the question of how are you raising the bar? How are you acknowledging and harnessing the desire of these different outlets to behave well? And then how are you running a process of addressing harm? In the context where even when you are intending to do good, you will inevitably make mistakes, you will harm people. There will be things that you didn’t anticipate. And then they have a co-created process of mediation, which is free to access, where the person who has been harmed gets a lot of say in what the kind of interaction is going to be like. And often what they will say at the end of the process is in some ways that the outcome was less important than the fact that they just got to be heard. And there’s something there as well about addressing that power imbalance between the publisher and the audience member.

Manda: Right. So it becomes more of a stewardship.

Debs: Exactly.

Manda: Which is exactly where we’re heading.

Debs: Exactly. And in terms of the story of the story, again, it’s saying, well, the story goes out into the world and then what happens? Well, maybe it harmed someone. And then what happened? Well, there was an investigation, there was a process which held both the publisher and the person who was harmed in a process which is both about accountability and also about care.

Manda: Right. Because being heard is just so important. And both sides coming to an understanding that in most cases the harm was not deliberate. It was a product of cultural conditioning and now that cultural conditioning has softened, we hope. Okay. We’re so over time, but I would like to look at a little bit more. Because I am watching a whole new media evolving of things like Substack and Ghost and people’s blogs and podcasts and the capacity to just make your own YouTube. And some of it is obviously way off on the Elon Musk end of the scale. But there’s an awful lot of people that I am beginning to follow who are just putting out stuff for free, because it matters now. And we’re not in a capitalist world where everybody’s trying to monetise their output. I mean, some people are, but most of the really good ones are just guys this is where we’re at, this is what I saw at a town hall in somewhere in the middle of Ohio. And here is what people were saying. And you need to know this, and we need to connect, and we need to be moving in ways that allows fluidity and flow and connection where connection is appropriate.

Manda: So one of the things that seems to me is the right are all united to the point where they’re actually rolling tanks across borders, pretty much. And we’re still at the point where vast sections of us will stop speaking to other sections because we didn’t spell the pronouns right. And that’s not necessarily useful and it would be really good to create a degree of cohesion that feels emotionally literate. Because I don’t know that Musk and the others are bothered about emotional literacy and cohesion, it is top down because it’s a system that likes top downess. And we don’t. We like horizontal systems and we want to acknowledge everybody and yet we exist also in a system where everyone’s limbic system is on maximum red alert, ready to be insulted even when it’s unconscious. How, in your experience of the world, how are we going to knit a big enough community of stewardship and resilience and emotional literacy within the storytelling of our blogs and our podcasts and our YouTubes? Does that make sense as a question?

Debs: It definitely makes sense as a question. I think it’s important to historicise it and say this has been the central question of the left, at least since the 1970s.

Manda: Since there was a left.

Debs: Yeah, since there was a left. But also particularly since the kind of fracturing of that mid-20th century, largely male, largely white trade union movement that was able to win significant concessions. I mean, you know, feminists were writing beyond the fragments in the 1970s. They were saying how do we overcome this fracturing, which seems to have happened and which seems to be impeding our ability to act in a unified way. Then this question of knowledge and information, and that’s definitely really crucial to it, but actually the specific technologies that we have, it sort of takes the emphasis off them. Because what you also saw in the 1960s and 70s was a flourishing of the alternative press, all the magazines and the free sheets and the feminist bookshops. People were creating counter knowledges and trying to speak to an experience which was outside of this sort of homogenised, centralised media system. And even at the time, people were going, now we’re too fragmented and we don’t know how to do anything together. And in that context, I do not have the solution to this, but I suppose…

Manda: Really Debs? Fix the world please, with one idea. Okay. Go on.

Debs: But I suppose that there is something about the basics. And how do you create spaces where we can even experience a taste of a more communitarian existence, to even feel the possibility of it? So to me, I think there’s so much that’s about the food system and shared eating spaces. And there’s trying to think in Sheffield about how could you have a system that was like the British restaurants of the post-war period. Not just a food bank, but a kind of food pantry and a social eating space and something that’s connected into local food production. And then actually that as a space, eating and telling stories is such an intuitive combination. And if you have these spaces where people are regularly interacting across class, across race, across these really fractured lines of power, across gender. And collaborating around material needs. And trying to practice some sense of abundance, some sense that you’re not just locked in a competition with each other. And then if that was the foundation of your information and knowledge system. If that was the place that you were looking for insights about what is going on in a city. If you had a whole network of that, and then a council was like, we’ve changed the bus routes and we want to know what the impact is.

Manda: Or what would you like the bus routes to be? Which might be a more useful question.

Debs: Exactly.

Manda: Yes. Okay.

Debs: But if there was much more integration between those spaces of meeting immediate material needs together and also doing the thinking and the visioning and imagining of how things could change or where you could go, weaving those stories together in those spaces.

Manda: Right. Because giving people a chance to be generous with their time and their experience and their understanding and their making you food together and all of those things. People want to give, I think. And eating together is an amazing way of doing that. I need to talk to ShefFood don’t I? At some point later down the line. Alrighty, I think I have kept you long enough. It’s been amazing. This is such a rich and exciting area. It really seems to me that the stories we tell ourselves and each other about ourselves and each other, and that spread out into the world, that’s what thrutopian storytelling is. If we can change the narrative of who we are and what we’re doing and how we’re doing it, then the world is a different place. And I love that you’re in so many different ways making this happen on the ground. So thank you. Just before we go, do you want to tell us about the Festival of Debate? Very briefly, because that will be coming up after this goes out and people might want to know about it.

Debs: Yeah. So the Festival of Debate is run by Opus every year for about six weeks. I believe it starts on the 22nd of April and runs until the end of May. There’s going to be about 60 events. I think there’ll be some big name speakers, but also lots of community events, people really trying to come together and imagine what the future looks like for Sheffield. And it’s a really great meeting point for all sorts of different organisations and people across the city and from beyond. So really come by if you can.

Manda: If I can possibly get there, I will. You’ve got some amazing people all the way through. So thank you. I will put a link to that along with lots of other things we’ve talked about in the show notes. And then, Debs Grayson, thank you for coming on to the Accidental Gods podcast. It’s been such a delight.

Debs: Thank you so much.

Manda: And there we go. That’s it for another week. Huge thanks to Debs for the breadth and the depth of her thinking. Really, it’s such a joy to be able to engage with somebody who’s really explored all the angles of how we can create this new media commons. Of how we can generate and share and amplify the amazing stories of what people are doing at the grassroots level. Honestly, everything that she connects with feels like it’s touched with fairy dust. And if you’re listening to this quite soon after launch day on the 23rd of April, if there’s any way that you can get to the festival of debate at Sheffield, I honestly think it’s going to be one of the most inspiring places to be this year. And if you can’t, I am putting a whole bunch of links in the show notes so you can follow up some of the things that we talked about. And there is a tiny possibility that we may be able to get some of the recordings from the Festival of Debate and play them later on the podcast. I would be dizzily happy if this happens. So watch this space and we’ll see how we go. That aside, we will be back next week with another conversation.

Manda: In the meantime, huge thanks to Caro C for the music at the head and foot. To Alan Lowles of Airtight Studios for the production. To Lou Mayor for the video. To Anne Thomas for the transcripts, to Faith Tilleray for the website, and for all of the conversations behind the scenes that keep us moving forward. And as ever, an enormous thanks to you for listening. If you know of anybody else who wants to understand how we can generate and amplify and share and change the nature of the stories that we tell, so that they build the pathways to a future we’d be proud to leave behind, then please do send them this link. And that’s it for now. See you next week. Thank you and goodbye.

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