Citizens - Alexander, Jon

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Résumé :
Citizens by Jon Alexander is a bold, uplifting wake?up call for anyone who feels that democracy, community, and everyday life have been reduced to clicking, buying, complaining - and waiting for them to fix it. If you're tired of politics-as-performance, brands-as-saviours, and institutions that treat people like customers or problems to manage, this book hands you a different lens: the Citizen inside every one of us. Alexander's core idea is brilliantly simple and deeply practical: to change the future, we must change the story. He reveals the hidden narratives shaping modern society - and why so many well?meaning reforms fail because they keep the same assumptions in place. The three stories: ? The Consumer Story: we're users, consumers, taxpayers, and voters-as-buyers. We demand, choose, and rate while organisations compete to serve us. ? The Subject Story: in fear and uncertainty, we trade agency for protection - hierarchy, obedience, surveillance, and strongman certainty. ? The Citizen Story: we are interdependent, creative, empathic people who can participate, collaborate, and c?create solutions. Citizenship becomes a verb: engagement, responsibility, belonging, contribution. With a foreword by Brian Eno and praise from leading voices in democracy, business, and social change, Citizens makes a persuasive case that the Citizen Story is already rising - often beneath the media radar. From citizens self?organising in crisis to neighbourhood renewal, Alexander shows how citizen power and collective intelligence can outperform top?down command or market fixes when challenges are complex: climate change, inequality, polarisation, loneliness, and loss of trust. What you'll get from this book: ? A fresh, memorable framework for democratic renewal, civic participation, and citizen-led change (ideal for readers of politics, social science, and systems thinking) ? A clear diagnosis of why consumerism can't solve the problems it created - and why change without consequences is a dangerous fantasy ? Real-world stories of ordinary people doing extraordinary work -f rom Birmingham and Berlin to Kibera, London, and Grimsby-proving that citizenship is not rare...

Biographie:
Foreword. Brian Eno sets out the value of Citizens in framing a new, optimistic cooperative story for our age, as opposed to the two other options: authoritarian states such as China and Siliconia - a Consumer state with centralised power and deep surveillance. Mentions Citizen Story

1. Opening. Jon Alexander sets out the need to 'step into' the Citizen Story so that we can deal with the many challenges of our age: economic insecurity, ecological emergency, public health threats, political polarisation, and more. Mentions citizens, economic insecurity, ecological emergency

2. Citizens Everywhere. How humans are bound together through interdependence and reciprocity, and in turn have a deep bond with nature, which conventional big business cannot understand. Picks apart the self-dependence and utilitarian philosophy of tech billionaires Peter Thiel and Mark Zuckerberg

3. Citizens By Nature. Central to the Citizen Story is a belief in ourselves and in human nature as creative, capable, and caring, rather than lazy, self-interested, and competitive within a zero-sum framework. Any redesign of institutions will fail if we haven&rsquo...

Sommaire:
it's human ? Practical pathways to participatory democracy: citizens' assemblies, deliberative democracy, participatory budgeting, community organising, volunteering, crowdfunding, civic tech, and open innovation...