It sometimes seems that the story is approaching its end.
Lest there be no more telling of stories at all, some of us out here in the wild oats,
amid the alien corn, think we’d better start telling another one,
which maybe people can go on with when the old one’s finished. Maybe.

- Ursula K. Le Guin (1986)

I set out on this PhD research journey in the hope of finding practical and generalisable answers to the following question: “How may online networks enable radical collective change through social learning?”

Having reached the end of this journey, what answers have I encountered? And what new questions have opened up?

I will first review the main findings from Chapters 4, 5, and 6. Then, I will discuss certain topics which I feel might warrant further research. I will end on a personal note.

My investigation of the trajectory of FC, and of the issues that befell this community, led me to unearth a number of useful practical insights with regards to questions related to the objectives and strategy, ways of doing, and ways of being that characterised this project. Other social movement organisations or prefigurative communities may wish to reflect on these findings in order to inform their own practice.

With regards to objectives and strategy, I found that such projects need particular vigilance when trying to bridge the twin missions of participating in speculative financial markets, and building grassroots alternative economic systems, as these can be profoundly contradictory. It also seemed crucial that various stakeholders be better informed of the consequences of strategic decisions that could affect the whole project, which may require more clearly identified membership tiers to consult.

FC suffered from multiple governance-related issues, around accountability, decision-making, and transparency, but also with regards to internal communication - which was largely text-based. This shows the need for social change activists to pay special attention to the agreements and processes that support participatory democratic projects, and to the extra challenges that arise in the context of text-based online communications, which make conflict resolution particularly difficult. An approach explicitly embracing emergent, episodic and distributed forms of leadership may also be helpful to avoid the informal concentration of power in one or several individuals.

Finally, such projects should not overlook ways of cultivating trust and mutual care, and strong relationships more generally. This did not seem part of the culture of FC. And when severe conflict broke out, there were no resolution or transformation processes in place that may have enabled the community to face its long-standing issues.

Despite the apparent failure of FC as a prefigurative community, I found that several useful tools – most notably, the ecological cryptocurrency Faircoin – had emerged out of it, and may yet come into their own as part of other ongoing grassroots efforts for radical collective change. Participants also stressed the importance of the friendships they had established in the project, and in spite of a widespread sense of burnout, spoke of various forms of cognitive, affective, and relational social learning that had taken place for them.

This case study was useful to my investigation in several ways. First, it enabled me to outline some of the practical insights - presented above - which I was looking for, in terms of designing or convening online groups to create social change. These insights, in turn, highlighted what appear to be necessary conditions for social learning spaces to remain functional to their participants: when trust is lacking, or when too little attention is brought to the interplay of vertical and horizontal accountability within a system, its social learning capability is likely to diminish (Wenger, 2009). In the case of FC, it appears that more could have been done to create instances of stewarding governance aimed directly at fostering learning capability, through a more careful - and democratically managed - balance of experimentation and alignment.

Finally, this case study led me to pay all the more attention to the possibility that relationality may be a critical condition of radical collective change. This aspect came to the fore in the second community I considered.

Contrary to FC, DAF was still active at the time of my research. Therefore, instead of focusing on the issues that were preventing social learning and change from happening, my investigation focused more strongly on what participants considered to be areas of ongoing, positive value-creation - although sources of dissatisfaction also emerged.

This case study set out to explore some of the primary areas of change that appeared to be taking place through this network and its groups (the seeds of change); the main factors that enabled or hampered this change to be cultivated (the soil); and the actions and forms of leadership that affected this change and its enabling or disabling conditions (the sowers).

Meaningful changes appeared to be taking place for DAF participants, as a result both of their involvement in the network at large, and in self-managed groups. At the network level, the emphasis on self-organisation and collaboration, and on integrating and transforming difficult emotions, were particularly valued. But the deepest personal changes took place within smaller groups meeting regularly, and which aimed at bringing about new ways of being and relating - for example, in Deep Relating or Earth Listening groups - or at fostering more critical consciousness of systemic violence in the network, in the case of the Diversity and Decolonising Circle (D&D).

Primary enabling factors for these changes included:

• The design of the social learning space, such as having clarity of purpose and clear principles of engagement; the presence of facilitators and moderators; a stimulating and informative space; and regular meetings within small groups.
• Relational and somatic processes and modalities, such as the forms of meditation practised within Deep Relating, Wider Embraces, or Earth Listening groups.
• Group culture and atmosphere, including a sense of psychological safety, trust, and the possibility to make mistakes; and an explicit attention to cultivating relationships.
• Enjoying the company of one's fellow participants, due to finding like-minded others and a sense of belonging; encountering a diversity of participants and perspectives; and benefiting from helpful and inspiring others, particularly key enablers or role models.

Factors playing a disabling role with regards to social learning included technical platform issues, as well as organisational issues, particularly with regards to DAF vision and purpose, the exercise of power and leadership, or reactions to anti-racism and decolonising efforts.

As I have noted in the case of D&D (Annex 5.3, Section 4), the most dynamic small groups in DAF display characteristics of communities of practice - such as a particular regime of competence - while still providing active social learning spaces that may be helpful to challenge this regime of competence, and thus amplify and deepen the social learning taking place thanks to them (Wenger-Trayner & Wenger-Trayner, 2020, p.33). It also seems that groups like D&D, which foreground the production of liveable knowledge, a commitment to candour and open inquiry, and the embrace of learning citizenship, exhibit particularly rich traces of social learning, which confirms Wenger's analysis on social learning capability (2009, p.4, 6).

In examining the role and action of the most active participants and conveners in the network, I found that they tended to most value relational activities as a key part of their involvement, and that they aspired to “orienting towards connection, loving kindness, and compassion towards all living beings” as a primary form of radical collective change, along with “a transformative shift in worldviews and value systems.” They viewed their participation in DAF as helping to promote these changes, mainly through an ongoing experience of unlearning taking place through relating with other participants in small groups. However, they did not view their participation as primarily aiming to bring about these changes. I concluded that the dimension of radical collective change that seemed most relevant to active participants within DAF was that of reorienting towards a relational onto-epistemological paradigm as an essential response to the global social and ecological predicament. It appeared that this community may be fostering new forms of consciousness and generative world-view transformations – although further research would be needed to confirm this.

In summary, this case study - and the Wenger-Trayner evaluation methodology - allowed me to explore in much more depth some implications of adopting a relational approach to collective change, as well as modalities and conditions that may enable important personal changes to take place within the context of online groups. The value-creation stories co-created with other research participants (Annex 5.2) have also been helpful to examine in a structured way a variety of aspirations, perspectives, and experiences of value-creation within the network.

However, this methodology showed limitations with regards to its ability to assess or reveal transformational change, as I will discuss further below. Indeed, I have come to view radical collective change as involving more than a set of practical techniques and methods, but also a degree of criticality toward the personal and cultural assumptions and narratives that underlie the very idea of creating change.

Finally, in Chapter 6, I explained how my research has led me to favour a decolonial approach to assessing radical collective change. I presented a framework, developed from my experience and readings, which I think can allow me to assess whether a prefigurative community has the potential to be enacting radical collective change. Then, I used this framework to examine the data I collected about FC and DAF.

I have come to believe that radical collective change requires fully facing the four denials of modernity, including:

• “the denial of systemic, historical, and ongoing violence and complicity in harm”;
• “the denial of the limits of the planet and of the unsustainability of modernity-coloniality”;
• “the denial of entanglement”; and
• “the denial of the magnitude and complexity of the problems we need to face together.” (Machado de Oliveira, 2021, p.51)

For radical collective change to happen, these denials should be faced not simply intellectually, but also affectively and relationally, through the creation of a mycelium of change-related initiatives leading people involved in them to re-orient their lives in important ways. I will return to this aspect below.

I also suggested that prefigurative communities of critical discernment (fostering care and belonging, welcoming conflict, and generating emergent leadership) provide a container for these initiatives to emerge and sustain themselves. So the more a community seems to be paying attention to the four denials of modernity, and the more it functions like a prefigurative community of critical discernment, the more potential it has to bring about radical collective change.

Using this framework, I looked back on FC and DAF. I found that FC displayed little potential for radical collective change, as it did not meet most of the conditions above. DAF had more potential: indeed, it was founded to address two of the four denials (that of unsustainability, and of the magnitude of global challenges), and groups within DAF were also confronting the two other denials (of systemic violence, and of entanglement). I also noticed that DAF displayed more features of a prefigurative community of critical discernment. However, I concluded that this potential was in need of strengthening, so that generative initiatives addressing all four denials may better emerge and thrive within or thanks to this community.

Here, I briefly introduce related areas of research that I have not been fully capable of exploring in the course of this doctoral research.

I was not aware of any initiatives in FC or in DAF through which the four denials of modernity were addressed, and which might have led to deep re-orientations in people’s lives. By this definition, no radical collective change seemed to have taken place thanks to these networks, to my knowledge.

What do I mean by “deep re-orientations”? And how might one assess them?

Since I consider radical collective change to involve, first of all, a full acknowledgement of the four denials of modernity, I would consider a “deep re-orientation” as involving changes in people’s lives that are enacted as a result of this consciousness, and which are viewed as transformative by the person. And in order to be collective, these changes should involve more than an individual – they would probably have a collaborative nature.

However, because “Modernity… is faster than thought itself as it structures our unconscious” (Machado de Oliveira, 2021, p.53), it is inevitable that our desires include the need to “look good,” “feel good,” and “move forward” (ibid, p.113). How then to assess whether these changes are merely performative, tokenistic, and transactional, or rather do constitute radical collective change?

I suspect that this requires an ongoing critical self- and mutual assessment, that should at least include investigating:

1. how a person is (re)orienting their life as a result of their decision to face the denials of modernity-coloniality;
2. what the observed results of this (re)orientation are – on the person and on others;
3. what stories are at play for the person as they enact these (re)orientations (how they interpret what they are doing); and
4. how critical they are of these stories, and sceptical of their own subconscious investments and desires.

In other words, whatever one does with the explicit intent to address one or several of the denials of modernity-coloniality, could be performative, or constitute radical collective change, depending on how and why they do it. This would depend on the intellectual and relational rigour brought to this initiative (Stein, 2021) - and therefore, on the material, affective and relational impacts it creates.

I surmise that the stronger one’s commitment to self-criticality, the more likely these (re)orientations may constitute radical collective change. From a research perspective, the Wenger-Trayner social learning methodology I used in Chapter 5 has been helpful to evaluate the first three aspects listed above, but has not allowed a strong focus on the fourth to take place. Cooperative inquiry group processes aiming at supporting the capacity for critical humility (European-American Collaborative Challenging Whiteness, 2005) may be particularly useful in order to challenge “self-delusion, avoidance or denial” (p.246), in a spirit of mutual care and compassion.

One could argue that if radical collective change requires intentionally, persistently, and skilfully grappling with the four denials of modernity-coloniality, which are at the heart of the harmful way of being that characterises modernity, such forms of change are very unlikely to spontaneously manifest in informal learning settings. Indeed, the culture of late modernity does not reward sobriety, maturity, discernment and accountability, but rather their opposites (Andreotti, 2022). I have experienced myself the immense difficulty of addressing the denial of systemic violence and ongoing harm within the context of DAF as a community; and fully facing the unsustainability of the modern-industrial civilisation, as well as the planetary predicament it has brought about, remains very challenging emotionally and psychologically for many people, quite understandably.

According to Vanessa Andreotti (2023), what is required to face the denials of modernity is depth education – that is, education that will help one to build the capacity to hold various layers of complexity in their understanding of the world and of themselves; to hold the weight of the contradictions and tensions between and within these layers; and to hold space for the good, the bad, the broken, and the messed-up aspects of humanity, with love and compassion, so that one will activate an ethical imperative towards others and the world that is not dependent on intellectual choice. Unlike the standard forms of mastery education that are typically imparted by teachers in school, and which can be likened to pouring water into a cup or conquering a mountain peak, depth education is more akin to onion-peeling – and like peeling onions, it can be very uncomfortable. My journey of understanding with regards to radical collective change has increasingly led me to bring my attention from the former to the latter.

A fundamental aspect of depth education is that of developing decolonial systems and complexity literacies, including different relationships with language; reality; voice and identity; time, teleology and progress; purpose, purity and relationality; pain and desire; and responsibility. These literacies, as objects of ongoing inquiry, are instrumental to depth education (Andreotti, 2023).

Envisioning such forms of education taking place in informal settings probably requires both the presence of “key enablers” (Chapter 5) who would be sufficiently literate with these aspects of depth education; and the willingness and dedication, on behalf of others around them, to learn from these enablers, and to make time and space for deeply uncomfortable (un)learning. Closely knit peer-support and learning groups like the D&D circle may constitute helpful containers in this regard. But it is much less obvious how such unlearning might take place informally at the level of an entire community, if this community’s purpose is not explicitly framed around these issues. More likely this would need to take the form of formal courses and workshops, offered to those with the willingness, consent, cognitive and affective dispositions, and relational capacity to engage with depth education (Andreotti, 2022).

The Wenger-Trayner social learning evaluation framework (Chapter 5) may be an interesting lens through which to study the results of such activities of unlearning across a social system – including by the (un)learners themselves, although I found the framework rather complex and not particularly easy to deploy. However, given its agnostic relation to all forms of value-creation, the methodology does not embed any particular criticality with regards to value-creation stories, besides the encouragement to check a story’s plausibility with other social learning space participants (Wenger-Trayner and Wenger-Trayner, 2020, p. 223). Therefore, integrating practices like the cooperative inquiry group processes mentioned above may be necessary.

A dimension of decolonial work that I have not explored in this research is that of the importance of re-establishing new connections with the land as part of decolonial efforts toward social change. This involves the political aspects of returning land sovereignty and stewardship to Indigenous peoples as a central objective of decolonisation; but also inscribing decolonial approaches, more generally, within place-based practices (Paradies, 2020). While in this PhD research I have concentrated on the issue of online communities, I now believe that prefigurative practice cannot remain decontextualised and deterritorialised if it is to be part of efforts oriented toward radical collective change.

An important reason for this is that this practice calls for profound personal and collective re-orientations, felt and enacted on a visceral, embodied level, which I doubt can be fully brought about through technical means such as computers and the internet. Escobar (2020) argues that moving toward a relational ontology is very challenging for modern human beings, who are marked by the liberal ontology and its reliance on notions like the individual or the free market. Much personal inner work is thus needed to unlearn disconnection and economicism and effectuate an “ontological reconversion” (Escobar, 2014, p. 60) – and this unlearning cannot only happen in the intellectual dimension, as Stein (2019) points out.

Recent examples of long-lasting social and ecological struggles taking place within territorial contexts point to affective, relational entanglements with the land and its other-than-human inhabitants as enabling activists to begin undertaking such a reconversion. For example, anthropologists, philosophers, and activists themselves (Fremeaux and Jordan, 2021; Descola and Pignocchi, 2022; Gosselin and gé Bartoli, 2022a) have studied – and experienced – how the struggle for the ZAD (Zone à défendre, or “zone to defend”) of Notre-Dames-des-Landes, in France, has enabled many of its (modern human) participants to enact a more relational world, and to undergo important affective and relational unlearning in defence of the territory with which they found themselves entangled – the bocage. This territory also displays important strategic potential as part of wider collective change efforts, by offering a radical alternative to the nation-state as a form of political organisation (Descola and Pignocchi, 2022). I therefore believe that the political activation of relationality within territorial contexts is another, potentially critical element of radical collective change.

However, I am also conscious that territories and communities can be essentialised as part of a reactionary politics. As I have described elsewhere (Cavé, 2023), prefigurative initiatives and networks are emerging that may appear to pursue emancipatory forms of radical collective change, but which do not attempt to relinquish fundamental aspects of modernity-coloniality such as racism, sexism, or heteropatriarchy. Some of them may even contribute to the widespread rise of fascism which can already be observed in various regions of the world (Palheta, 2022). For this reason, I find it crucial for land-based ontological ontological alternatives to be centred on emancipatory purposes (Kothari et al., 2019).

In this study, I have not been able to investigate the aspect of scale with regards to the topic of radical collective change. The predicament I have outlined in Chapter 1 is planetary; yet, the two online communities I investigated have only brought together a few hundred to several thousand participants, with an active core of only a few dozen people. Besides, my methodology has not allowed me to evaluate changes taking place outside of the groups I studied, as a result of participants’ involvement in these groups - although certain value-creation stories have mentioned changes taking place on occasion. An area for future research would be that of collecting value-creation stories focusing on more wide-ranging social impacts of participating in online prefigurative communities.

How to envision these changes having an effect on the wider paradigms, power structures and social systems that are continuing to inflict harm on the human and other-than-human world, day after day? And how to consider the issue of scale without falling prey to a colonial and capitalist logic?

I find myself inspired by ideas like those of Stout (2021), a prefigurative community theorist and practitioner, who suggests “seeding” transformative change fractally and at various social levels, notably by means of a common set of simple, universal principles for generative social change, a “DNA” that could be adopted by social change activists in various social movements and communities, and adapted to their local context. However, the question of how to create alignment around universal principles in a decentralised way, and without enforcing uniformity (particularly in a time of increased epistemic fragmentation), is one that remains open.

As for sustainability scholars Schreuder and Horlings (2022), they build on the existing literature on potentially transformative social innovations (Moore, Riddell and Vocisano, 2015), and state that “a combination of different scaling processes is needed to foster system-wide and multi-scale change, varying over time” (p.7) – including scaling out, up, deep, and within. Using this framework, it would appear that relatively small communities more focused on inner transformation, such as DAF, may establish partnerships with other change agents that have more capacity to help innovative tools and process to “scale up,” and thus increase their potential for transformative social impact. In the case of prefigurative communities, this could include coalitions with more conventional political actors that have more clout, such as trade unions or political parties (Monticelli, 2021). I suspect that only through such alliances may radical institutional reconfigurations to take place, such as the emergence of the regenerative terrestrial institutions outlined by Gosselin and gé Bartoli (2022a) – born from the shared experience and entangled perspectives of humans and other-than-humans.

Finally, another direction of research that is relevant to the study of radical collective change is the emerging transdisciplinary field of socio-technical tipping points (e.g. Otto et al., 2020; Smith, Christie and Willis, 2020; Sharpe and Lenton, 2021; Fesenfeld et al., 2022; Lenton et al., 2022). This discipline investigates how small changes within social systems may enable a given innovation to trigger “tipping cascades and large-scale socio-technical transformation,” so that “niche innovations in technologies and behaviors can gain momentum and eventually trigger non-linear changes in previously dominant socio-technical systems” (Fesenfeld et al, 2022, p.1100). Exploring how relational practices and world-views may percolate through social networks to become more widespread appears urgently needed.

Four years and a half since I set off on this research journey – how am I?

Journal entry – Feb.12, 2023
My entire being heavy with grief and fatigue, I lay on the pebbles by the side of the flowing river whom we haven’t visited in months, letting the radiant sun and the speedy purling of water work through the pain and the pointlessness. Contemplating in awe the flight of a white heron, admiring the lithe playful agility of a robin flitting to and fro between the roots of a fallen tree, curious about the two strange creatures sitting there not chasing insects. Trying hard not to think about how many insects or birds will still be part of this graceful riverside in a few years’ time. Fantasizing about a whole month of rest, come April. Luxurious. Deep. Abolishing calendars and clocks. Weeks in the mountains, seeing no one, saying nothing. Recovering from 4.5 years of foolishness gone by like a flash in a pan, the clang of stones thrown into a cauldron. Violent erosion of mind and body. Until the next bout of idiocy?

As I write these lines, I feel the strain of the continued effort that writing this thesis has brought into my life – the gradual narrowing of my attention range, until very little else still matters. Which, inevitably, brings me back to some of the nagging questions I raised a few chapters ago – “What’s the point of all this? Was this thesis worth the white hairs that have grown on my head since I started writing it?”

I will probably never know if any of the millions of words I have said, read, or written over this time have been helpful to bring about generative forms of collective change. So I try to make my peace with this unknowing.

Following the fungal advice I received on a summer solstice, some time ago, I continue to look for the path that will lead me up the Third Mountain of my life, as the story goes (Andreotti and Crier, 2020). I expect to get lost, time and again – and I trust that getting lost, and humbly listening to all the beings that surround me, from all times, may be part of finding the way. In the words of Bayo Akomolafe,

The invitation is to listen, it's to humble ourselves enough to fall down to the earth, and listen differently, listen to ancestry, listen to the world around us that we've numbed and muted as “resource,” in our attempts to progress beyond the planet. … We need new patterns of learning together, that the university cannot provide us. We need new ways of thinking about ourselves as going beyond the individual. … We must learn how to get lost together. ... It's not entirely left to us [humans] to solve these problems. If it were left to us, we would be reinscribing an anthropocentricity that I find deeply troubling and problematic. It's not entirely left to us. That's where humility finds its feet. To know that we're not going to solve this problem, Bill Gates is not going to get us out of this shit, we're not going to assemble and say “kumbaya,” the IPCC will not save the day... we will need to sit with failure, we will need to sit within cracks, and listen deeply. (Climate Crisis, Fragmentation and Collective Trauma, 2021)

As I slowly make my way through the wilderness, following the advice of Buddhist master Thích Nhất Hạnh, I try to breathe into the end of the world as I know it – the end of “a civilisation that has become antithetical to the ontology and ethics of interexistence” (Escobar, 2020, p. 114):

Breathing in, I know that this civilization is going to die. Breathing out, this civilization cannot escape dying. (Nhá̂t Hạnh, 2008, p. 53)

Everywhere, I hear echoes of increasingly terrified attempts, on behalf of the masters of this world who see their ship beginning to sink, to barricade themselves inside “armed lifeboats” (Parenti, 2012; Buxton, 2022). Desperate to control the “threat” of mass migration, to keep at bay the people fleeing places rendered uninhabitable by the lifestyles of the masters themselves. Throwing far more money at barbed wire and AI-powered border controls (Disclose, 2022) than at climate adaptation. Vigorously fanning the flames of the “three evils of society” identified by Martin Luther King – “the giant triplets of racism, economic exploitation and militarism” (King, 2018).

And I wonder: if eradicating exclusion and oppression means widening our conception of “we” until no one is excluded (Rorty, 1989) – how to keep expanding this circle of solidarity, to all humans, but also to other-than-humans, and to the Earth itself? How to puncture the armed lifeboats and decolonise our hearts and minds in a time of collapse?

This calls for a healing of relationships, and for reparations that may allow this healing to take place. I want to end by quoting from Chief Ninawa, of the Huni Kui people of the Amazon, who speaks most eloquently about the magnitude of this task – and about the particular responsibility, in accomplishing it, of those most thoroughly steeped in modern education systems, such as myself (Andreotti and Valley, 2021):

The destruction that is happening is led by people with a high degree of formal knowledge and with a high degree of education. The most educated people are the ones who become most invested in the fantasy of separation and superiority that is destroying our planet. … We need to confront the harm that this illusion has caused to our planet. The Earth herself and the global challenge we are facing are our teachers.
… In order to do this, we will need a lot of courage, we need a lot of stamina, a lot of compassion, humility, and a lot of patience. We will need to reactivate a form of love that we have forgotten, but that is latent within us.
This process is difficult and also painful, but without it we will not be able to understand why the house that was built by colonialism and human arrogance is now falling apart…. If we do not go through this difficult learning, our dreams, our hopes, our aspirations will only reproduce the same fantasies that have brought us to the world of illusion.
... The land is our mother, and as part of it we are a huge family of human and nonhuman relatives. Many Indigenous people still carry this feeling, but it is important to emphasize that, in our tradition, there are not concepts that can be written in words. This is a way of life that involves the intellect, but that is also much broader than the intellect.
The ways of living that respect and care for the Earth and that care for future generations are not just beautiful words, they involve feelings and actions that promote sobriety, maturity, discernment, accountability, which have the power to stop the individualism, arrogance, vanity and greed that put us on the path of extinction. We have to be clear about that.
We need an education that heals, but we cannot have healing if we don't know what disease is making the planet, our hearts and our feelings sick. So, a healing education begins with a confrontation with what humanity has done wrong in the past. This is necessary to open up the possibility of contributing something new and healthier for future generations. This involves the disillusionment with the promises and fantasies of economic growth as progress that are sold by the governments. Each of us needs to do our part.