This Thursday’s colloquium is an opportunity to have you playfully explore a new kind of political reality. A political reality based on empiricism, where decisions are based not on what a small elite of humans desire, but on the needs of every being. Our conceptualization of politics is inspired by the work of the French philosopher Bruno Latour, which also gave the name of the game: Politics of Nature, now commonly known as PoN.
Politics of Nature (PoN) is an independent and autonomous science and activism-driven initiative started by Frederik Lassen and Jakob Raffn designed to enable the rapid exploration and testing of new types of societal operating systems. PoN has iteratively developed and refined the tabletop game over the past 18 months, with workshops conducted in six countries on three continents. PoN has now become a movement, taking place in multiple places around the world with no centralized administration, made possible by keeping everything open source and free to use by anyone. The next step is to scale the politics through developing a digital hybrids.
Jakob Raffn has made PoN part of his Ph.D., which focuses on Making Science Matter. He has published a paper on the utility of including uncertainty in Water Footprint assessments and the PoN Manual will be published this spring. Two additional publications will follow. One documents Politics of Nature as a tool for water allocation in South Africa, the other outlines a transactional system for seamless trading with allocated resources. Together the papers will join into a thesis that provides an outline of a burgeoning societal operating system.