The Citizen Story: stepping into a many-to-many society - with Jon Alexander

Podcast Notes

Jon Alexander began his career in advertising, winning the prestigious Big Creative Idea of the Year, before making a dramatic change. Driven by a deep need to understand the impact on society of 3,000 commercial messages a day, he gathered three Masters degrees, exploring consumerism and its alternatives from every angle.

In 2014, he co-founded the New Citizenship Project with Irenie Ekkeshi to bring the resulting ideas into contact with reality. Since then, they have been on a mission to figure out how to use our skills — not just to sell stuff — to Consumers, and involve people in the decisions that affect their lives as Citizens.

In this engaging conversation, Jon shares some great insights from his latest book Citizens: Why the Key to Fixing Everything is All of Us. We also explore how we can move away from being a passive consumer to being an active agent, how collective power leads to exponential results, the responsibility we have to build our own systems, and what a Citizen democracy means for the government.

A full transcript of the episode can be found on our website: https://boundaryless.io/podcast/jon-alexander/

Key highlights 

We discussed:

• Defining Citizenship
• The Subject and Consumer stories versus the Citizen story
• How leaders of organizations can help to empower people to be Citizens
• Becoming active agents of change and investing in the future

Find out more about the show and the research at Boundaryless at https://boundaryless.io/resources/podcast/

Thanks for the ad-hoc music to Liosound / Walter Mobilio. Find his portfolio here: https://boundaryless.io/podcast-music

Recorded on 13 March 2022.

🌐 Boundaryless Conversations Podcast is about exploring the future of organizing at scale by leveraging on technology, network effects, and shaping narratives. We explore how platforms can help us play with a world in turmoil, change, and transformation: a world that is at the same time more interconnected and interdependent than ever but also more conflictual and rivalrous.