The Problem with First Horizon Gossip

Why it's difficult to talk about what matters most in the public realm

I want to talk about gossip, and perhaps I even am gossiping when I ask:

“Pssst! Have you heard about the 'H2 Minus Vortex'?” 🔥 👀

I wrote about it at length for Perspectiva on Tuesday but the quick summary below is all you need here, and we can talk about what Dave was wearing and what Sally did on Friday later…

In this post, I offer a further iteration on the three-horizon model, namely that what we think of as news and analysis can also be seen as ‘First Horizon Gossip’. The gossip and the vortex act like two bouncers on the door, keeping the future out of the nightclub.

So first, briefly, the vortex:

This H2Minus Vortex is the fate of most new ideas and initiatives, especially those trying to forge a different kind of world that don’t initially serve prevailing economic and political interests, but end up doing so. The vortex is how power protects itself, capital sustains itself, and society perpetuates itself. If you are working in civil society and trying to change the world but not simultaneously working to deactivate the vortex, there’s a good chance it will swallow you. 😱

The 3 horizon model is more dispositional than temporal. It is not so much about the present, the near future, and the distant future, though that sometimes works as a shorthand. In Bill Sharpe’s original formulation the idea is about three main attitudes or dispositions to the future, in the present.

Horizon 1 managerial, about coping with events to achieve objectives within the world as we find it. Horizon 2 is entrepreneurial, forging new policies, practices, products and services. Horizon 3 is visionary, the playground of emerging futures.

All horizons are important, but Horizon 2 is our field of adjacent possibility in technology and culture, and there is potential there to forge a better world.

However, since work in Horizon 2 is often funded by national governments, or dependent on the investment-return cycle, and infused with the spirit and shadows of modernity, the best of such innovation is invariably coopted by incumbent power and managed back into the logic of business as usual to shore up the status quo (‘H2minus’) rather than forging a path to a transformed future (‘H2plus’).

Greenwashing is classic 'H2MV', and so, I believe, is 'green growth'. The H2minus vortex is also how the mindfulness revolution became ‘McMindfulness’, how the digital public square of Twitter is now a decaying Billionaire’s playground, or why OpenAI shifted from non-profit to for-profit.

We desperately need H2plus innovation, but it’s rare because it refers to the kinds of generative, prefigurative and transgressive sensibility that can resist the H2minus vortex and help to create a transformed world.

The challenge is that the vision of the third horizon has to manifest in a tangible form as innovation in the second horizon, where it typically depends on the financial power and institutional dispositions of the first horizon. H2plus work has to be inspired by a countervailing attractor(H3) that says: let’s move away from this(H1) towards that(H3). That kind of innovation is difficult because political, economic and technological power is invested in the H2-/H1 nexus that creates societal immunity to change.

This predicament is a tension for all non-profit organisations, including Perspectiva, and this is why visionary philanthropists should ask themselves where they see themselves in the three-horizon model.

Horizon One Gossip

The coinage ‘Horizon One Gossip’ is a way to challenge the perceived importance of most of what passes for news and analysis. Gossip has its place, and I’ve been known to gossip myself. The aim here is not to make a bogeyman out of gossip but to indicate that many conversations that purport to be something more worthy or profound often amount to being a kind of gossip.

There is anthropological literature on gossip. I don’t know it well, but Nigel Rapport and Joanna Overing (whom I met when considering a PhD in Anthropology) indicate three main theoretical approaches. Gossip maintains culture (functionalist) but it is also used strategically to advance individual or group interests (transactionalist) and it is used as “a meta-communicative process” to help people negotiate their shared sense of reality and thereby find their place in it (symbolic-interactionist).

I think H1 Gossip has all of these features. I am particularly interested in the functionalist account, what it implies about the inherent conservatism of much of the infosphere, and why people in the liminal web, who are more likely to ‘live’ in the second or third horizon, often feel they have nowhere to go. Rapport and Overing put it like this:

“Gossip helps maintain group unity, morality and history. The essence of gossip is a constant (if informal and indirect) communal evaluation and reaffirmation of behaviour by assessment against common, traditional expectations…gossip at once disassembles, evaluates and reconstitutes the everyday world.”

We tend to think gossip looks something like this:

Image from an article in The Atlantic called Gossip Can Be Good

Or like this:

From The Science of Gossip in The Conversation.

But we need to consider that gossip also looks like this:

or even this:

Coming back to the three horizons, H2plus innovation is what we need, but it’s rare because it refers to the kinds of generative, prefigurative and transgressive sensibility that can resist the H2minus vortex and H2minus gossip to help to create a transformed world. H2plus work is pulled by a countervailing attractor(H3) that says: let’s move away from this(H1) towards that(H3). That kind of innovation is difficult because political, economic and technological power is invested in the H2-/H1 nexus that creates societal immunity to change. The way that H2-/H1- manifests culturally is through a kind of gossip.

Let me be clear that I very much enjoy listening to The Rest is Politics podcast which is now wildly popular for good reason. However, I have realised that the conversation is almost all (excellent) Horizon One gossip, with occasional forays into new ideas or initiatives in Horizon Two. Whenever something more transformative or visionary from Horizon Three is mentioned, it is framed to sound politically impossible and therefore unreasonable - it is managed out of existence.

This resistance was evident in Rory Stewart’s handling of Kate Raworth’s vision of Doughnut Economics, discussed here. I am a huge fan of Rory in general, and I like that pragmatism is one of his main political values. However, because he lives and thrives in the first and second horizons he feels strong scepticism towards horizon three thinking and appears to play down the necessity of it. That podcast conversation is a good example of how the H2minus vortex operates, particularly because it tacitly challenges the legitimacy of being over-invested in Horizon One gossip.

Unlike most guests on the show, Kate’s message is a direct challenge to the status quo writ large, and an indirect challenge to the (excellent!) H1 Gossip that characterises the show. In effect, the implication of Kate’s model and analysis is that week in, week out, the Rest is Politics is having an outdated conversation, and Rory and Alastair’s cultural influence is not utilised to optimal effect.

The Doughnut economics analysis says the third horizon is necessary and we know its (ecological and social) constraints and should work towards it. Rory responded as if utilising a psychotherapeutic defence mechanism, and rendered the argument into a second horizon scenario with some ungenerous assumptions to make it seem implausible. For instance, he attributes to Kate ideas she indicates might be necessary and desirable rather than things that have to happen immediately. Rory then frames the proposition as an immediate cessation of growth in the developed world and the equalisation of living standards with the developed world, and then he says that won’t work in the first horizon - we literally can’t manage it. He is not wrong there, and there are real democratic and practical obstacles towards achieving anything like Doughnut economics at scale. Rory might defend his position by saying it’s disingenuous of Kate not to reckon with the political implications of her economic vision. Maybe.

But even if that’s right, what was missing was the kind of intellectual flexibility and imaginative playfulness that gives H2plus a chance to breathe, to find its form and strength before H1 gossip makes it sound deviant, and H2minus vortex swallows it up.

Without getting beyond H1 gossip, and without letting people play in the world of H2plus - “how might this necessary and desirable thing become possible” - H3 will never come into being.

With this post and the prior one for Perspectiva, I have tried to clarify two major sources of our paradigmatic immunity to change: Horizon One Gossip, and The H2 Minus Vortex. I don’t know how this lands with people, and how helpful it is, but suddenly I feel I see our challenges more clearly. I would be glad to hear from you in the comments.