What is Civic Interplay?

Civic Interplay is a space for reflection on a basic question: What does it mean to become-citizen in an era of sovereign AI?

If times have become strange - agentic, even - the nature of enquiry need not be without play.

Civic Interplay is all work in progress.

This work is emerging as we speak. Its formal practices are yet to be discerned. This is not a space where outcomes are pre-determined. What is known is no longer, necessarily, the ground on which we act.

The ‘Macro Age’ We’re Living Through

Many speak of a poly-crisis.

We are living through the Sixth Mass Extinction, the rise of AI sovereignty, and a series of catastrophic climate tipping points.

But the speech-acts: what have they become? Units of attention to be hard-earned, quantified outputs to be reported, inputs to a hyperscaler’s model?
And the crises: who gets to say they are leading the change?
The global governance response? Multi-lateral institutions have given way to a planetary AI now governing the logics of information, computation, and increasingly, co-intelligence.
And yet, and yet.
We are here, and we are significant as Felicity Castagna would say.

In this macro age, the existing language of ‘citizenship’ may not feel adequate.

It may feel better suited to other times, times different to our own. From these other times we inherited a political world order that enabled many to live comfortably in recent decades. To think little of politics, and of what it means to act as citizens.

From these other times we almost reached the end of history.

The macro age we find ourselves in is creating, before our eyes, a different kind of history.

It’s not the kind of history we were taught before. We can no longer say: And then they lived comfortably ever after.

We are not so sure of that any more.

But we can say: We are the interface for a new politics of becoming.

By ‘interface’ I mean something specific: we are the living, sensing, semi-autonomous connection between the world as it has been and the world as it might become.

Through our daily choices, about which platforms to use, which data to share, which automated systems to trust or resist, what terms and conditions we say yes to, what model we sign our alligience to, we are actively training the planetary intelligences that shape material futures.

If this sounds post-rational, perhaps it is. Perhaps this is the role playing asked of us during these emergent years of the agentic age.

This is the micro-politics of civic interplay.

The language of digital computing is suffused with legacy models:

‘Cloud computing’—as though our data had no weight, no carbon cost, no material infrastructure spanning the earth
’Human-centred design’—as though humans are the only thing that matters in a more-than-human world facing ecological collapse
’Artificial intelligence’—as though it is somehow not real, or not borne of the collective wealth of knowledge
’Information design’—as though designing how information flows were not also political acts

What about instead:
Our interconnected lives operate as training grounds for a new kind of planetary intelligence. The question is not whether we’ll have planetary-scale AI systems—we already do—but what kind of citizens we’ll be in relation to them.

What about instead:
The institutions to which we owe our allegiance and identities as citizens are becoming strange.

It is not only ‘governments’ as we have known them, but ‘governing bodies’—extending beyond these formal states—upon which we have become interdependent, in both cognitive and infrastructural ways.