When Douglas and I first met in his house in Islington back in the mid-1990s, we talked about Bach and mathematical patterns in music (about which my knowledge was sketchy at best) but also about Hermann Hesse's Glass Bead Game, which we both loved. That novel is about a complex intellectual game that synthesizes knowledge across disciplines. It opens with these lines:
> For although in a certain sense and for light-minded persons non-existent things can be more easily and irresponsibly represented in words than existing things, for the serious and conscientious historian it is just the reverse. Nothing is harder, yet nothing is more necessary, than to speak of certain things whose existence is neither demonstrable nor probable. The very fact that serious and conscientious men treat them as existing things brings them a step closer to existence and to the possibility of being born.
That is what we are doing. Treating this wildly improbable thing (a truly member-owned global digital platform) as if it exists, thereby bringing it into being. Not through wishful thinking but through serious, conscientious, playful work. Through building and testing and discovering. Through drama and dialogue and deliberation. Through honouring ancient wisdom about governance while creating something genuinely new for our digital age.