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WOLFGANG IS A WIDE-RANGING GENERALIST with a background in philosophy and political science, experience co-founding a software development company in Hamburg, and more recently has been deeply involved in climate activism in the UK. He describes himself as a facilitator who ‘helps teams and organisations make sense of their situation, generate options for strategic action, and take concrete steps to implement them,’ and prioritises work in education and social movements. He has co-founded the Movement Ecology Collective and Organising from Elsewhere and is currently working on tools for movement mapping and fostering collective intelligence.
We met thanks to a mutual connection this past spring from the Creative Bureaucracy Festival, and during our in-person meeting in a sticky June heat wave in Berlin (viscerally appropriate for discussions of climate change) we circled around his current reflections on reprioritising his work in order to effect the greatest change, and lingered on the topic of ‘collective agency.’ As you’ll read below, Wolfgang flows naturally from high-level theory to biological parallels of agency on a cellular level, to concrete questions we can ask ourselves about what our role(s) are in systems change. He offered the idea that the polycrisis is in fact an experience of incoherence, and on a more personal note, reminded me of the benefit of considering ‘coherence’ from the lens of our own personal narrative of life and purpose. He leaves us with imaginative potential to how we approach the question of ‘what kind of impact can I have with the kinds of things I can do well?'
Leigh Biddlecome: We met at a turning-point and reflection moment for you, as you look back on what you’ve done and what you want to shift your work towards. And I know that you’ve done a huge range of different projects across multiple fields and ecosystems. Can you start by telling me a bit about that path from the perspective of where you're sitting today, and how you would describe your interests and work now?
Wolfgang Wopperer: Right now I’m sitting on a boat in West London. So on the one hand, my life is quite low tech. I live on a boat. I have to empty my poo container every week. There’s a lot of manual work involved in this kind of lifestyle.
On the other hand, we are having this interview via Zoom, and it’s being automatically transcribed. I’ve been looking into the technology behind this over the last few weeks quite a bit, learning about large language models and AI agents, and how they can support us in tasks from transcribing interviews to software development. I’ve been doing some interesting experiments with different models in theory development, having extended conversations with them, and seeing how emergence works between these very different types of intelligence, me and them.
And then all of this is aiming for some kind of political impact. Most of my work revolves around the question of how can we build collective power for large-scale system change?
Looking back on my life, I see different lines that converge in this moment. I studied philosophy and political sciences, with the clear plan of becoming an academic and a philosophy professor. So there’s always been this interest in abstract and ‘pure’ thinking.
Then there was a long period when I got distracted from that by the Internet and technology more broadly, co-founded a software development company and a co-working space in Hamburg, Germany, and was very engaged in the tech scene. Then, when I moved from Hamburg to the UK, I became involved in climate activism and had a ‘late conversion’ to becoming a political activist.
For quite some time after that there was this tension – how do these things fit together? Connecting this to your theme of coherence – how do I create coherence out of all this?
It feels like now, slowly, things are coming together in a way where what I’ve learned about technology can be practically useful for political purposes. Just yesterday I was part of a conversation about how the political right is using AI to flood online platforms with propaganda, how the left is not, and what to do about this asymmetry.
At the same time, I feel the work that I’ve been doing in theory can be made practically useful in developing strategy and in helping people make sense of our current situation. So there’s also a convergence between theory and political action.
The challenge that remains is to figure out how that translates into practical next steps. What does it mean for me this week, next week? What do I prioritise? But it feels like, yes, there’s a shape emerging from all of this.
Wikimedia Deutschland Assembly 2024
Leigh: I find there’s this interesting evolution that happens in one’s mid- to late-thirties. Or at least I’m sensing for myself that these disparate strands will coalesce, or at least become more coherent in the next phase of life. In that sense, hearing your perspective (from a few years beyond me!) is helpful, and I think it can be useful to younger folks who perhaps expected to be ‘in the thing’ already.
Wolfgang: Oh, yes, I’ve been thinking about this repeatedly in different phases of my life. There was always this assumption or expectation that things would settle into a specific configuration, and that would then be my life. As a young person you expect that as you become older, your life will take a definite shape or form. Looking back at my parents’ life, this seemed pretty much how it went for them – but I think that’s true only looking at it from the outside. When I talk to my dad, for example – he's turning seventy-six this year – he says he can’t really conceptualise that he is supposed to be seventy-six, because his life still feels in flux, and there’s still the schoolboy inside him who wonders about how the world works.
But I feel in our generation, and probably in the generations after us, it’s become more and more obvious that for most people this ‘clear, single path’ is just not what’s going to happen.
Leigh: There’s a connection there to the multiple, interlocking crises we’re currently experiencing – do you have a preferred crisis term, by the way?
Wolfgang: I think my preferred one is ‘polycrisis’ because it highlights both the diversity of processes and their interaction and the emergent larger crisis, without emphasising either of these aspects too much. And yes, I think on the one hand, there’s an almost deliberate force keeping people from settling down because the system we live in pushes highly consumerist growth, a highly sped up way of life that needs us to be constantly looking for something that gives us a temporary sense of stability and relief. But when we get it, it’s just this little dopamine peak. Then comes the trough, and we need to find something else. And this cycle repeats over and over again.
On the other hand, the polycrisis as a whole is, I think, for many people just an experience of incoherence. What does it all mean? What’s really happening around us? This lack of coherence is deeply unsettling.
Leigh: This idea that perhaps the constant searching is potentially both symptomatic of and feeding back into the problem reminds me of those who are choosing to go buy land and farm, in an attempt to remove themselves from the consumerist growth system.
Wolfgang: In my wider network, there are quite a few people who have tried to do this, with varying degrees of success. But of course the risk is that you’re just leveraging your existing privilege to opt out of all the difficult stuff. And that’s not a real alternative for me, either.
Movement Ecology workshop in Manchester with community-supported agriculture, food justice, and land rights groups
Leigh: Indeed. Let’s go deeper on the ‘coherence’ front. I’m curious what you make of this working definition that the Cohere+ group has developed?
‘A state of harmony and alignment where all parts of a system work in sync to support the whole as well as the freedom and efficiency of its parts, in order to actualize its goals.’
And apart from any thoughts on the definition, I’d be interested in hearing where you have seen this come up in your activism work? Are activists using this terminology or other words for the same concepts?
Wolfgang: The definition pretty is pretty close to my implicit working definition, even if I would probably use a few different words.
For me, this idea that a coherent system emerges out of the interaction of smaller systems is central as well. For that to work there needs to be enough alignment between those smaller systems, so they are working together to uphold the larger system, and at the same time have enough autonomy so they can pursue their own goals.
Ideally this also creates enough leeway to move within the system so it can adapt to changing circumstances.
Leigh: I like the idea of leeway and autonomy within the smaller parts. Do you have any examples from your work in the last years that has fed into this conception?
Wolfgang: Definitely. I’ve been working as a facilitator for the last ten to fifteen years, with very different groups and organisations, on rather abstract things like strategy and organisational development, but also concrete projects and challenges. What’s become clear over the course of this work is that what I’m actually doing as a facilitator is helping these groups think together as a collective, create a shared understanding of the situation they’re in, develop options for strategic action, and then find ways to collectively decide about them.
And I’ve gradually realised that this term ‘collective’ doesn’t mean that there’s a bunch of people with individual positions or perspectives, who then negotiate what to agree on. It actually means that they are contributing to an essentially shared process. ‘Distributed cognition’ would be the technical term for it.
You can see all these post-its from recent work on the wall behind me. Even if it’s just me and my colleagues working on strategy for ourselves, we’re using these practical steps of capturing an idea, making it visible, materialising it, then socialising, sharing it. Then out of this shared collection of individual contributions, patterns and common threads emerge – the group looks at a wall of post-its arranged into clusters, and suddenly they see insights they wouldn’t have seen on their own. Those are not individual insights generated by individual people. That’s truly the thinking of the group.
I think that has been my key learning over the years: my work is really about helping these larger-scale systems or agents, like groups, organisations, or movements, to generate understanding and strategic perspective on the level of the larger system.
Facilitating at Wikimedia Deutschland Meeting 2024
Leigh: And in that sense you’re serving their own recognition of this understanding as fundamental, not just the outcome itself.
When we last spoke, you mentioned your work on helping people develop a sense of ‘collective agency’. Can you speak more about that and how it connects to systems change?
Wolfgang: I think collective agency is a prerequisite for the large-scale change that we need.
There are very different assumptions about how to bring about systemic change, and many within the systems change community are lacking a clear political perspective on this question. For example, there’s a lot of thinking about how things could be different on an individual level, like adopting a zero-waste lifestyle or becoming vegan, and then there’s supposed to be an ‘accumulation’ of these individual actions which will at some point magically lead to a step change in the larger system.
But that’s a bit like in this cartoon where two scientists look at a blackboard, with equations to the left and equations to the right – and in the middle, it says ‘then a miracle occurs.’
Leigh: [laughs] yes, this is actually very similar to the fallacy that Anne Caspari pointed out in a recent essay she wrote for Emerge, in which she called out the error in assuming that adding up individual personal growth is going to suddenly equate to collective change.
Wolfgang: Exactly that.
What you need, in addition to these accumulating individual changes, is some kind of mechanism that generates collective power in order to change things on a larger scale. If you want to change a socioeconomic or political system, that’s not going to happen by asking the system to change. It’s only going to happen by changing the constraints around the system, so the system has to adapt to these changed circumstances. For that you need some kind of collective power, and collective power in the first instance needs collective agency. You need to act coherently in order to create that kind of collective power.
If you use a very general conception of an agent as a system that solves problems to reach a goal, like the biologist Michael Levin has been proposing, the challenge becomes: how do you catalyse the emergence of a larger-scale collective agent?
For me personally, and for the work we’re doing with Movement Ecology, this framework is really helpful because you can learn a lot from it about the preconditions for agency to emerge. For example, you first of all need smaller-scale agents to come together to interact in a meaningful and collaborative way, and one condition for this to happen is if there are shared interests or if their future depends on similar things to happen or change.
So one way of helping catalyse collective agency is helping people see where there are shared interests across traditional class divides, through popular or political education. For example, there are folks in very different life circumstances, such as migrant service workers and non-tenured academics, who share the situation of being constantly threatened by precarity because of the uncertain conditions of their work. So in a way, they navigate the same problem space.
At a symposium in Brussels on complexity and anarchism
Then if you look a bit further, out of the interaction of the smaller-scale agents, there is a coherent larger system emerging, which will have its own problem space to navigate. For example, a cell in our body navigates a very different problem space than we do as the aggregate of all of these cells – they solve the problem of forming tissues, organs, and ultimately a body, while we, the body, have to move successfully in the three-dimensional world around us.
Likewise, the organisations and social movements that we form navigate yet different problem spaces: to change social reality, to achieve something like system change. So one of the next steps is to understand the problem space that this emergent collective agent is navigating and what kind of cognitive processes and resources it needs for that.
As an example for this, take an organization called Movement Research Unit. They’re based in London and have a network of hundreds of volunteers all over the world that work together to provide crowdsourced intelligence about things like connections between corporations and the far right, the flow of money between the economy and political circles, to research the background of the CEO of a large corporation you want to expose, or to identify resources and grants that grassroots organisations could leverage. Other examples are the facilitation and strategy development support that we offer with Movement Ecology – all are basically helping the larger-scale agent ‘social movement’ become smarter.
And then the last step is that an agent needs to have some kind of model of its environment in order to navigate it successfully. So the question becomes: how does the larger-scale agent, the social movement, make a model of the world and of itself? That could be something like a myth, an ideology, a conspiracy theory. How do you help such a self-model emerge? Which kind of narratives or memes could help foster this kind of coalescence?
Leigh: Do you see that as part of your role – as the person helping make these narratives and self-models visible to social movements?
Wolfgang: I think it’s a potential avenue, yes. But that’s not something you can impose on or force any system to adopt. It’s a process of discovery you can support.
Leigh: Yes, and you have to be embedded to some extent for that, similar to the methodology of multi-modal anthropology.
I’m thinking back to the point that you made a bit earlier around the systems change community. To put it diplomatically, I have also sensed that many in this world find it more comfortable to ‘rest within the theory’, let’s say – and what you’re describing sounds like a way of breaking out of that mode.
It’s a perennial curiosity of mine why individuals who exist between spaces – such as theorists and activists, in your case – don’t necessarily get recognition or even basic understanding for this ‘translation’ work.
Sprinting towards systems change at Tough Mudder
Wolfgang: As you say, being this kind of bridge builder/connector/sense-maker means I’m always operating at the boundaries of things, and very rarely at the centre.
Being at the boundaries of organisations or social movements, or at temporal boundaries (at the beginning or end of things) can be a very uncomfortable place. For most people, it’s not very obvious what the value is of being in between, instead of fully committing to something. So if you don’t have a network of people who think similarly, it can get quite lonely. You start questioning yourself – am I doing the right thing here? Shouldn’t I be committed to this specific organisation or that particular strategy?
So for me, it’s been super important to find this kind of ‘in-between tribe’, if you will, the people who are sense-makers and facilitators and bridge builders. The work that we’re doing with the Movement Ecology Collective is born exactly out of this realisation. The three of us have come together and realised we’re not alone as individuals – we’re this little three-person agent doing this work. Then there are other groups and networks emerging. That’s something that we’re concretely working on – how can we support these emerging networks and create opportunities for them to meet and determine what’s helpful for them?
Leigh: Similar to the question of being ‘in between’—since you exist both in theory and activist spaces, what do you think is most needed right now in terms of bridging these modes?
Wolfgang: I think the challenges that we are facing – in the longer term, global civilisational collapse, and in the shorter term, deeply intertwined with this process, the emergence of a twenty-first century fascism – need very concrete action.
There is a very loud call to take whatever theory you have and make it useful in political action. I don’t remember who said it, but something that stuck with me is the quote ‘there's nothing as practical as a good theory. ’This is very true, but only if you take whatever theory you have and actually apply it to building strategy, forming connections, doing work on the ground. If you’re not doing this in some way, you are just pretending not to hear that call. And you can only afford to do so if you’re privileged enough.
I don’t think that there’s a definite answer for what type of ‘practical action’ you need to do. It’s not necessarily the obvious ones – sitting in the road with a placard, getting arrested, going to a march, writing a petition…
I think everybody needs to find something that they can have a specific impact with. That’s coming back to the question we had in the beginning, to the practical ‘how’? The guiding question for me at the moment is, what kind of impact can I have with the kind of things that I can do, and do well?
There's a lot of creativity involved in answering that question. I think it’s a mistake to think about this as an obligation. Figuring out which action to take can help you actually realise your potential and do something that you can be proud of and enjoy doing, because it’s the thing that gives meaning to your life.
Leigh: Well put. Framing it as a creative, engaging process is definitely more appealing than saying something like ‘ok, now you just need to pursue degrowth’…
Wolfgang: That’s actually how I got into political activism, by being offered such an interesting option, something that was exciting and fun, and that seemed to be within my reach. That’s another question: what is within your reach? But you need to be really careful that you don’t again take the first exit towards whatever is enabling you to keep your privilege, whatever keeps you comfortable. The balance you need to keep is always between alignment and autonomy. What can I do that brings fulfillment to me and that is needed at the moment given the challenges we’re facing?
Adam Tooze made the argument in his newsletter a while ago that unions fulfilled the role of helping navigate these questions for the working class – they were not only a way to build collective power and pursue collective interests, but also for workers to discover that they were not alone and to lift each other up. It offered them a way to make sense of their situation – not by scapegoating someone like the recent immigrant, or by falling prey to conspiracy theories, but by pointing towards the concrete social realities of exploitation. Who’s responsible for this, and what can we do together to change it?
When this context evaporates with weakened unions and fewer incentives for collective bargaining because of low inflation, then suddenly these places of collective sense-making disappear, and people become vulnerable to conspiracy narratives and to the far right.
Leigh: Exactly. It also exemplifies structural learning alternatives to expensive ‘sense-making workshops’ on offer across the metamodern ecosystem. What’s the contemporary form of the union that can work for people that are not necessarily working in the same organization, but across organizations?
Wolfgang: That’s part of the outlook of Movement Ecology: How can we create or help these structures emerge? And then there are very concrete projects connecting people with shared interests but different work backgrounds, like the London Renters Union, which is a union centered around the shared interests of renters and not connected to a specific industry or workplace.
Leigh: That brings us back to your boat, and the importance of having the kind of the home from which to do this work.
Wolfgang: Yes! Part of why I’m living on a boat is because I don’t have to pay rent. That means I can do less commercial work, which means I have more time for these other types of work.
Leigh: That makes sense. These are structural and ethical choices that some people can make and others can't, but it all fits into navigating the creative ‘how’ side of what one can contribute.
We’re nearing the end now, to avoid an esprit d’escalier moment, is there anything we didn’t cover that’s on your mind still?
Wolfgang: As we’ve been talking, I’ve been thinking about the question of what are the options for people that are part of the systems change community? It’s so important to strike this balance between doing something that is required at this time, that responds to the very serious situation we’re in, and doing it in a sustainable and fulfilling way that doesn’t lead straight into burnout.
Leigh: That sounds a lot like the work that the Hologram and Casino for Social Medicine in Berlin have been doing – both (related) experiments and tools in how to get social, emotional, physical, and spiritual needs met in an alternative, sustainable way.
Wolfgang: That’s a great example. A strong conviction in our work is that a central component of any future political strategy has to be building these alternative systems.
We’re seeing increasing state retrenchment – you can understand austerity and anti-immigration policies as moves to exclude more and more people from the provision of basic goods, mental health, physical health, material and immaterial resources. These gaps need to be filled, so why not do it ourselves instead of leaving the field to the far right? Because that is what’s been happening in, for example, Germany for some time, with neo-nazis organizing to drive elderly people to their GP appointment or doing their shopping for them.
If we start filling these gaps and building these alternative models of needs provision, that can be a source of strength and a way to build collective power. And if you manage to link up all of these initiatives and build a network, this is a much more promising approach to system change (and ultimately revolution) than, as you described it in the beginning, ‘waiting for enough to accumulate’.
The complement to building these very localized alternatives is: how do you then scale and replicate them? Scaling cannot be done in the traditional modernist, technical way of simply copying them across contexts, because we need to be sensitive to the different conditions of different places. It’s about finding ways of sharing experiences, ideas, and resources between those initiatives so they can be seeded in different places, where they will look and go slightly differently, but all working towards a shared goal – actual large-scale system change.
Words by Leigh Biddlecome
Leigh is an American writer, facilitator, and interdisciplinary consultant based in Berlin and Florence.
