Why Now, and Why Not Later

There remains the hardest question, and we owe the reader a direct answer to it: granting that coordination infrastructure must eventually be built, why must the building begin now? Why is this a deadline and not merely an agenda?

The answer lies in the nature of the thing being built. Coordination infrastructure of the kind this volume describes — infrastructure built on genuine trust, on the slow cultivation of presence, on the patient accumulation of relationships and the development of human capacity — cannot be assembled quickly. It is not a technology that can be deployed in a crisis the way a vaccine or a financial bailout can be deployed. It must be grown, and growing takes time. The relationships must be formed, the trust must be earned, the capacities must be developed, the institutions must mature. A coordination infrastructure adequate to a crisis cannot be built during the crisis. It must already exist when the crisis arrives, or it will not be there to help.

This is the precise sense in which the present moment is decisive. The forces we have described are accelerating; the need for coordination capacity is rising toward a level we do not yet possess; and the infrastructure that would meet that need is exactly the kind that takes years, perhaps decades, to grow. The window in which to begin building is therefore not the moment of greatest crisis — by then it is too late to begin — but now, while there is still margin, while the slow work of growing trust and cultivating presence and forming the relationships can still be done ahead of the need. To wait for the necessity to become undeniable to everyone is to wait until it is too late to act on it. The deadline is not the moment the crisis becomes total. The deadline is the last moment at which the slow work of building the response can still begin in time.

We do not write this to frighten. Fear is itself a form of dysregulation, a narrowing of the aperture, and a civilization governed by fear coordinates worse, not better — a truth this volume will return to. We write it to locate the work precisely in time: to say that the building of coordination infrastructure is not a project for some future generation that will have the luxury to attend to it, but the load-bearing work of this generation, to be begun now, in the margin we still have, by people willing to do the slow and unglamorous labor of growing what cannot be built quickly. That is the imperative. Everything that follows in this volume — the architecture, the mechanism, the governance, the currency, the invitation — is offered as one attempt, held humbly and built in the open, to begin meeting it while there is still time to begin.

Coordination infrastructure cannot be built during the crisis that requires it. It must already exist when the crisis arrives. That is why the work must begin now — not because the need is greatest now, but because now is the last of the margin in which the slow growing of trust can still outpace the acceleration of everything else.