On the tenth anniversary of UnitedPeoples (UP), a field report from the place where fandom and platform economics fused into a civic engine, and the world’s stories learned to work for the world’s people.
By nine the summer wind had dropped, and the hills above Edinburgh turned into a natural amphitheatre. A hundred thousand phone lights rose in waves from Princes Street Gardens to the Castle esplanade, where a choir drawn from five continents, a pop-dance collective from Busan and a Glasgow grime poet traded the last lines of a song that had passed through sixty-two languages in a fortnight. The crowd chanted no brand and no politician’s name. What they chanted was a promise: “Do better. Be better. While doing good.”
UP had promised an Age of Thriving by 2035. A decade on, culture had turned out to be one of the engines that made it real. Coffee in hand, I watched NAVi — the AI guide embedded in the UP HUB — subtitle the crowd’s speeches as they happened, turn a stream of small donations into micro-grants for a mural in Mombasa, and match a young Syrian violinist to a conservatoire bursary across town. It sounds implausible until you see it; it is simply the infrastructure Arts Culture & Entertainment spent ten years building, under rules that were as much moral as technical. NAVi was the orchestration layer. The Tenets were the score.
UnitedPeoples is built as a federation of fifteen GlobalCircles, one for each domain of human life. Arts Culture & Entertainment is the one that touches what people touch first: songs, screens, stages, museums, catwalks, games, and the creator economies that now cross borders faster than trade agreements. Like every sibling Circle, it runs on a plain, stubborn architecture — a recognised Host, ten Thought Leaders who steward strategy, and a professional secretariat whose job is to keep promises from turning into press releases. It is a mobilisation platform rather than a forum, wired into UP’s rails of embedded finance — banking and payments built into the platform itself — data and NAVi-guided tools, so that Projects do not die in committee. They deploy.
The vehicles of action are the parts of the machine you can touch: ThemedCircles for strategy, programmes and delivery; BrandedCircles that anchor in institutions and personalities — festivals, studios, labels, museums, creators; and LocalCircles, which sit apart from the GlobalCircles as autonomous neighbourhood teams that turn Missions into lived experience on local stages, in rehearsal rooms and makerspaces. In Arts Culture & Entertainment that comes to roughly 15,000 ThemedCircles and some 76,000 BrandedCircles — because culture is where institutions meet their audiences at the level of habit.
For ten years, this Circle behaved less like a mirror than like infrastructure — and the world’s stories learned to work for the world’s people.
The Circle that learned to move faster than politics
“We stopped admiring problems,” says Nadine Corso, a film producer who helped host the first AC&E Summit in Cannes and now sits among the Circle’s Thought Leaders. “No think-tank papers, no endless panels. A Tier 1 Circle defined the system change; a Tier 2 designed a programme with partners in three countries; a Tier 3 team put solar on a studio roof and a price on the diesel generators it replaced. The rule was simple: show your work.”
The operating system of belonging
UP’s civics are idiosyncratic — part digital nation, part guild, part neighbourhood association with unusually good software. The UP HUB feels like a city you can log into: a hundred million members by this summer, forty-one million of them subscribed to Arts Culture & Entertainment. It is where Projects live, from global concert coalitions down to an eight-person BrandedCircle run by a Bradford community arts trust. People do not join to follow issues. They join to help each other — and that habit of peer support, formalised across every GlobalCircle, is what makes the Circle a serious instrument and not a celebrity mailing list.
At the heart of it is Appreciative Collaborative Exploration, or ACE — the method that replaced the old culture-war reflexes with a habit of designing from strengths. Its rhythm, DARE, runs in four movements — Discover, Aspire, Refine, Empower: notice what already works, imagine a bolder version of it, shape something small enough to test, then commit the people and the support to carry it. Ten years on, the muscle memory shows. When a Lagos venue faced a harassment scandal in 2027, the response was neither a cancellation nor a cover-up. A LocalCircle ran the problem through ACE, mapped what was already working, and rebuilt safeguarding from the inside out — backed by a ThemedCircle that went on to certify venues across West Africa. The scandal faded; the standard stayed.
NAVi is what lets these human choices scale. Its original brief read like a manifesto — personalised support, intelligent Project matching, cross-cultural translation, continuous learning, and an ethical spine: guarding against bias, and always showing its reasoning. In practice that meant translating lyrics into Quechua one minute and contracts into fairness the next: flagging a lopsided royalty split, recommending mental-health provisions for a touring crew, pointing out that the cheapest supplier would carry the highest reputational cost.
“NAVi never told us what to sing,” laughs Jae Min Park, a creative director at a Seoul studio who now co-hosts the ThemedCircle Narrative Infrastructure for Hope. “It told us who might need the song next — and who might be hurt if we got the context wrong.”
When money learned to behave
The other thing that changed is money. UP’s rails — “embedded finance,” in the diagrams — were built so that a fan who taps donate in Dublin could become a co-financier of a free concert in Cape Town, with little of the usual friction or leakage. Philanthropy was the spark. Then came UP Ventures, with its Igniter and Amplifier funds for the creative industries, followed by UP BusinessBank in 2028 and a retail UP Bank in 2029. The point was never to replace the music business; it was to give culture a balance sheet that reflected its public value. AC&E calls the result “civic cashflow” — money that moves at the speed of attention but is held to the Tenets.
The governance was unglamorous and decisive in equal measure. Embedded finance, impact measurement, anti-abuse tools and a bias toward shared intellectual property meant a green touring standard or a museum restitution programme could be financed as infrastructure rather than charity. “The only reason a touring rig still burns diesel in 2035 is that someone chose not to change it,” says Ayo Falana, a Nigerian festival director whose BrandedCircle in Lagos piloted clean power as a service for stages. “The money is there. NAVi shows you how to use it.”
Missions that moved norms
AC&E’s portfolio started wide and grew deliberate. Of the twelve headline Missions the Circle announced at its 2026 launch, five changed the temperature of the room.
Tenets in the Culture Mainstream
The premise was simple and unfashionable: when the world’s most trusted cultural figures adopt a code — equal dignity, an end to violence and discrimination, freedom of expression, protection of the natural world — their audiences will try it on for size. What looked like performative virtue in 2025 reads more like a social contract in 2035, because it arrived with Projects attached. BC TaylorNation, one of the earliest BrandedCircles, routed stadium traffic along citizen-designed safe corridors, worked with the GC for Government Politics & Public Sector on crowd-management transparency, and paid for carbon-free power in cities that could not afford it. The fandom learned to build a city for a night and leave the kit behind.
Narrative Infrastructure for Hope
It sounded like propaganda until you watched it work — a commissioning pipeline for films, series, music, games and exhibitions, built on one rule: hope has to be earned, not asserted. The work had to show agency rather than rescue, complexity rather than purity. What came out of it helped a generation step back from nihilism without pretending grief away. Co-funded with the GC for Health & Wellness for its mental-health benefits, the programme’s outcomes were dull to report and quietly thrilling to witness: measurable gains in young people’s belief in their own agency, across seventeen countries.
Democratic Resilience & Information Integrity in Entertainment
This was the hard one. AC&E worked with the GC for Journalism & News Media to pre-bunk disinformation — debunk it before it lands — from inside culture: building verification tools into music videos and game worlds, giving audiences shared rituals for checking what’s true, training creators in the hygiene of an election season. When the British touring industry adopted “quiet hours” on social platforms during sensitive polling windows, it drew fury first and, slowly, admiration. The aim was never censorship. It was care.
Fair & Future-Proof Creator Economy
This began as a fight over royalties in the age of AI and ended as a new normal for how creative work gets valued. NAVi’s contract-checking, royalty-data pilots with the major labels and creator bootcamps took much of the heat out of the “AI is stealing our jobs” panic, largely by making sure the money followed the contribution. The GC for Science & Technology played both ally and adult supervision.
Sustainable Production & Touring
The rigs got lighter and the routes got smarter. A Tier 2 programme built a shared library of modular, low-carbon stage designs; a Tier 3 team retrofitted venues in forty-three cities; and a coalition with the GC for Sustainability Climate & Food made diesel-free touring the default. Fans learned to read a show’s emissions the way they read a set list.
There were others — Heritage & Repair, Youth Access & Apprenticeship, Open & Trusted Attention Platforms, Creative Rapid Response — but it was these five that turned AC&E from commentary into consequence.
AC&E’s most political act was mundane: it made the good path cheaper, faster, and less lonely.
The people who moved the mountain
By the numbers, the transformation looks implausible. Of the twelve million Projects UP had catalysed by 2035, AC&E now ships close to 600,000 a year — most of them Type 2 Projects, partnerships with festivals, studios, museums and platforms, because that is where the money and the audiences sit. But the figure that made my editor raise an eyebrow was smaller and sweeter. A five-year independent survey of 220,000 AC&E members, set against a demographically matched non-member group, found a 14% gain in reported wellbeing, 11% more stable creative income, and 17% higher participation. “Do better, be better, while doing good,” it turned out, was less a slogan than a measurable life skill.
The faces behind those numbers rarely look like Thought Leaders, but the Circle’s stewards mattered. They set a tone: a cultural super-league should carry itself like artisans with responsibilities, not barons with an audience. “We knew from the first day that AC&E would be the most visible Circle, and the most contested,” says Dr Alina Farough, its Host and a former museum director. “We expected fights — over authenticity, over commercial capture, over who gets to tell whose story. ACE gave us a way through that didn’t need unanimity. It needed people to form something and then carry it.”
When fandom became a civic institution
Sceptics called it “NGO-washed show business,” and they had a point — until the fandoms started behaving like civic institutions. BC BTS/HYBE built anti-disinformation protocols that music networks from Lagos to Lisbon later adopted. Beyoncé’s BC Parkwood ran a women-in-production apprenticeship that sent cohorts onto stadium crews and film sets across Africa and the United States. BC Blackpink, working with city authorities in Jakarta and Manila, piloted green touring pop-ups that cut generator use by two-thirds. BC MrBeast learned to hang short video arcs off long-term infrastructure, funding desalination pilots with the GC for Sustainability Climate & Food while teaching a generation to think like project managers rather than patrons. BC Disney/Pixar and BC PlayStation Studios quietly worked empathy and pluralism into mass franchises, with help from NAVi’s cultural-context toolkits.
The most interesting part, to me, was never the celebrities. It was the audiences. UP calls them the Silent Giant: the values-driven majority with means, long underestimated because they refused orthodoxy, ideology and the performative extremes. When AC&E handed them Projects — crowdfunding a school theatre, co-owning a community label, greening a festival — they supplied management as well as money. By 2035 that cohort held on the order of $65–130 trillion in household wealth, and UP put its scale to work: not against governments or markets, but as a constructive force that reset norms, redirected investment, and showed that shared prosperity could drive systemic change. AC&E taught the Silent Giant’s wealth to behave like patient, productive capital rather than idle consumption — and in doing so, it made the audience the author of the story.
Cross-domain choreography
None of it would have worked had AC&E been allowed to become a ministry of culture. Its power came from its interfaces with the other GlobalCircles. With Journalism & News Media it fought the hijacking of narratives. With Science & Technology it turned AI from a threat into a tool, and occasionally a conscience. With Sustainability Climate & Food it rewired touring and production logistics. With Health & Wellness it made mental-health support for artists and crews an industry standard rather than a perk. With Law Society & Public Safety it treated harassment, safety and restitution as design problems rather than PR crises. These interfaces were not metaphors; they were schedules, compacts and shared budgets, brokered by NAVi in the background and reported in the open.
“We treated each Circle like a section of an orchestra,” says Kelechi Ofor, a programme manager whose LocalCircle in Peckham grew into a citywide network. “AC&E had the strings. When you need brass, you call Foreign Policy National & Global Security; when you need percussion, you call Science & Technology. NAVi kept us in key.”
The friction that kept it honest
There were errors, and — just as important — there was accountability. In 2029 a major streaming platform’s BrandedCircle was suspended for failing to implement the creator-fairness standard it had helped write. In 2030 a high-profile museum exhibition was withdrawn after AC&E showed its curation had excluded Indigenous voices; the re-launch was co-designed with LocalCircles and descendant communities. In 2033 an influencer “giveaway” stunt triggered an audit that changed how embedded finance is explained to young audiences. The Circle’s posture — open-society expression, but a hard line against dehumanisation — was tested again and again, and its willingness to publish its own failures is what kept trust alive.
The cultural right called it soft coercion; the commercial left called it mission creep. Both misread the design. UP never tried to replace the state. It tried to remove its alibis — to make the responsible choice the cheap, fast, unlonely one, so that a government could no longer plead that the better path was too expensive or too hard. Sovereign states stayed sovereign. AC&E simply held them to a standard citizens had already come to expect from their festivals and their feeds.
Local is where it lasted
The big headlines — the stadium coalitions, the platform compacts — made AC&E famous. The small stories made it permanent. In Hull, a BrandedCircle backed by the Hull City Arts Council teamed up with local librarians and grime artists to turn a neglected municipal theatre into a weeknight school for stagecraft and storytelling. In Naples, a Tier 3 ThemedCircle trained ushers as mental-health first responders, and incidents fell by half. In Warsaw, BC Warsaw Museum of History used NAVi to pair a diaspora curator with a local historian; the exhibit they built moved thousands to tears and seeded a city-funded programme on shared heritage.
What binds them is the THRIVE Plan — UP’s plain, committed promise to treat your own flourishing as the precondition for your public impact. Artists report fewer breakdowns on tour, creators less burnout, volunteers who stay. Not because life got easier, but because the work stopped being lonely.
The audit: did AC&E really change the trajectory?
What, then, is the fair verdict? Ten years in, AC&E did not end disinformation, or abolish exploitation, or kill the urge to turn every human impulse into inventory. It did something humbler and, in practice, more radical: it made it harder for harmful defaults to pass themselves off as inevitable. It made care louder than noise. It taught money to behave. It turned fandom from decorative energy into civic capacity. And it made the case that the stories we make together should be measured less in tickets and streams than in cleaner air around a venue, better pay for the person tuning the piano, and a child’s first attempt at agency.
And it did this at scale. The structural numbers tell part of it — roughly 15,000 ThemedCircles, some 76,000 BrandedCircles, and, across the domain’s first decade, several million Projects — but what mattered was the velocity: cultural actors mobilising faster than governments, institutions or markets had ever managed, and doing it with accountability built in. The AC&E Summit rotates — Cannes, Seoul, Lagos, Rio, Edinburgh this year — less as a pageant than as a way of sharing authorship.
The design choices that mattered most were not glamorous ones. Peer support instead of personality cults. ACE as the default method for resolving conflict and creating together. NAVi built as an accountable tool rather than a mascot, with transparency, bias mitigation and explainability in from the start. Embedded finance used to ease the public good rather than subsidise the private bad. And a stubborn refusal to treat culture as a neutral mirror. Every one of them unshowy; together, decisive.
Culture is power. AC&E taught it manners.
A last scene; a last question
Back in Edinburgh, the choir had scattered into the city’s closes and corners. I walked down to the old Cowgate, where a LocalCircle had taken over a shuttered club and turned it into a civic living room. On one side, a pop-up legal clinic for creators; on the other, a rehearsal space where a Syrian violinist — Amal, the one I’d watched on the Castle esplanade — was trying a riff against a Shetland fiddler and a Polish techno producer.
“You journalists always ask whether this is art or activism,” Amal told me, wiping rosin from her strings. “It’s neither. It’s care. And care is what art sounded like before we started listening for market share.”
On the way out, someone had taped a scrap of paper to the door, hand-lettered and wonky: “In a world that keeps telling you to be an audience, remember — you are the author.” The door swung shut, and the note fluttered in the draught.
If the Age of Thriving holds, it will be partly because a circle of artists, organisers, fans and financiers chose authorship over spectatorship — and then built the infrastructure to make that choice ordinary. The most counter-cultural sentence of the decade may be the one AC&E taught a generation to say without irony: we belong to each other.
Or, as Dr Farough put it when the lights went down over the Castle: “Stories used to be what we escaped into. Now they’re how we arrive.”
