J. P. Barlow — Internet Has Broken the Political System 773
MexiCali59 recommends an account up at Hillicon Valley on a speech by John Perry Barlow to the Personal Democracy Forum in New York. "The deluge of information available on the Web has made the country ungovernable, according to EFF co-founder John Perry Barlow. 'The political system is broken partly because of Internet,' Barlow said. 'It's made it impossible to govern anything the size of the nation-state. We're going back to the city-state. The nation-state is ungovernably information-rich.' ... Barlow said there is too much going on at every level in Washington, DC, for the government to effectively handle everything on its plate. Instead, he advocated citizens organizing around the issues most important to them. 'There is a circle of fat around the Beltway that is incredibly thick. We can no longer try to run this country from the center. We've got to run it, just like the Internet, from the edges.' Barlow also said that President Barack Obama's election, driven largely by small donations, has fundamentally changed American politics. He said a similar bottom-up structure is needed for governing as well. 'It's not the second coming, everything won't get better overnight, but that made it possible to see a future where it wasn't simply a matter of money to define who won these things. The government could finally start belonging to people eventually.'"
Organizing (Score:2, Interesting)
he advocated citizens organizing around the issues most important to them
How is that different from what is happening now?
Our elected officials typically understand very little of what they legislate, and often little of the bills they themselves propose. "The shoulder thing that goes up", "tubes", the Patriot act, net neutrality, the bailout. In practice citizens ogranize themselves into some type of lobbying effort to spoon feed their wants and needs to politicians.
Sometimes that organization is in the form of a corporation. Sometimes it is a PAC. Sometimes it is a group of individuals showing up at a rally. But private citizens are driving it.
Like the internet? (Score:1, Interesting)
We've got to run it, just like the Internet, from the edges.
1. Go play any FPS game on the internet that has dedicated servers
2. Observe how admins treat the players
3. Realize that the level of corruption in our current government probably mirrors admin abuse
4. Plan local government like this?
Re:Broken? More like fixed. (Score:2, Interesting)
Yea, I find it interesting how someone finds the truth when it suit's their needs. For years, they attempted to get around the entire 10th amendment and the diversity of the nation and impose things by virtue of the power (miraculously found) in the federal government. Now that they don't like the monster that was created, it seems they advocate going back to the original set up because it suits their needs.
BTW, I have been arguing that this entire top down approach is what makes third parties in the US non-viable. The two major parties are so powerful because they surround people from the bottom up and they are comfortable with going that direction- even though that direction may not reflect the one taken on the national stage by the same people.
Re:Broken? More like fixed. (Score:4, Interesting)
And what will you do when some of these localities start bringing back segregation, or other policies abhorrent to the nation as a whole? The federal government needs to be able to protect the rights of citizens across the country. That's how it got to be this way in the first place. Expecting people to uproot their lives and move to a different locality that respects them isn't a reasonable fix.
The Hill is incomprehensible, not Barlow (Score:3, Interesting)
To summarize, the Internet is the solution. The internet is the problem. We're connected, but not engaged. We're "networked" but not mobilized. We're Friends and Followers, but not active and acting.
We've come so far, we have so far to go.
The internet has allowed people to become much more informed than they once were, but it also lends itself to pointless bloviating on /. that ultimately accomplishes no political change. Like this.
That's the problem! (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem is that we ever tried to manage the country centrally in the first place.
Any network or systems administrator will tell you that managing a diverse set of systems centrally is difficult. The only way you can pragmatically do that is with uniform conformity through diktat.
Unless you want to verge into absolute dictatorship, managing many smaller systems centrally is difficult if not possible, leading to a lot of loose ends and bad ideas. The founding fathers realized this, which is part of the reason they went for "limited powers" in the Federal government. There's only so much that a single person or body of people can multitask.
Unfortunately, we've forgotten this reality many times in the past 200 years, leading to an excess of government. "Big government" has to be small out of necessity of self-preservation, or scope creep will grow it to a colossal, unsupportable size.
Think of government as a compute cluster, or cluster of clusters, if you will. If you send jobs off to a cluster, which then sends jobs off to a node, you're trying to balance the overall computation amongst all available systems so no one node/processor doesn't get overtly taxed. This is the opposite of a "we're here to help" federal government: all jobs go up to the process scheduler/dispatcher, and get stuck there, while the lower levels of government (state, county, local) largely ignore what are ultimately their own affairs (poverty, crime, unemployment, civil projects, etc.) because the Federal government "is here to help".
This is why community gardens often thrive, while government food subsidy/distributions are usually failures (in terms of results as well as costs). Local problems need to be dealt with locally.
Re:Broken? More like fixed. (Score:5, Interesting)
That's what Jefferson and his crew were about, but they lost and the other guys won. If it wasn't clear then, it certainly was after Lincoln
Re:Broken? More like fixed. (Score:2, Interesting)
If local areas have ample latitude to govern, those who like such government can relocate there.
States can be different, and it is reasonable to expect people to move to an area whose government suits them.
There would be less friction if, for example, Mexifornia appreciated that Arizona is different, and they governed what BELONGS TO THEM as they wish.
The Mexicans can move to Mexifornia, proceed with Reconquista as they wish, while Arizona can proceed differently. They don't have to like each other,
"How do we make sure the monolith is moral and fair to all?"
Destroy the monolith and let States choose for THEMSELVES. The States don't belong to the people who don't inhabit them. The country is an alliance of States. "Moral and fair to all is an absurd idea because morality and fairness are subjective. If we want FUNCTIONAL fairness, MOBILITY is the solution.
Think the South is a redneck hellhole? Get the fuck out.
Think California is Mexifornia? Get the fuck out.
Tired of how New Jersey smells? Avoid the guidos and landfills by Getting the Fuck Out.
The best States will win the competition for the most desirable place to live, the locals everywhere will OWN their own government, and we can support a WEAKER Federal government less prone to delusions of Empire over us and the rest of the world.
ecause those constructs are subjective. Each state is a reasonable size for local government, and States can compete. Obviously, people will vote with their feet. I certainly would.
Re:election != fund-raising (Score:2, Interesting)
Hillary blew it for Hillary. It had little to do with Obama. If Hillary had run a competent campaign Obama would still be a Junior US Senator.
missing the target (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Broken? More like fixed. (Score:2, Interesting)
mostly agree, but local positions can vary unnacceptably.
Uh, no. Unacceptably to you. Please stay out of other's ppl's way of life. What makes you think you know best for the rest of the US, and by extension, the world?
One very easy example to the GPs comment is racism. The majority in a small locale may view it acceptable to mistreat, abuse, and even murder a minority group, because of their race, color or creed. If the local governance allows this and isn't regulated, this could have far reaching effects across the nation ranging from gradual desensitization and acceptance of abuse to retaliatory effects where the minority is in the majority. Again, I am inclined to agree with the GP that a centralized government helpful for normalizing laws across regions.
Re:Somethings wrong... (Score:2, Interesting)
What about apathetic voters?
You seem to leave them out of the picture. It's not like a democracy works with the people don't do anything.
What if we actually voted er, upright politicians into office that didn't get swayed/purchased by corporations? etc. It's not like w ewere voting in good, quality politicians and all doing our civic duty, spending responsibly, etc., and WHAM - a corporation-bought government of corrupt politicians showed up.
Yes, let's put blame where it belongs. But let's not forget that the voters are somewhat to blame, too. If you get told a bunch of "facts" that are false, and you don't even bother to THINK about them let alone look them up and verify them, then you have some blame as well as the person lying to you.
Just look at the responses you get to various things in politics. People respond emotionally and vote. It seems that people forget they should think about these things and vote rationally. Instead, we vote for so-and-so because he says he will kill BP, and we vote for so-and-so because we hate Bush, and we vote for so-and-so because they think Obama isn't a US Citizen. We support impeaching Obama and don't even know that impeachment is for something illegal. We all accuse Bush of warmongering in Iraq even though most of the Senate voted for it.
In short, we have a tendency to simply believe whatever someone tells us. We don't think and we don't vote. And then we get mad that our government doesn't care about us anymore.
To put it bluntly (and I'm not referring to you directly, of course): if you tell me you care about the government but you don't vote and don't think, then I refuse to believe you.
It'd be like saying you love your wife but given the opportunity, never spend any time with her because it's too much effort.
What's so ironic is that now it's even easier to GET information and easier to think, and yet it seems the tendency is to think less and verify less.
Re:Broken? More like fixed. (Score:1, Interesting)
interesting choice of words (Score:5, Interesting)
"The nation-state is ungovernably information-rich." You mean that the powers that be can't piss on our heads and tell us it's rain when we're no longer wearing blinders, nose in the feedbag and under sensory deprivation. We can smell it, we can taste it, we know we're getting pissed on. Maybe we wouldn't be so upset if they were doing their job of governing the country instead of focusing on keeping us baffled and confused while robbing us blind?
The Internet is the printing press turned up to 11. We saw the kind of shitstorm that swept Europe when Guttenburg started cranking out his bibles.
Um, which is it? (Score:3, Interesting)
I saw this in TFA:
"The political system is broken partly because of Internet," Barlow said. "It's made it impossible to govern anything the size of the nation-state. We're going back to the city-state. The nation-state is ungovernably information-rich."
And then this:
"Speaking at Personal Democracy Forum in New York on Thursday, Barlow said there is too much going on at every level in Washington, D.C., for the government to effectively handle everything on its plate. Instead, he advocated citizens organizing around the issues most important to them."
Ok, so which it? Too much information, or too much government?
I can tell you, in my opinion, if you think you have too much information about the government, you have too much government. And if the complaint really is that there is too much going on in Washington for citizens to make sense of because they can actually get information on it, there is TOO MUCH going on in Washington.
Nice try, though.
I also read this comment:
"I explained it like this: Would you, in Sweden, approve of someone in Portugal being able to set laws that regulated what you did?"
Um, that sounds EXACTLY LIKE THE EU. Except Portugal needs to get a few other nations to gang up on Sweden. Look into the feta cheese controversy in the EU. Nice. This is an argument for or against states' rights and Article Ten how?
He's got it backwards (Score:3, Interesting)
While I don't disagree that more local responsibility and governance would be a good trend, the idea that adding more information and more information flow efficiency makes the system inherently ungovernable is both counter-intuitive, and almost certainly wrong.
It's true that adding more information and failing to manage that information and its use would make a mess. But along with more information, we've also added such things as - Google, to select just the information you need from the sea of information, like - Wikis, to make intranet (distributed) team cooperation much more effective, like - service-oriented architectures and workflow systems, to pool the services of multiple agencies into a more informed, coherent larger decision-support and transaction system.
And the Internet, through social information sharing and interaction, is breaking down cultural barriers (and making ignorance or parochialism a necessarily willful and socially unacceptable state to be in.)
I predict that the Internet, and distributed information and transaction systems, will allow for more effective governance at even larger scales than the nation-state, as well as more effective nested federal (jurisdiction-sharing) forms of governance at every level down the hierarchy.
We just got a global nervous-system, and the beginnings of a global memory and mind. That's only likely to cause us to descend to tribalism if it provokes a fearful backlash from the willfully ignorant, or those unwilling to compromise, discuss, and share at many levels with many sizes of surrounding societies.
If done while maintaining democracy and responsibility at all levels, this technology could lead to better governance, and governance at the global scale we clearly require to face down several serious global issues we have created for ourselves. We've got global trade and business. A counterbalancing force of effective and democratic global governance is now needed, and technologically possible.
Re:Broken? More like fixed. (Score:4, Interesting)
When you see politicians in Alabama claiming their opponents aren't real creationists or biblical literalists, it tends to reinforce the stereotypes about the South. When southern school boards continue to have fights about teaching evolution, it tends to reinforce stereotypes about the South. When Texas school boards remove Jefferson from the curriculum because he was mildly anti-christian, it tends to reinforce the stereotypes about the South. Not to mention that if you visit there, the continued institutionalized (does not mean government) racism is usually pretty obvious.
Do I think the South would bring back slavery? No. Do I think the South would get rid of civil rights legislation? Some of it. Do I think the South would enforce civil rights legislation? A small fraction of it.
Re:Broken? More like fixed. (Score:1, Interesting)
I doubt America would have survived long without the services of Hamilton. He was instrumental in making the country work at all. If you think Jefferson had it right and was so visionary you should go back and read about his opinions on he French Revolution. I have a lot more respect for Hamilton as Founding Father and can relate to him more as a human being then I ever could for the currently deified Jefferson.
Utter horseshit. (Score:3, Interesting)
The political system is broken because money has taken over the input to our representatives and megacorporate control of media has taken over the output to the voters.
That is to say, it's the same problem, both ways.
Our democracy has become overwhelmed by the concentration of wealth in a few hands, owing to vacuous sophistry that skews our economic system towards one that shovels money to those who have it and entrains the lives of those who don't.
People who call any attempt at regulation or any braking of the egregious concentration of wealth "socialism" are buying into a psychological campaign of misinformation that is used to suck the foundation of the country out from under them.
While it's possible to get rich and not become a plutocrat, that just takes one person out of the stream and leaves hundreds of others to let the money tell them what to do.
If you want to fix this information economy, you need to get control of the economy first, so that the money doesn't overwhelm the information.
Re:yes and no (Score:1, Interesting)
I thought we had put the CRA myth to rest already, but here we go again:
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/03/things-everyone-in-chicago-knows/
Fannie and Freddie got federal dollars to subsidize the private banks, to keep them in business. They had decided that they did not want another Lehman on their hands. And rightfully so.
Re:Ring of fat around the beltway (Score:1, Interesting)
Obama will never get the blame for the economy. The media simply will not allow that. They'll publish an article or two about Obama's failure but make sure it's mentioned at least a hundred times that it was really Bush's fault. Doesn't matter that the President has no control over the economy. Our poor education system leaves people believing he does.
Where there's a will... (Score:3, Interesting)