The Greatest Thing. Imaginable.
Most people work hard to do a good job for fair rewards,
and want to be reasonably protected from random ruin. Call them Producers.
A few people work hard to use money and personality
to control a hierarchy
of
that first kind of people. Call them Controllers.
What would happen
if Producers found their collective voice and
a means to reverberate their preferences among their awesome majority?
And what if they aggregated their most widely held values into actionable
tasks, paid for from their own contributions?
Aha! It's called a Democracy.
Well, it's actually a Republic,
a representational democracy, since only elected representatives
could compile all our preferences and parse our preferences and contributions
into
employees
and actions that give us what we say we want. There is simply no way
on earth to 1) encourage millions of preference sets regarding the
issues that matter to each of us and 2) aggregate
them
into a valid knowledge base of what the Producers want. Or is there?
We make do with a system that grew
up while we weren't watching, with elected toadies in Congress in the pockets
of corporations
living off government welfare. Companies who employ 33 lobbyists per
congresscritter to
suggest which way to jump and how high. Happens on both sides of the
aisle: defense companies tell the Republicans how to jump while the media
industry
specializes
in Democrats.
If we managed to build a means of communication that gave
the Producers their collective voice, most people would say it's the greatest
thing imaginable.
A Kid-filled Room
I helped imagine such a thing this weekend at a mini-summit
in our apartment here on 43rd Street. Zephyr Teachout, the Dean
Campaign's
director
for Internet Organizing & Outreach, came down from Vermont, and Zack
Rosen(r) and Evan DiBiase(l) drove over from Pittsburgh. We met to understand
what
Zack and Evan and Josh
and
all the rest of the Americans
For Dean team could do that would be useful
to the campaign. We came away with a galvanizing sense of what's possible
for governance.
What a contrast this weekend was to the vision of well-padded
white guys like me, dictating the means by which their favorite toadies
go through the
perfunctory
ritual of an election charade. We were designing things! We
were coaxing an open architecture toward more openness; enabling more
people to
express themselves with less effort,
finding ways to hear the most voices using the best aggregation tools possible.*
Compare that urge toward transparency
to the cynical
new White House E-Mail system, describing its new barriers
as features.
The Americans For Dean site (A4D) will offer an open source
toolkit that anyone can use to establish sub-domains at the fordean.net domain: iowa.fordean.net,
programmers.fordean.net, vietvets.fordean.net, etc. (I
just got a vision of jamesdean.fordean.net: "If you're cool
like me, you'll vote for my nephew Howie," thus starting another
urban legend.)
The A4D programmers are like other volunteers who are good
at canvassing and distributing flyers and answering questions at town picnics.
But they're programmers expressing their hobby by building outreach tools
for the one campaign that "gets" the Net and invited them to participate.
They're doing what they most love to do, which isn't always the case with
knocking on doors...
A4D is being
built by volunteers using an open source language (PHP)
to assemble software components (like Drupal,
MySQL, RSS,
etc.) to build the toolkit. And their work is open source, so it's freely
available for others to re-use and improve
by returning their improvements to the code
base. Sure, the code will be papered with advisories that it was developed
for the Dean campaign beta users–notices that must be left in the code–but
all candidates of all stripes are welcome to benefit from this extraordinary
body of work.
It's the Governance, Stupid.
This vision is for a single campaign, but it serves the broader
ends of the Emergent
Democracy concepts being hashed out in the blogosphere. When
(not if) a President is elected using these tools, you'll see an administration
embracing even better open
tools to stay close to its constituents. That
will be the dawn of a more perfect Union.
Dean fans get a lot from their candidate: stirring stump speeches,
the promise of old-fashioned New England integrity, and a working couple
in the White House. Even more, they get to be swept up by Joe
Trippi's perfect storm of Internet politics. Hell, they are Joe's
Perfect Storm!
A4D promises to be a megaphone for the passionate
comments found at Blog for America.
Dean fans (so much more than supporters–the guy's a Rock Star!) use the comments
section eloquently to cross talk; mini-blogs,
really, making suggestions, asking for assistance, congratulating each other
and
their new buddies on the campaign staff.
In order to maintain their franchise, Controllers need the
Producers who feed them to feel stupid. Otherwise they might find their voice.
But we aren't stupid.
What John
Taylor Gatto said
about schools applies equally to politicians. To justify their existence,
governments literally require the worst thing imaginable, mass dumbness:
"The shocking possibility that
dumb people don't exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the millions
of careers devoted to tending them will seem incredible to you. Yet
that is my central proposition: the mass dumbness which justifies official
schooling first had to be dreamed of; it isn't real.
"With less than
thirty hours of combined training and experience, a hundred million people
are allowed access to vehicular weapons more lethal than pistols or rifles.
Turned loose without a teacher, so to speak. Why does our government make
such presumptions of competence, placing nearly unqualified trust in drivers,
while it maintains such a tight grip on near-monopoly state schooling?
When Producers–the majority of people who need only each other
for a reasonable life–find their collective voice, our imagination will
be boundless. And stupidity, literally a state of mind, will be out of fashion
overnight.
A new State of Mind is to image-a-nation
1:54:41 PM 
|
