growing pains

"The tribes and clans of early man never left us, they just expanded outward like ripples in a pond, becoming more intricate." - without losing too much of their easy use of violence and coercion.

We can reshape - build networks of decentralized public power using smart tools for communication and knowledge-sharing, decision-making and organisation.

But then again, we should never underestimate the potential  for things to get very much worse instead (or first?), as the priests and warlords - now corporations and politicians - steadily turn up the manipulation and violence to keep things running in their favour.

so called modern democracy

Part of the problem with current democracies is inherited. As all systems adapt and evolve they are often left burdened with artifacts left over from the systems they replace, long after these artifacts become unnecessary or irrelevant. Human systems are not immune. We  see this looking back through history and there is no reason to believe that we’ve somehow broken free from this effect today.

The public’s relation to our modern leaders, and the space that we create and allow for leadership, seems to me to be a good example of this. In these terms, so called modern democracies aren’t too removed from the royal courts that they evolved from.

We now have groups selected not by their birthright (so much), but by one or another system of voting, to make important decisions on behalf of the public. Yet apart from the method of selection, the new formation carries forward much from the older system.

Modern democratic representatives/leaders still have esteem, power and privilege heaped on them, as well as plenty of material benefit - similar to all that the lords and ladies of royal courts enjoyed. They still treated with what must be palpable deference, still honoured, pampered and fawned over - pretty much still treated like royalty - ripe fodder for all manner of narcissistic disorder.

Then, as I imagine in those royal courts that precede them, they are surrounded by others with similar status in spaces where maneuverings and machinations are encouraged and rewarded, and given closed doors behind which to negotiate and trade for favour and power.

And despite all this we expect them once installed to such office, to behave differently - better and more responsible than their 'ancestors'. They are installed in surroundings of virtual royalty; surrounded by the pageantry and intrigue of royal courts, and we are all still terribly surprised when they behave, sooner or later, with the same self interest and careless disregard for the public as the lords and kings of old.

infopolitics teaser

Techno-optimism and its bashing aside, there are two things that I'd like to repeat:

• We will continue to be bad at predicting the forms and shapes civilisation will take as it evolves.
• And the more information rich a civilisation becomes, the less and less tolerant it will be of the self parasitism that plagues it.

fork governance

Time to begin hacking on top of -and away from - these current primitive democracies. The governance systems in use globally carry way too many design features common to the royal courts they emerged/evolved from (strong hierarchical design, centralised opaque authority, personality based leadership, etc.).

[Distributed governance models. Decentralised technologies that might be used to underpin new forms of collective cooperation and decision-making.]

"I use the term “governance by design” to describe the process of online communities increasingly relying on technology in order to organize themselves through novel governance models (designed by the community and for the community), whose rules are embedded directly into the underlying technology of the platforms they use to operate"

http://commonstransition.org/commons-centric-law-and-governance-with-primavera-de-filippi/ (As part of a series on the 100 Women Who Are Co-Creating the P2P Society, Rachel O’Dwyer interviews Primavera De Filippi)