There is a similar mechanism at work in our economic and political systems - they both rely on a well informed and highly motivated population to run effectively. This is the ultimate check in the system against the power of elites. The greatest imediments to thriving democracy and capitalism alike, are the bottlenecks through which resources flows. To use the media resource as an example, money controls information, information controls choice, and choice controls the levers of economic and political power, and economic and political power control the flow of money. This cycle creates an elite circle of powerbrokers with the ability to manipulate the levers of power. All of this is predicated on their ability to push information down through restricted media venues.
While the printing press helped to enable the enlightment through the newfound ease of spreading knowledge, the startup costs of a printing press also helped to entrench a model of pushing information out to passive consumers, and our economic structures followed this model due to this push model being the source of disseminating economic information as well. It has also formed our political process whereby our political choices are pushed down upon us through the use of old media. We can see this philosophy embedded in the way that our political parties are organized, the electoral college, our current model of campaign funding, and the way that primaries are organized.
It goes further than this as well. This fundamental design choice permeates much of our infrastructure, physical, political, social, you name it. From the energy grid, to television and radio, to the way that authority is delegated in corporate, political, and religious organizations, it is a fundamental understanding of the way in which humans organize and relate which has governed the past 500+ years. It goes far beyond specific systems and implementations and really has to do with the fundamental model under which we organize human behavior.
People talk a great deal about various components of this. The most prominent has always been the internet and now specifically technology around software for social organization (of which blogs are a subset, as well as applications like friendster and meetup). There are others as well. Decentralizing the energy grid is one promising application (and one which I consider to be more and more morally imperitive as our environmental/energy breakdown unfolds), as is peer to peer file sharing - a technology which has the potential of breaking the stranglehold of the big conglomerates over entertainment media. We also have the potential, in the consumer area, of aggregating massive amounts of consumer feedback to generate new models of informed consumerism (think of the way in which Amazon.com generates recommendations as a very crude example - some music applications like Yahoo's launch service are quite a bit more advanced). Ebay has the potential of opening up a global peer-to-peer marketplace to an artisan in rural Sudan, giving them exposure to customers in the United States and anywhere else - this could entirely upset the world order under which money and resources are controlled internationally. There are also setups, such farming collectives and employee owned corporations, which point toward new models of hierarchical structures that we can exploit.
I believe that these technologies are also all deeply connected and representative of a large current at work in the world. They express a fundamental model of organizing human behavior that can replace the old model and possibly fuel human progress for a new era. The producer-consumer model will become obsolete. Now we will have the producer/consumer model under which we are all peers consuming and producing for each other which a vast information network allowing us to actively seek out what we want and make informed choices on what we buy and what we sell. Further, as we see in the social structures of internet culture, this structure supports thriving niche markets and the emergence of vibrant subcultures, unlike a push model which benefits structurally through economies of scale from pushing a monoculture.
The entrenched interests will continue to fight every aspect of this change from beginning to end though. I believe that this is a fight that we must not only support, but actively engage in. To battle trickle-down theory we must vociferously advocate the trickle-up benefits of peer to peer. I think that trickle-up will work better and will eventually win because it is far more efficient at mobilizing massive distributed resources and is better at allowing the best ideas to float to the top.
I would like to propose a challenge to the DKOS community. How can we utilize this technology to make a better world? Let's hear some ideas.
I had one idea in a previous diary (please excuse the perhaps repetitive expository in regard this diary). Now I will present another one to kick things off: The Elected Official Corruption Index.
Roughly, this is how it would work: The system starts with an objective set of criteria for scoring how corrupt a given politician is. Did they use public funding? What percentage of their funds are from small donors? Did they vote for or against a given reform bill? etc. Finally, there would be a public discussion and feedback mechanism which would have some effect on the scores. The site itself would not be affiliated with any partisan organizations. Yes, it would get ugly at times and be subject to freeping and other behavior, but the goal would be to fine tune the scoring process as well as aggregate large enough amounts of data to make it harder for concentrated groups to effect the outcome - to generate a self-correcting model akin to wikipedia which is not perfect, but is nevertheless effective on a larger scale. The ultimate goal of such a project would be to encourage certain types of behavior from elected officials in the interest of cleaner government by giving voters a metric against which they can measure performance. In some ways it would be akin to a heavily weighted/specialized form of opinion poll.
What's your idea?