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Bruce Sterling: Network Society Isn’t Compatible With Democracy
- VladRussian 16y agonothing surprising that a two plus thousand year old form of societal organization (which emerged to organize small cardinality set of equal peers who themselves were the top of the hierarchical society (oligarchy)) - democracy - and the form that has emerged during recent decades are incompatible. How many 2000 year old things are still actual or fitting well with the modern technologies? Horse races? Sailing? Basics of writing and calculation?
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- slapshot 16y ago> How many 2000 year old things are still actual? Horse races? Sailing? Basics of writing and calculation? Prostitution. And it's even older than that. Bread, beer, wine. Perfume. Hebrew (sortof). The numbers 3 and 4 (sortof: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_numbers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_numbers). Etc.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- alexqgb 16y agoLanguage? "Oh" you say "but language has evolved." Which is true. And so has democracy.
- VladRussian 16y agoNo, it was patched only. Democracy is a system that can't effectively scale beyond big room or small town square (in particular, the voting event is a "synchronization barrier" that restricts the scalability). As a result with increased number of participants we are forced to keep oligarchical structure with small cardinality set of equals (among themselves only) peers - city council, Congress, etc... - on top of the managed society. The development of human society calls for a system where everybody is a peer equal to everybody else. While it is early to say, it is possible that network technologies pave the way for such new forms [or may be some completely different, hard to imagine] of society organization
- slapshot 16y agoI'm still waiting for my browswer plug-in that will generate computer transcriptions of online video. Bonus points if it crowdsources corrections. The video looks really interesting, but I can't watch it at work. Somebody please build a solution to this problem.
- defen 16y agoSecond video is worth it for the look of contempt on Sterling's face when he compares old-school hackers to new-school (start at 1:00 and watch through to 1:18).
- soamv 16y agoQ: "And are you saying that networked soceity people and democracy are incompatible?" A: "Uh, yeah, I don't think they're inherently incompatible but certainly republican democracy with its set of geographical settings, and you know... the power coming from geographical regions and networks, don't work. The great lesson of wikileaks is that global internet networked soceity, and the international order which is mostly run through diplomacy and kind of... people representing states talking to other states, those do not mesh at all well."
- toddh 16y agoThe US constitution was based on the idea of balancing factions. What Madison could not have known when designing his version of a Republic was how modern mass high speed communication would turn his plan into the exact opposite of what he intended: tyranny of a majority. His intention was to prevent factionalism from destroying the Republic as it had all previous Republics. The options for preventing factionalism had been either a tyranny to suppress the factions or creating homogeneous/fraternal society in which factions were less likely to develop. Madison took a third route, he instead encouraged factions and counted on factions to keep each other in balance. The constant struggle between factions would prevent any one faction from winning and instituting a tyranny of the majority over the minority. The minority that mattered seemed to be the rich people and their property. The majority was the poor people, who if they had power would want to take it all away. By having a representative democracy then the states would act as a buffer keeping any faction from gaining a majority. It would be difficult for any faction in one state to gain enough support in other states to create a majority capable of exploiting the minority. A fascinating and interesting plan. Completely different from Montesquieu's idea of a republic at the time in which loose confederations of small groups participated directly in their own government. The US government is purposefully architected to prevent direct public involvement in the government. Madison views the likely representatives to be lawyers who he thought would be less swayed by the masses. He wanted an aristocratic form of representation. The anti-federalists wanted citizen farmers as representatives because they were more virtuous and independent. We still see this same split today. Madison's strategy to control factions in order to prevent employing the the power of the centralized government for they tyranny of the majority may have worked in his time, but it's clearly broken for our time. State boundaries mean very little today as far as creating factions. Movements quickly and easily form on a nationwide basis in a way that Madison could never have imagined. This allows for majority factions to arise and take power, completely gutting the system that was supposed to protect the American Republic from succumbing to the same factionalism the doomed every other Republic. Clearly that has failed. So in this way the republican form of democracy embodied in the US constitution is incompatible with modern technology. It's interesting to think what factionalism preventing design strategy would be appropriate for a modern era?
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- Estragon 16y agoAnyone got a link to the audio of his talk? I've always loved his SXSW talks, and they've been available on the web pretty quickly in the past.
- nazgulnarsil 16y agodemocracy always sounds like a good idea to educated value-homogeneous groups because it works fine for educated value-homogeneous groups.