

Bruce Sterling: Network Society Isn’t Compatible With Democracy - psawaya
http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/17/keen-on-bruce-sterling-%E2%80%9Cnetwork-society-isn%E2%80%99t-compatible-with-democracy%E2%80%9D-tctv/

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slapshot
I'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.

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defen
Second 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).

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nazgulnarsil
democracy always sounds like a good idea to educated value-homogeneous groups
because it works fine for educated value-homogeneous groups.

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soamv
Q: "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."

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toddh
The 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?

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VladRussian
nothing 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?

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alexqgb
Language?

"Oh" you say "but language has evolved."

Which is true. And so has democracy.

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VladRussian
No, 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

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Estragon
Anyone 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.

