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The Last Days Of Politics
(Note: First in a series.)Maybe those manifesto-spouting Wired gurus were right after all. The modern political campaign as an entity is increasingly surreal and remote, especially from the perspective of this corner of the world, where nobody seems to be paying any attention and virtual reality is taking on a whole new meaning. Are these the last days of politics? I think so, and I'll be posting (with permission) your e-mail and threads responses and thoughts in subsequent columns.
As the presidential election gets closer, what comes to my mind is some of the more fevered rhetoric of the early days of Wired, before Conde Nast slicked it up and the magazine starting smelling like a kid on the way to his first prom.
Enthralled by the early days of the Net and Web, the cyber-theorists (especially the most passionate (l/L)ibertarians) opined that politics were over, that the digital revolution would sweep away the very notion of two political parties running the country, the idea of bureaucracy, political fiefdoms, Washington itself.
The sci-fi writer and futurist Arthur C. Clarke once wrote that he hoped he would live to see the day -- and he believed he would -- when politics in its present form would cease to matter. "The time will come," he wrote in an essay, "when most of our present controversies on these matters will seem as trivial, or as meaningless, as the theological debates in which the keenest minds of the Middle Ages dissipated their energies."
Browsing on the CNN and Washington Post political Web sites and watching cable news, it seems to me that Clarke may live to see that day, at least for a part of the world -- the tech nation, many high school and college students, people under 40. Journalists, boomers, CEOs and the elderly may still be paying attention to the strange ritual being conducted by the Republicans and Democrats, but from this perspective smack in the middle of an ascending and vibrant alternative culture, nobody else appears to be.
Can anybody cite a single interesting or important idea or argument that's emerged from the months of campaigning in the current U.S. presidential race? Despite the millions spent on primaries, advertising, debates, press conferences, press-the-flesh tours, photo-ops? In the midst of a technological revolution, has anyone involved in this musty political ritual used technology in any imaginative or innovative way or invoked it, except as a (false) menace to children?
I'd be curious to know if anybody reading this believes there's much difference between these two exhausted ideologies, or that the country will be substantially altered if one rather than the other prevails. For me, and for most of the people I come in contact with online, electoral politics is like a ghost ship, fading out to sea; surreal and mystical and most of all, remote.
A few years ago, it would have seemed ludicrous to talk about the last days of politics. Now it seems almost belated. It's been years since a majority of Americans even bothered to vote in a national election. Poll after poll shows mistrust, boredom, alienation and disgust with the brawling, negativity, stalemating and irrationality of the process. Both conservatism and liberalism seem spent, far too small and narrow to survive the Digital Age, the explosion in research and information and thinking and community and economics pushed along by the digital revolution. Washington journalists look absurd as they gather to transmit the spin, breathless, blow-dried and self-absorbed. There's something relentlessly 19th Century about the way they talk and think. Big, even enormous stories are popping up all around them, but they only have eyes for one another and the increasingly arcane system they cover.
To me, politics is conducted so sordidly and unimaginatively its real potential for good is obscured, almost beside the point. It doesn't inspire ideals but disdain. It's covered more accurately by jeering late- night talk show hosts than by the journalists who feed on the process. The biggest suspense in the campaign seems to come from waiting to see which candidate will attack the other the most bitterly. When the campaign finally turns ugly, as it inevitably will, this kind of politics will perhaps be revealed for what it is: a nasty, top-down, anti-democratic, non-interactive and irrelevant exercise in marketing. Clarke's vision almost has to come true: politics has to be reborn if it is to survive at all.
Online, the world is still different, if far from perfect. It seems, to me at least, that the cyberculture has had an enormous, if indirect impact on institutions like politics. Cyberspace isn't going to replace everything in the the material world, or create a utopian alternative, but it sure has drained a lot of energy, enthusiasm, money and creativity from institutions like politics and media, which look especially dready and exhausted in comparison. Online, ideas fly through the ether, as do arguments and opinions. New communities pop up constantly; movements like open source become more political by the day, challenging one industry and institution after another. There's still the sense of innovation, revolution and opportunity.
In this environment, freedom isn't a platitude but a genuine value, embraced and practiced by millions of people. Online, innovation and originality remain prized and ubiquitous, whereas the political system hasn't advanced an innovative idea in years. Occasionally the system intrudes, as with the Sonny Bono Copyright Act or Digital Millennium Copyright Act or a failed Communications Decency Act. Mostly, what they do seems to matter less, whether or not it should. Napster is in trouble, then Gnutella appears. Some political historians -- Peter Gay, Langdon Winner -- compare the last days of conventional politics with the eclipse of the Holy Mother Church centuries ago.
Mostly, politics seems to generate moral outrage among the younger populace that's enthralled much more by technological change than politican convention. Officials who urge "young people" to get more involved with these system of politics sound increasingly desperate, because anybody who spends two hours in a high school or college knows it isn't going to happen, not while politics takes this form.
According to historians, this isn't all that new. Whenever technological change becomes intense -- as it is now -- old conventions, ideals and institutions become severed from the new. Moral standards shift, and people begin to treat institutions with increasing indifference and contempt. That seems a perfect description for the widening divide between Netizens and the political institutions beyond, girding for yet another barren, outdated exercise.
It's a borderline time, a transition between one culture and another. Technology is the most exciting political and social force in the world at the moment, and its innovations and impact seem likely only to accelerate. The figures on TV uttering soundbites at those campaign stops seem completely out of date; they're moving their lips but have almost nothing to say, and more and more people seem to have stopped even pretending to listen. We're constantly told that what they're doing is important, and that we should pay close attention, but it becomes tougher all the time to remember why.
So I think that maybe the Wired gurus were right: These are the last days of politics. On this site, the opportunity to disagree is implicit, and doesn't need to be stated, but I'd be especially interested to see if anybody else sees it this way.
I prefer your cartoon on Comedy Central to these articles. They were much better.
NOOOO!!
The establishment has sewn up all the power bases.
When even the most out there third party candidate (Nader) is a multi-millionaire with a Washington Mansion, can you admit with a straight face that the establishment doesn't control everything?
I think most geeks are smart enough to recognize this, and recognize the growing power of the corporate state, which is why we're all so eager to worm ourselves into those technocratic corporations, we may not be able to give much input as to the steering of these plutocratic ships, but at least we're aboard, as scullery help if not as first class passengers.
But if you vote, you're just giving assent and acceptance to the cage of control which you're in... just giving the government the key to your door.
Government sucks. Devotion to governance only begets more government. We'd be a lot better off if Congress would take a long, long vacation and stop passing laws.
blessings,
"Only in their dreams can men truly be free 'twas always thus, and always thus will be."
--Tom Schulman
the day politics die is the day politicians no longer control the air we breathe, the food we eat, the water we drink, the comfort we take in not being shot if we step outside the door, the electricity we use to heat/cool our bodies and the trust we have in the fact that no nukes will come raining over our heads. The day politics die is the day humanity dies.
For once I wish Katz was right. I'd very much like to see US politics get overhauled. It wouldn't even require a change to many of our laws or documents. The two party system has a stronghold on our choices for candidates in almost every election, and it is very rare that a third party candidate wins at any level of public office. Unfortunately, I think we'll be seeing the same old thing for many years to come.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
I do not believe that it is the END of politics, as much as it is the end of politics aswe have known it. People will still campaign, people will still vote, but it will be done in new and different ways than it has in the past. In the past debates have been broadcast on television, the radio, and candidates have toured on trains. This will continue of course, but we will start to see political banner ads on web sites etc.
In addition the web has given more power to smaller political parites and underdogs. IT may not be far away that someone from the reform party or the green party, or some smaller political party has a seat in the white house. The internet will help to empower more people to run for President and get their ideas out and get noticed. The internet is an empowering device for the delivery of knowledge and ideas.
Finally I believe that we will still be going to the polls to vote for many more years. The US government is not ready to move the entire voting process over to the internet. Neither is the American Public. So the idea that Politics is dead is wrong. No, Politics, like the world around us, is just changing everyday.
[Something witty and intelligent should have appeared here.]
{Traicovn}
He didn't use the word 'paradigm'
With an article like this, the real Katz would not be able to resist...
When I were your age, all round here were fields...
If anybody minds an end to hypocratic bipartisanship they should speak against all that is said in this article, say politics is not on a waning slope, and find some cute windows program that promises to make the internet safe for you and your entire family.
Really, does no one else notice that this year there are more 3rd parties actaully recieving press time and being put on the ballot? They aren't there because they paid their way in ala Forbes and Perot; they are there because they actually have unique, controversial ideas and therefore appeal to the growing number of intellectual and cynical people in America.
This change has got to be because of the increase in technology and resulting overall prosperity of the nation. 3rd parties dont need to spend the millions on TV ads to get their message across, and besides, for most intelligent people the internet has become the informational tool of choice. Check out some parties' websites and you will see that for example the Libertarians have a much cleaner site with more non-propaganda content than either of the major parties. This is true of several 3rd parties.
When all have equal access to information about the parties, it really will become more a matter of who has the better platform and ideas, and not who has the better press or most relatives in Washington.
I think the reason why politics is pretty meaningless at the moment in terms of content is that this is an era of peace and prosperity similar to the 1920's.
If you examine the politics of the 1920 ie: Warren Harding term then it too has a pretty low content of meaningful political debate. No big diferences in positions of the Republican's and Democrats, a lot of corruption and zero ideology.
I think with the fall of communism and the undermining of socialism as a creed, there is no one really challenging the USA consensus domestically or internationally.
Perhaps if oil remains at its current high level and/or China starts kicking off then we will return to old style "life and death" politics. Hopefully we don't.
then why state it?
"So I think that maybe the Wired gurus were right: These are the last days of politics. On this site, the opportunity to disagree is implicit, and doesn't need to be stated, but I'd be especially interested to see if anybody else sees it this way."
Jon, we know how this site works. You know we'll disagree. You don't need to give us permission.
Last Days of Politics my ass. Politics are not going anywhere. Government politics might change, but that's about it. Whether the politics refer to the interaction between government representatives, or in the corporatist future that you lecture about, between high-ranking individuals within the company, politics and the science of politicing will always be around. It's human nature to strive for advantage and to gain favor from others. Humans are a socio-political entity. That's what we do.
"Online, innovation and originality remain prized and ubiquitous, whereas the political system hasn't advanced an innovative idea in years."
I'd disagree. Yes, innovation seems to be seen strongly online, but just because it's the most active sector, that doesn't mean that's the only place where new things are created.
And why is the political system supposed to change at the same pace that the online world is? Reminds me of the old "joke" about how Bill Gates says that if the automobile advanced the way technology has, cars would run 1000 miles on a gallon of water, weight 20 lbs, and you'd be able to throw one out and get a new one for $5 or some shit like that. The head dude from GM replies, yes, but if cars progressed the way technology has, your car would crash every 30 min and need to be restarted, be outdated the minute you purchase it, you'd have to wait on the phone for a technical repair line for hours on end, and rather than getting it fixed or upgrading, you'd end up using it for a door stop.
Yea, i probably butchered the joke, but imagine if our political system was completely changing the way technology has? Half the time tech and online ventures release things without thinking about the consequences, but only the short-term gains. And what about all of the instabilities?
Culture, religion, and politics should progress slowly... just ask the Amish.
I don't know, JonKatz might not be weird/off-his-rocker/etc... but if you compare his subject material and his style of speaking and the types of words his uses, it doesn't seem like he fits in with the rest of the /. community.
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politics make me wanna go to bed, goodnight.....zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
If you want representative government, pick names out of the phone book, like a lottery where the, uh, winners have to go, and we all live with the result for the next four years. Then throw 'em all out for the next bunch.
All you/we have now are party systems filled by failed lawyers. And where they all tow the party line, which is to say whatever the other party is saying is crap. (They're both right.)
All they know how to do, more deeply ingrained than a knee-jerk reflex, is pass more and more laws. Some are hilarious, many are contradictory none can even claim to be representative.
Bet the lobbyists would hate that. They'd have to get real jobs instead of kissing lawyers' butts. (No elections, no pond scum running for office, no pond scum to sell your orifice out for a chance at office.)
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
I think that as we move more towards a "wired" world (sorry for the Katzism) in which any fool with a net connection can make there views heard we will see an increase in factionalisation as people reject traditional parties in favour of their own conclusions. In the short term, perhaps an end to party politics as we see them today. In the long term, the reduction of politics to anarchy and flamewars.
After all the net gives everyone their own pulpit from which to preach, but it doesn't guarantee anyone would be heard. And in a world where five years is becoming a huge period of time, people's opinions will change by the hour as they fall under different influences.
But is this a good thing? I dunno, but there is the risk of popular orators and demagogues being able to capture large chunks of the voting population through rhetoric and promises rather than through even an attempt at a solid foundation of policy. Throughout history we see how entire nations have fallen under the sway of charismatic leaders, and do we want to return to an era in which democracy falls to the first person who can make a good speech?
This is certainly true in the judicial and executive branches - the supreme court (which is growing in power and scope - an undemocratic trend that should alarm you) is entirely appointed.
The candidates for president are largely appointed - the primary system is largely a show at this point.
While the legislative branch is still somewhat democratic, the two-party system is becoming so homogenous that users are essentially robbed of real choice - those selecting the candidates for the house and senate have largely usurped the democratic process.
To find the real meat in modern politics as in modern everything. This article looks to me like the work of someone who's just skimmed the surface. You should take a look at Ralph Nader's candidacy (www.votenader.org). 1) He's well poised to shake up the process 2) He's the only one who's blowing the whistle on how indistinguishable the two parties have become 3) He's completely funded by private individuals (like us). 4) Most important, (IMHO) he's showing us all what a political candidacy can look like in the 21st century, rather than the 18th. Is Nader going to win this election? No, of course not. But he's already way ahead of Buchanan in the polls and I think he has a clue about the future.
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I'll bet / with my Net / I can get / those things yet.
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I'll bet / with my Net / I can get / those things yet.
--Dr. Seuss
Are these the Libertarians who would try to put a price tag on the environment, and then sue corporations that befoul our encironment?
Your honor, representing the environment, Smokey the Bear, bear attorney at law
Hmm, why do I think this is a bad idea?
We need some government to keep the corporations in line, though we're not voting anymore because the corporations becoming too powerful. Obviously, we need to increase the power that the government has over corporations, or live in a Gibson/Sterling corporatacracy.
Now what should end is the enforcements of borders. There's nothing more hypocritical to an ideoligy of freedom and equal rights for all humans than a border with INS officials starting with the assumption of "What right do you have to be here?"
-Daniel
i've been using computers too long.
The last days of politics will come about the same time as Hades reaching 0C (32F). The reason is simple. Even if we go to a "True Democracy," all that will do is change which parties influence our thinking. Without politicians, it will simply be a matter of groups advertising directly for their own issues. Once this takes place, anarchy is right around the corner.
Right now, you can at least look at the politicians and see who is pulling their strings. Without politicians, you'll get 300,000 "opinions" from "ordinary" people. There's no way to verify if they're paid to think that way or really do think that way.
Perhaps a better way to fix the problem would be to take the Senate away from the people again. The original idea behind the Senate was that each State or Commonwealth's legislature would elect 2 reps to go to the Senate. In theory, these people would not be bound to a particular company or organization, since they would not have the need to spend huge amounts of cash on political campaigns. This would give a certain amount of balance to the US Congress. Right now, we have House and Senate members that are bought and paid for by special interests. These groups represent corporations, evironmental groups, unions, etc., who all want their merchandise (IE: Their rep) to vote their way on all issues. Is it any wonder the laws of the US don't follow the will of the people? A small group who purchases a legislator has more voice in government than the ordinary person. By returning the Senate to the original idea set forth by the framers of the Constitution, we would at least have a better chance of getting some true representation in the halls of Congress.
- No matter how subtle the wizard, a knife between the shoulder blades really cramps his style.
There is something in what Jon says, but the major and lasting difference from this Presidential election will be in the Judiciary.
There are at least 3 and probably 5 new Supreme Court appointments for the next President. Plus a bunch of Federal Judges. They will serve for ~20 years, heavily affecting the Courts.
Now you can say that the law is becoming increasingly irrelevant too [Napster], but just how lawless do you want society to become?
No. Can you recall one from the last election? Or the one before that? Or the one before that?
Yes, American politics is in decline. Yes, it's less relevant than ever before. But this has a lot more to do with television, Watergate, and campaign finance than it does with anything that has a keyboard attached to it.
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Give me liberty or give me something of equal or lesser value from your glossy 32-page catalog.
I turned 18 this past year and was looking forward to voting in my first presidential election...but as the time draws near, I am increasingly bleak about my options. Bush and Gore seem to be virtually the same person (and I'm not about to vote for the 'lesser of two evils'), so I checked out the third-party candidates. After much reading, I settled on Ralph Nader--he seems to be the closest embodiment of who I would like to see in the White House.
Then I began talking with others about voting for Nader. Wherever I turned, I got responses that mirrored the following sentiment: "Please don't vote for Nader, he'll only take votes away from (Bush|Gore)." People still feel locked into the two-party system, so much so that they tell others to and themselves go against their instinct to vote outside the system just to prevent some "greater evil" from gaining power.
How can politics be dead when such attitudes still prevail?
AJS
The end of politics? I think not.
It amazes me how short sighted we are to think that the here and now is so much different from any of the previous episodes in history, or that we will rid the world of the evils of [insert your enemy here]. Politics is, and always has been a slimey profession. One that is bent on manipulating and controlling large groups of people by any means available.
So we now have the internet, a wonderful media that no longer silences the ignorant among us (Hot Grits!). That will not change or eliminate political maneuvering. We have had other effective political tools in the past that have changed the face of politics, but the games still go on.
How many of you reading this actually believe ANY public opinion poll? I hope none, as these are political manipulation tools. I hadn't always thought this way, but after working at a polling firm for a summer job, I uncovered some creepy undeniable truths:
1) People (the vast majority of people) are stupid. Worse yet, the ones who actually take the time to respond to pollsters are ignorant of almost everything that they are asked about (invalid data that turns into a valid poll).
2) Polls, and the questions that they ask can be used to skew results to unbelievable conclusions. This never makes it into the nice USAToday pie chart or bar graph.
In turn, polls become self fulfilling prophecies for whoever paid for them to be taken, by changing the public opinion.
The internet will not end this, if anything it will provide for a larger audience to manipulate.
-- Len
First off you are wrong. Secondly you have several very good points. Yes, to most geeks politics are very insignificant and we have a habit of doing nothing and sometimes not even voting. I have a very difficult time seeing a real difference with either canidate in the aspect of DMCA, blah blah technical things. But coming from a very political past,(ex fiancee way too into all of it campaigns, lobbyist etc, etc) I can see why canidates do this. If I am a canidate trying to get more votes than the other canidate, am I going to campaign to the small minority of geeks that are not even going to get out to vote? Or am I going to campaign to the older, elderly, demographics that are more than likely going to vote? Until we have a voice, No Slashdot in its current form does not count, we will nto be heard. Even though Gore must frequent here since he invented slashdot I mean the internet.:) So if we want to kill the established system we need to let the system know that it needs to change or we will change it. Not say haha we all talk to each other so you can campaign however you like and your politics are meaningless. NONONO they are very meaningful to us. Look at all the horrors we have allowed by not truly getting involved. Oh well enough ranting. Back to work.
I am 31337 or something.
The real people making a difference in this world are the local level politicians, where it's not as "political" as the national level. Sure people spend lots of money trying to gain the highest seats in local government (i.e. Mayor) but those people are still beholden to the people because they are physically present. I work within blocks of the white house, but have never seen the president. Not once. Not ever. He's never called me to see if he's doing a good job, or asked what I thought about foreign policy. That's not his job either. However, it is the job of the local politicians to be in touch with their people, and in lots of case they are. The internet didn't bring about this end, it only hastened it. It emphasized precisely how worthless Washington is in general, and how valuable your town council and school board are.
Katz, you asked in your article:
Nope. Not one. Not a single solitary one. These men are not leaders, they are figureheads of worthless old institutions. Neither of those men have the suitable qualifications to be President.If anything, the net has become useful in creating a more "central" party. It's created a more populist centrist politics which both these candidates have embraced. Both candidates are trying to appeal to the widest number (neccesary for election) and as such have no stands on any issues. Gore has the only foreign policy experience and Bush the only "outsider's view" Both are worthless. Yes, in 20 years, we will look back and laugh.
So there I was. Naked. In a refrigerator. With a potroast on my knees. Smokin a cigar. That's when it got REALLY weird.
I'm sick of hearing this nonsense about American apathy from people like Jon Katz. It's time that we put a stop to this. I vote that we... that we... ah, screw it. I don't give a damn anymore.
Seriously, though, the Net isn't a hotbed of political activity. The Net is where people go to bitch about politics rather than actually do something about politics. This is why things like DMCA, stupid patents, and UCITA get gotten away with. Rather than let their frustration build until it charges them into action, most Netizens just let it all out on discussion boards and think of themselves as having "educated" someone else on-line, who probably won't do anything about it either.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
The whole point we're getting at here is that people are becoming more and more disinterested with politics. People are realizing that there really isn't much of an option, the left tries to provide more services, the right tries to cut taxes... blah blah blah... Where is the real change? The point of the matter is that until the system itself changes, the politics won't. So I wouldn't expect any great changes in the way things are run until the majority of the people realize that it's time to move on and explore different ways to maintain a successful society. Think of all the civilizations that gave way to stagnation... Holy Roman Empire, English Imperialism, ... it's our turn next.
Maybe that's where the tech culture steps in. Since it's fundamental nature is to progress and include more and more people into its structure, it ensures it's own evolution.
UBU
I'm more detached from the campaign than ever this year. I barely know or care who's doing what in the "republicrat" parties. I don't know who I'm going to vote for, I'm only certain that it won't be one of them. Maybe Nader, maybe Browne. At least then my vote will mean something, though probably not much. At least it'll be a vote for change. How's voting for a republican or democrat going to change anything?
It seems like people will gain a lot more influence by organizing to change things securely and anonymously online in the coming years--encryption will gain a foothold eventually. People don't need an office building or complex of office buildings anymore to create a strong organization. They don't need to be in the same physical location to ensure private communications.
I guess what I worry about most is, what happens when the politicians' biggest relevance is that they're the guys with control of the guns?
numb
Instead, I see corporations making rules with little regard to politics. Hell, the companies will buy what politicians they need. Therefore, I doubt that politics will end, but will simply become ever-more business-centric. ... of course, businesses have always played a big role in government, but it seems that voters will be offered an ever decreasing number of real choices, while blocks of special interests (insurance companies, car manufacturers, brokerage houses) will work to make their favored candidate look more appealing.
Having more people fed up and ceasing to vote means it becomes easier it is to buy the remaining votes with ads and promises.
"The girl makes Godot look punctual." -- Buffy
I find myself reading everything I can about the candidates, watching every news channel I can find, looking for some shred of "good" journalism. The best info I can find, however, is on the web. The homepages of the candidates are the best resource so far, despite the FUD that I find there, too. I have definite beliefs and at this time, I feel like it is very difficult to find out what a candidate really thinks about issues that are important to me. They all want the same ends, but profess different means. I wish that we'd stop hearing so much "I want to save the children" and more of "This is why my plan is best for America." I would prefer having to pick the candidate I feel good about, not the one I feel "less bad" about.
I'm on a chair.
I'm tired of people saying politics is dead without suggesting alternatives.
"Some call it a 6-pack. I call it a support group" - unknown.
managers...why god invented purgatory
Here's the difference, jkatz: on Oprah (sorry for the lame-ish source), Bush stated unequivocally and repeatedly that he believes that government has no soul. Sounds like your thesis here. Given that government has no soul, what do you do next? I believe that taking the [non]existence of a humanity, spirit, or soul of government as an axiom, it does produce a difference in practical ideologies.
Bingo Foo
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taken! (by Davidleeroth) Thanks Bingo Foo!
I'd like to think that politics in this format are over.. but until everyone has net access, and until natural resources aren't controlled by these warthog's, the government will continue to be "By the business, for the business, and of the business". We need another amendment. Separation of Business and State. If we keep going this path, we won't survive. I hope we make it.
We have that already. It's called Slashdot.
"And in other news tonight, President Portman urged voters once again to reject the Hot Grits Act of 2010, saying it went too far. She was immediately drowned out by Anonymous Cowards singing the praises of Penis Birds."
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Give me liberty or give me something of equal or lesser value from your glossy 32-page catalog.
Aside from the fact that those in power will never agree to this, politics is very much a specialized job. Sure, people picked at random would probably pass laws that were, in spirit, more representative of the interests of the American people as a whole. But then the big corporations would send out their lawyers to walk through the gaping loopholes and pervert the laws to their own ends.
In order to write laws that will hold up at all, you have to speak legalese and have a pretty good knowledge of how our legal system works. These or not qualifications that the average person has or really wants to have.
Of course, you could appoint legal advisors to these representatives to help them write the laws, but the opportunity for corruption there is immense. ("Oops, did that law accidentally allow corporation X to dump toxic chemicals into the ocean with impunity? I'll have to watch out for that loophole next time." And meanwhile mister advisor is pocketing a big check from corporation x)
It's been years since a majority of Americans even bothered to vote in a national election.
Well, a quick bit of research with a search engine gave me this page which shows that every year up until 1992 was over 50%, and if you browse the rest of the site, you see that it was 49.08% for 1996. Admittedly, if you count those not eligible to vote, you would drop below 50% for most of the historical data, but surely Katz is above lying with statictics to further his cause?
Fuel for road vehicles (petrol and diesel) is taxed over 75% tax. This makes our fuel the most expensive in Europe.
Earlier this month a protest was started by the road-haulage companies and farmers. This consisted of peaceful blockades outside fuel depots and oil refinerys, preventing fuel tankers from making deliveries.
Within a few days this blockade, coupled with panic buying, brought the country to an effective standstill. In addition essential provisions began to sell out in some stores, again caused by further panic buying.
The government steadfastly refused to make any changes to this tax policy (despite it being the root cause of inflation). The dispute stopped, temporarily, to restart 60 days later if nothing has changed.
The upshot of this is that the government has suddenly become very unpopular (the Millenium Dome farce hasn't helped), the opposition party are also unpopular for starting this tax policy, and the third party are unpopular for pledging to put taxes up further. Most people I've spoken too seem to have no idea who to vote for in the next election, which will be called soemtime within the next 18 months (how I'd love to have a fixed term).
As long as there are two sides of an issue, then politics will continue to be an important part of our lives.
If /. is supposed to be taken as a model for future decision making then civilization is doomed. We can't even decide on something as simple as which text editor or scripting language to use. I can't possibly imagine sorting out more difficult topics like what to do with our dams on the lower Columbia, or how we should manage our forests so that they don't all burn down. Even worse a change to online politics will not change the landscape at all, it will simply re-arrange the people calling the shots. In the future it won't be the Democrats and the Republicans, it will be the Linuxistas the Beosians, the Slashdotians, and the Wired-ians.
If there is one thing that can be proved conclusively it is that the Internet has not added anything to the lost arts of diplomacy and compromise. People are less likely to compromise online than anywhere else.
Of course, Jon is old enough to know better about sweeping generalizations of this sort. Every rising generation believes that they hold the key to righting the "mistakes" of the past, and yet mostly all you get is smoke and noise. Like the hippies of yesteryear the online revolutionaries will soon find that politics is both necessary and beneficial.
It is true, however, that the mass-media is going to play an increasingly small part of the debate. As people begin to look for their information online they will soon realize that they can very effectively bypass the pundits and get right to the heart of the matter. Also the cost of broadcasting is going to fall until it is withing all of our reaches.
This will certainly change politics, but it will not destroy it.
Every year I hear how the net will change politics. Suddenly John Doe will be able to get his message out and not have to be tied to a party. This is a lie. As long as we don't personally know the people we are voting for we will vote based on a marketing image. Marketing has always been run by money and will always be run by money. Big websites still cost money to maintain, lots of money. And having a big website doesn't help any if you can't spend money to get people to visit it. If you think the rules have changed simply because the medium of propaganda has changed you are wrong.
This is why my generation as a whole has stopped voting. They know the propaganda isn't true. Somehow we feel we have to be educated about who we are voting for. Somehow the straight party ticket doesn't ease our minds. Better to not vote than to vote for the wrong guy
My generation is politically active, but only in things we can change. We vote with our money. Give to causes that support our ideals. Let the lobbiests we support actually do some good. Lobbiests have much more power than average voters. They can say, "if you take this stance on this issue you get $x for your campaign." Those dollars translate directly into votes. More "so and so for such and such" signs to increase name recognition. More "my competitor used crack when he was 12" ads. Lobbiests and Organized groups drive the spinless politicians. We know that Crisis Pregnancy Center isn't going to go wishy washy on the abortion issue. If we are for gun rights the NRA gets our money, and they sway votes with it. If you want to protect Social Security AARP will stand up for you.
The political process is as it always has been. The wealty make the decisions. The poor get the shaft.
Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human.
Illuminatus I, The Eye in the Pyramid, 149-150
Robert Anton Wilson
I agree with Katz' data, but not with his conclusions: what's dying here is Americans belief that we live in a democracy, that we're still a free people. Of course, our democracy itself died a long time ago.
The colonies revolted against Britian with much less provocation than we have today, and the low voter turnout is showing the number of Americans waking up to that reality. Many would say we're being ungrateful, that we're citizens of the richest, most powerful country on the planet. But with the U.S. Government become less and less acountable to its citizenry, we're well on our way to becoming the most well-fed, pampered slaves on the planet.
Quotes from A Man for All Seasons
Anyone capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.
The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, series 2.
In the meantime, I recall the occasion when the Greens polled 5% in European elections in the UK. The result was a sharp shift greenward in all the party platforms. A vote for an unpopular party isn't "wasted" because both the mainstream parties will immediately steal any idea that looks like attracting votes.
Paul.
You are lost in a twisty maze of little standards, all different.
Perhaps the reason that there has been no relevant use of newer technology is a prior decision to ignore those potential voters who partake in such technology. The two-party system in America has morphed into one corporative institute that cares not for drawing new, younger voters. Rather, they believe that innovation would invite change to their stronghold on the voting American public.
Due to the lack of young voter participation in recent elections, there probably is a feeling among life-time Washington politicians to plain ignore the young vote. It has happened before, in the 1972 Presidential elections. McGovern (the Democratic candidate) was running against incumbent Richard Nixon. The Nixon faction ignored the youth vote, while McGovern realized the sheer numbers of younger voters, and attempted to utilize their numbers. Unfortunately (in my opinion), there was a lack of coordination and communication which led to a victory for Nixon.
Now, the Republicans and Democrats have both decided to ignore the large number of younger voters, for pretty much the same reason as Nixon did. The young voters had not voted before, so why should money be spent attracting them to the polls, especially when they might not vote for the "correct party"? Thus, both Republicans and Democratic campaigns have decided to ignore the youth vote to save money that could be spent pushing food and fundraisers on the corporations who fund lobbyists in Washington, and to keep potential "wrong voters" out of the polls. Ignorance of the election is an advantage for the main parties, as that will keep people out of the polls who would think for themselves.
Now, I am NOT saying that everyone who votes in an election for Republican/Democratic parties is not thinking for themselves, but there are a large number of voters who have always voted along party lines and would never think of changing. But, there are other candidates. Ralph Nader, for instance, of the Green Party (you saw it coming, didn't you?) is a candidate who believes in a change of the political system, much in the same way as the article above describes. Their site (http://www.votenader.com) opens the door to online participation in issues, supporting a campaign, and sending in those questions which a voter feels important.
The two-party system has decided to play a safe campaign, as the end result will be the same between the two parties. Neither one is especially conservate or liberal, both are pretty much controlled by the same corporations, and will lost not a whole lot if a particular side loses. That is why voter awareness is so important. There are a number of options (the Green Party, Libertarian Party, etc) which are viable groups of citizens who care about changing this sordid, stagnant political system.
It is possible to raise the bar for political awareness of the large numbers of voters who have never been noticed before and won't become noticed until we/they educate ourselves. There is the opportunity for a change of the two party system in this country. Educate yourself, raise awareness of other parties in your area, and then the government will change appropriately, utilizing technology and paying attention to this growing generation.
The media and politicians still have a stronghold. Until the way most people get their news is changed, we will not see any major changes.
Anybody interested in becoming "media literate" should check out the documentary Spin by Brian Springer. I digitized and encoded it on:
http://www.PhDepot.com/spin
and it is available in Media Player format and RealPlayer format.
Spin uses satellite backhauls, which are raw footage feeds which are relayed before being packaged for final news, in order to demonstrate how the media and politicians affect the news. There are some entertaining and educational clips involving people like Larry King and Dan Rather, as well as politicians like Clinton, Al Gore, Bush, and others. Pat Robertson is also featured throughout.
Any comments?
"Can anybody cite a single interesting or important idea or argument that's emerged from the months of campaigning in the current U.S. presidential race?"
Um, have you been paying attention? The differences in ideologies between the major candidates and even the third-party candidates are huge. Voters have a real and substantive choice here, regardless of what they think of the political process. Hell, you have Ralph Nader who couldn't be more outside the mainstream and hs no corporate ties and could do better than anyone thinks.
The entire thesis of Katz's article is just plain wrong. How many net-based campaigns have done a bit of political change without people actually getting off their butts and doing something. The whole idea that politics is irrelevant because of the Internet is like those who said that computers would replace schools - they haven't, they won't, and they can't.
There will always be politics. There will always be disagreements over who gets what, when, where, and how much.
The alternative to politics is a system where there are no decisions, no free thought, no choices, and no hope. Mr. Katz, you've railed against systems like that many times before - yet your proposals would lead exactly to what you despise.
Politics are what lets us fight injustice. Politics are what lets us fight things like the DCMA, the MPAA, and the RIAA. No amount of sitting behind a computer screen will ever fix those problems. You don't have to like politics, but you do have to live with it. It is those who actively take a stand that will decide the future, and the choice is clear: either be trampled by those who do realize this, or get organized and get involved.
I agree that the political system as a whole is largely clueless, but remember that every other major upheaval of socio-political standards has resulted in bloodshed.
Right now, our government is very much a reflection of our society. Our society believes with a moral certainty such absurdities as guns are bad and copyrights are enforceable. Freedoms are being happily revoked 'for the children' and because 'no one needs to do that', two reasons that would make the founding fathers apoplectic. The government lies to the populace with startling regularity; but that's allright, our schools lie to our kids. How am I as a young 'netizen' ever going to trust these systems? However, I'm certainly not turning my back on them. They have real teeth, and when the revolution does come, it may involve actual bloodshed.
Just a thought.
A society that will trade a little liberty for a little order will lose both and deserve neither. - Thomas Jefferson
In the current election:
Missile Defense Systems
If GW gets the seat in the Oval Office we are gambling with a new arms race.
This is something that would affect us twenty years down the road even if politics as we now know it are dead.
...the web posting of the new book? It's been months since we were promised that JK would make right the arbitrary snarfage of /. comments by posting the book as a serial.
/. ID is lower than the real Bruce Perens'.
Moderators: I have a +1 and I didn't use it. Consider this post already modded down.
The real Threed's
--Threed
Society hasn't become more jaded - John Katz has. Those "manifesto-spouting Wired gurus" have. When they were young they were naive and idealistic and they still remember those times in those terms. Now they are older and more cynical - but too self-absorbed to realise that it is they who are more cynical, not the society around them. This is a phase that many people in every generation go through. Next they will start wearing carpet slippers and cardigans, smoke pipes and vote Nazi party. At that point, shooting them is the kindest thing you can do.
Meanwhile, for anyone with an eye to see it, todays generation have rediscovered protest and direct action and are taking it in new directions.
Can he please never be on the front page again as he really fucking annoys me!
There's an interesting article entitled Sesame Street, Epistemology, and Freedom. The author argues that much of what is wrong in education and politics is a failure to teach children some of the important concepts in philosophy beyond the Sesame Street game of "One of these things is not like the others".
I'm reluctant to accept any argument that finds the one central problem. This article points out that that is precisely the problem. Essentially, politics has become an argument over whose abstraction will be accepted as the model for the issue, who gets to determine which are the two sides of the issue. Consider the similarity between multiple choice tests such as the SAT and ballots. Only one answer wins.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
Katz says that conservatism and liberalism are " too small and narrow to survive the digital age". I agree with this, in a way, but I disagree with his analysis of what that means. First, it is naive to equals conservatism and liberalism with any of the parties. The old ideas of conservatism and liberalism have not been represented for many years in conventional politics. I would argue that in order to compete with the developing issues of our new digital, corporate society, the parties broadened to accommodate, not narrowed, which is why they seem so similar at times. On the other hand, the political spectrum, on the whole as represented by the parties, remains much too narrow.
I have issues with the idealization of the freedom and joyful anarchy we supposedly enjoy on the web. There are some wonderful things happening, no doubt, but it would be wise to remember that there is still only a select demographic represented. And that demographic is primarily members of the privileged classes: the academic and corporate. In addition, all these wonderful bytes are going over the lines of a few companies who decide who gets this bandwidth. Rather than pat ourselves on the back for the online utopia we have created, perhaps we should find ways to bring other groups into our fold as a viable alternative to the degeneration of "off-line" politics.
Finally, I would mention that there are some hopeful signs. The direct action in Seattle, DC, Philadelphia, Prague and other places around the world show that there are people, online and off, who have not given up hope completely, even if they don't feel the ballot box is going to be there salvation.
Everything is political. The nature of politics may change with new technology. But politics is far from dead.
John, I have to disagree with you on your assessment on the ability of politicians and the political process. Political activity goes in cycles depending on the ability of the populace to believe in something. What you are describing strongly correlates to political activity in the 1970's and in Post WWI France. Political power is the most powerful thing there is. That is why it is so important. At the end of the day it dosn't matter the stock options of Sony of what Microsoft is doing ultimately the US government could just declare martial law and sieze all the corporations assets and there would be no way to disagree.
The fundamental "staleness" of the political process is basically because of our relative stability as a nation and the good ecconomic conditions that we have. The issues are far and above more complex than you gave in your essay. While I agree that many of the ecconomic policies are in fact pretty much the same ones that have been going on since the 1880's I feel that the general apathy is not a good thing in the American voter.
Many of the non mainstream political parties are in fact not fit to govern the country but have active followings in many liberal states in the union. Would you have wanted Ross Perot to run the USA? He had new ideas but they were not exactly accepted or practical.
The way many, many, many technological workers think is not exactly the way I want my country to be run in any sense of the matter. People who want instant change and who believe that everything has a quick fix or even an easy one is a fool.
Respond to s
That politics has been replaced by a frightening monolith of government that has no room for real political conflict anymore. If you look at the current presidential campaign it is nothing but an endless series of promises to fix things that aren't actually broken and accusations that the other party broke it. They keep going on about how we have to save Social Security. BULL! Social Security survived worse than the coming tide of elderly in its past, the only reason it looks worse now is because they changed how they measure their projections to be ultra-conservative.
The problem is that while they are sitting their puting on a play for the constituents, the Republicrats are sucking from the tete of corporate money and doing anything to keep their supply from running dry. So we get horrible laws like the DMCA, that totally kiss that collective butts of the corporate media empires. We also get laws that pander to those few who still care about the elections, creating a new government enforced morality.
Politics is not a ghost fading into the distance. Politics is a rotting corpse in a very poorly ventilated room. We all sit around smelling it, and being nauseated by it, but none of us wants to touch it. So we sit there in our disgust, trying not to think about it, and wait for somebody else to clean it up.
---
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Maintaining the State is a social game, not really a political game. The US "democracy" is simply one way to play that game - where the goal is to legitimize the existence of the State. In our case, the US Gov't legitimizes itself by promising freedom, prosperity, and security. The illusion of meaningful elections is part of that "freedom", as in civil rights, sort of thing.
Modern States have 3 was to legitmize themselves (according to Giovanni Poggi, whom I happen to agree with):
physical force - ie fear, intimidation, repression, as many African and South American oligarchies used to do.
having a common enemy - the old Machiavellian principle of having someone to hate - ie the Cold War/Communism (and in Russia's case, Western Capitalism).
quality of life - the promise of Universal Health care (long abandoned by Gore), guns in every home (Bush), no more SUV's (Nader), and so forth. Obviously, though Reagan was all about the Cold War cause, most of the US's legitizing power comes from the last, quality of life (and to a small extent the first).
Without [perceived] legitimacy the State can no longer exist (the people don't need it). What Jon is saying is that all the false promises and claims to improve quality of life that our political candidates expouse are largely ignored by the public because everybody knows that it's a sham.
However, if you subscrbe to a more Foucoult-ish interpretation of power, the idea is that modern States derive power from the ability to observe, classify, and track it's subjects (with the technology that exists today, it's not that hard). That being the case, the State has won and humanity is screwed (we're actually screwing ourselves) and thus who the fuck cares if Tweedledee or Tweedledum get elected?
I'm still gonna vote Nader.
[pink beam of light]
It's a little dry but some of those technical articles about new chip X or bad legal case Y are much longer. I believe that one of the Napster related legal briefs was about ~100 pages of pdf text.
Respond to s
Sure the political and election process is irrevelant. Have you ever watched c-span: "My distinguished colleague on the other side of the aisle is an idiot," "I ask unanamious consent to revise and extend my remarks," blah, blah, blah...
However, they still make laws that affect all of us (americans anyway). Ok, so one can ignore/bypass the DMCA or other law, but wouldn't it be easier if it wasn't on the books? Fact is there are billions and billions of dollars and hundreds of years invested in the current system, and it meets its goals well. The rich continue to get richer, the environment is destroyed, individual freedoms are subjugated to the "rights" of corporations, etc... The current system meets these needs of the plutocracy perfectly - its going to take a lot to change that.
I'm not familiar with the ideas of the particular authors Katz is speaking of; how exactly do they envision the future of politics/government ending up? How will we prevent the current power structure from taking over the new tools of indivudual empowerment, as they are attempting to do now? Honestly, the recent story about Alexa just showed that coprorations are gaining more and more control. The top 10 websites get 20% of the traffic; that doesn't seem like individual empowerment to me, just another way of getting the mainstream viewpoint.
How can I, as an individual, fight back?
-brian
Put congressional voting records online
Did your congressperson vote for campaign finance reform? (Mine voted against it) Some organizations such as the ACLU and Common Cause keep track of a few issues, but normally I must learn the voting record from the candidates themselves before election. That forces me to parse their lies: "During my term, I increased funding for libraries and fought smut on the internet" translates to "I loaned libraries $100 and forced them to install useless $200 filters on their internet machines". If a few more people can go to the source and verify the politician's claims, then the politician won't have a free license to conveniently spin his story for re-election. A database that's searchable by topic would promote integrity in campaign literature and advertising.
Turn off the TV
What did Bush and Gore do with over $100,000,000 of campign money? 30 second commercials with thinly-veiled half-truths that should disgust any critical thinker. Television ads are the major reason why campaigns are so outrageously expensive. If you want third parties to introduce real issues into politics, then don't watch ads. Turn off the TV. That will even the chances for candidates with less money and more ideas. Then the greater influence will be the word-of-mouth from people who have researched the issues, not from a sensationalist appeal to undecided TV watchers.
Vote for a third party
Democrats insist that they are the only way to prevent Republicans from restricting abortion rights. Republicans keep right-wingers in the party by threatening: "if the Democrats gain power, they'll take away your guns." They've made those threats during every election for the past two decades. Don't let fear of the worst party prevent you from voting for the best. Don't worry about the magic of how new supreme court appointees will vote. Supreme Court members have suprised their nominators by voting fairly on the issues, not like the presidents intended. Don't let the Dems/Reps conspire to shut out third parties by restricting debates, by keeping campaign costs high, and by other means (for example, after Nader announced a rally in Flint, MI, then Clinton flew in for a seperate rally at the same time one block away). Vote your ideas!
The problem I see is that people like Al Gore can only do one thing. That's politics. More and more politicians are born and bred that way. They don't have any other career goals or skills. The problem is that the US government should be "for the people and BY the people". People who are career politicians are not one "of the people" they represent.
We need more smart people with other careers they can fall back on to start entering into politics. Politics does matter!
Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they're not after you!
Sadly, it seems politicians have adopted a strategy of divide and conquer the electorate. They use fear, class-envy, and demagoguery to divide Americans. Instead of proposing solutions to the serious problems we face, they attempt to muster more votes at the expense of the nation. This phenomenon has polarized Americans such that it is rare we make headway toward reasonable solutions to our national problems. For example, our energy policy has suffered from this abuse. We are approaching an energy crisis in America, but emotions on this issue are so visceral and heated that we can't have a rational national dialogue. America's opposing ideas about issues need not be a weakness. Instead they should lead us to better solutions than either side would achieve unchecked. We must come together to find a reasonable balance to our energy needs and our enviornment. But before we can do this we have to reasonably answer some questions: what amount of energy can the enviornment support, what amount of energy do we need, what policies are we going to impliment to meet our energy and enviornmental needs into the future, and etc. But how can we hope to get to this stage when our leaders are dividing us instead of leading us?
I'm afraid that politics is a part of the human kernel.
Of what worth is the vote when the candidates are never held accountable to their promises? Or when their shortcomings in doing so are easily covered up with a flurry of propaganda PR? Heck, they all bend over to the transient whims of the popular opinion polls anyway. Presidents are fast becoming mere figureheads, someone who rubber-stamps the popular issue of the week, not someone who wields any substantial power stemming from any real sense of honor, justice, or knowledge.
I think so, and I'll be posting (with permission) your e-mail and threads responses and thoughts in subsequent columns.
This isn't a flame. Really. I'm wondering why Katz needs to post our e-mail and "threads responses." Don't we have this whole fancy messaging system just so that isn't necessary?
-Waldo
I find myself initially frustrated with the endless evasion tactics, then bored because responses become too predictable.
I live in the UK, and political campaining doesn't cost 'quite' as much as it does in the US, but we're on our way.
-- Hob - Java Spectrum Emulator
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Here's a quote straight from Nader's homepage
"Social Security is a tremendous success story."
Enough said.
You have every right to state your oppinion of Katz's article but please give some arguments for your statements.
It's not the least bit helpful for the discussion if you just state things without tell us why you think so.
- j
What's Nader out ranting about -- he's out there complaining that Hollywood is marketing violent video games and movies to kids, and should be punished. Oh yeah, that's something we've never heard from the Republicans and Democrats.
Only real alternative is Harry Browne, and what's he at, 15 voters?
Ralph Nader was born in 1934 in Winsted, CT to Lebanese immigrants Rose and Nathra Nader. Civic duty had a special meaning in Winsted, the small town in northwestern Connecticut where Nathra ran the Highland Arms Restaurant and engaged his customers in spirited debate about public affairs. Studious, bright and intense, Ralph followed the Yankees, played with David Halberstam, the future journalist, and read back issues of the Congressional Record with equal enthusiasm. By age 14 he had read the early muckrakers--Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, Upton Sinclair and George Seldes--who were to inspire his thinking about the distribution of power in American society and the possibilities of citizenship.
In 1955, he graduated magna cum laude from Princeton, and 1958 from Harvard Law School. It was at Harvard where Nader first explored an unorthodox legal topic: the engineering design of automobiles. His research resulted in an April 1959 article published in The Nation, "The Safe Car You Can't Buy," in which he declared, "It is clear Detroit today is designing automobiles for style, cost, performance and calculated obsolescence, but not--despite the 5,000,000 reported accidents, nearly 40,000 fatalities, 110,000 permanent disabilities and 1,500,000 injuries yearly--for safety."
In 1963, Nader, then an unknown twenty-nine-year old attorney, abandoned a conventional law practice in Hartford, Connecticut, and hitchhiked to Washington, DC, to begin a long odyssey of professional citizenship. "I had one suitcase," he recalled. "I stayed in the YMCA. Walked across a little street and had a hot dog, my last." (A few years later he would expose the repulsive ingredients that go into hot dogs.) He took a job as a consultant to the US Department of Labor, working for Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Nader moonlighted as a freelance writer for The Nation and The Christian Science Monitor. He also acted as an unpaid adviser to a Senate subcommittee which was exploring what role the federal government might play in auto safety.
In 1965, he targeted General Motors and the American auto industry in his best-selling book Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile . When GM attempted to discredit him, he sued them for invasion of privacy. This landmark case forced the president of GM to go before a Senate Committee and admit wrongdoing, and a series of safety laws were passed in 1966 which forced the auto industry to make drastic design changes for safer motor vehicles. With the money Nader won in the settlement, he launched the modern consumer movement.
The publicity he received, and the reputation he created for standing up to predatory corporations, inspired activists from around the nation to go to Washington, DC to work with Nader. They became known as "Nader's Raiders." Organizations were launched to push for laws to protect people as consumers, workers and taxpayers, and the environment, combating corporate abuse, and increasing citizen access to government.
Ralph Nader and his Raiders have identified and confronted political and corporate bosses on hundreds of issues. They have fought against insurance companies; global trade arrangements that allow other countries to evade our environment, labor, and consumer protection laws; corporate lobbyists and politicians who attempt to block safety standards, or to deny fair access to court for injured parties.
In 1971, Nader founded Public Citizen, to be the consumers' eyes and ears in Washington, working for consumer justice and government and corporate accountability. More than 150,000 people are involved in the six branches of Public Citizen: Congress Watch, Health Research Group, Litigation Group, Critical Mass Energy Project, Global Trade Watch and Buyers Up, which protect Americans from government and corporate power that threatens our well-being.
Congress Watch protects citizen interests before the US Congress. It works to strengthen protection of health, safety and the environment; demands an end to corporate subsidies; ensures citizens' ability to address corporate wrongdoing; exposes money's corruption in politics and advocates for campaign finance reform.
The Health Research Group works for safe foods, drugs and medical devices. It fights for consumer control over personal health decisions and universal access to quality health care. It promotes system-wide changes in health care policy, and advises and informs and the public about drugs and medical devices. The HRG has exposed the tobacco industry's powerful influence in Washington, the failure of state medical boards to discipline incompetent doctors, and the excessively high rate of caesarean section deliveries.
The Litigation Group is the nation's leading public interest law firm. Its attorneys bring precedent-setting lawsuits on behalf of citizens to protect health, safety and rights of consumers.
The Critical Mass Energy Project protects America's natural resources and promotes safe, economical, environmentally sound energy use through conservation and renewable sources. This organization is a watchdog for nuclear safety issues, and stops the reckless disposal of radioactive waste.
Global Trade Watch educates the American public about the enormous impact of international trade and economic globalization on our jobs, the environment, public health and safety, and democratic accountability. GTW was created in 1993 to focus on an area few public interest groups covered: the international commercial agreements shaping the current version of globalization.
Buyers Up is a home heating oil cooperative group buying program that acts as an information resource on home energy and environmental issues. Its reports have yielded important data on the over-promotion of high-octane gasoline by the oil companies, and the failure of many states to ensure the quality of gasoline sold to consumers.
Nader's organizations have been responsible for federal consumer protection laws such as the Safe Drinking Water Act. They have launched federal regulatory agencies such as the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), Environment Protection Agency (EPA), and Consumer Product Safety Administration. They've caused the recall of millions of defective motor vehicles, and created access to the government through the Freedom of Information Act of 1974.
Ralph Nader has written, co-written or sponsored many books, including Action for a Change, Corporate Power in America, Taming the Giant Corporation, Verdicts on Lawyers, The Menace of Atomic Energy, Who's Poisoning America, Winning the Insurance Game, The Frugal Shopper. He has created trust, admiration and respect with his action, integrity, and commitment to the people.
Other groups he inspired include the Aviation Consumer Action Project, Center for Auto Safety, Clean Water Action Project, Disability Rights Center, Pension Rights Center, Freedom of Information Clearinghouse, and the Congressional Accountability Project. Nader helped establish the Public Interest Research Groups (PIRGs), the organizations funded and controlled by students that function on college campuses in 23 states. Their impact alone has been tremendous. The groups have published hundreds of ground-breaking reports and guides, lobbied for laws in their state legislatures, and called the media's attention to environmental and energy problems.
In November 1980, Nader resigned as director of Public Citizen in order to devote his energy toward other projects. The organization is now headed by Joan Claybrook, former head of Congress Watch and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
Today he lectures on the growing "imperialism" of multinational corporations and of a dangerous convergence of corporate and government power. With the passage of autocratic trade treaties like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the new General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the merger of corporate and government interests is escalating. A magazine founded by Nader in 1980, The Multinational Monitor, tracks the global intrusion of multinational corporations and their impact on developing nations, labor, and the environment.
Nader has focused his efforts on empowering citizens to create a responsive government sensitive to citizens' needs. The top of his agenda has been defending the US civil justice system. Corporate lobbyists and certain legislators have worked on both the federal and state levels to limit consumers' rights to seek justice in court in the areas of product liability, securities fraud, and medical negligence. Nader recently co-authored a book on corporate lawyers and the perils of the legal system entitled No Contest.
The Savings and Loan bailout is also a large concern of his: the de-regulation of the banking industry in the early 1980s led to speculative real estate deals which taxpayers must now finance. This is one of many examples of corporate subsidies taxpayers finance through a system Nader calls "corporate welfare." He is an advocate of insurance reform including loss-prevention activity and insurance consumer education. He co-authored the book Winning the Insurance Game, and has been working with consumer activists in Massachusetts and California on lowering the cost and raising the coverage of automobile and health insurance in those states.
Nader is un-intimidated by the deregulations posed by the Reagan and Bush administrations and perpetuated by Clinton. He says, "You've got to keep the pressure on, even if you lose. The essence of the citizen's movement is persistence." When asked to define himself, he always responds, "Full-time citizen, the most important office in America for anyone to achieve."
Ralph Nader is one of America's most effective social critics. He has been called Muckraker, Consumer Crusader, and Public Defender. His documented criticism of government and industry has had widespread effect on public awareness and bureaucratic power. Time magazine called him "US's toughest customer." His inspiration and example have awakened consumer advocates, citizen activists, and public interest lawyers who have established more public awareness organizations throughout the country.
Nader's original research organization is the Washington, DC-based Center for Study of Responsive Law. Since 1969, the Center has produced innumerable reports on wide-ranging subjects such as the Interstate Commerce Commission, food safety, pensions, corporate welfare, and government procurement.
His impact on the American political system is tremendous. As former US Senator James Abourezk observed, "For the first time in US history, a movement exists whose sole purpose is to keep large corporations and the government honest."
Do people still want to hurt each other? Do they still want to attach a badge of legitimacy to the suffering they cause? Do they still want to spend someone else's money on things they find important, rather than spending their own money or letting the other guy spend it on his own stuff? If you've answered yes to these three questions, then you surely realize politics is here to stay, perhaps forever. If you said no to any of them, then you should go home, Nader.
It would be different if your opinions were as well-researched as they are overdrawn.
Be careful what you post! Katz, & Co. will use it without your permission in another crappy tome.
www.ridiculopathy.com
First HP points out that the Powers That Be -- ie the established wealthy -- pretty much have things sewn up and are most involved in protecting their status. Even the super-rich who are not part of the Insiders have trouble pushing their agendas effectively (Ted Turner serves as an example there), because of the difficulty in changing the momentum of the current system. Make no mistake that both Bush and Gore are members of political and corporate dynasties.
Which brings me to my second point. Maul mentioned that for those of us who self-select to forums like this one, libertarianism and apathy loom more largely than they do in the general populace. In my experience Middle America also contributes to the momentum of the current system.
Some people of religious faith take a very strong interest in politics in order to preserve their so-called "Family Values" agenda. This may explain why the Republicans have such a social conservative bent despite the fact that polls tend to indicate that Americans prefer some level of freedom of reproductive choice and some level of gun control.
This is not to say the other people of religious faith take a strong interest in politics to promote the so-called Liberal agenda, but the "Family Values" camp tends to have more fervor and voice because they invoke fear of Other. In this case the Other is the "teenage immigrant welfare mothers on drugs" (to borrow from the Austin Lounge Lizards.
Controling populations by fear isn't anyting new. Loads of dynasties have done it. Come to think of it dynasties have been cracked by it. It's an effective tool.
There's a piece of Campaign Finance Reform legislation led by Senator John McCain undergoing the final Senate scrutiny as they wrap up their current session. It has already passed two votes in the House of Reps and all but 7 Senators needed to pass the bill have announced their committment to vote for it.
This legislation is incredibly important--it closes the notion of "soft money" and makes it a crime in indisputable terms for anyone to offer money to a public candidate or official in exchange for an influenced vote, and makes it equally unlawful for any public candidate or official to accept such bribes. We need this to get enacted into law in order to remove the influence of the corporations and wealthy on our political process and daily governmental operations.
I'm disenchanted with the existing system for the same reasons most other people are:
(1) the only real political power comes from having a large pocketbook, not from having the right to vote;
(2) the only candidates we are really permitted to choose from in elections are ones who take and raise tons of money, so your everyday citizen with a sharp mind and a genuine concern for the well-being of the general public simply can't afford to run a competitive campaign;
(3) the only candidates we are permitted to choose from are part of the same insidious little elite of lawyers, corporatists, and career politicians that have caused all the problems for this country in the first place.
By enacting a separation of government and special interest money, we can take the entire political process back and put it in the hands of the general public once again. A single vote will actually count for something fair again.
The current disgruntlement with politics doesn't signal the end of politics at all--it just signals an end to the way politics have been heading for many years now. Politics will continue to exist, but the entire system will morph and change just like an economic system or a sociologic system, depending upon the needs of the time and the desires of the people.
- "It's just a matter of opinion!" - PRIMUS
I'm not saying revolt is a bad idea -- but how to make it a successful revolt?
Quotes from A Man for All Seasons
check out SPIN: www.PhDepot.com/spin
Geeks should be smarter. We should be able to hack the political system. We should be the ones in control.
The $group should be smarter. We should be able to hack the political system We should be the ones in control.
$group=Italian Faciasts, German National Faciast Party, Ustasha, Iron Guard, etc.
Not one group is solely fit to govern that's why we have a representative democracy that represents the interests of the many and the few at the same time.
I agree with Katz, to some extent, the system holds nothing good or helpful for us but it can be harmful.
The system is fine it's the people who have become lazy, slothful, apathetic, and uninformed. Hell I bet dollars to doughnuts that I personally am in the upper quartile of slashdot's informed in the area of politics/history.
People who make an extremely nihilistic statement like "the political process holds nothing for me" are fools, and madmen. Kind of like the unabomber.
If you don't like the process change the process by voting for people who will vote the way you like or better yet run yourself your can loose nothing but gain almost everything if you win.
Imagine fair use totally gone, reverse engineering gone, the ability to use hardware on your favorite platform gone
and no way to create something new since all good ideas infringe on someones overly broad patent.
Guess what why does each and every person miss a critical detail; namely that it's impossible to actually prevent the release and development of code if you are determined. In principle most people get caught because they scrawl their name on the code and never bother to think that they might get caught for it. Sheesh it's kind of like a bank robber going into the bank and leaving his life story on the desk and posing for the security camera and then stealing the loot.
Respond to s
These are good times. History is filled with good, prosperous times when people and leaders lost interest in the national agenda. Focusing on the day to day at home and complacency about what happens a couple streets over is the seed of change.
Consider what we're witnessing this year, the current energy crisis. As fuel prices go higher, disposable income is lower, luxuries are sacrificed first. I.e. Consumer Electronics, the next best PC, etc.
Petroleum reserves in the middle east *are* becoming exhausted. We heard all about this 25 years ago, that the world had about 40 more years of petroleum. Saudi Arabia may last 10 years at the current world rate of consumption, but Kuwait, Iran, and UAE are five years or so from the bottom of the well. When they run dry the draw on Saudi wells will increase. Iraq, thanks to the Gulf War, will have petroleum longer, as it has stayed put for almost 10 years. Probably not a bad idea for Europe to make friendly overtures to them.
As this crisis unfolds over the next few years, politics will again become a keen focus. How do people in the northeast not freeze to death? How do people get to work? How do farmers plant and harvest? How do we manufacture? What do hundreds of thousands of auto workers and parts manufacturers do for a living when the big layoffs hit? How do we manage this chaos when the oil is going, going, gone? Yeah, then we'll really see some politics.
--
Chief Frog Inspector
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Back in the early days that made him fameous as a crusader for right was when he basically displayed the corruption of GM in their auto manufacture and safety practices. Although over time he has come to love money and the ability that money brings. I don't think it's inherently bad to have moeny to help out one's cause.
Respond to s
Pretending that politics are dead is a bit like the situation with the legal system and the online world. Online world pretends 100's of years of legal system will evaportate, and is then very shocked when it doesn't. Yes, most people who are not lawyers don't understand it, but that doesn't make it irrelevant. My uncle is a judge, and when he hears the cry's that the legal system is dead or that it can't keep up with the online world, He laughs and makes a comment about foolish young people who will grow up and learn. I think the same is true of politics. I think humans are political. You may be disgusted with the current system, but you can't pretend it doesn't matter (you do drive on roads, use libraries, call the police/fire dept etc... for which government is CRITICAL). Further, I think that government and politics are in-seperable. The second you have a concentration of power is the same second that you will have people fighting for it ( I think power is neccesary to get anything done, for and example of this not working, look at Somalia right now- massive lack of regualtion, and many there want a govenment so they can get infrastructure).
I think the utopian veiw has always existed just 30 years out, and that it will always remain about that far away. Humans will probably always be human (barring massive genome changes)
Gavin Fischer
Quite honestly, this garbage that Katz is calling an article doesn't even warrant an kind of explination. It's so totally ridiculous, it's tough to poke holes in it, because that's all it is. That's like saying 'Please describe why you disagree with the statement "The sky is red"'. It's false. It's silly. Period. How do you counter that?
Nader isn't blaming Hollywood, he's blaming the corporations for marketing the violence.
This is from In The Public Interest
Corporations and Violence
By Ralph Nader
May 5, 1999
Following last week's tragic homicides at Columbine High School and the mourning over the loss of life there, House Speaker Dennis Hastert and Senate majority leader Trent Lott announced they would convene a national conference on youth and culture.
That's good. Such a conference is sorely needed.
But it must not be an empty dialogue. Our country needs better. Throughout the last week, politicians and the media have searched for the causes behind the disaster in Littleton, Colo., and have been quick to ascribe it, in part, to the violence in video games, music, the Internet, pop culture, Hollywood, movies, and television.
Such comments, though understandable, do not go far enough. They stop at the symptoms, fall short of the cause. They fail to grasp the central fact of our commercial corporate culture: it is produced by corporations that are getting rich by promoting products to teenagers, corporations governed by profiteering that impels them to respect no boundaries in their exploitation of teenagers' vulnerable minds.
Every day hundreds of companies work in pursuit of one goal: manipulating children and teenagers to purchase video games and music and watch movies and television endlessly and mindlessly.
In their quest for larger audiences and greater profits the commercial media predictably races to the lowest and basest standards, with ever more blatant displays of violence, sex, crassness, and nihilism on television, cable, movies, radio, video games, and music. Our society, even 10 or 20 years ago, would not have tolerated such youth-beamed depravity. These are the motivations that relentlessly drive the creation, production, and marketing of ever more Doom, Quake, Basketball Diaries, Marilyn Mansons, Mortal Kombat I and II and III and IV, Jerry Springers, Howard Sterns, South Parks, and the rest of it.
This poison has got to stop. Enough is enough.
There is a crying need in this country to redraw the lines, establish the boundaries, declare to the media industry in no uncertain terms: "Thus far and no farther." It is time to say that our children matter more than this brutalizing entertainment. There are few critiques that Congress or President Clinton could start that would have such a salutary effect upon our children and, therefore, on our nation's future.
After all, the people own the public airwaves and should be given the time to challenge such video muck. It is easy to point the finger at the Marilyn Mansons. But they are merely instruments. Speaker Hastert and Senate majority leader Lott ought to focus on the deeper problems. Behind every Marilyn Manson are corporations and corporate executives who cynically draw their large compensation packages from the fruits of such work.
The Hastert-Lott national conference on youth and culture will be a charade unless they discuss the corporations and the powerful, moneyed interests that produce this dominating corporate culture and vigorously insinuate it into the minds and pockets of American youth.
Will Speaker Hastert and Senator Lott have the courage to trace the problem to its source, to focus their national conference on youth and culture upon the commercial rewards that give rise to this destructive culture, and on how we might alter these dynamics? Can they enable corporations and civic institutions to produce a culture that nourishes and doesnÕt harm its teenagers? If so, they will provide an important service for this country, its parents, and their children, who are surrounded by debasement and conscripted into violence by methodical, calculating corporate huckstering that our teenagers may not understand.
There is nothing Congress could do that is more important than making America's children safe again from the interests that would rob them of their childhood. Many teenagers and children are powerless to defend themselves against the clever media magnates, their advertising and marketing firms, and their hostility or total disregard for teenagers' health, happiness, and well being. Families and children need help. The question is, will Speaker Hastert and Senator Lott help them?
The Arthur C. CLarke quote, and the fact that Katz uses it for his theme for the piece.
The debates in the Middle Ages were trivial and meanigless, I think not. Discussion, and argument are the progenitors of change. We would not be where we are today without philosophy. It is the beginning, and end of the sciences. Political, and social sciences included.
I don't understand how Kaz can draw the inference that one day our political system, or debates, or whatever the hell point he's trying to make in analogous to Middle Age philisophical debates. He an Clarke are both misguided. Just because something turns out to be incorrect, or ends up being discarded after a while does not invalidate it. Our current political climate is THE single most important thing to our growth towards a better system.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
the government still controls 30-40% of our GNP that makes it the most powerful force in the country. period.
McCain's popularity was with the press, not the people.
When the people got the chance to vote, McCain lost BIG.
You need to stop watching the news.
I think Katz and others carry a good point...the world of politics does not carry as much clout as it once did, and there are so many of us who believe that things need to change. But I do not believe this will happen just yet.
Katz seems to imply that the reason politics will not work anymore is because the issues they are discussing don't matter anymore...that the community of the net and the technology is making all of it irrelevant.
But for millions of people...not just Americans (U.S.), but for people all over the world, there are still issues that need to be solved, and they do not involve the internet. To many of us, these are tired, old issues, but to many, including the young, they are very important. I am of course referring to the issues such as Abortion, Gun Control, and all of those things that we cringe when we hear a politician mention.
The issue is that right now most people still want to think they have a say in this, so they elect the "conservative" or "liberal" candidate whome might do what they think is right...but in the end, we get exactly the same thing.
Throughout this election year, I, as well as others, have seen the candidates and thought...who picked these guys? Do they really have what we want at heart? All I've seen is a pissing match to see who can get the "highest office in the land". Nothing more.
Democratic politics was designed to be a way for the people to say what they needed to live in the world they wanted. But the United States is no longer this way. We exist in a place where companies, special interests, and possibly above all, other politicians, decide who we vote for and who runs our government. These groups are NOT the people...as much as they'd like to pretend they are.
But politics as we know it...such as it is...will not end yet. It will not end until those that Katz mentioned, the ones controlling these groups--the boomers, the corpratists, etc. are long gone. Then we will have a time for the people who have known freedom--through the net perhaps, and who do believe that the other issues are perhaps irrelevant, and the change will take place. I know I await that day.
But until then, we have to deal with what we have. This election is probably the most important one we will face in the forseeable future. For technology/net related issues, who is elected will determine the de-facto law that all cases(such as copyright and IP) will be based on. Hopefully, the right choice will be made.
-Julius X
-Julius X
remove "-whatkindofspamdoyoutakemefor-" from email to send
Check out SPIN: www.PhDepot.com/spin by Brian Springer. Hard to believe that nobody has seen this documentary before. You probably won't ever see it on CNN.
Here's a way to get rid of your little "anarchy" business.
1. Become a public speaker and find friends/associates who share your dream of power.
2. Show people of their suffering at the hand of various roving bandits/thieves/axe murderers/rapists/etc.
3. Then promise to get rid of 2.
4. Get followers and arms to bring your goal to fruition.
5. Make alliances with others and then gradually start to assimiliate the larger factions. What you cannot assimiliate your conquerer.
6. In the process of 5 make sure that you have some very public examples of your wrath and illustrate that you are also compationate as well with acts of generosity.
7. Eventually power will be yours after a while.
Respond to s
There are several problems with our current government.
First is that it no longer matches the vision of the founders. Currently, about 1/2 the laws that come out of Washington are passed by Congress. Or in other words, 1/2 of the laws passed every year are passed 1) by the president as "Executive orders," 2) by the Supreme Court as they reinterperet new laws and 3) by national commisions and agencies in the form of rules and regulations. The Supreme Court has ruled that all three of the above are as much law as anything passed by congress.
Second, the Senate, which was established to protect the states' rights, originally had members appointed by the state legislatures. When the 17th amendment was ratified, it made Senators elected by the people, thus signing away the states' ability to defend themselves.
Third, we live in a welfare state. It seems to me that the line "promote the general welfare" now means the everyone should be on welfare. Candidates are elected, not because of their views, but because of their ability to bring more money "home" from Washington. We are at a point where we have the ability to choose between the Socialist and the otger socialist. No wonder we get tired of listing to them.
For example, let's look at the income tax. Karl Marx stated in his manifesto that one of the pillars of Communisim is a heavy income tax. An income tax implies that the government has more right to a person's money than the person that earned it. Then the politicians try to convince us that by letting us have more of our own money, they are doing us a great service. Internally, they refer to tax cuts as "tax expenditures." They actually consider a tax cut as a government expediture. Nice huh. The site http://www.fairtax.org has more details on this.
What we need to do is bring this country back to the original Constitution. We can only do that by electing people that believe in the priciples of the Constitution and the only way to do that is to learn those priciples for ourselves. You can start by checking out the site http://www.nccs.org. Once you know the priciples, theach them to others. The OS community did not grow because we kept knowledge to ourselves. Only by sharing our knowledge of the Constitution can we get enough people voting based on those priciples to elect candidates that believe in those priciples.
PerlStalker
Good point. If he does in fact own the millions in stock perhaps because the media is so controlled by the corporations proetecting their interests I haven't heard about it. Good point nonetheless, where did you find this information?
Any "government" that slashdot were to set up would be instantly eliminated by another larger government. Have thousands of people start to post and never actually stop posting. Just post roughly every 7 minutes and you have an effective way to prevent going over your daily cap. Take a bunch of other IPs from the other group who wants to kill the slashdot "government" and do the same thing. Maybe submit millions of stories along with it.
I really don't understand why anyone would fancy slashdot a government or an anarchy. It's just a bunch of strangers doing random things not a cohesive group of people in any sense. They have no power so I guess it's similar to the (lack of) power in an anarchy.
Respond to s
McCain proves nothing, except that the press (usually) cannot elect a President. The only popularity McCain held was because he managed to portray himself as an anti-candidate. When you people looked at what he really believed, he crashed and burned.
I don't disagree with some of what you say (particularly about the cynicism of this page), but I believe McCain is an example of the system working.
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
# Here is your lifetime supply of democracy (use it wisely):
X X X X X X X X
X X X X X X X X
http://fsfeurope.org/
Really you have to have money all the time to spend your days lobbying in Washington for political causes and paying for various staffers, etc. It's not a cheap life.
Respond to s
However, in the case of this coming election, I don't think that either of the representatives are worthy of being the President, so I will not vote.
Why can't there be an option on the ballot paper for a 'No Vote'. If the 'No Votes' are the majority then the political parties should choose another representative.
I wonder if such a system would work? I'm tired of either being forced to vote for someone I believe is not worthy, or not having a say at all.
The rest of the quote is:
"Social Security is a success story providing retirement income to 35 million people, and disability insurance and life insurance to almost all workers. Its sound financial base ensures solvency well into the future. But because politicians and investment firms use scare tactics for their own benefit, millions of Americans believe that Social Security is endangered."
The Cure of the ills of Democracy is more Democracy.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
In any society, there will always be a ruling class. This has been true since we started walking upright (didn't you see the beginning of 2001?). There will be some group of people who have more power than any other.
Now the whole idea behind our Democracy was to help offset this kind of power by giving everyone a voice in the decision making process. When you disengage from this process, however, you leave the door open for those who ARE engaged in the process to get exactly what they want.
Ask yourself this: if politics is dead, why do corporations and wealthy individuals hand over hundreds of millions of dollars to the political candidates?
The system works, my man, but only for those who choose to take part. There will ALWAYS be someone at the top, be it the Catholic Church, the Kremlin, the King, or a handful of oligarchs. They will ALWAYS want to impose their will on YOU.
So go ahead, disengage from the system. I encourage you to. 'Cuz guess what? I'm VERY wealthy and I'm VERY well-connected with my Congressmen and Senators. And The less I have to worry about mindless peasants getting in the way of what I want to accomplish in life, the better. Keep up the good work. Please spread the word that politics is dead.
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
Spin is one of the most influential documentaries available: www.PhDepot.com/spin It uses satellite backhauls to demonstrate how the media and politicians spin the news. Especially timely in light of the "Debates" coming up.
They had a 70% no-show rate at their recent election. It is really sad that the only reason to go to the pools is to PREVENT some gorilla from hurting us.
Where do you get these figures? Are you french? It wouldn't suprise me since the French have had a history of crappy governments and social problems that their governments couldn't handle.
But if you vote, you're just giving assent and acceptance to the cage of control which you're in... just giving the government the key to your door.
What a load of crap. So basically your saying that you shouldn't vote because you are giving the government "the key to your door" and then you site the fact that the government does stupid shitty things that hurt people who didn't even bother to vote in the first place.
Government sucks. Devotion to governance only begets more government. We'd be a lot better off if Congress would take a long, long vacation and stop passing laws.
But government is elected by the people. Maybe it's the people who suck and don't vote that make sure that the government hurts the people who didn't vote.
Laws represent various interests that are in American society. You cannot have representation of all groups without some laws to appease them all. Some of those laws are going to be in conflict against the basic tenets of the binding social contract of the society (the US constitution) and are struck down in the US suppreme courts and various Federal courts around the country.
Respond to s
- Seriously, though, the Net isn't a hotbed of political activity.
Ahh, don't be to sure about that. All of the recent political protests have been primarily organized using the 'Net. Just take a look at www.indymedia.org and you'll see what I mean. There are literally thousands and thousands of politically radical web-pages, email lists, and newsgroups. Some for organizing, some for just talkFor one thing, the Zapatistas would not be around anymore if it weren't for the internet - they documented and publicized their struggle against the Mexican PRI in Chiapas on the net - whereas most of these small, radical guerilla groups are born and die in a week (anyone remember the Tupac Amaru?).
Human Rights groups doing research on oppressive governemnts encrypt their reports before crossing borders, since the discovery of sensitive, politically charged information would likely mean a swift execution/imprisonoment.
There are thousands of people using the net for political activity - it's just that the geeks are too focused on playing video games and cashing in on the e-cash cow to notice.
[pink beam of light]
We've all recently read about people like Robert Altman and Alec Baldwin stating their intent to leave America if the 'wrong' person (in their cases wrong meaning Bush) is elected. While these notions can sound like bluffs, or even childish histrionics, the reality is that escaping a country/state/feudal landlord with intolerable policies has always been a person's final social safety valve.
/to/. Where will you be able to go in twenty years when you finally find it unbearable to live and work under the bootheel of lobbyists for the RIAA and MPAA? Where will you go when your food, air and water have become wholly toxic? To what country will you escape to where governmental policies are not dictated by multi-national corporate interests?
What has frightened me lately is the reality that the long arm of corporate rule means that there is increasingly nowhere on earth to escape
If you really want to do something worthwhile with your life, you should probably work on creating affordable, personal space travel because there soon won't be a place left on earth where a person could even hope to build something better.
Night
'Life is a disease of matter.' -- Goethe
Really if the government would dissapear tomorrow I think that Russia and China would be in a nice little battle to see who got to take over the country. Without government anarchy reigns and as I mention in an earlier post anarchy is a defunct idea. Take a look at how the Facist parties came to power in Italy and Germany. How the Weimer republic was so weak and how that eventually the faciasts became so powerful in germany that they made Hitler chancelor after the death of Hindenburg.
Respond to s
www.PhDepot.com/spin
Great movie with some entertaining raw satellite footage. It will (no matter who you are) change your view of media and politics.
Why is it that very few people vote? The two choices is that they either feel very strongly disillusioned and are "droping out" or they are just mostly ambivalent between the canidates.
If indeed they were droping out we should see strong votes for the alternative parties..instead people are just staying at home. The truth is you only get large voter turn out when there is a real perceived difference between the canidates. Gore and bush despite their little squablles are, in the big picture, almost exactly the same canidate.
The reason they are the same canidate is because this is what the people want. Sure maybe they might have wanted a little differnt (like mccain) but overall they want buisness as usual.
People don't like to change or be challenged. This is why we pay to avoid new and possibly disturbing ideas at the grocery store and on TV. Bot explicitly but with our feet, we don't patronize places the have ideas (or advertisments) that we find disturbing (do you realize how fast a grocery store with pro or anti abortion propoganda around would go out of business). As a country we would far rather wallow inside of our self-made nest of comfortability than get out and see what is really happening.
How would online activities help this? Apart from a coup by power mad geeks hacking into ICBM systems not at all. While the opinions on slashdot may be differnt *everyone* is getting online and while it may seem like they are dissatisfied with the current system because they complain about it all the time this is just a ruse. The internet, unfortunatly, will be mostly sanitized and clean transformed into the steril, but non-offensive, storefronts of the suburbs pushing any real chance of mind expansion out into a distant realm of rarely visted web sites.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
The people who were handing out the ballots had a hard time even finding the correct ballot for the Libertarian party, they finally found one, and had to have some guy signed it - it hadn't even been signed as "official" yet... Apparently I was the first one to show up that day (And it was getting close to the end of the day) that was Libertarian.
All I could do is smile and say "Well, it doesn't look like my votes are going to do much good, huh?"
I guess I'm stuck voting for the lesser of two evils in the presidential election, Gore is pretty unimpressive, but I'm going to vote for him. GWB reminds me of Councilor/Darth Sidious from SWE1, definite disconnection from reality there, everything he says makes me distrust everything he says. My internal bullshit/untrustable filters indicate 100% BS, bright lights flashing and sirens going off. (Although, I gotta say Liebermann LOOKS more like Darth Sidious! :)
Status of Libertarian party in Omaha Nebraska: Near Dead. Really disappointing...
More reason that we need to get into direct-vote, non-representative government. I know there are a lot of strong arguments against it, that it could possibly turn the whole thing into a mob-mentality popularity contest, but ain't that what we already have?
Direct voting would sure get people interested again, knowing that their vote will not just get ignored by their representatives. How many times have we seen that happen - a majority vote for an issue, but our "esteemed, wise" representative chooses to ignore the constituency and vote otherwise, saying "It's for the greater good, and I'm a professional, so I know what is better for you..."
This is a much more elegent way of putting it than I was about to write (and have written at the top level elsewhere). The parties do not have as much sway with the populace as the mass-media guidance. The pen and the anchorman are truely mightier than the sword.
Originally I was going to post an off-topic comment about various almost candidates (McCain, Bradley, etc.) but that would probably inflame somebody. I have realized that I don't dislike anyone who has run in this race, I just disagree about their fitness for the job. My opinion, like the opinion of everyone else in the contry, was formed by the sound-bite or staged candid shot. What do these men actually stand for?
My short voting career (since '92) has been filled with disappointment. Tsongas, my first choice back then, dropped out of the race before my state's primary. As I paid much more attention back then, Mr. Clinton gained and lost my support in subsequent days by making different mutually exclusive promises to conflicting groups. I couldn't divine where his compass pointed, and dismissed him as unworthy of my trust. Mr. Bush (Sr.) had lost the fire in his eyes. His body language told me (and the rest of the country) that he didn't want the job anymore, and was just going through the motions. I am almost embarrassed to say it now, but I voted for Perot, and was in a state of denial that he was a nut.
I went through the same this time around. I had a lot of respect for McCain before he ran. The mass-media that had built him up, had also delivered enough to tear him down. Quick, what rhymes with gook? Cook!
So now we are left with the two bastard butterknives in the silverware drawer (and a pair of salad tongs). It all comes down to who gets the best polish from the mass-media.
-- Len
Yes, there are issues in this campaign, but as usual, Katz is too wrapped up in his cynicism and "social theories" to actually watch the candidates.
I believe this is one of the most important ideas of this campaign: School Vouchers.
Education must be taken back from the Teacher Union Nazis, the social architects and the grad school failure "experimentalists" (whole language anyone?)*
Why anyone would be in favor of entrusting their child's education to the government rather than keeping control themselves in beyond my comprehension. My kid is only a year old, but there is no question that he is going to private school rather than public school. Fortunately, I have the means to do it. What's amazing to me is that the same people who rail against the benefits that upper class people enjoy are the same people who think that the poor should not have access to the best private schools.
In fact, I might even say there is a twinge of racism involved. Liberal do-gooders think that the poor (read: minorities) are not "sophisticated" enough (read: too stupid) to be able to make "proper" educational choices. Therefore, they need do-gooders to do it for them.
Now, I would send my kid to a non-religious school, but the religious school issue is a non-issue to me. The constitution says that the government is not to establish an official religion -- and also says that it should not prohibit the free excercise thereof. It's none of the government's business whether a child receives a religious education. As long as the government does not favor a particular religion, there is absolutely no reason that a religious school should not be paid for.
*Aside: Did you know that the people in the Graduate Education department at universities have the lowest GMAT (testing) scores? If you've ever talked to some of these people, you know it's true.
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
When JonKatz stated:
Can anybody cite a single interesting or important idea or argument that's emerged from the months of campaigning in the current U.S. presidential race? Despite the millions spent on primaries, advertising, debates, press conferences, press-the-flesh tours, photo-ops? In the midst of a technological revolution, has anyone involved in this musty political ritual used technology in any imaginative or innovative way or invoked it, except as a (false) menace to children?
He was stating a fact - neither candidate is advocating radical change. The economy is doing well, the rest of the world is not about to invade us, crime is down, drug use is down, etc. NO ONE WANTS THINGS TO CHANGE. The public will only want *change* when things are in the toilet.
Both candidates are just "doing their job" - which is to piss off as few people as possible. People don't *for* a candidate, they vote *against* one. Neither one wants to be the one you vote against, so they stay in the middle of the road on everything. No big surprise there.
Me? I'm voting *against* both of them, so I'll probably vote for Ralph Nader. I encourage everyone to not "pick the winner", but make your vote send the message you want sent to Washington.
Interesting points. I think it is important to note that society encompasses a much larger group than those who are technically knowledgeable. The technologically endowed part of society is, I believe, moving toward a world-view similar to what you describe. Part of this is a certain status quo whereby the "big ideas" that were fought over in the past are no longer in question (cf. Fukuyama). It's a satisfactory situation for folks in segments of society that are self-sufficient such as the computer-literate but cannot (IMHO) be long-lived. There are stresses in the whole of society that will rear their heads sooner or later-poverty, the state of the 3rd world, over-population,etc. One can, perhaps, not be personally affected by these over the course of a lifetime or even a generation (if you live in Silicon Valley for instance) but it's not a world that will remain that way forever. I think a better analogy with past social changes is provided by thinking about the revolutions of 1848. A stable contented status quo that never really dealt with the issues raised in part by the French Revolution was imposed-as seen by a select few. I am quite delighted by the advances in our society via information, technology, and communication, but I think we should be a little less navel-focused.
The problem with Social Security isn't what's happening with it now, but what will happen to it a years down the road. The key is that the money you pay into Social Security isn't saved for you until you retire. It's paid to current retirees.
Right now the "baby boomer" generation is paying the Social Security bills of the generation before them. This is all well and good as there are more baby boomers than current retirees living off of Social Security.
However, advance a few years down the road and the baby boomers will have retired. They'll be living off of Social Security while "Gen X-ers" (for lack of a better term) pay the bills. This is where the problem lies. There will be more Baby Boomers on Social Security than people putting money into the system.
There are basically 3 courses of action:
1 - The "Out of sight, out of mind" theory. Don't change anything and hope the problem goes away. The problem here being that the problem will not just go away, Social Security will eventually be drained, and either #2 or #3 (or both) will have to be enacted.
2 - Raise Social Security taxes. Unlikely (except to a small degree, perhaps) as this would be political suicide. Think of how much of your paycheck is eaten up by Social Security already and ask yourself "How would I react if that was doubled?"
3 - Lower the Social Security payoff. This has been done to a small degree by shifting the "official retirement age." Anytime a politician so much as thinks of touching someone's Social Security check, though, they are attacked by the (ever-larger) voting community that relies on those checks.
It's not an easy problem to solve. It'll take a lot of hard work. But the politicians can't change things one way or another without committing political suicide. So they opt to stick their heads in the sand and leave the problem for the folks that come after them.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
When some Christian fundamentalist says "Lets ban Quake because it goes against family values" the Leftists shudder at right wing fanatacism. When Nader says "Lets ban Quake because it's an evil corporation marketing violence to our kids," Leftists cheer.
I guess all the cops in Oklahoma needed to do when they confiscated copies of "The Tin Drum" was to say they were doing it to fight multinationals and the Green Party would have been behind them 100 percent!
Here's the downside to all of this...
the tech community - Politicians continue to take away rights online and eat away at freedoms in general by doing so. The tech community, being outside of the political arena, sits on its hands and whines.
ppl under 40, high school and college students - Have you been noticing the 'major issues' of this campaign. Not making America a great nation, a noble nation, or a nation of equality for all. No, the main issue is paying off the boomers and the elderly, keeping them filled with drugs to prolong their existence. The younger generations are having their futures bought and sold by politicians that they ignore out of choice or ignorance.
Politics are not dead, not yet at least. And I fear people like me will have to pay the price for/with my peers.
It isn't. It would be nice if the candidates were so indistinguishable from one another that voting for either or neither would result in the preservation of the status quo, but this is simply not the case. The lack of distinguishing characteristics between the two main candidates is, quite simply, a ploy by the Republican Party to get a wolf in sheep's clothing elected president of the sheep. W. is nothing but a shallow cut-out, a carefully groomed candidate who has been instructed to say exactly what he needs to say to get elected. This is why he can play down his anti-abortion stand when talking to Republican centrists and yet still come across as God's chosen when talking to the Religious Right.
Our belief that the candidates are interchangeable rests on the fallacy that either one will simply continue, in a weaker vein, the policies of the current administration: maintain a strong economy, build up the IT sector, etc., etc., etc. Nothing could be farther from the truth. A Bush/Dick Presidency will mean a return to the days of robbing the infrastructure of the country to make a profit for the already filthy rich, a return to privatization for profit, not because it's good for the economy or the country, and a return to the trickle-down theory of economics (more accurately labelled the pissed-on theory).
When the similarities of the main candidates truly become more than skin-deep, _that_ will sound the death knell for politics. Until then, THINK and VOTE.
Politics as a concept was never intended to show innovation or originality. Even the Greeks (one of our sources for Western culture) didn't see it that way: Politics was the term used for living in society.
Their word for individual was idios, the etymological source for our word idiot, a good descriptive word for Mr. Katz' lack of insight into what makes the world a safe place for his technology (techn´ethe Greek term meaning art and skill in opposition to heart and culture (tuch´e). Even thousands of years ago people recognized that technology was a means and not an end.
What Mr. Katz should remember is that technology in its current iteration of the 'net is nothing more than a vehicle implementing democratic politics and nothing more, nor can it be otherwise.
Currently, politics is the distribution of power (food, energy, shelter, money, employment) by an authority to a mass. In a democracy (regardless of its flavor or fervor), the authority at some level reflects the mass.
The 'net does not in any way reflect the mass. The mass worldwide is nowhere near connected to the 'net in its current form, as that requires electricity, a phone line and computer access, not to mention a preference for literacy in English (something not even prevalent in the USA).
Before Mr. Katz starts declaring politics dead, perhaps he should point not to the DMCA but to his solution for solving the AIDS crisis in Southern Africa or the economic crisis in Russia or the oil crisis in Europe or the education crisis in the USA. Until his "technological revolution" can solve problems such as these, politics is our best bet.
Katz, I agree that the two parties look very similar -- in terms of sound bites and imagery, Bush is trying to look like a bleeding-heart conservative, and Gore a liberal with family values. However, this is only the rhetoric, which is (as you would agree) canned for public consumption. In substance, the two parties are night and day: just look at Bush's massive tax cuts and Gore's massive social programs.
It worries me when intelligent people think there's no differnce between the parties, because it shows that they're only hearing the superficial messages tailored to sway the public. Look beneath the surface.
Newspapers said in 1910 the era of wars was over.
Only skirmishes since Napoleon's defeat a century earlier.
Human nature, being ignorant, especially in "Jaywalking" America is doomed to repeat its mistakes.
Current techheads have tunnel vision and cant see past the last IPO.
Everyone always says "get involved in the system if you don't like it, and make a difference!"
:)
Wake up. Getting involved in this system NEVER makes ANY difference. Someone please name an instance where the involvment of the little people made difference one in anything recently (last 20 years or so), especially with large issues.
Of course, not getting involved makes no difference either. That's the problem. There is no way to MAKE a difference without having billions of dollars to spend or plenty of power to wield. Welcome to the American plutocracy, and lately, the corporatocracy (if that's even a word).
The only place politics still work (poorly at that, but that's my own personal experience) is at the local level. Go to your town hall sometime and see for yourself. It might give you an insight into how it is supposed to work, and never does.
Let them pass their laws, and nibble away at our freedoms as much as they like. When they pass their absurd laws and nobody obeys them, and pass their internet regulations that have no jurisdiction outside the US only to find that the rest of the world is laughing at them, what will they do?
They'll do nothing, just like the rest of us. The whole system is so broken that neither end can understand or affect the other. They can't jail everyone, and unpopular laws are impossible to enforce (prohibition, copy protection, etc).
Eventually the whole mess will collapse under its own weight and fall apart, and I think we'll live to see it happen. Time for the next american revolution. Maybe this time we can get it right and use the net to have a real democracy. WTF do I need repesentatives for when I can read the issues myself, read the opinions of the experts myself (all of them, and the crackpots too), and then make my own educated decision?
True, I can't be everwhere and read everything, but I probably shouldn't be voting on something that I don't understand or that doesn't concern me. I'll leave that to the people who are concerned and know what the hell is going on. Our current representatives sure as hell don't.
And why have only two parties? Seems like you could fix the system by having about 50. Who has enough money to lobby all 50 parties? Now you really have a lot of choice in your representatives
Just sit back and relax guys. This doesn't seem to be the time to act. That time will come eventually, and everyone will know it when it gets here. In the meantime enjoy yourself, have a good time, do what you feel you should be ableto do, and let the rest of them run around like idiots. Just be aware that sometime we will all have to get together and fix this mess. I'm sure we'll see it coming a mile away.
I'd also remind you that the US isn't the only country out there. Get on a damn plane and visit some of them, it'll be the most fun you've ever had, and it'll open your eyes wider than anything else if you haven't done it before. If the US becomes too intolerable, then leave! I certainly would.
Here's to hoping that we make this revolution a lot less bloody than our last few.
PS. Nothing pisses me off more than the worthlessness of the vote that so many people died for. It's like a carrot that they dangle in front of your nose to get you to move ahead and fight for it, but when you get it, it's rotten to the core, and full of maggots.
Hell is being intelligent in a world full of idiots.
I don't have the depth of experience to say whether this is a temporary state - this campaign vs the others - or really the way things are going to stay, but Katz' description sounds pretty accurate to me.
The U.S. political system increasingly resembles a three year old swinging a chainsaw.
The real exchanges of ideas and opinions, the real shifts in thought, are taking place on the 'net and in the burgeoning global protest movement - a movement enabled, one might even say created, by the arrival of the 'net as an omnipresent utility.
Bush and Gore are spending all their time whining about the high cost of prescription drugs, the sad state of public education, and a couple of other things I can't remember. The reporters who cover them are spending all their time sniping about this or that campaign tactic and don't seem to think there is anything more going on than a complicated public relations campaign.
They're right, of course: the candidates are using irrelevant made-up "issues" to joust and spar and make each other look bad. Where's the discussion about the sanity of putting 1.5 million people in jail for possessing substances the morality cops don't like? Who's talking about the morally bankrupt foreign policy of guns, bombs, dirty tricks and lies? Why won't either of these guys talk about the fact that three out of every four Americans is making the same or less money now than before this new miracle economy began, much less suggest something to do about it? Why won't either of them point out that the general has no clothes, and demand an end to the insane levels of military spending relative to the actual threat? (Do they really think the U.S. needs to be able to fight off the entire rest of the planet, at once? Do they know something I don't?) Why won't they address the economic and labour injustices perpetrated by the policies of the WTO & World Bank and the US' participation in those organizations?
Do they not realize that these conversations are all happening, and they're missing out on the chance to be relevant by ignoring them? Do they not realize that we're all busy deciding for ourselves what's going on?
-Mars
Actually, the internet has allowed people from all over the world to suddenly follow what once were only local political stories. For example, those of us without MSNBC who live outside of the New York area were able to watch the Clinton/Lazio debate online. Likewise, we can look at political races all over America and find so much information that interests us.
I think it's naive to think that politics will fade away. After all, it's only a matter of time before the full force of the legal system comes crashing down on the internet, and those of us in the industry are going to have to think about retaining lobbyists and giving a lot of thought about if a candidate will stand up for what we support.
In a sense, Katz seems to be promoting the glorification of the "booboisie" -- the blissfully ignorant and anti-intellectual, merely masked with the veneer of being "post-politics".
-Dean
I agree with you on the most of what you say. Politics in most parts of the world is either big-business, or murder. Here in the UK we have big-business. Our Govt. is more interested in making money than in listening to or serving those who bothered to vote them to power. As a result of this, election campaigns are nothing but knee-jerk reactions to a hysterical and al-too-powerful press, bandwagoning, and cheap jibes at eachothers (marketedly poor) past records in government. As you say, this may be the case, but at the end of the day, who cares? It doesn't matter.
So, what exactly are you saying, Katz? That politics just doesn't matter to us "enlightened" citizens of The Net? This "politics sucks, so we can just ignore it" attitude is one thing I find really frightening about the Net culture. This kind of thing is funny to hear coming from Slahdot, considering how you are always posting outraged articles about the freedoms that are being taken away from us every day by the marriage of politics and corporations.
I am one of those young people that you think are just apathetic and disinterested in politics. The reason people have become disinterested in politics is that they have no say in it. We just tell ourselves that the political system is working fine without us, while it's being hijacked by corporate interests. Now what was a two party system has merged into a single party system with two faces, two identical candidates backed by the same corporations. Perhaps you will wish you hadn't been so quick to declare politics dead, when they take away your right to print articles saying what you believe. To quote Ralph Nader: "If you're not turned on to politics, politics will turn on you."
All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.
But we are witnessing the twilight of democracy in America.
From homeowners associations and schoolboards to the highest levels of Federal government. The ability to communicate (or spam) ideas quickly and cheaply as made it easier than ever to misinform and control the country and the world.
Just look at the multitude of "crisis" that we are "faced" with. From the violence in the media crowd to federal surplus, we are knee deep in bullshit.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
---
---
I don't think that the entire political system is at an end, nor is the current two-party system. However, I do feel that the two parties in office have become useless to us. This is both because they are becoming increasingly central and identical, but also because the elected officials in these parties vote solely along their party lines. Periodically in America's history, the parties themselves have changed, but not the system. The time is ripe now, for new parties to replace the old.
Lack of support for the current candidates does not necessarily translate into lack of support for politics. In the past, the reason I have opted not to vote has been because I was unable to commit my support to any of the existing candidates. The reason I have changed this stance is because of the failure of the other end of this system: impeachment. If there is no valid, functional mechanism to remove a failed executive officer, then it is vital that we exercise what little amount of choice we do have, on the front end.
An alternative? Tell me, of those of you who do not vote, or who do not actively support the candidate you vote for...would you vote if you could place a negative vote? So, I don't want to vote for either candidate, but I object to one more than the other. I place my negative vote against that candidate. When votes are tallied, positive votes are counted, and negative votes are subtracted. The candidate with the least objection wins. What do you say?
---
"The Constitution...is not a suicide pact."
"Life. Don't talk to me about life."
Katz and his wired pals should spend more time examining why this is, rather than the fact that it is.
Obviously the appeal of these candidates is two-fold:
They must be popular to their backers
i.e. Pandering to special interests
They must be popular to the electorate
Elect me and I'll slash your taxes, balance the budget and spend more on programs important to you.
We should be choosing leaders, not political weasels.
--
Chief Frog Inspector
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Virtually identical to the US two-party system, there is one fundamental difference in voting patterns: in the US, people vote for the party their parents voted for, in Canada, governments are voted out!!!
The majority government under Brian Mulroney (arguably the most corrupt/criminal PM in Canadian history) dropped to two seats in the next election. This has led to a gov't comprising roughly five parties.
I see a lot of problems with this. OTOH, I also see a number of far more serious issues with the two party system. So don't give up hope, the US may still eventually break the death-grip the two parties have on US politics.
i tell you how i've saved myself a lot of pain and time this election season: i haven't paid any attention at all to the presidential campaigns.
it's not that i'm not going to vote; i am. it's just that the republicans chose bush over mccain, and thereby deprived me of any significant choice to make.
it's not even that i like gore. i abhor his stance on privacy issues and freedom of speech. but bush is, for me, simply unacceptable.
is this wrong of me? i feel like i'm cheating or something, but it makes my life so much easier...
-k. ^-^ ^D
Here, again, the rebels of cyberspace show that they still can't drag their minds out of the "America is the Universe" mindset. Sure, the rising power of the Knowledge Class around the world means that the Hacker Ethic is slowly penetrating global society, but it is hardly the end of politics just because Americans don't care enough to watch TV campaigns and vote.
There is a comfortable life available for any geek who knows how to join (or become) a profitable corporation, but that doesn't mean that the rest of humanity is similarly complacent about their future. Where there is hope for change, the political system functions pretty well. Unfortunately, the rules of the global economy seem to be beyond the comprehension of the institutions that claim them as their domain.
Forget about the Emperor having no clothes, because he also doesn't have a clue.
The ruling "elite" is merely moving to the corporate sphere, and away from their classical home in the political one. The process is nearing completion.
Face it: most people already know their vote doesn't matter. Ratification of the work of elites once every X years is hardly democracy. The political class is losing its respectability (ever since the 60s) and the bright lights of tomorrow will be hard pressed to find a convincing reason to give up a profitable career in the private sector for the dubious rewards of "public service".
Until there is a merging of the political, social, and economic roles (I'm too chicken to add spiritual to that list...) and people actually feel they are rewarded in several ways for their involvement in the tedious process of policy making, nobody will want to commit their time, effort, and intelligence to the process.
But once everyone who cares to be involved CAN BE, we can finally approach policy rationally. How about this for a revolutionary concept: Everyone affected by a decision should be involved in making it. Corporations. Religious groups. Grandmothers. Teens. Any group or individual could represent their views, and the new task of the "elite" would be in moderating this process, not suppressing it.
Although I am not hopeful that we will see "the death of politics" any time soon, I would hope that democracies around the world will begin to elect "radical" elements of their societies to help begin the process of deconstructing our institutions and creating new ones based on the Hands on Imperitive. Once people feel their opinions matter, and that the experts won't tell them to shut up, they can turn their intellect away from the distractions (sports, fashion, etc.) and reclaim the power that was taken away by the culture of "Administration" and the organs that support it (Media, Universities, Security).
So let's forget about how much we all hate the arrogance and fatuity of the ruling classes (whatever their political stripe may be), and focus on raising the noise level worldwide so that the "signal" of idealist rhetoric in every society is drowned by the voices of people who speak plainly and mean what they say.
The rabble must be heard.
- Start off with a totally absurd topic that's an extreme aberration of reality.
- Reach into every geek's darkest corners and excite their hatred for common fools
- Subtlely imply that they're all out to get us
- Delete last paragraph of article in order to make it look like an "open" topic
- Watch angered readers' karma drop when they criticize the numbness of your story
Lather, rinse, repeat.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Some say that this apathy is only on the net, but I think its everywhere. Some say that it is related to the current choice of candidates, but this has been going on for some time.
It may sound somewhat utopian, but maybe it's real.
My first question is though: what is next? We need some way to run the country; currently it is with politics. Marxists would say that communism/socialism is coming after this. But I just don't know.
Another question is: that is real nice for the rich to say "the internet is making representative government obsolete," but what about the folks that can't/don't afford/understand this ephemeral community we call the "'net"? You could say that current politics are only of interest to the elite, so what's the difference? I say that we need something better, not just some "net savvy" version of the status quo.
room101 -- how much can you stand before they break you?
(they always break you eventually)
When talking about whether politics is obsolete, the point is NOT "are people interested in whats going on. The question is, are people fed up enough to do something different. The ancient Romans became disintested in the political process, but it took centuries for the nature of Roman politics to change. It's not enough for people to be apathetic about whats going on, they have to have the will to change things, which is something few people seem to have. Apathy can only cause the status quo to continue, apathy is not enough to establish a new system!
Politics in the USA? Two guys arguing over how to spend the money their armed goons are about to take from you. An advance auction of stolen goods.
From a solipsist, navel-regarding point of view, the fact that the pols aren't paying attention to Jon Katz might mean that politics don't matter. What he fails to realize is that they're not paying attention to him *just* yet*.
When Al or George's socialist utopia goes into implementation phase, Jon will realize that politics do, in fact, matter. His tax burden will make sure of that.
Actually, I think this points to a larger issue. Most Americans are on one subsidy or another, while at the same time most Americans are either off, or about to be off, the tax rolls. Hence, the politicians don't have to pay attention to the taxpayers - a voting minority - just the tax consumers they're trying to buy.
Wait for the bread and circuses to become larger and larger and more and more expensive.
Last days of politics? My ass! The games are only beginning.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
These ads read like freakin infomercials. People argue that you should vote for the lesser of the two evils, I understand this thinking, but I personaly believe I make more of a difference by not voting for this trash.
then politics will matter. Try the inverse: Send a note to Washington telling them that they are irrelevant and therefore you will not pay your taxes. You will then meet another government institution that seems remote and irrelevant to you now: The judicial branch and its enforcement mechanism. Have you ever been stuck in a traffic jam due to road construction? Government. Have you ever driven on a plowed highway right after a snowstorm? Government. Have you stopped to think about why your water quality now is better then it was 30 years ago? Government. Taxation, municipal services, adjudication, and regulation are all functions of government that haven't gone away just because you're so focused on geeking you've forgotten about them. You might even say that you CAN forget about them because the Government is handling them and you don't have to.
I used to support Katz. Sure, he gets a hard wrap, but I liked his writing style and some of his points. But this goes to far. This is downright dangerous.
;) but let's focus on just one election -- the President. Why are the 2000 elections so important? The elected president will be in a position to sway the balance in the Supreme Court. With Bush we'd get a much more conservative court.
;) The point is the deadliest thing you can do is not vote. It's dangerous not to get involved.
Does Katz realize what the 2000 election means? I won't talk about the much more important local races since this is dependant on your area (assuming you're in the US; if not then just forget this post
As an openly gay tech nerd this scares me. This means that commercial empires will continue to reign (conservatives seem to be rather leniant on anti-monopoly policy), and I don't even want to think about the consequences it will have on Civil Rights. But it doesn't matter if you agree with me. Hell, I don't care if you are a right-wing xenophobic neo-nazi
In Jon Katz dreamworld where he can go around not even realizing that he lives in a world that is still very much in a constant power struggle between Nations/Interest Groups/Religions/Etc. But in the real world, there is a damn spoon, and if we ever forget that, think things will work out OK without our help, then I would be terrified to see the type of world we would become.
Shh! Nobody knows I'm gay!
Shh! Nobody knows I'm gay!
Wherever "Campaign Reform" has been practiced, it has acted as incumbent re-election insurance.
"Campaign Reform" is nothing less than the violation of the First Amendment's protection of freedom of speech. How can you differentiate the advocacy of a particular candidate from advocacy of, say, a particular pr0n site, or the green agenda, or even pro-life sentiments? All should be (but are not currently) protected speech. And the only one that's not rigidly protected by the ACLU is candidate advocacy. Limits on the amount of money I can spend to help a particular candidate are limits on my freedom of political expression. All such "Campaign Reform" limits are thus unconstitutional and must be replaced with freedom.
Any candidate who refuses to publicly post (on a website, of course!) the sources and amounts of his or her campaign contributions deserves to receive the ire of voters on election day.
McCain deservedly got the ire of those voters who have realized that "Campaign Reform" is just a euphemism for Incumbency Protection.
The IPCC has purposely engineered a massive scientific fraud.
I met a woman on the plane a few years back and I said (half-joking) that I want to be president.
She thought for a moment, 'That would be refreshing to have a technical president.' Funny, because I'm not even an engineer, but simply a technical writer. But it goes to show the lack of knowledgable, technical people in politics today.
It's not like we have never had any technical politicians. The brightest one was probably Jefferson who was simply amazing.
Look at Jefferson's technical accomplishments: architecture, math, agriculture, politics, writing, etc. Other great politicians have similar qualities. They all knew how to solve problems which, oddly, may be enough to qualify them as a technical politician.
As a side note, wouldn't it be interesting to see what Jefferson could do in today's highly techological world?
So that's what we need IMHO: a technical politician. Someone who can think on their own, solve problems, and develop solutions that we sorely need. I think that it is that simple.
The only thing that I see in politicians today is the ability to listen to people around them as they try to wrangle with the political marketing effort that Katz refers to. And you know, they would go a long way if they had a few good engineers to solve those problems, too.
Tim Somero
Katz is a smart guy, but he suffers from an unfortunate mental handicap which sharply limits the value of much of what he has to say: namely, his idée fixe technological determinism. This appears to be a legacy of his days among the Wired crowd, that gang of happy-go-lucky ex-hippies turned Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, and their sycophants, who breezed through the 1990s on a wing and a stock option and became techno-millionaires overnight, all the while serenely confident that they bore the torch of the techno-libertarian future. What Katz seems not to understand clearly is that it was the money, not the technology, that made this crowd a political force.
Katz correctly notes that fewer than half of the American public bothers to make its preference known in federal elections (and the percentage is ever-decreasing), yet somehow fails to realize that this represents, not the failure of the existing power structure, but its ongoing victory over real democracy. Far from being out of touch, the political-economic power structure in the U.S. exists in a day-to-day frenzy of adaptation to its audience: no country in the world is more closely scrutinized, polled or focus-grouped. All that attention serves to keep the audience happy, applauding and in its comfortable seats, rather than up on stage with the players.
Is technology the ultimate determining force in politics? Will the Internet make you free? Maybe, if you've spent the last decade or so making sure you own a piece of it. For the Rest Of Us, though, that promise is rapidly diminishing as the process of laying tile, hanging neon, and spraying plastic ferns rapidly transforms the Net into the Biggest Shopping Mall in the World.
"The deep-fried Mars bar is a symptom of a wider crisis." -- Nutritionist Ann Ralph, on the Scottish diet
I just went to one of Nader's speeches at the Key Arena in Seattle on Saturday.. The place was about 75% filled as far as I could tell. Everyone there paid $10 to attend the event, on a Saturday night. Alot of young people (i'm 21) and alot of old people. To me, this is just incredible. The Democrats and the Republicans can't PAY people to go to their events. No one CARES about what they have to say because everyone knows everything they say is bullshit. I'm not even that much of a hard-core lefty, but i'm definetly voting green this year. For those of you considering voting green, don't be disuaded by the fools who tell you that a vote for nader is a vote for bush. If Nader gets enough votes this year, the green party gets matching funding for next year's campaign. And, I believe he would even stand a chance if he were to get on the debates. Take Jesse Ventura, for instance. He was around 8% in the polls before he started debating and won. He won because you could tell he wasn't full of crap like every other politician.
-WG
"America, I smoke marijuana every chance I get."
What we are currently seeing is a situation that has never happened in the history of man.
The talking heads constantly bring us minute by minute tit-for-tat news of every misstep and foible of our leaders. And what, exactly, does the average citizen get to do about it? Absolutely nothing.
The eye tends to ignore static if favor of the quick moving bauble. By trying to satisfy the desire for 'news', we have 15 channels of gossip. The network execs don't care, it's cheap to produce, but the result is that it tends to get ignored over time.
This actually has little to do with the Internet, which only a small (but growing) portion of the population are really involved with other than looking up the next corporate offering. (Does cruising AOL to look at stocks really qualify as utilizing the Net to its fullest?) This has to do with people realizing that they are really only a small part of the universe that their small local problems are more important to them than national problems that they have no effect on.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Yes. Should non-Social Security funds (namely, general government revenue) be used to subsidize Social Security? One of the two major candidates puts it in his plan; the other does not.
Should the United States proceed with ABM defense against the wishes of Russia? Again, this election.
Should gasoline taxes be raised significantly in order to penalize energy consumption? One candidate has supported that in the past, but his spokesman was flustered and stumbled on national TV when asked about this not that long ago.
Is the carrot or the stick more important when dealing with the PRC? Various elections, actually.
Is donating money to a party or candidate an expression of free speech? And how and why should it be regulated?
And so forth.
Perhaps you're just not paying enough attention.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Then I suppose we should all be very grateful for the technological revolution we are experiencing now. If it did not exist possibly we would not have the current mass impetus to break our bonds and free ourselves from the large institutions that govern, restrict, and encroach upon our rights. Then, where would we be in ten years?
If it were a contest between two ideologies - however exhausted they may be - I'd be interested.
But it's not. There is only one ideology, and it's common to both of the major parties: power.
Power: How to get it. How to keep it.
The debates over Social Security? Nobody debating this issue cares about SS per se - they care about nailing down the Grey Power vote. Education/health? The soccer mom vote. Violence in the media? The religious right then says the things you can't say.
DMCA and UCITA are straight out of Machiavelli. Both the feudal lord and the Prince of the Rennaissance city-state can (and should) abuse the peasants all they want - the abuse prevents them from rising above subsistence levels, and the Church placates them. But don't ever piss off the nobles. They're where your real support comes from.
The 'net as a playground for terrorists, pedophiles, and pirates? Scare the ignorant into voting for you, and simultaneously lay the groundwork for a surveillance state - a necessary piece of infrastructure for long-term consolidation of power.
Don't ever delude yourself into thinking that anyone who wants your vote is interested in anything other than power.
Anyone who thinks "It Can't Happen Here" hasn't been paying attention:
From a CNN article:
If you think the Chinese and Russian net.surveillance systems are things that can only happen in totalitarian states, think again. Since the end of the Cold War, we've gone from defending the free world against totalitarianism to helping totalitarian states set up their surveillance programs.
Yes, "politics is almost over". Not because of some fluffy Katzesque triumph of free Netizens, but because there'll no longer be a need for the charade.
The former USSR held elections for the 74 years following the Revolution. Present-day China does the same thing.
Power wins.
The Cure of the ills of Democracy is more Democracy.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
If I understand you correctly, one of your central themes is that you and those whom you claim to represent aren't being spoon-fed political information in a tasty enough form. My response to this is to tell you to ignore the politico-marketing hype and take advantage of this new tool called the net to learn for yourself the issues and positions of the candidates. You could even (gasp) summarize your findings, package them 'imaginatively', and make them available to your fellow ennui-suffers. Which is exactly what's happening all across the web, if you'll take the time to look. Politics is not only not at an end, it's flowering in thousands of ways as the old obstacles to information dissemination fall. Criticizing 'the system' is just an easy excuse for not bothering to take part.
As you noted in your essay, even if you ignore the political beast, it isn't ignoring you. It will pass laws, subject you to surveillance, prosecute you, decide what you 'need', and generally make a nuisance (or worse) of itself unless controlled. Remember the quote, "For evil to triumph, it is only necessary for good men to do nothing". Whatever your definition of political evil, you're running the risk of getting just that if you don't pay attention and participate.
In my experience, distaste for, and ignorance of, politics is a condition of youth. Get a little older, have a family, get some money in the bank and you'll generally start to care a lot more. For those who don't, I'm happy not to have their ignorant votes mucking things up for those of us who take the time to inform ourselves. Just sit back, we'll be happy to run things for you. Just don't bitch when it isn't what you wanted.
"If I have seen further than other men, it is by stepping on their glasses." - Michael Swaine
Now, in addition to pricey and inefficient solar panels, we're seeing electric cars actually advertised on TV. GE is marketing a hydrogen fuel cell that can power your house, including heat. (Yes, they've got it set up to run on hydrogen from propane, but you can modify it to accept hydrogen cracked from water using windmills or whatever.) Not enough power for you? You're wasting to much by living in "traditional" construction -- luckily, Monolithic Domes fulfill the promise that Geodesic Domes failed.
"But Bullwinkle, that trick never works!" It certainly hasn't up till now. But necessity is about to make these options a lot more popular.
"It's about time the people who run this planet of yours realized that to be dependent on a mineral slime just doesn't make sense. -- Dr. Who
Quotes from A Man for All Seasons
4 - Replace the ponzi scheme of Social Insecurity with privately funded and privately directed investments that each citizen owns for themselves.
The Chileans had a Social Insecurity system somewhat before we did (they started in the 1920's, we didn't start down the road to serfdom until FDR's 1930's). Chile privatized their Social Security system in 1980 and Chileans are now retiring as millionaires.
Our current system is weighted against poor, colored people, since they generally die before they get to collect any Social Insecurity, and Social Insecurity can't be passed on to their heirs.
A privatized system like the Chilean system won't discriminate against the working poor and will allow them to pass their benefits on to their survivors.
Replace the coercively-funded Social Insecurity system with a privately-funded pension system that will truly provide for the working poor. Vote Libertarian!
The IPCC has purposely engineered a massive scientific fraud.
I believe that politics, as we know it, can't be snuffed out. Our current political machine is self-sustaining ... really it's more than just self-sustaining, it's picking up steam as it goes because politicians breed politicans.
... the computer industry is a great example of marketing driving votes(read sales) for substandard product ... e.g.: Micro$oft, Oracle, and Sun.
... but, as a general rule, poeple are stupid, so they'll believe what they are told to believe (especially if they are told in a new or clever way). Once in office the focus shifts drastically away from the issues that got them votes, and on to the agendas of the people / bodies that funded their election.
At some point in the distant past someone discovered that elections could be won based on popularity alone, that political agenda really had little to do with an election. Tell a voter what he wants to hear, smile a lot, maybe throw in a little saxaphone playing, and you'll get a vote. They key to winning an election is really marketing, and we ALL know that marketing works
The realization that elections were nothing more than popularity contests begat career politicians. You need 2 things to be a career politician: charisma and marketing capital... and who has marketing capital? Industry. A match made in heaven. A politician needs votes, so he/she must pander to the public at large
The end result is our current political system. One in which a "truth" spoken by a politician is more rare than an alien abduction story. One in which a multi-[mb]illion dollar popularity contest is held every four years to decide who has the privilige of being able to lob a nuke at another country! It's really quite absurd when you think about it.
"Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever." - Napoleon Bonaparte
Politics is a self supporting system, and human nature craves power over ideals. Technology will most likely be integrated carefully into the current system to ensure that things don't get out of control. After all, not to many politians making laws that keep them from being re-elected. Sure, you get your share of commercials about campaign finance reform, etc etc, but is anything ever done? Sure, you get your republican platforms carefully drawing in the radical right, but no politician wants to put his vote on any extreme right measures, cause he won't get re-elected....and vice-versa. Everything is about getting your streotypical vote, and when technology comes to the forefront, they will have all the right words to say and nothing to back it up....
I need a TiVo for my car. Pause live traffic now.
You talk like the two-party system assures stasis. Au contraire, the parties evolve over time as the political consensus changes. When a party stops winning elections, its platform (or at least its rhetoric) shifts in order to bring back the voters. (And even so, parties don't exist into perpetuity: the Republican party hasn't existed since the founding; it came together in the mid-1800's, and elected Lincoln as its first President.) Our two-party system actually functions by incorporating the one-issue voters into the larger parties, rather than having them splinter off into their own as they would in, say, Italy. The result is pretty much the same.
"If I have seen further than other men, it is by stepping on their glasses." - Michael Swaine
Reminds me of Dick Gregory's Political Primer, which was written (in prison?) in the form of a college textbook. I recall (enough to paraphrase) one of the questions to the student in the back of one of the chapters.
"In four words or less, describe the difference between the two major political parties."
Bluesee
SDMI: Finally! Music that won't rip or burn! Brought to you by the fine folks at RIAA.
if you need money, start making it. This might entail certain risks, such as giving up your safe little geek job and starting a business of your own. Or if you don't want to risk your own cash, start raising the cash. We are talking the politics in the country of endless possibilities, aren't we. What happened to the American Dream? Anything can be done, if you want it hard enough. But hey, feel free to post while not doing anything.
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
I predict that the near future (2000-2010) will reveal a movement away from partisan politics and toward a more direct, nonpartisan citizen involvement. This can be called "direct democracy" as a perjorative to conjure up "mob rule!" rants, but it will actually be a new form of decision-making where citizens in communities (at levels from neighborhood to nation) will propose, deliberate, filter and vote (or come to a consensus) on measures. This new "community decision support" mechanism is already possible from a technical perspective, but the trick will be in getting people to find time to participate, learn the issues and simply to accept the responsibility in making a lot of difficult decisions. I could go about this concept, but this is just one side of the coin.
The other tilt is that parties no longer have a rationale for existence. No party can best represent the views of anyone, unless those represented are of the rare cults of the narrow-minded. I don't make this statement lightly. In these new times of very deep access to information we never could conveniently access before, the views of many individuals are likewise deepening and no political party can ever hope to align itself with these new, more thoughtful folk.
Once everyone starts viewing political parties for what they are, they will roundly reject them. Political parties advance a set of arcane ideologies that are represented in the form of their platforms. And these platforms are increasingly not corresponding to individuals' belief systems. Thus, when you vote for a party politician, you are selecting a boatload of positions, many of which you agree, but also many of which you disagree. And what follows if your choice wins the election is that he/she will advance many policies you disagree with. There's no effective way to have a voice on these individual policies, that is, unless you feel so strongly about an issue that the incumbent opposes, you'll get a chance to vote against them in the next election cycle.
Let's face the facts head on: As a lowly citizen, your position on any issue is hopelessly filtered to oblivion! And the cause of this is partisan politics.
Obviously, creating a "No Parties" party is totally oxymoronic (make that moronic), but many good people will need to find a way to overturn the current, overbearing apparatuses of the two-party system. The next step is for the adventurous among the very sharp, technically-minded individuals, the ones who are creating the Gnutella's of our time, to create Democracy 2.0, a mechanism that relentlessly erodes and eventually crashes the parties.
It's our turn to govern now. It's inexorable and it's right.
Steve Magruder
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
Love Canal
Love Story
Earth in the Lurch
The Internet
Iced Tea
The Buddhist Temple un-Fundraiser
The Strategic Petroleum Reserve
and, of course,
"Bill Clinton will go down in history as one of America's Greatest Presidents."
668: Neighbour of the Beast
http://www.votenader.org/
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
Written by Alexander Tyler about the fall of the Athenian Republic over a thousand years ago. He wrote this when the original thirteen colonies were still under British rule. "A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the public treasure. From that moment on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most money from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy followed by dictatorship. The average age of the worlds great civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed from BONDAGE to spiritual faith. From spiritual faith to great courage. From courage to liberty. From liberty to abundance. From abundance to selfishness. From selfishness to complacency. From complacency to apathy. From apathy to dependency. From dependency back to BONDAGE." It seems pretty insightful to me. BTW I'm voting for Nader just to thumb my nose at the Reps and Dems
mas cerveza, por favor politically incorrect stu
Perhaps you think that if you say it enough times, it will become true.
Never take moderation advice from sigs, including this one.
Wrong!
McCain was a pugnacious little bastard, well-known for getting in fistfights, racist slurs, and his bad, bad temper.
That guy would have had us at war with China within six months of inauguration. Now, whether or not you think that's a good thing, I'm not sure. But I'm pretty sure he wasn't above torturing a few Chinese to get revenge for his P.O.W. time.
And, sure, he's justified. But I don't like to elect mentally unstable presidents - even justified ones.
"Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he deems himself your master."
The so-called popularity of Sen. McCain was a complete fabrication of the media to deflect attention away from more serious candidates like Steve Forbes and Alan Keyes during the primary phase. McCain had only one theme and that was campaign finance refrom. Why that is a laudable goal, you can't build a successful Presidential run on one plank of a platform. It's the same thing that happened with Gary Bauer who only espoused pro-life stances with distrgard for the rest of the issues. However McCain would be a whipping boy for the media by appearing on every talk show and contracticting himself, disputing his fellow republicans and allowing the media outets to get that one juicy soundbite. In this way, he "appeared" more popular to people who judge popularity based on thier media outlets.
The apathy in politics from the younger generation stems from the lack venue to "Get involved". Many people WANT to get involved but it's increasingly difficult to do so because of the nature of how politics is presented by the media. Watching any mainstream media outlet or even the Internet-based extentions of some of them (e.g. CNN) all you get is the station's/paper's spin based on the political stance of the publication. If these media outlets think that their readers and viewers don't pick up on these blatant biases they are blind. Take a recent CNN article (I only offer this example as the latest I've seen. This not an anti-Gore flame or anything -- just a recent example I recall). CNN has taken an incredibly pro-Gore stance in this campaign. As a result, Gore's continued tired rhetoric about "Saving Medicare" takes up 3/4 of the article and most of the "meat" while Bush's (euqally tired) discussions about education in America are glossed over in 2 paragraphs. Shouldn't an un-baised news source either give more equal coverage or make it two separate articles? Speaking as a voice of the 18-24 deomgraphic, I'm tired of the media attempting to slant my thinking towards their viewpoint. I recoginze that every writer's work is going to be at least somewhat colored by their own experiences and beliefs, but lately most media outlets don't even try. The younger Americans would be MUCH more likely to get involved in they had a more direct avenue of reaching and understanding the candidates.
Some people take their .sig way too seriously
If politics mattered as little as you say it does, you wouldn't need to even write about it. It would be self-evident and go without saying. The very fact that you bring it up shows that it's still very much a matter of consideration.
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
I think Katz has a good point here. Maybe a bit over-dramatized, but we cannot ignore the fact that digital culture is pretty much growing up seperate from "The Government" and politics, and that digital culture largely ignores "The Government" when applicable.
...
What angers me is that alot of people make arguments for The Government in a manner as if to imply we have no say-so until The Government feels moving its godhead would be profitable. And then it's usually a compromise that introduces new monsters. Who are the American citizens here? Don't we have the ability to say what is right and what is wrong? Or do we just "elect" these pawns to office and HOPE they see it our way? If the Senate passes a bill that goes against the American way, must follow it? If free speech were abolished, would we lay down and die? I hope not, but it is concievable with this attidue we so proudly display. Will America degrade to Anarchy without Big Brother looking over our shoulder? Are the American people incapable of governing themselves? (Will he ever stop using Capitalized Nouns?) Let me remind you, if we had been incapable 200 years ago, we would not be Americans now.
So what is our identity? Do we or the elite have the power to make decisions for our own lives?
"The fact no one understands you doesn't make you an artist. But we love your new '99 models." -7Ball
Damn, Katz articles contain so many things wrong with them that it would be possible to write forever detailing everything that is wrong with his views. Fortunately, most people already seem aware of that.
Can anybody cite a single interesting or important idea that's emerged from one of Katz's diatribes?
Does anybody really think that we are on the brink of a radical revolution?
Sure there is some rumbling from online forums over the DMCA and intellectual property law, but I read of hardly anybody really rumbling about ending representative democracy or killing our political system. If anything there seems to be a trend online at least away from corporate and private interests and towards public interests.
We have an economy that is doing incredibly well in the United States, and polls indicate that the bigest issue this campaign is what the government should do about health care. Many people want the government to become more involved in regulating the health care system. Such a situtation does not often precipitate a revolution.
Katz writes:
A few years ago, it would have seemed ludicrous to talk about the last days of politics.
It is still ludicrous to talk about the last days of politics.
While they're answering about Nader's corporate issues, maybe they can explain why he accepted matching funds, thus stealing from all U.S. taxpayers to fund his campaign?
There are always times of resurgence in Politics, take america for example. Europeans began flooding america because of political reasons, and people became interested in politics because the politicians and the great thinkers of the time were inspired, brilliant, and inspiring people. Take Ben Franklin, John Locke, even Robspierre found ways to inspire people. At the time of the american revolution, people wanted to be involved, they wanted to know what was going on. Another example can be seen with JFK. He was an inspired leader, and was able to connect with the populace. The problem with politics is that none of the leaders are as charasmatic as before, and no one is going to bother paying attention to a boring leader who is bringing up the same old boring topics with the same old boring dance around a solution. I feel that politics will resurge and be reborn once another great leader comes about, not afraid to hide behind his reputation, and worried if he will be voted out of office, and will do something truly great for our country.
So long, and thanks for all the fish.
Yeah, Jon, I was thinking to myself as I read your polemic: "He talks about the Wired gurus, but what of their Suck bretheren who recently posted that article accusing the nerds of being out of touch with the justice and legal system - at their peril?". I Wish things were different and I Know that the arguments put forth by candidates are fluff and deceptively clever, but I can't help but believe that to date the only way we (by this I mean computer savvy people) - that is to say, You - have addressed political realities is by ignoring them and hoping (or just pretending) they will go away. This tendency, as much emotional as pragmatic, tends to make Arthur C. Clarke's vision more seductive.
But how can we affirm and hasten that transition from what we have to - what? I dunno - if we ignore the reality that those in power are going to make it their job to Stay in power, ineffective self-governance notwithstanding? Witness the ways they can wield influence: through the legislature, the media, local and national politics; possibly everything But the Web.
At some point the status quo may become so unbalanced that the political system topples and gets replaced by something 'web-based' but short of a Bastille Day / French Revolution type thang, I don't see it happening in our lifetime.
I guess what I am saying is that we/you need to actively take on a political role and become active in the everyday life of John Q. Public in a way less technical and more practical. But the one big stumbling block to that is your/our inability to organize / compromise / agree on anything.
That suck quote comes back to mind (to paraphrase):
"How did they respond? By posting. Thousands and thousands of posts."
We gotta come up with something more tangible than this, guys, or we will never see the change we are imagining...
Bluesee
SDMI: Finally! Music that won't rip or burn! Brought to you by the fine folks at RIAA.
http://washingto npo st.com/wp-dyn/articles/A18824-2000Sep26.html
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
Yes, American politics is in decline. Yes, it's less relevant than ever before.
Have you ever looked at your pay stub to see how much is consumed in taxation? And you say politics is less relevant? Since you don't consider it very relevant, you must have plenty of money. Why don't you pay my taxes for me?
Ok, you wanted something 'imaginative' and 'innovative'? Here you go: www.slaphillary.com. I love reasoned political discourse.
"If I have seen further than other men, it is by stepping on their glasses." - Michael Swaine
Moderators: I have a +1 and I didn't use it. Consider this post already modded down.
/. gives +1 to people whose posts deserve a bit of pre-moderation based on their track record. If someone elects not to use it, then they have effectively modded themselves down (from their default).
/. ID is lower than the real Bruce Perens'.
Oh, OK. I'll just set my preferences to display comments at "1, except 2 for people with a +1 bonus."
Actually, that's probably how thresholds should work, even if it wouldn't explicitly say so (shouldn't be too hard to code either).
Moderators: I have a +1 and I didn't use it. Consider this post already modded down.
The real Threed's
--Threed
Consider the plight of Yugoslavs. The recent Yugoslav election was anything but boring...
:)
Let's see:
The NATO nations insinuating that voting for Milosevic will precipitate more bombing.
Billions of dollars in bribes if you vote ABM (anything but milosevic). A lifting of sanctions. Rebuilding of destroyed infrastructure.. so what if it ends up being foriegnly owned.. sure beats rubble. An end to demonisation... ah...
A bunch of enemy warships lurking around just to spice things up...
Hmmm.. makes for a nice level playing field.. now, who you gonna vote for..?
Be glad your elections are boring, you clueless twit.
Hopefully the next Yugoslav elections will be just as boring
Software patents delenda est.
This sounds more like a paradigm shift in our thinking, than an end to politics.
Politics is a way of interacting with other people.
True. It seems that this "old" system needs to be revamped due to the apathy and the dislike that the citizens, not just the netizens but all of 'em, have for this current political system.
The change that will happen will have to be a revolution, whether it is peaceful or not depends on the people. IMHO, I think it will be peaceful. But a change does need to take place.
--Buck up Bud! Every ending has a new beginning.
This pretty much derives from pure Athenian democracy. The problem with Athenian democracy is scalability. Too many issues, too many people voting over them, it's just a lot of time that you or I don't have. And scaling that to a state or a nation is ludicrous.
The republican solution is to simply vote for the people you "trust" to vote the way you would. This is a better solution than simple democracy on a large scale, but it has its drawbacks. A lot of these drawbacks occur due to the fact that, since a limited number of people are actually making the laws, whoever controls those people control the nation. And it's a lot easier to control a small number of legislators than a large population.
One solution is a proposed "pebble democracy", described here. This solution relies on the extensive IT infrastructure that we now have, that our forefathers had no access to.
The general ideas are:
- Everyone gets an equivalent vote (but not necessarily one vote, perhaps one thousand).
- Votes are kept, audited, and tallied on a computer network. You vote from your own computer.
- All legislative issues come up to a general population vote. You still need executives and other "fast-acting" officers--democracies are good at long term decisions, not short term ones.
- You can use as many of your votes as you want to vote on any given issue, until you run out of votes. This way, you have more influence on issues you know and care about, and little or no influence on issues that are irrelevant to you.
- Anyone can set themselves up as a "legislator" by offering "tickets". A ticket is a suggestion on how to vote that you can download onto your own voting computer, if you trust the ticket's writer. A voter simply allocates votes to a ticket, and automatically uses those votes per the ticket's suggestions.
The last item, with "tickets", establishes the scalability of a republican government without the "limited number of people" issues. Special interests and lobbies become these legislators, writing tickets, and their power is directly related to the number of people who trust them, not how much money said people have.If you have a setup like this, to screw things up you have to fool (bribe, blackmail, influence) the majority of the populace, rather than just a few hundred congressmen and fifty one Senators.
--The basis of all love is respect
And finally, "Campaign Reform" is just another way the Republican-Democrat party has of guaranteeing its incumbency. All "Campaign Reform" is an unconstitutional limitation on the freedom of expression guaranteed by the First Amendment. Replace all "Campaign Reform" with a voluntary posting on a public website of all campaign contributions and their sources. That'll be real campaign reform.
The IPCC has purposely engineered a massive scientific fraud.
or dying. For politics to die, you have to take away the causes of such a system. Namely government and disagreements. Does anyone else see these things leaving us in the near future? I thought not.
I personally think mr. katz is off his fucking rocker to say politics is about at its end. You, dear sir, have just made the same idiotic mistake that every other technophile in the world has made: Believing that the net/technology is the end all be all of existance. You don't specifically state this, but it's in your tone. Your soliloquy about politics is bathed in terms like "The digital age."
This has been said before and it will be said again...and although you can disagree about the specific aspects of it, the fundamental point remains the same. The internet will not solve the problems of the children of etheopia. What makes us think it will solve the problems of politics or of the high cost of oil, or of any of the million other problems that plague us in a REAL fashion?
Sell your stock now...cause the only thing people are going to become less and less interested in is the "digital age" when they realize that it hasn't solved any of their problems. At least those corrupt politicians we constantly slander are trying.
FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
Politics dead? The string of protests against the WTO, IMF, World Bank, WEF, etc -- this is politics. Super-rallies for Ralph Nader where 10,000+ average citizens pay to see a presidential candidate -- this is politics.
The problem here, Jon, is that you're using the word "politics" as a shorthand for "professional politics as usual". But the real politics these days isn't to be found coming from the power elites. That's pageantry, not politics.
Meanwhile: VOTE OR DIE!
It is certainly not the last days of politics!
As long as a government has the ability to weild more force than the governed then politics is important. Regardless of if you chose to participate in government or not the policies of that government have immediate and permanent effect on you.
Those politicians make determinations on how much (more) of your money they will take from you and for which actions they may imprison or execute you.
Given that the government has become a major part of the population, and is certainly much better armed than the general population (and increasing the disparity through 'gun violence' and 'war on drugs' paranoia) it's a long way off before anyone can just offhand decide to ignore laws or taxes they decide are unjust. Ruby Ridge and Waco being a few key examples.
So you damn well better take part in the political process.
-- Greg
Slashdot, would a spell-checker for posting be too much to ask? It's not rocket science!
If you don't believe me, Check out the facts here.
The IPCC has purposely engineered a massive scientific fraud.
>>> While they're answering about Nader's corporate issues, maybe they can explain why he accepted matching funds, thus stealing from all U.S. taxpayers to fund his campaign? >>>
Uhhh, no. This was the bastardly Pat Buchannan of the Reform party. But it sounds like you prefer that candidates should simply raise the money themselves, and the election should go to the highest bidder. For instance, $94 million for George Bush so far. Gore is at about half of that. Nader has accepted just over $1 million, choosing to raise money through speaking events instead.
Yup. There is the other option of completely changing how Social Security works, and I agree it needs an overhaul. However, in the rare case that a politician advances this idea (or a similar one), they are beset by groups lobbying for the elderly who feel they want to take away Social Security entirely. They can't move left or right without raising a political ruckus, so they seem to just opt for the status quo thinking: "Sure Social Security might need to be fixed, but I'm not risking my neck to fix it."
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Despite his rhetoric concerning 'the CyberCulture' and 'the Digital Age', he may have a point. Politics, particularly the democratic campaigning and election process, does seem (at least to me) as something that is further and further away from me and my world. So, if this is the case and ultimately the current form of politics becomes completely irrelevant, what is next? What will rise up to fill the void? Some would say 'Big Business', but they're just as entrenched in the current system as Washington is. Others (like Katz) might say the internet subculture will, but that seems unlikely, considering that most of the people I know, while vocal internet users, don't know the first place to start reforming the government, especially online. Maybe it will take sweeping moves by an overwhelming minority in control to piss enough of us off to actually do something
about it.
-- "I'll be posting more crap soon, I swear!"
www.dynamanga.net
So long as governments have the right to take away my property, my liberty, and even my life, participation in politics -- not only voting myself, but convincing others to vote as I do -- is not an option, it's a necessity.
And my favorite, a binding "none of the above" option on every ballot.
Right on. Been preaching that one myself for years.
The Divine Creatrix in a Mortal Shell that stays Crunchy in Milk
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
Want an example of using technology in new and creative ways to effect policy makers? Let's all get together and treat the IMF with "indifference and contempt."
Toy Z Tech has a web page up outlining a call to action. The purpose of the action is to shut down IMF web sites (this is synchronous with the protests in Prague). Toy Z Tech offers a download (a web-based IRC client) that supposedly functions as a tool for electronic civil disobience.
Although Katz is not totally right, he does have a point-- The American Political System is decaying. Whether this is simply because they are ignoring technology, or one of many other reasons.
The best explanation, i believe, is this. The Politcal System is in a state of decadance; it is untouchable-- there are too few people willing to actually do something about it, and many of those who might are too apathetic or simply too weary. The political system doesn't truly reform itself, because if it did, it would lose its inherent power, its remoteness from the control of the people. Many of those who actively work to reform the system are defeated by it as well, because in trying to grab the attention of the politics-weary majority, they go to extremes, often invalidating themselves in the process. This is to say, most people will not vote for someone they view as over-zealous-- there seems to be a intrinsic detraction from these people amongst many whom i've known. Also, is the fact that there is a divergence amongst those who wish reform. Divided they are not enough force to create any change. There are likely other factors involved here, but I'm far too lazy to list them all. =)
But I'll say this: If given the chance to involve myself in a non-extremist mass reform movement, led by individuals who i would consider reasonable, I would definitely join the movement.
Why hasn't such a thing happened? Do we really need 1000 miles between "us" and "them" to successfully do this?
This is what i'd like to see. A bnuch of people who want reform in different areas to get together and COMPROMISE on the issues, and form a single movement. That and that alone can create the demise of the current political incarnation... at least in my opinion.
Um, how exactly this completely relates to the topic, I'm not overly sure. But, I think it gives a better explanation of our current state of politics. I'm not stating that i'm right, Just perhaps a bit more perceptive and less buzzwordy.
Yow. That was a mouthful.
This isn't a redundant post; I just set my threshold to 6.
So, don't blame corporations, blame The Corporation that establishes this irresponsibility in the first place.
Libertarians aren't anti-incorporation, they're just anti-irresponsible-corporation.
And, as far as the environment goes, would you rather have the folks that brought you Rocky Flats (the former nuclear bomb facility north of Denver) take care of your environment, or would you rather have the Nature Conservancy or the Audubon Society care for the environment. It's up to you. Oh, and don't forget how well the Forest Service looks after private property in Los Alamos.
The IPCC has purposely engineered a massive scientific fraud.
ya know.. the way katz-bashers keep dodging that question, maybe politics isn't quite dead afterall...
I really can't understand why people think they are smart enough to start such an arguement but can't find their own damn slashdot preferences...
- rewster
"Over time, slowly but inexorably, interest groups accumulate in society and defend government programs that, once entrenched, never go away. As the government's arteries clog, it loses the flexibility to adapt to a changing world and solve problems."
This is a great read for anyone who agrees with Katz's premise that American politcs have stagnated, but doesn't believe it is politics that has come to an end. Rather it is larger than that; it is Government's End . The parties almost identical centrist positions are merely a reflection of this reality within the electoral process.
You asked "I'd be curious to know if anybody reading this believes there's much difference between these two exhausted ideologies, or that the country will be substantially altered if one rather than the other prevails."
I honestly believe that it is very important that the Republicans be given a chance and hope that they win the White House and keep the Congress. I believe that the reason there is so much of the apathy you describe is that we have had 40 years of Democrat control of the Congress. They have been very busy those 40 years passing laws and slowly eating away at our civil liberties, while all the while demonizing others as doing just that.
I agree with an earlier poster who said he would be happy if Congress took a few years off and stopped passing laws. I think, more importantly, we should give the Repulicans a chance to get in there and repeal some of the burdonsome laws.
Granted, I tend to vote Republican; however, I go into each election with an open mind and truly vote for who I believe will represent me the best. However, I have recently come to the decision that I cannot in good conscience vote for a Democrat because I truly believe that they are little more than socialist slowly attempting to chip away at our rights. First it was tobacco, soon it will be SUV's. They are attempting to legislate through lawsuits rather than dealing with the issues upfront.
As for are there difference between the two parties? Yes. I am a conservative (not a Republican) first and foremost. I believe that the conservative movement is about taking responsibility for yourself and only allowing the government to do what it is there for as described in the constitution. I believe that the liberal (Democrat) movement is about having the government pass more and more laws to try and take care of everyone (cradle to grave). They are doing this for no other reason than to create dependants upon them that must continue to vote for them or lose their favorite government program.
Thanks.Politics will Never die. Politics have been practiced from the first day three primates met at the same location and decided who was going to be the dominant one. You had a winner a loser and a supporter. The problem with politics in America today is that we are a Democracy where any one can vote. There are no prerequisites to voting other than reaching an arbitrary number of days with some sort of brain function, and just enough ambition to fill out your voter registration card when you get your drivers licenses renewed. You do not need to know the issues to vote. You do not need to research the best solutions to vote. You just need to make it to the ballot box. America's problem is not her politicians. You cannot blame the fox for eating the chickens when locked in the coop. Americans do not want to be bothered with details. They want to watch their sitcoms and eat pre-packaged food. Those of us who are (self) educated enough to know how to perform meaningful research on the web, and have tried to teach some one out side the industry to duplicate the same search, know that too many Americans are too lazy to learn. They do not care any more. They will not change a 200-year-old system based on a 10000-year-old system. Therefore, politics as we know it will perpetuate indefinitely, or be taken over from the inside by the power hungery.
More of my thoughts
Most voters are well over 25 and still watch newscasts. Do any of us regularly tune in to watch Ted Koppel or Sam Donaldson go on about things that we already know, or, if we don't already know them, appear to be pure fluff about 'our health' or the Class of 2004? You can call it the Apathy Crisis or whatever, but the simple fact is that everything, that means everything political is commercial. Everything has a message, and behind that message is 'brought to us by...' directly after it. We don't care about what they have to say because we already know what they're going to go on about. They tell us what we want to hear and the 30+ adults out there soak it up like some kind of dilapidated sponge. Please mister Democrat, tell me you care about this. Please mister Republican, save my children. Please mister Nader, save the bad commercials from ruining our country. It's all sold-out over-hashed and under-messaged bullshit. We've become so jaded to the facts ads are in our face all day, we don't see or care what else is behind it.
A politician on slashdot is basically a bullseye target. Someone to knock down, pick up, then knock down again. They didn't do this, so slight them. They voted against this, pick them up and kick them again. There's no way you can continue to berate those who are in office and still expect them to respect and listen to you.
If a politician hasn't sold out to lobbyists and/or corporations, nobody has heard of them. If they have, people can't stand/believe that they would lower themselves to accepting money from such and such people. You can't have it both ways people. So which way do you want it?
Billionaires for Bush (or Gore)
Is that the sense in which you believe politics has ended? That there's no place for anything but billionaires (individual or corporate) to participate? The only other way to end politics is to have surpassed the need for coercion, and, last I checked, that hasn't happened for any but the most ignorant of the privileged.
Saying "politics doesn't matter anymore" is clearly foolish, and I don't think Jon is a fool, so I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that wasn't his point. After all, politics affect us greatly in every way, every day - from how much money we have to what books we can read. It affects every aspect of our lives, financially, personally, socially, and so on. There's no disputing that politics has a huge effect on us.
That being said, I believe Jon's point was that fewer and fewer people follow, or care about politics. This, in contrast, is deonstrably true. So in that sense, and that sense only, politics are "mattering" less to individuals bcause so many people either feel that "my vote can't change anything, so why bother", or "all politicians are scum", or they feel too busy to bother, or they're just generally angry at the system, or whatever. For any or all of those reasons, people are becoming less and less involved in the political system, just hoping and trusting that "someone is in Washington taking care of it". They have a sense that nothing really bad can happen, and if it starts to, "the government" will take care of it. In short, citizens have sold their franchise and voice in exchange for the comfort of ignorance and the pormise that someone else will take care of everything. I don't need to point out to anyone here how dangerous that kind fo thinking is.
What is really happening in politics is this: the fewer people involved in the process, the more power gets concentrated in the hands of those who still do care enough to participate. And, unfortunately, those people often tend to be the fanatical, one-issue zealots. More and more, the political system is being dominated by, and policy is being made by, those who are extreme enough on an issue to get off their asses and do something.
We have to remember that people always have the government that they deserve. As Amerians, we have collectively given up our freedom in exchange for promises to be left alone in our comfy cocoons, undisturbed by thorny issues: "Just keep the cable TV and pizza coming, and I don't give a damn what you do out there." And therefore, we deserve a government that doesn't respect us or our rights.
It's been said, correctly, that "America is at that awkward stage where it's too late to work within the system, and too early to shoot the bastards." The entrenched powers-that-be have no interest in ever giving up that power, and since Congress controls all the laws, there's no way they would ever pass a law limiting their power. The one and only big miastake the founders made when writing the constitution was giving Congress the power to police itself and make its own rules. When the only body that can control Congress is Congress, the conlict of interest couldn't be more clear.
Sadly, there's only one solution, and it seems extrememly distasteful at first: we will simply have to adopt "direct democracy", whether we like it or not. Every person is allowed to vote on every issue, electronically. Representative democracy was originally structured the way it is primarily because direct democracy wasn't really possible when the fastest news could travel was by horse. Now we have the technical cpabaility for everyone to vote on everything, and as sucky as system as it would be, it will still be better than the current one.
Yes, I hear everyone saying "But most people are morons! They don't know anything about the issues! They will be swayed by demagogues and fleeting passions!". We, OK, yes - they will be. But the question is, will they be swayed any more than the people in congress? Could they do any worse?
Originally congress was supposed to be a buffer between the people and the law, carefully considering laws objectively to see if they were good for the country in the long term. But we all know it's been quite a long time - if ever - since congress has actually been objective. Laws are passed or not passed based not on how good they are for the country, but how good they are for congressmen's careers. So, if we're going to have laws passed based on self-interest, shouldn't be our own self-interest and not some congressman's?
All the objections to "Direct democracy", that The People Are An Ass, are true. But the fact is that Congressmen are bigger asses, and they are asses in greedy, personal, self-enriching ways. Better to have the people voting for their own selfish self-interest than the congress, for theirs.
My first step in reforming government would be to make elections for representatives 'at large' rather than by district. No district in any state, with the exception of Vermont a one district state, is going to have sufficient support for third party candidates to get them elected. Statewide however, third party candidates could probably find the support they need to get elected. Sure the Dems and Repubs will still get a majority of the seats, but with 13 districts (using my home state as an example) Libertarian, Green, and/or Reform candidate(s), even in bible belt Tennessee, could get elected. With a more pluralistic house, third parties could build upon the bases they create to leapfrog candidates to the senate and presidency.
Maybe that's a dumb idea (if so tear me to pieces) but it seems to me that it could easily work.
Insanity is the last line of defence for the master diplomat. But you have to lay the groundwork early.
The fact that things are boring is a great reason to get involved in one way or another. It's very important to have people who think in different ways to get into politics. Jesse Ventura is the great example. He's been doing a lot here in Minnesota, not the least of which is learning about a thousand different subjects that he probably never thought about before.
I think politics would be a great thing for many techies to get into. Governor Ventura has said how much he enjoys the job because he's always learning something. He'll be in meetings all day and talk about things ranging from environment to education to transportation to the economy. If you enjoy learning about diverse topics, politics is an interesting field.
--
Ski-U-Mah!
I think some quantitative data might aid Mr Katz' argument. Broad statements like "Poll after poll shows mistrust, boredom, alienation and disgust", unsupported by references to acutal polls, inspire mistrust, boredom, alienation and disgust in this reader. I hope this will be corrected in the rest of this series.
To his credit, Mr Katz does quote the speculations of of authors and political historians, which, while not exactly concrete data, are more than I will give in the speculation to follow.
I don't think politics are dead or dying. A better word might be hibernating, at least in some parts of the world. I think this has a lot to do with economic prosperity, and in the technological corner of the world where we are debating, prosperity is not lacking. If rising gas prices or some other, unforeseen disaster sends our economy grinding to a halt, you will probably find our president posting weekly addresses on a website, and people will be as enraptured by them now as they were in the 60 years ago by Roosevelt's weekly radio addresses.
To the question of whether government can control the internet, I think the answer is a qualified no. Taking Napster as an example, if its use is made illegal, you and I will just fire up Gnutella and continue pirating music to our hearts' content. I think most people agree that Gnutella can't be policed, and, even if it can, we'll find a way around that too. However, less technically savvy people tend to find Gnutella difficult to use, and they tend to prefer paying exploitive prices instead of learning how to work around them. The same thing probably applies to DeCSS. Government clearly can't exercise total control of the internet, but it will find a way to exercise significant partial control. I think the internet will remain a place of freedom, but only for those determined enough to seek it out. But is this situation really different from the "real world" anyway?
A better question than "What does the internet do to politics?" might be "What does the internet do to the media?". Practically anyone can be a news source now, but there is hardly any control to make sure that news is accurate. "Ideas fly through the ether", but hardly anyone stops to ask for evidence to justify them.
Yeah, you wish. Apathy only strengthens politicians and gives them more arbitrary power. How much power do you have- almost none, how much power do the politicians have- almost all. How the heck do you propose to destroy that!?
As less and less voters turn out, more and more power will go to those who do vote (generally old people). This basically means that resources will be siphoned off from the young for the old- including political power. Since when does apathy produce a political advantage for the apathetic? If you do nothing, you get nothing.
Today, all campaigns are simply an attempt to woo swing voters. The parties already have their base- so now all they need are those who can't make up their minds. That's right folks, the entire election comes down to the swing of those people who are wishy washy!
Hence, political power is given away by wishy-washy voters who are easily manipulated. As a result, political power swings to the best manipulator. Thus, political power is even stronger now than it has been in the past. Meanwhile, the apathetic simply go online and bitch. Good strategy, NOT!
Eventual evolution to a plebescite based system? that way you don't relegate your decisions to a proxy. or you could change your proxy at any time. problem is this would require large representative chunks of the population to be online most of the time. chus
Wrong!
My opinion isn't wrong, your assessment of it is.
McCain was a pugnacious little bastard, well-known for getting in fistfights, racist slurs, and his bad, bad temper.
In your humble opinion
That guy would have had us at war with China within six months of inauguration. Now, whether or not you think that's a good thing, I'm not sure. But I'm pretty sure he wasn't above torturing a few Chinese to get revenge for his P.O.W. time.
Also, you're humble opinion
And, sure, he's justified. But I don't like to elect mentally unstable presidents - even justified ones.
Another opinion.
As I wrote: I still think McCain (regardless of his actual stand on issues) was far stronger than Bush, Gore and Bradley put together. Hence, he's out in the cold.
He's a man of his own principle. He has a following across party lines, even though he's very conservative. That he embraced an idea radical to his party's current behavior also speaks volumes about character.
Another poster mentioned how exciting the primary season was in New Hampshire, I had to agree. During a couple months I was more interested politics than I had been in ages. As Thomas Jefferson wrote, "I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical."
IMHO the alleged death of politics revolves around the lack of people to back a leadership which is bold and takes risks. McCain resonated with people because he was bold. Too bad he let himself get mired down by the touchy-feely crowd.
--
Chief Frog Inspector
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
You know that box that says "Presidential Election Campaign: Do you want $3 to go to this fund?" on your 1040? I suggest that this year, you simply check the "NO" box! That way they will just be stealing from us idiots who check the "YES" box.
Hello, I must be going. I'm here to say I cannot stay, I must be going.
Complaints against our current political system are more boring, more tired, more unimaginative than the system itself. However, I will attempt to explain and answer these tired old prophecies of doom for the current system.
To demonstrate just how tired and boring your complaints are, I'll start with a quote from Benjamin Franklin's final address to the Constitutional Convention in 1787:
Why is a certain portion of the population chronicly bored with politics and agitating for radical changes, usually without proposing any?
If politics is boring to you, chances are your priorities and interests are not shared by the majority of your fellow Americans. The reason why this is true is that state and national politics are directed by pollsters who determine which topics are most important to the largest numbers of people.
This system may be annoying and we may all wish it weren't that way. However, it makes a lot of common sense. State and national leaders have to speak for a broad constituency with a wide spectrum of philosophies and ideologies. The political electoral process weeds out those people who are so focused on marginal issues that they alienate the majority of the people they want to represent. Those candidates who are left standing at the end of the day will not agree with every citizen, but will be acceptible to the majority of them, which is the definition of a democratic election.
The biggest problem with modern proponents of alternative political systems is that they hate history as much as politics, and thus propose solutions which they believe are brand-new, but that have already failed miserably.
Those who learn from history know that the structure of our government has been the underlying topic of public discourse in almost every public debate since June 7, 1776. The fact remains that there is no acceptible alternative to the system we have, Voter.com's appeals for pure democracy notwithstanding.
No, dissatisfaction with the political process is nothing new. In fact, the clash of ideas that named our major parties was the clash between a pure democracy (Democrats) and a republic or representative democracy (Republicans).
The clash between pure democracy or republic was a continuation of the clash between the federalists and the anti-federalists. The federalists had clearly won the day and established a strong national government through our constitution.
After the anti-federalists lost, the parties reorganized around methods of implementing the federal government. What precipitated the formation of the southern Confederacy and the subsequent Civil War was not only slavery, but also the old debate over federalism and a defect of the electoral process that brought Lincoln to power with less than 33 percent of the vote.
By the time of the Civil War, the Democrats were for slavery and state's rights, hoping to accomplish both by subjecting all major federal decisions to a referendum of the citizens of each state. At that time, the Republicans were either abolitionists or against the spread of slavery, imposed by the federal government regardless of the will of the people as expressed by referendum or state legislation.
What triggered the formation of the Confederacy, however, was not ideology, but a structural objection to the way in which Abraham Lincoln was elected President. The Democratic party was unable to agree on one candidate for president, so they nominated three candidates. All together, the 3 Democrats won 65 percent of the electoral votes, but Republican Lincoln was elected with only 33 percent because his votes were not divided. Thus, the majority of the country disagreed with Lincoln and voted against his ideas, yet the breakdown of the two-party system put his minority policies into the White House. After the Democratic south formed its own country, the Northern Republicans gained control of the federal government.
Now, almost all modern Americans, including me, are quite glad that Lincoln became president and that slavery was eventually abolished through his leadership. But the majority of our forefathers, Lincoln's contemporaries, would have disagreed with us. The question is, what would happen if a multiparty system were to leave us with a much less honorable president than Lincoln?
Despite the fact that one of our best Presidents would never have been elected in a two way runoff, the fact remains that the will of the majority was violated, ultimately resulting in what was best for society, the abolition of slavery. The majority opinion of the day was wrong, but shouldn't we see that as an aberration of the times?
More recently, in 1992, the multi-candidate system helped elect another president without a majority, Bill Clinton. Objective studies prove that Clinton would never have been elected in a two-way runoff, but Ross Perot siphoned enough Republican support from President Bush to give Clinton the edge he needed to win.
Now, some would propose a runoff system to make sure that the will of the majority is served in elections. However, there is already a runoff system, with the party primaries as the first round and the general election as the final round. Third parties disrupt this system.
However, if there were a series of more official runoffs, it would surely diminish the stranglehold of political power-mongers from the election process. But, those who propose such a system should recognize that neither Republican Lincoln nor Democrat Clinton would have been elected under it. Instead, we would be subjected to the annual alliance-building chaos that has caused so much trouble in the parliaments of India, Japan and every other democratic nation without a strong two-party system.
Is our current system perfect? Absolutely not, and it should be continually refined in ways that improve it. However, there are alternatives like pure democracy, poorly planned runoffs or weaker parties that are so utterly flawed that to attempt them again would be incredibly foolish considering historical wisdom and the high likelihood of human nature being impervious to technological change.
In the meantime, apathy is rampant, ranters complain and minority views seem to be marginalized by the majority view. Politics has been that way in this country for 224 years, and in post-Magna Carta Europe for centuries before that.
You, the author of the series of articles, may think your alienated ideas are new and different, because these ideas occured to you without much outside influence. Our technological professions train us to conclude that our ideas are often unprecedented. Politics is a much older profession, so it is true that most political ideas are ancient and well-studied, even if they seem new to you.
Thus, it would be wise for the author to study the long, long history of people who have made the same, tired, unimaginative objections to our political system over the years. Dissatisfaction with the system is even more boring and lifeless than the system itself, because the complaints are not usually accompanied by viable solutions or tempered by studious research.
Furthermore, my response to your complaint is equally overhashed and trite because dozens of generations of complainers have had to be educated.
Yet, as uninspiring as they may be, the political forces surrounding the current elections are just as monumentally important as they have always been. On the one hand, the conservative Republicans generally promote smaller government, the inalienable right to life, traditional moral values, citizen individualism, lower taxes, balanced budgets and re-engineering of government to cut waste and vestigial depression-era agencies.
On the other hand, the liberal Democrats promote larger government, socialism in health care and other industries, the rights of women to murder their unborn daughters, loose moral values, citizen dependency upon the government, higher taxes and re-engineering government by increasing the proliferation of projects and entitlement programs.
As for foreign policy, the Republicans are mostly insistent upon freedom and democracy in order to maintain economic alliances. The Democrats are soft on dictatorships and socialists like Fidel Castro, because they don't feel as strongly against government's control of the thoughts and private lives of citizens.
Both parties are insincere about campaign finance reform and generally clueless about education. Too bad, but nobody's perfect.
The best success that a third party can achieve is to help elect their most vehement opponents. Voting for ultra-liberal Ralph Nader will help elect conservative George Bush, while voting for ultra-conservative Pat Buchanan or Harry Browne will help elect liberal Al Gore, their polar opposites. Thus, third parties do far more damage to their own ideals than any good they may hope to achieve.
In the future, if third parties and independents become rampantly popular, then runoffs must be instituted in order to avoid the situation that led to the Civil War. However, while the two-party system continues to be predominant, no drastic changes are required. Instead, whiners and compainers should look for more realistic incremental reforms agreeable to a consensus, or else be proactive about their feelings of boredom by withdrawing their own boring drivel from public discourse.
I leave you with another quote, often ascribed to others, but here attributed to Thomas Jefferson, third President of the United States and writer of the Declaration of Independence:
No disagreement that the election seems meaningless, and the whole campaign seems out of some alternative dimension. Nevertheless... Ask Gates/Ballmer if it doesn't matter who's the Antitrust Division Chief/Attorney General/President. (Correspondingly, ask Jim Clarke, who played the game really, really well...) Ask a woman who has to bring an unwanted pregnancy to term if Bush wins and Roe v. Wade gets overruled. Ask someone who becomes "an enemy of the state"--the old domestic leftists, the Black Panthers, Wen Ho Lee--what their life was like thereafter. Ask anyone who finds that all those Hollywood fundraisers really did pay off for the entertainment industry with the passage of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act--and what that's doing/going to do to P2P file-sharing. Ask me (and now I'm showing my age) what the night of the original draft lottery was like, when, with perfect arbitrariness, the course of your whole like was/seemed like it was changed by the government. I'll concede that all these examples are negative. But the government really does have an awful amount of power, and who controls that power is, as these examples suggest, not without importance.
In order to have a discussion about politics, it is necessary to come to a consensus about what each participating party means when he/she says "politics".
Judging by your article, I conclude that you hold to the standard mainstream American idea of what politcs is (campaigns, issues, candidates, etc.), yearn for the ages when it actually "meant something", and further predict that the "wired" crowd will replace the conventional taxonomy of American politics with something else.
I first must caution you and say that at the root of politics is power, and while social structures exists--i.e. while humans interact--power will exist, and consequently politics will exist. To call what is currently happenning "the end of politics" misses several fundamental points. You're referring to a transformation, which involves and end and a beginning, but to focus on one or the other exclusively is short-sighted. (It does, however, serve to generate interest. :)
There are several other points to be made, but for brevity's sake I'll just mention my main one: life in the United States of America has, is, and probably always will be about capital. The aristocracy of blood and lineage was replaced by the aristocracy of wealth and influence. Some crumbs, i.e. the Bill of Rights, were passed on to the general population along with the infinitesimal chance of true social mobility to keep them docile and pliant. I believe that the contemporary American political climate can be measured by the degree to which the general population understands this. (This is never very widely understood.)
Both post-boomer generations witnessed the sickening boomer transformation from "flower power" to corporate power. ("Yesterdays hippes are today's yuppies.") Having one's hopes crushed is an unpleasant thing, so Gen X simply abandoned the pretense. For this, we were called "slackers". What we really were/are, I believe, were the ultimate Americans--beholden to self-interest and nothing else.
So, we'll let them have their show, and also let them pretend it means something. Sadly, though, most people know that their vote doesn't mean a damn, that it is simply a ratification of decisions bought a long time ago. People will pick an issue most important to them (abortion, etc.), vote for the candidate who says they share that view, and pray devoutly that the candidate isn't bought off later on and switches his/her position.
You've detected that "young people" are sick of this game. I put to you that many people, across all social strata, are sick of this game. Yes, we have this new medium to express ourselves with. But all media are vulnerable to propaganda, the glue of contemporary democracy, and as soon as "they" figure out how to "lock-down" the 'Net we'll see the prodigal medium welcomed into the mainstream political structures with open arms.
Can you name two issues? One? I can. http://www.geocities.com/WPL510 Go learn.
While there may have been a noticable Green turn in the other party platforms, it doesn't necessarily mean that those platforms will be adhered to after the election; it may just represent an attempt to steal more votes away from one party, without making an effort to adhere to the reason behind the Green ideals.
It's really the difference I see between a platform and an agenda. Parties use platforms to reach out and grab as many votes as they can. If they succeed, they stick to their agenda and accomplish what they really want done. "If we seem to move slightly towards the Green way of thinking, we'll knock loose their votes, pick them up, and then continue on with our plans anyway."
For this reason, votes for unpopular parties can be wasted; you may just be shifting the way the major parties are going to try to steal your vote away. If you really want to count, make sure you spread the word about your way of thinking; do what you can to advance the party that you agree with, don't just vote blindly for it.
I'm mainly speaking of my perceptions of our wonderful American system, though. It might be different in the U.K., but the cynic in me doubts that quite a bit.
The problem in this country is that nobody cares. This is brought on by the good economy. I'd be willing to bet that if the economy collapsed tomorrow more people would take an interest in politics.
When we were sucking down 98 cent gas nobody seemed to complain... the second gas prices shot up the first question on everyone's mind is "Where is the government on this one?"
Is the political system dead? No... We're just all too fat and weighted down with thick wallets to notice it's existence.
"Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know."
-- Ernest Hemingway
Of course the price of change is great and frequently underestimated (just remember the last time you upgraded your OS)
New ideas for change should always be discussed and debated. If they hold little merit, or the merit they hold is outweighed at the time by the cost of change then of course orthodoxy should triumph.
But to say "After 5,000 years of societal evolution we have reached the pinnacle of political development and will go no further" thats just dumb.
And to say "We will evaluate no opportunities for change" well thats the path of stagnation.
Of course maybe its just America's turn to stagnate (its been a long ride at the top for you people). Thats your choice as a nation.
Maybe a nation with a more pressing need for change (a number of asian nations spring to mind but their social constructs have in the past mitigated against positive revolutionary/evolutionary change) will throw off its chains and build something brighter and better.
The failure of imagination that was communist revolution has meant the last 80 years of revolution in search of social justice has been wasted.
That doesn't mean the next big idea won't be a better one.
But hopefully while those in greatest need of change revolve, the western democarcies can find the strength and imagination to evolve.
'There is a Light that never goes out.'
That's what I've been telling everyone this year. Gore doesn't represent liberals, and Bush doesn't represent conservatives. And as for libertarians, if they buy the Republican party's pseudo-libertarian rhetoric ("We're against Big Government, by which we mean we're against the government doing anything that big corporations don't like!") I've got some oceanfront property for sale in Kansas.
Those presidential debates mean nothing now that Nader, Browne, and Buchanan have been excluded. Do you expect to hear Gore and Bush debate the death penalty? The war on drugs? Free trade with China? Any of the scary technological issues spawned by too much corporate power we read about here every day? Nope. As Billionaires for Bush (or Gore) say, "We don't care who you vote for: We've already bought them."
grep -ri 'should work'
If borders are not enforced, what is to prevent invasion? If the US were to open its borders to China, we would be a Communist country within 2 years. If we opened them to everyone, all kinds of drugs and contraband would flow freely. Foreign terrorists could easily plant bombs. The world is not exactly in love with the USA.
Opening borders would only work in a perfect world. Unfortunately, we have stark realities to deal with. A strong border policy is absolutely necessary while even one country declares us their enemy. Sadly, many countries would love to overthrow us.
Equal rights for all humans supports everyone's equal rights to defend their homeland from invasion. There is no contradiction here. A non-citizen's freedom of movement must never supercede a citizen's right to defend their self-government.
Besides, if anyone is serious about becoming a US citizen, they can immigrate legally and become naturalized, just like I did.
Just imagine a president who got impeached, not for screwing an intern, but for slaughtering half of Congress for being hypocritical, lying bastards.
Anyone who doesn't know who I'm talking about, needs to watch "Ruronin Kenshin" (anime). Saitoh isn't really a good guy or a bad guy, but he is the type who doesn't leave very many enemies
Beyond Katz's enjoyable article is:
Technology is Political - we've known this since McLuhan & Chomsky. Economic global systems (the military-industrial complex's bastard son) feeds on the human impression of empowerment that technology brings. In a sense, digital convergence is a political statement - it says no matter what the merit of your social viewpoint, you can still be broken down to 1's and 0's. Your view can be seen in the same basis as every other politcal view, no matter how ordsinary, beneficial or vile.
But wait - there's more. Politcal systems of course adapt to their environment. They have adapt ed to converge on a single meta-politcal level, and that is that politcal content & integrity no longer matters, just preservation of a system they get to exploit cyclically with their partners (the parties that lost the last election) in the crime of subverted democrazy.
The real issue that stands before us is changing the politics of technology so that it benefits the politics of the human social and cultural world.
All bits are NOT equal - some mean more than others.
.vortex
Time flies like an arrow -- Fruit flies like a banana
So you think your candidate is "worthy" to rob me of my money? Explain to me again why anyone should be compelled by law to finance a political campaign he is ideologically opposed to?
Not for me, no thanks. I'll vote for the Constitution Party. Even if it qualified for matching funds it would turn them down. Your tax money isn't meant to be used as campaign financing, and neither is mine.
(As far back as May the CP has been ahead of the Reform and Green parties in getting ballot access, yet the media continues to ignore them. Why is that?)
Constitutionally Correct
-politicans don't need to make interesting discussions about politics, they have the power, they want us out of the way and not to care about what we say
-the Digital Age and the progress is one of their buzzword-illusions to keep you busy with things they don't fear (like football)
When you think that politics are just that silly talk and superflous elections that you see in TV, then they are pleased. Politics is deciding! How do you decide about wages or weapons production?
-as long as they are not after you (like after the deCSS-hackers), you don't do anything that can harm them
+elections have nothing to do with control over your life and how the society treats you and others
+free (GPL-)software shows an alternative: how to work and publish
-as long as people have to sell themselves to make a living and are divided into different nations and as long as US-citicens do not question the role of the USA(-society-model) in the slaughtership and dictatorship in many countries (read Noam Chmomsky's "5th freedom" for that), so long the power of the politicians is not questioned
+maybe not voing at all can help changing something, if 95% of the population was joining that, but that does not give them control over themselves.
(I konw my English could be better)
there's enough for everybody, let's share it
Sure, the political system is *way* out of date and we're ready to change. But most people are too lazy to bother to change anything. Besides, they're being fed 'the system is good!' by those in it, and chances are they haven't bothered forming their own opinions. There is also the problem of forming a better system. Many people have died in the cause of overthrowing a government, only to have another as bad or worse come in its place. (Russia circa 1917 comes to mind.) Overthrowing a government is easy compared to finding a better system to replace it. Then there's the ever-present greed that leads people to grab whats best for right now, not thinking of their or their countries (groups, whatever) future. Of course, we have progressed from tribal to monarch to democratic governments ... er, make that semi-democratic ... so there is hope for change. But just because its time for change doesn't mean change will come.
Also about the two parties... From a Canadian perspective, American politics looks *so* stupid. The same two parties since the violent birth of the nation, and those as different as beige and eggshell. Add one god-like ego at the top and more checks and balances than an accountant sees in a lifetime. Of course, the Canadian system isn't much better. But slightly.
The opinons expressed are those of the voices in the author's head and are not necessarily those of the author.
"The majority government under Brian Mulroney (arguably the most corrupt/criminal PM in Canadian history)"
So go ahead an argue, then. Let's hear your proof. Back up that claim. I'd like to see it.
Or maybe you read that in the news somewhere, because, brother, I *know* you don't know what the hell you are talking about. I spent seven years in Ottawa, and I've seen a lot of stupid, slimy, and vain people in politics (and believe it or not, I've seen more than a few good people, too... from all parties), but mostly I saw a lot of hatred for a PM that did what he said he was going to do, and then got treated like he had lied to everyone.
Compare that to the present administration, which tries to do as little as possible, while coasting on the initiatives put in place by the Mulroney government.
And I post ;)
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=00/09/10/00592 23&cid=282
Canada is just as dysfunctional as the U.S. when it comes to national elections. In some ways it's even worse, since our smaller population is so unevenly distributed it makes concentrations of power very significant. In the last federal election, the two right-wing parties (Reform and the Progressive Conservatives) both polled about 20% of the popular vote. But, since Reform's support was concentrated in the West, and the PC's support was dispersed across the whole country, Reform got 60 seats to the PC's 20.
The next federal election here will be decided in Ontario, because the other regions of the country either have small populations (the Maritimes) or vote for parties that can never form a majority government (Quebec with the Bloc Quebecois). If right-wing voters in Ontario concentrate their votes for one party, it'll win, otherwise the Liberals will coast to another majority government.
Just as the U.S. is essentially a two-party system where occasionally one the parties changes, so is Canada. The Liberals and Progressive Conservatives have been alternating government since Confederation. I argue that we're currently in the midst of a change where the slightly right-of-center party is morphing from the PCs to the new Canadian Alliance party (which used to be Reform). If that fails and we remain with five strong parties, the Liberals will continue to win elections as long as they don't become too corrupt to alienate their core constituency in Ontario.
The mostly two-party system even holds for provincial elections, although with a little more variety, since which two parties vie for power varies from province to province (and within provinces, changes on the timescale of decades). I agree with the other posters that this appears to be a consequence of the first past the post system, and a proportional system of some sort (or even just runoff elections where there was no clear majority) would better reflect the populace.
Let everyone else decide for you.
Wrong!
You respond to arguments exactly the same way my five-year-old niece does; instead of arguing a point, or clashing, you repeat "that's just your opinion".
Everything you've written is also opinion; the only difference is that your opinion is unsupported and happens to be asinine.
Electing an extremely conservative pit bull who wants to run the country in a pre-Vietnam fashion does not qualify as "a little rebellion now and then". That's two steps back, not one step forward.
McCain resonated with the terminally myopic because he was bold, and scared the fuck out of everyone else because he was mentally unstable and brimming over with repressed rage.
"Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he deems himself your master."
Because he isn't really a geek. He pretends to be one. Since we are real geeks, we see through his disguise.
Politics stems from disagreement over the ends that a socety is pursuing. Over the past twenty years, such disagreement has all but dsappeared from the US - at least among politicians. Your political leaders all agree in their support of balanced budgets, the war on drugs and the death penalty; their disagreements are about the means to these ends, rather than the ends themselves. As a result, they seem less and less relevant. Will the election of TweedleBush instead of TweedleGore alter anything? I doubt it.
The above is just the politician's picture; The consensus may not be shared by the majority of US citizens that don't vote, but they don't have the political clout or the access to even bring their concerns to public attention.
Idiot/Savant
WARNING: opinions subject to change without notice.
Big-L libertarianism is probably generally wrong as it tends to look more like anarchy than a political system.
Small-l libertarianism ala Milton Freedman or Robert Nozick does seem to have very redeeming qualities, and I'm not so sure that you could find any major faults with the arguments (unless you're a die-hard egalitarian)....
-Stu
Poll after poll shows mistrust, boredom, alienation and disgust with the brawling, negativity, stalemating and irrationality of the process.
Any possibility that most people simply don't understand politics? Has anyone ever heard of sour grapes? (Actually I have found that most people don't know Aesop well enough to know what "sour grapes" really means, but that's another rant.)
It's simple. Most people don't like politics because they don't understand politics. They place themselves above politics because people always try to place themselves above things they don't understand. The fact is that most of the people who say they are not voting are not voting because they are basically immature dummies. Polls asking people to identify whether they are immature dummies are hard to conduct.
Some non-voters _are_ high-minded, of course, but they are the minority -- if an admirable one. I just hate to see them confused with general, garden variety, can't-take-the-heat losers.
The Internet, by the way, is going to become the very medium of e-demagoguery. Most people are going to believe what they want to believe. That's it. With the Internet, this process will only occur a lot faster.
I agree completly. The conflict in politics, and even in American life in general has changed drasticaly.
Polititians shun debates. Lincon and Douglas carreid on 7 debates, admittedly before television. The modern 'discussion' is a bunch of people sitting around saying "this is what I think " rather than people defining standards of evidence, contending points etc.
The only way to stop politics is by instituting a totalitarian state.
While I don't see it as a conspiricy, it worries me that kids these days are becoming more and more involved in 'organized sports', (sports organized by adults or a park district) and less capable of organizing themselves.
The basic structures underlying democracy- organized confilct and debate, the ability of the people to organize into independant groups, even a basic knowledge of history or the ability to make a cogent, logical argument are being whittled away for the bulk of the population. There are exceptions, of course, but these skills need to be mainstream for democracy to function.
Katz touched on this lack of conflict, but strangly passed over the insidiousness of it. Strange, since he seems to gravitate towards and embellish insidiousness like a kitten to warm milk.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
We have to distinguish here between
- 'politics' as a large and fuzzy-edged strand of human activity
andThe former is likely to be around as long as humans are.
The latter may well be under threat, but will likely continue to evolve in its characteristic hyper-darwinian way to "meet the challenges" of a "wired world". The threat is real, however, because there are some necessary relations between politics, power and information. With luck, in this limited sense of "politics", Jon Katz may be right.
Cynics have long held that politics is the applied science of lying and there is a grain of truth in that view - in real politics control of information is, if not all, at least a very great deal. Remember the 'science of lying' is a branch of information theory.
From the point of view of the politician, sustaining power is a matter of "getting the electorate to agree" - the news media are partners and sometime adversaries in the delicate game of defining what's important, what's out to lunch and what's irrelevant for the electorate.
It's a read-only client/server model, with very many clients and very few servers. Controlling the agenda effectively ('lying') is easy in this model.
With enhanced communications through computer networks, many other models are possible. Now this is a bit of a truism in the hacker community - and is often taken to mean some form of 'electronic democracy' where the government kindly devolves power through online referenda and focus groups and the like, but I think these other models are likely to be implemented over the (dead or horribly maimed) bodies of the old ones or expire themselves (viz the recent "vote auction" fiasco.)
At this relatively early stage of the game, where everyone is still waking up to what is happening, a lot of chips have still to fall and it's pretty much impossible to guess the specifics of the outcome. But as the information spectrum broadens, as it becomes easier and easier for information sharing, opinion forming and mass action to be co-ordinated by self-selecting groups, it's possible that strategies and models will emerge that actually challenge the power base of the existing poliitical system.
So what would be the napster / gnutella killer app for online activists?
Well, if Freenet delivers then that is probably going to help (the yet to come legal struggle over freenet - for which the recent cases can be seen as limbering up - will be interesting because it will identify those whose vested interests are threatened by it...) but I think by and large we already have the software tools in web media (you're looking at one!). We are still waiting for the concepts and 'forms of life' that will make these effective political tools.
One area that comes to mind is 'active consumerism' - buying according to ethical criteria - which if enacted on a really large scale can certainly have impact. Like the man said: "Get organised."
BTW: Politics is still very important to some people, eg microsoft - enough to spend a few million dollars on anyway. See: this article (based on this report) (just give me the report, already!)
.sigs: Just Say No!
I think I must bring to your attention a book called Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card. Why is this relevant? In the story, the main character's siblings, both of which are quite underage, sign on to their family's internet-of-the-future-account and take on the aliases of Locke and Demosthenes. They write political essays and participate in debates, rising through the informal political ranks until they are considered the foremost politicians in the world (all politicians are on the Internet in their era). Well, anyway, I better wrap it up. Wouldn't want to tell you what happens--but it's a great story, even if their rise through politics isn't the main storyline. Aciel aciel@speakeasy.net
I can't determine whether you're right or you're too closely aligned with my own political dreamworld. Because I'm living in it - I'm glad it doesn't matter who's elected this go 'round. But I'm one of those nutsy libertarians who wishes the government would just go govern somewhere else. I bet people would vote if there were interesting issuses to rally around. Peace, it seems, comes with few passions and bored politicians scare me a hell of a lot more than war. Times are good. Maybe we netizens should be grateful politics don't matter -- and pray we never get as big a target as Microsoft did.
What do you mean "Where are the chicks"? The only reason I come here is for the chicks...
I tend to believe that politics as we know it is in no shape or form dead, or even dying. For instance, I'm subscribed to the SLUG mailing list at my University, and there was a very long and heated political thread that went on for days. Nothing but geeks debating the politics of today and the upcoming election.
How about this Jon: Politics as we know it isn't dying, it's just that there will always be people disinterested in it, and I would also go so far as saying that the "geek community" has just as many people who just don't give a fsck about politics as does the general public. Just look at the voter turnout of past elections.
"I have no special gift, I am only passionately curious." - Albert Einstein
Don't push it off on Buchannan - though I agree he's no better. Nader took his matching funds. For details see:
h tml
http://votenader.org/press/000701MatchingFunds.
I do check 'NO' on that box but you left out the most important part of that line on the Federal tax forms.
According to the tax form I'm looking at (1998 federal Telefile; I doubt they've changed it) the complete quote is:
"Do you want $3 to go to the Presidential Election Campaign Fund? If a joint return, does your spouse want $3 to go to this fund? (Checking "Yes" will not change your tax or reduce your refund) "
So if that money isn't coming out of the pockets of those who check "Yes", where is it coming from?
False. Demonstrably so. It costs nothing to vote, and people are free to vote their conscience, not for some media-hyped buffoon whose Daddy was a big politician.
Not false. Demosntrably so. If you actually think that your freedom to vote means that your single vote bears any realistic weight next to the monetary influences of large corporations on the political process, then you need to consult the congressional records for your senators and representatives and compare their voting behaviors against a list of contributing interest groups to their campaigns.
False again. You can vote for a Libertarian for President and for a majority of the U.S. House seats.
Not false. A vote for a Libertarian candidate bears about as much weight as a snowball in hell. Why do so few people vote for Libertarian candidates relative to Republican and Democratic candidates? I'll give you a hint: it has nothing to do with the issues, and nearly everything to do with the strength of the campagining machines of the Republican and Democratic parties. Special interest groups want to give their dollars to the parties that can push an agenda on the largest scale, and that certainly isn't the Libertarian party.
Mostly false. If you vote for lawyers and professional politicians like Bush, Gore, Nader and Buchanan, you will be missing the UnPolitical choice of the Libertarians.
No, mostly true. Although I could vote for a Libertarian presidential candidate, my vote obviously won't count for anything in the face of the Republican and Democratic votes. And even if by some miracle that candidate gets elected, they will be just as likely to accept big money as anyone else once they are in office.
- "It's just a matter of opinion!" - PRIMUS
The internet is changing our civilization itself in many ways, of which the political changes are only a small part. As I'm sure has been said many times before, the Internet is the most powerful too ever created for the storage and exchange of information and ideas. Each time new tools of this nature have been introduced, whether it be radio, television, the printing press, or written language itself, the world has changed dramatically and people have become more free.
At the dawn of civilization, increases in population led to new developments in agriculture. These allowed cultures which were formerly hunger-gatherers and nomads to settle in one location. From there populations increased over time and with them the need to keep track of things like who owned which cows and where did one person's land begin and another's end. To solve this problem primitive writing was created. This evolved as the culture grew and expanded with its population. Civilization was born. The great civilzations of the ancient Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans, or the ancient Chinese would never have existed without written language. It is because of their written language that we know of them today.
The printing press changed world when it opened up a new world of knowledge and ideas to people who formerly would never be exposed to them. Books became something that many people could afford, increasing literacy and improving the average person's understanding of the world. This was something the church fought because they rightly feared that new knowledge and ideas would lead people to question church doctrine, undermining its authority. At one point it was illegal to print copies of the bible because it put the word of God in the hands of the common man, removing his need to get it through a priest.
Radio and television have by and large been used for entertainment, but not exclusively. News reports put people in touch with events happening anywhere and everywhere in a way that even the best newspaper reporter never could. Even the entertainment programming contains ideas that influence how people think.
Now we have the Internet, the greatest tool for social progress since the invention of the printing press or perhaps even the written word itself. It allows people to not only experience the ideas of others, but to put forth their own ideas. It makes it very difficult for those in power to control our civilization's beliefs by controlling our access to new and different ideas. This is partly why interest in politics has waned, people realize that the power to change the world rests with themselves. This of course undermines the existing power structures which depend on maintaining the status quo by misdirecting the people's energies for change into useless and even counterproductive activities.
Information and Knowledge are power, as is the ability to communicate information and ideas. As people aquire these things they aquire power over their own lives and the power to influence the world around them. It is this which spells the downfall of tyrrany and oppression and the birth of true freedom. It is very difficult for political or social ideologies which are based upon lies to gain a foothold in the face of thousands or millions of people who are willing and able to speak out against it and be heard. The internet makes true democracy possible.
In the future historians will look back on this time as the point at which things changed. Things like this remind me of how easy it is to be oblivious to history when we're the one's living it. I for one am glad to be here playing, playing my part in the changes all around us.
Lee Reynolds
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
It would be nice to think that the government, and institutions in general, will change in the near future, but as can be seen with Napster, VHS-BetaMax, and even the Communications Decency Act, goverment and institutions will fight just as much as the technologically minded netizens fight. For every programmer distributing open source software, there is a political lobbyist pressing the issues of Big Business. For every media 'worthy' hack, there is a motion on the floor of congress for tigher controls on internet security. This fight could go on forever, except for one thing. Politics gets it's power from not moving, from keeping majority and remaining in the known past. Technology and the internet pulls power from an ever moving, ever evolving mantra: we will build better software and faster networks, we will work around the next patch. Eventually the technology will outstrip the need to address the outside forces of stagnant politics: but this will require change on a massive scale that many of us couldn't comprehend. Regulation and laws will not change until capitalism is modified and reformed. Capitalism will not change and reform until it either has no choice, or falls to a stronger force. I'm not preaching revolution in the Marxist sense, not even close. So far, the capitalist culture we live in(that has been our only experiece in life, for the most part), has been the source of our technology. Fiber optic gets burried because Qwest is making a profit. Open source can develop the software we use, but I can't imagine I'll find many of us out on the highway digging trenches for cabling just for fun. The 'revolution' that will make politics obsolete in it's current form will take place through the evolution of culture on the net. Yes, evolution. Chat rooms are fine, as are message boards, but it is not the human interaction we are genetically programmed to look for. The evolution of net culture is constantly happening, we just have to understand what is happening, and adapt to it as a technology. I don't know what the next instance of culture on the net will be, it would be premature to even attempt a guess, but new interactive technologies bring us closer to the community that culture needs.
The quote from Boston.com is:
"And Green Party nominee Ralph Nader, famous for his proconsumer, anticorporate stance, is also a capitalist, with more than $1 million worth of Cisco, and millions in cash, Fidelity funds, and other high-tech firms. He says he regrets not owning stock in the Washington Post Co., up more than tenfold since the 1970s, so he'd have more profits for ''consumer and other civic initiatives that its newspaper too rarely covers.''"
So he owns stock in Cisco Systems (http://www.cisco.com/) so what? They aren't exactly a huge megaconglomerate eager to buy out everything. I think they are a very consumer conscious company to invest in.
The articles on Salon.com are all pro-Nader, so what's your case? He owns stock in Cisco, la-di-frickin'-duh, it's not a big oil company or anything, his money isn't being used to support monied interest and squash the competition or muffle the press.
These are not the big matching funds that most people think of. When you get 5% of the vote in a given election, you are awarded millions for your next campaign. This is what Buchanan, Gore, and Bush have. Unfortunately, this type of equal campaign is not good enough for them, and they try to raise more soft money than their opponent on top of it.
You don't think it's worth giving equal public money to campaigns to avoid this corporate ownership of candidates? Give me a break, that is the only logical way to do it.
It doesn't change the amount of your return, however funding of the Presidential Election Campaign Fund is limited by the number of people who check "YES" on the little box. If no one checked "YES" the fund would be out of money and out of luck.
Hello, I must be going. I'm here to say I cannot stay, I must be going.
Katz makes the assumption that everybody is plugged in and on line. I work for a major technology company and I can tell you, a good chunk of the folks don't know their mouse from their...never mind.
Even if these folks were plugged in, its fairly safe to say that they're not reading intellectual treatises on politics anywhere much less at slashdot.
No, the net has not unleashed a new brand of American politics, nor has it really changed the existing political landscape. It has merely given a weak voice to a minority of folks that actually have some semblance of cranial function. The majority are still buffaloed by the moneyed minority, and po' folks don't show any signs of coming to consciousness soon.
"That's no moon"... Obi-Wan Kenobi
Rumors of the death of politics are greatly exaggerated.
It is necessary to have some basic control measures in society, and at a minimum this needs to include: adherence to the principle of the rule of law; the creation and maintenance of a fair and equitable body of law; and some means of enabling the people to express their views (whether their views are acted upon is another matter) without punishment. A pluralistic democracy has been found to be a reasonably effective way of achieving this.
One of the downsides of democracy is that ideas can be (and frequently are) put into practice simply because the people have been persuaded that they are good, irrespective of whether or not they are even workable let alone beneficial. Persuasion is usually achieved by promising the people money for nothing or requiring less effort from them to progress. Socialism is a classic case in point.
Although today communism has been comprehensively discredited, socialism and European-style social democracy are still powerful political forces, and are up against conservatism (whether compassionate, mainstream or radical) and libertarianism, as well as the fringe environmentalist and nationalist elements of society. This debate isn't going away any time soon, whatever the relative merits of each philosophy, and so politics will remain as long as we live in democracies.
The death of politics is possible, but it really depends on which way society develops. A libertarian capitalist system will tend to result in a slimmed down political process and fewer politicians and lobbyists, simply because the scope of government activity is reduced. On the other hand, a more left-leaning system will increase the number of politicians, lobbyists and public servants as the scope of governmental activity at local, state and federal levels is increased (by expanding the provision of public health care, welfare, increased petty regulation, and so on).
Whatever the relative merits of the Presidential candidates this time around, this is the basic choice on offer - from the Democrats, increased regulation & interference and taxation to pay for it; from the Republicans, probably no major reductions but equally no serious increases in any of these.
Since there will always be a demand from part of society for "free" health care, welfare payments and an easier working life, and a contrary demand from other parts of society to avoid the social, taxation and regulatory burdens that this would impose, there is for some time going to be a healthy political debate on these choices and the various ways of implementing them.
The best way to describe Jon Katz, from what I have read of him, is that he has no clue as to the real world.
Cyberculture? On machines which are owned by people, bits fly across lines owned by corporations. Here's a clue - you're not in cyberspace. You are in a chair in your living room, office, whatever.
A few weeks ago, there was an article on Suck.com about geeks just don't get it. At the top of the list is Jon Katz. I wish I had the URL handy, so he could read it.
The fact is while he is dreaming about an end to politics, those "have-been" politicians just keep taxing us, and taking our rights away. They keep closing their stranglehold on us, while Katz closes his eyes. and dreams about a happy place.
This stuff isn't going away, in fact, it's getting worse. More restrictive laws, more taxes.
The politicians draw their noose tighter in the real world, whilst geeks sit in front of their monitors, with no clue, thinking it is geeks who are making the rules. Sigh, one born every minute.
We need real world changes, not fantasies. In the meantime, let Katz goes where he belongs - in the cubilcle next to Fred Moody.
Then again, when has anyone in the US did anything to raise even their own children? Or, for that matter, look after large corporations?
Your track record speaks a lot. You really need the guidance and control.
And besides, without Nader, you'd still be dying in your precious cars a lot more often.
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OTTERS RULE.
Logical? That is steal stealing from taxpayers. Let people give what they want to who they want to, no max caps. It's the only logical way to do it in a free society!
Oops! Should be "still stealing"
You've ducked the point though. If you vote yes and I vote no (for simplicity assume we're the only 2 non-politicians in America - not far from the truth probably!) then $3 gets added to the slush fund. That money comes from general taxes, of which I am a contributor. Basically, other Americans are allowed to reach into my pocket and take money from me to fund politicians who don't represent my beliefs in the least.
Read 'Distraction', not for the cognition/biotech bits, but for the incisive look at the political process in a wired and image-spun world.
--
"in the marionette's eyes
glimpse the nature of the wire"
--
"in the marionette's eyes
glimpse the nature of the wire"
Wrong!
... this explains a lot.
There he goes again.
Everything you've written is also opinion;
Nice of you to notice.
your own opinion is unsupported
In your opinion, vitriolic and unsubstatiated as it is.
You respond to arguments exactly the same way my five-year-old niece does
You argue with your 5 year old niece
--
Chief Frog Inspector
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
When I met Jim Collier four years ago, he was a healthy young man. Today, both he and his brother Ken are dead.
Why?
They published a book in 1992 entitled Votescam: The Stealing of America.
You can find out more about how the American political system is rigged at www.votescam.com.
`
Warning: It is a federal offense to impersonate The President.
Perhaps the last days of politics as our parents knew it. But, the nature of politics of working out compromise to conflicting ideas and policies is, I think, a basic element of human social behavior.
Anyone who's worked in a new startup can see the creation of internal "politics" at work.
Katz's comparison to the Church is telling. Although somewhat arthritic today, the Church still has large amounts of control and a strong effect on large parts of the world. Traditional politics will also continue to have strong effects. Albeit as the primitive "reptilian brain" of social debate perhaps.
Traditional polictics will, I believe, be suplemented with many increasingly newer ways of reaching organized group decisions. I used to be that the only way groups of people were able to communicate was through heirarchies of politics, business, and religion. We now have ways of communicating and finding community with many others easily. Email & web, the killer app for self-organizing social groups. And, organization is what politics really is.
It can't be that hard, it's only ones and zeros: http://onesandzeros.tangozulu.biz
Wrong!
Your message contains no real content, essentially an admission that everything you said before is incorrect!
My five-year-old niece and I mostly argue about whether or not she can throw play-dough at my monitor - but I'd feel more comfortable having her pick the next U.S. President than your dumb ass!
"Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he deems himself your master."
Now maybe that's because even though I'm a citizen of several places, I'd rather be a citizen of none or all.
we have stark realities to deal with
Which I believe have been created through the concept of land ownership (in large part).
what is to prevent invasion and everyone's equal rights to defend their homeland from invasion.
What's an invasion? If its having a bunch of people show up one day, and mill about a bit, and act pretty decent, then you have no right to defend yourself from this, nor to prevent it. If it's people who ring your door bell to kick you in the head and take your stuff, then go ahead defend yourself, but you're not defending from invasion, you're defending from a violation against yourself. While you're at it though, try and remeber that while the person may be chinese or whatever, he's not representative of every person you'd classify as chinese.
A non-citizen's freedom of movement must never supercede a citizen's right to defend their self-government. Besides, if anyone is serious about becoming a US citizen, they can immigrate legally and become naturalized, just like I did.
The only problems with this, is that there's really no difference between a citizen and a non-citizen, don't let anyone fool you. Sure thinking as a citizen, and being nationalistic has lead people to put bombs in other countries and be generally nasty to some people they don't even know, but perhaps by realizing that there's no difference, such types of hatred could be worked against. Now if by circumstance of birth I'm not a citizen of X why should that change how I'm treated? Certainly one can naturalize, but its not as easy for some. Think of it this way: you're born in india, you live in say france for a bit, and you're a citizen of some EU country. Now you want to spend a few years in the US, and citizenship is open to all; great! but you'll have to drop your other citizenships and never again be quite welcome in France or India unless you're on a limited vacation, and switching takes a number of months to years depending. [not all of us are sought after theoretical physicists welcome in any country].
Finally, I'm glad you didn't argue about taxes, but I thought I'd point it out for others: regardless of citizenship, people living in the US for a certain amount of time in the year are taxable on their income worldwide by the IRS. But if you're a US citizen even if you don't live in the US, then you're still taxable worldwide, and I find that last bit a mite strange.
-Daniel
Every day I seem to come across a new "community" on the web, and every day I am yet again stunned. (in a good way). I'm just turning 60. And until perhaps a year ago, I had given up hope for America. I figured the "dumbing down" was going on full blast, and I honestly didn't think there were 200 people under 25 in the whole country who had any ability to analyze and/or question what the media was telling them. I used to joke (probably not alone) that "America is the first country in the world where its citizens eagerly sit down every evening for their daily dose of brainwashing." Now I've explored blogs, everything2, attended Fray 4, and much more, and I sure am breathing easier! I am very much a loner (I was once married for a whole year! :), and until recently very depressed and pessimistic. But thanks to people I have read at places like slashdot, I feel somehow a little "connected."
My only thoughts on the political future in America might be a word of caution about the power of money and ownership. And don't write Wall Street off completely, at least not yet.
Based on the thinking I am encountering in this thread, I don't think any of you are amongst those in Silicon Valley who totally ignore Washington, until they want something to go their way (when the lobbying begins). I firmly believe your personal ethics and morals prevent you from doing that.
And one massive calamity, or maybe a big war, will set things back quite a lot. But frankly, it's such an invigorating atmoshpere here, that I hope and pray this doesn't happen.
An interesting observation: the protesting youth of the 60's sincerely scared politicians, and Washington DC in general. Now in 2000, they sure don't seem to be scared, concerned, or even AWARE of what is really happening. Which augurs well I believe, in that the change is more profound, and on a level they aren't even aware of.
I salute you, and wish you well!
To Proctor and Gamble, General Foods, Gillette: You're gonna lose!
What will replace conventional politics? Too early to tell?
Norm
The rhetoric Katz presents is interesting but only because it is utterly devoid of any bearing on the reality of ever burdensome government. Politics may be less important per se, but government power grows relentlessly. What Katz stated has no bearing on the true nature of government - force. For any moderately successful person, governments at all levels will still take over 50% of their income. I am in that persecuted class known as a business owner. We bear the brunt of the arrogant bureaucratic class. It is astounding the increasing resources we must expend to please bureaucratic edits that issued by busy bodies in government. It is worse since we pay those who harass us. Rhetoric such as stated will only be meaningful when the government parasites loose power over our productive output. That can only happen if large numbers of government parasites are lifted off our backs (i.e., fired) and turned loose to pursue productive work in the private sector. Until then rhetoric such as yours will only cause me to smile at its naivete. PS May I suggest you read Rose Wilder Lane's "The Discovery of Freedom." It discuss the precious gift of freedom -- and how short lived it has been in human history. Isabel Paterson's, "The God of the Machine," is another classic.