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J. P. Barlow — Internet Has Broken the Political System
MexiCali59 recommends an account up at Hillicon Valley on a speech by John Perry Barlow to the Personal Democracy Forum in New York. "The deluge of information available on the Web has made the country ungovernable, according to EFF co-founder John Perry Barlow. 'The political system is broken partly because of Internet,' Barlow said. 'It's made it impossible to govern anything the size of the nation-state. We're going back to the city-state. The nation-state is ungovernably information-rich.' ... Barlow said there is too much going on at every level in Washington, DC, for the government to effectively handle everything on its plate. Instead, he advocated citizens organizing around the issues most important to them. 'There is a circle of fat around the Beltway that is incredibly thick. We can no longer try to run this country from the center. We've got to run it, just like the Internet, from the edges.' Barlow also said that President Barack Obama's election, driven largely by small donations, has fundamentally changed American politics. He said a similar bottom-up structure is needed for governing as well. 'It's not the second coming, everything won't get better overnight, but that made it possible to see a future where it wasn't simply a matter of money to define who won these things. The government could finally start belonging to people eventually.'"
I thought Newt Gingrich was gone?
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
The government of the United States was never supposed to be the top heavy behemoth it is today. At the time our nation was formed, the states of our federation were intended to be much more autonomous - for exactly the reasons outlined in the article.
Local issues and positions can't be handled fairly from a central authority. A country this big just can't be homogeneous enough for that to work.
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
There's too much information available to people! It makes them harder to govern! By golly, when people UNDERSTAND our Policies and can see ALL of our platform, it sure does make it hard to make them like us! When people can actually review what we've done without relying on the news centers, how do we keep up the lies? We're doing our best to keep them as uneducated as possible, by failing to properly support the school system, but they seem to be teaching themselves how politics work by discussing it with other people!
Oh the humanity! What ever will us political figures do if we can't keep the sheep acting like sheep!
...politicians can no longer get away with the same bullshit they once did. Imagine if the Internet was around during Nixon's days, or World War II. Things would have been extremely different.
Politicians have always lied...the difference is that the common person can now find proof about it in a matter of seconds with a single Google search.
Living With a Nerd
he advocated citizens organizing around the issues most important to them
How is that different from what is happening now?
Our elected officials typically understand very little of what they legislate, and often little of the bills they themselves propose. "The shoulder thing that goes up", "tubes", the Patriot act, net neutrality, the bailout. In practice citizens ogranize themselves into some type of lobbying effort to spoon feed their wants and needs to politicians.
Sometimes that organization is in the form of a corporation. Sometimes it is a PAC. Sometimes it is a group of individuals showing up at a rally. But private citizens are driving it.
http://hotair.com/archives/2010/04/23/obama-still-lying-shamelessly-about-how-important-small-donors-were-to-his-campaign/
"In the general election, Obama got about 34 percent of his individual donations from small donors, people who gave $200 or less, according to a report from the Campaign Finance Institute. Another 23 percent of donations came from people who gave between $201 and $999, and another 42 percent from people who gave $1,000 or more."
The nation-state is ungovernably information-rich.
Your right, we should tax the information-rich individuals and make them give some of their information away...they do not deserve that much information! (Greedy bastards)
there is too much going on at every level in Washington, D.C., for the government to effectively handle everything on its plate.
Oh he is soooo right! I mean, the government was working perfectly before the internet. Wow, glad I've been shown the light!
The former Grateful Dead songwriter said those disppointed in Obama are disregarding the extent to which the political system is broken.
Well that's OK, because Obama said he was going to help fix it! :)
"There is a circle of fat around the Beltway that is incredibly thick" Barlow said. "We can no longer try to run this country from the center. We've got to run it, just like the Internet, from the edges."
Wow, that is an even better analogy than the internet being a "series of tubes"!
I lost some brain cells beating my head against the desk after reading this "quality" piece, but I do not blame the author as much as I do the speaker. In my opinion, perhaps Washington should stop "clogging the internet tubes" as they would put it...
We should start a new Slashdot and return control to the geeks. It actually wouldn't be that hard to get some users to
Barlow also said that President Barack Obama's election, driven largely by small donations
Obama's election wasn't driven by "small donations". It was driven by the fact that the country was sick of GWB and the GOP. Any Democrat not named Jane Fonda would have won in 2008. Obama's fund-raising achievements were very impressive but I wouldn't credit them with securing his victory.
Timing is everything in politics. If John McCain had beaten Bush in 2000 he would have gone on to be President (and the last eight years would have been very different, but that's another discussion). If Obama had run in 2004 he would have gotten creamed.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
To summarize, the Internet is the solution. The internet is the problem. We're connected, but not engaged. We're "networked" but not mobilized. We're Friends and Followers, but not active and acting.
We've come so far, we have so far to go.
The internet has allowed people to become much more informed than they once were, but it also lends itself to pointless bloviating on /. that ultimately accomplishes no political change. Like this.
"Google’s capacity to control human thought makes the Catholic church jealous, I bet," Barlow said. "They wish they’d thought of it."
I'm scratching my head trying to figure out how exactly Google is controlling my thoughts. Sure, I use google, and gmail, and I have a Droid... how does that equate to controlling my thoughts? Maybe they have unique access to my thoughts, as written down, but that is a far different thing than control.
File this one under Rant/Drug Induced/EFF Nonsense
Brawndo: It's what plants crave!
The problem is that we ever tried to manage the country centrally in the first place.
Any network or systems administrator will tell you that managing a diverse set of systems centrally is difficult. The only way you can pragmatically do that is with uniform conformity through diktat.
Unless you want to verge into absolute dictatorship, managing many smaller systems centrally is difficult if not possible, leading to a lot of loose ends and bad ideas. The founding fathers realized this, which is part of the reason they went for "limited powers" in the Federal government. There's only so much that a single person or body of people can multitask.
Unfortunately, we've forgotten this reality many times in the past 200 years, leading to an excess of government. "Big government" has to be small out of necessity of self-preservation, or scope creep will grow it to a colossal, unsupportable size.
Think of government as a compute cluster, or cluster of clusters, if you will. If you send jobs off to a cluster, which then sends jobs off to a node, you're trying to balance the overall computation amongst all available systems so no one node/processor doesn't get overtly taxed. This is the opposite of a "we're here to help" federal government: all jobs go up to the process scheduler/dispatcher, and get stuck there, while the lower levels of government (state, county, local) largely ignore what are ultimately their own affairs (poverty, crime, unemployment, civil projects, etc.) because the Federal government "is here to help".
This is why community gardens often thrive, while government food subsidy/distributions are usually failures (in terms of results as well as costs). Local problems need to be dealt with locally.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
the problem with the "destroy government" crowd is that we need strong regulations for something like the economy to work. since 1994 when the republicans took over congress, we have systematically taken away governmental regulatory powers over the economy and wall street. the result is the financial meltdown in 2008
so obviously, we need a strong central authority to monitor and control the economy to keep it healthy. the libertarian myth of unicorns and leprechauns and a marketplace which regulates itself is factually and historically false, just study the banking panics of the 1800s and why we had the great depression in the 1930s: this what you get with a marketplace that is not regulated. the natural state of the marketplace is manipulation of the market by its largest players (corporatism) and constant bubbles and pops (greed, then fear and panic: all you need is simple human psychology for that). the libertarian myth of a level headed marketplace of equals is mythmaking, not reality
that being said, there are plenty of areas of bloat where the government can and should be downsized. its just that i see no intelligence in the "destroy government" crowd, just a lot of people with an almost religious fanaticism to the idea of small government, ready to hack away at everything. we need intelligence on the issue: WHERE do we cut, because obviously we don't cut everything, especially with the need for the strong regulation of the economy
to deny that is to simply stand in complete denial of what 14 years of deregulation of the economy wrought in 2008
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The real power of democracy is overthrowing the veil of pretend democracy, which advocates ignorance to a sub-par governance system.
I will bend like a reed in the wind.
Corporate greed and the ease for them to "purchase" government officials, the total lack of oversight in spending and operation, ignoring the will of the people and doing whatever the f*ck the governments wants, the constant blaming the "other" party for any problems, trying to fix things and sway the people with marketing instead of any actual actions, the corruption (Sure BP is at fault for the oil spill, but wasn't our government supposed to make sure they were in compliance? Oh that's right, it's just cheaper to buy them off with hookers and cash. Gotta keep the share holders happy.), becoming so large that it's just utterly inefficient to run has made the country ungovernable...
There, fixed that for you.
The real Sig captains the Northwestern. This one captains
the us gov. Was broken before the internet. The internet just enabled everyone to know how fricking hopeless it actually is. In all actuality, I don't think there is a country in the present with anything more than a corrupt, dysfunctional government. Think about it. It's pretty dismal all over. The world needs more functional psychopaths running it.
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
"The nation-state is ungovernably information-rich." You mean that the powers that be can't piss on our heads and tell us it's rain when we're no longer wearing blinders, nose in the feedbag and under sensory deprivation. We can smell it, we can taste it, we know we're getting pissed on. Maybe we wouldn't be so upset if they were doing their job of governing the country instead of focusing on keeping us baffled and confused while robbing us blind?
The Internet is the printing press turned up to 11. We saw the kind of shitstorm that swept Europe when Guttenburg started cranking out his bibles.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
the idea that the government created the greed in the hearts of bankers is obviously false, but it is more disturbing that so many people like yourself think that the banks needed government encouragements to act greedily
the community reinvestment farce is indeed a misstep by the government, and was wrong, and contributed to the 2008 meltdown, absolutely. but it is no more than propagandistic alternative reality mythmaking to believe this is the causative agent of the meltdown in 2008. do you do not see that it merely enabled simple human greed? it scares me about you and anyone else who believes this nonsense
"If the Federal government had stayed out of it, it wouldn't have happened."
you really believe that? you really believe a marketplace without regulation functions better?
at best, you can say government missteps hurt, and that the government needs better policy. but please don't tell me you actually and honestly believe that no government regulation somehow results in healthier marketplaces. if you honestly believe that, i really fear for this country, that somebody can be so deluded
please read up on economic history. please educate yourself about how the economy actually hurts. please admit to yourself that the marketplace's greatest enemies to stability and health are NATURAL enemies (manipulation by large players, simple human psychology of greed and then fear and panic). please wake up from the propaganda
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I saw this in TFA:
"The political system is broken partly because of Internet," Barlow said. "It's made it impossible to govern anything the size of the nation-state. We're going back to the city-state. The nation-state is ungovernably information-rich."
And then this:
"Speaking at Personal Democracy Forum in New York on Thursday, Barlow said there is too much going on at every level in Washington, D.C., for the government to effectively handle everything on its plate. Instead, he advocated citizens organizing around the issues most important to them."
Ok, so which it? Too much information, or too much government?
I can tell you, in my opinion, if you think you have too much information about the government, you have too much government. And if the complaint really is that there is too much going on in Washington for citizens to make sense of because they can actually get information on it, there is TOO MUCH going on in Washington.
Nice try, though.
I also read this comment:
"I explained it like this: Would you, in Sweden, approve of someone in Portugal being able to set laws that regulated what you did?"
Um, that sounds EXACTLY LIKE THE EU. Except Portugal needs to get a few other nations to gang up on Sweden. Look into the feta cheese controversy in the EU. Nice. This is an argument for or against states' rights and Article Ten how?
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
While I don't disagree that more local responsibility and governance would be a good trend, the idea that adding more information and more information flow efficiency makes the system inherently ungovernable is both counter-intuitive, and almost certainly wrong.
It's true that adding more information and failing to manage that information and its use would make a mess. But along with more information, we've also added such things as - Google, to select just the information you need from the sea of information, like - Wikis, to make intranet (distributed) team cooperation much more effective, like - service-oriented architectures and workflow systems, to pool the services of multiple agencies into a more informed, coherent larger decision-support and transaction system.
And the Internet, through social information sharing and interaction, is breaking down cultural barriers (and making ignorance or parochialism a necessarily willful and socially unacceptable state to be in.)
I predict that the Internet, and distributed information and transaction systems, will allow for more effective governance at even larger scales than the nation-state, as well as more effective nested federal (jurisdiction-sharing) forms of governance at every level down the hierarchy.
We just got a global nervous-system, and the beginnings of a global memory and mind. That's only likely to cause us to descend to tribalism if it provokes a fearful backlash from the willfully ignorant, or those unwilling to compromise, discuss, and share at many levels with many sizes of surrounding societies.
If done while maintaining democracy and responsibility at all levels, this technology could lead to better governance, and governance at the global scale we clearly require to face down several serious global issues we have created for ourselves. We've got global trade and business. A counterbalancing force of effective and democratic global governance is now needed, and technologically possible.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Ironic how The Peoples' Republic of America has been found "ungovernable" and surprise, surprise: the answer is governing at the STATE level! It's almost as if this guy is channelling the Founders.
No, we simply don't believe that it was greedy bank behavior that cause the meltdown. It was government-provided immunity. Nobody had to care about the credit quality of mortgages--they were Fannie Mae insured!
yes, the feds forgot to lock the doors. which allowed the robbers to steal the loot. so you blame the feds, and give the robbers a pass! and then, you conclude that the real solution to the robbery is to take off the doors entirely!
Attempting to choose what is good for us ranges from bad to disastrous...
the regulations don't tell you how to live your life, fool. the regulations simply prevent you from committing crimes. duh. is it your assertion that if we had no laws against mugging and no police to stop muggers that no one would get mugged? then why the hell do you believe that an unregulated marketplace will have no crimes committed? why are you so daft? ...often because the regulators become pawns of the regulated.
on this part i agree with you 100%. so it is my assertion that we should get the graft and corruption out of the police department. meanwhile, you assert we should get rid of the police department!
what the hell is wrong with you?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The political system is broken because money has taken over the input to our representatives and megacorporate control of media has taken over the output to the voters.
That is to say, it's the same problem, both ways.
Our democracy has become overwhelmed by the concentration of wealth in a few hands, owing to vacuous sophistry that skews our economic system towards one that shovels money to those who have it and entrains the lives of those who don't.
People who call any attempt at regulation or any braking of the egregious concentration of wealth "socialism" are buying into a psychological campaign of misinformation that is used to suck the foundation of the country out from under them.
While it's possible to get rich and not become a plutocrat, that just takes one person out of the stream and leaves hundreds of others to let the money tell them what to do.
If you want to fix this information economy, you need to get control of the economy first, so that the money doesn't overwhelm the information.
Protecting and enforcing the values upon which the nation was founded does not require massive micro management.
(emphasis mine)
That does mean bringing back slavery, as slavery was a core institution at the time the US were founded. Too often people say "but it's not in the constitution!" either as a knee-jerk reaction or as a weak attempt to say that something is not permissible. How about instead of talking about the constitution all the time we have a real debate?
What bugs me is that so much of the so-called "states rights" movement is nothing more than a series of pick-and-choose ideas. We don't want federal programs (except Medicare! And agricultural subsidies! And small-business loans!) We don't want the federal government involved in schools (but we want school prayers! And no evolution!) We don't want environmental regulations (but now the Louisiana governor wants the government involved in cleaning the oil spill!) And on and on and on... The constant whining for small government has little credibility anymore.
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it dissolve.
Your post pretty much consists of worthless ranting but one term caught my eye: corporate anarchists. I've heard people use it before but what on earth does it mean? There is no wikipedia entry on it. Can you define it? And if you can't, why are you using it?
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
Mr. Barlow belongs to the "keep the people stupid" school of thought.
I mean I am a doctor. I could complain that the "internet" is a real pain in the ass because patients come in asking lots of questions nowadays. In fact some of them come up with diseases even I have never heard of (except as a footnote in some text). I could claim that INFORMATION IS BAD and is standing in the way of my medical practice.
Or I could make sure I was good at my job, congratulate those patients who manage to correctly self-diagnose, and educate the ones who don't. But I guess asking a politician to put some effort into his job is going over the top.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Sen [Name] is an opportunist, who's got a real talent for [talent]. But he and his [party affiliation] buddies have broken the political system. Because they hate [something important]. They're [vitriolic adj/noun combo], hiding behind the brand name [political adjective].
FTFY
Wow. Somebody's been drinking a big helping of Ma Pelosi's Pot & Kettle Kool-Aid. In slightly modified form (name, party, adjectives), your remark can easily apply to 90% of the politicians in Washington. Take the blinders off.
Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find the text of Mr. Barlow's speech - but the part cited by the author doesn't inspire confidence in his insight. California's issues are a microcosm of the federal problems, exacerbated by the initiative process. The state has become governed by mass vote via initiatives. In effect, every single person has become a special interest, or at the least easily manipulated by them. That process is not dominated by the net, thought it has slightly worsened the severity of the problem. With initiatives having hamstrung the budget process, the government is unable to flex the budget to accommodate economic reality, or reduce a budget bloated with special interest projects without now cutting vital services. "The Edge" isn't the answer, it is a large part of the problem. The reason we have a representative government is that the people who created the Constitution saw that what was needed was people who could look at the overall picture and set priorities and see them through. We need to do what the founders expected of us, elect intelligent people of good conscience with the courage to set priorities and actually make decisions regardless of the consequences to their political future. This is true at both the state and federal level. Too often, we elect people based on a beauty contest, asking too few questions and demanding too few answers, and then we fail to let them do the job we elected them to do. Governance from the "Edge" would be a surrender to chaos.
Where there's a will (and a control freak), there's a way. Government isn't going to give up power that easy, I would expect some dangerous new automated monitoring systems are on the horizon. Along with some interesting countermeasures. We may start looking for browsers that will automatically surf dozens of unrelated sites for every site you browse just so that the collected data will be too erroneous to properly evaluate. Of course, that itself labels you a subversive...
Why do we need statesman to be held in high regard? They're human, just like the rest of us. Some may like to surf p0rn or diddle the occasional intern. I elect my representatives to handle my affairs in the capitol. Not because they are better people than I. But because I'm too busy doing other things. Same reason I pay someone to mow my lawn.
The whole idea that politicians' words are worth more than that of the average citizen was just an excuse for them to manipulate the system for their own gain. "Trust me. I know better than you." is just a line of bullshit employed by every confidence artist in the business.
Have gnu, will travel.