- New types of citizen engagement platforms are being created and used to form policy and participate in direct democracy, such as the Pirate Party Liquid Feedback4, Your Priorities5, DemocracyOS6 and WeGov7. There is resistance from those who control the current system but I believe it will be futile because people are creating a shadow form of governance, or rather self-governance. This is happening on the fringes still, but it is moving towards the centre at a steady speed.
We need more studies to see the pros and cons of active voting systems and liquid democracy models, with delegates rather than representatives, for example.
We need to do the opposite of what Russell Brand is advocating, we need to use our votes. Even if we don’t want to engage with the current broken system, we should not use that as an excuse for apathy. We should see it as an encouragement to engage in creating our own alternatives, our new co-created systems; to be creative about it and to connect. Connectivity is the key to a rapid change; but information in itself is meaningless if we don’t know how to decode it into wisdom.
theadvancedapes, thought of you while reading this. Hope you are well friend.
Thanks for the shout out thenewgreen. I've been well, still getting settled in Belgium, but thoroughly enjoying the intellectual atmosphere at the GBI. If people are interested in the thoughts of this article - which essentially argue for a structural paradigm shift in modes of control - then you may be interested in my latest paper (just published in the Journal of Evolution & Technology ). In it I propose Human Metasystem Transition (HMST) theory, which argues that fundamental control transitions always occur with the emergence of a higher information medium (in this case the Internet), and this is an evolutionary model within which new forms of governance can not only be expected to stabilize in the coming decades, but also an evolutionary model in which this transition can be predicted and studied.