Posts tagged ideas
same world together
Elites are not conspiracies. Very seldom does a small group of people get together and deliberately try to take over a larger group for its own ends. Elites are nothing more, and nothing less, than groups of friends who also happen to participate in the same political activities. They would probably maintain their friendship whether or not they were involved in political activities; they would probably be involved in political activities whether or not they maintained their friendships. It is the coincidence of these two phenomena which creates elites in any group and makes them so difficult to break.
In recent years, analysts have been much more willing to credit participatory democrats with explicitly political purposes. Experiments with egalitarian and cooperative decision making are a kind of politics-just not the politics of parliamentary maneuver and bureaucratic manipulation. Rather, as sociologist Wini Breines put it in Community and Organization, her seminal study of the 1960s new left, by “prefiguring” within the current practices of the movement the values of freedom, equality, and community that they wanted on a grand scale, activists were helping bring them about. Their dilemma-and it was a dilemma, not a mistake-was that they wanted to effect political change without reproducing the structures that they opposed. To be “strategic” was to privilege organization over personhood and political reform over radical change, and this they would not do.
Settlers vs. Citizens
Recently, everything reminds me of Wirite: community organizations struggling to gather support for their causes; people in Egypt, Libya, Syria, and Yemen being left with the enormous task of replacing old ways with new better ways of living; anything on the news about a liberally minded person getting riled up by a conservatively minded person, or vice versa; news stories that show someone frustrated about something – not able to breathe about something in their life… some injustice; every time I hear someone saying that they are frustrated with the roles that our leaders are playing in our country, and throughout the world; every power struggle that just moves and moves around and around, and every time the people that should make the real decisions about things, since they are the ones most influenced, not feeling empowered to express themselves.
If I studied politics, government, or business, I would have a set of tools that would allow me to wrap my head around these things – to be more comfortable and level headed when talking about “the way the world is” and “the way we can help or do good”. It’s tough not having this set of tools. But therein lies what is so valuable: if you can be strong enough to be frustrated and struggle to understand something that makes absolutely no sense to you, you can come up with special ways to help.
In his book “Democracy in America”, Tocqueville seemed to capture a sense of what the United States was and is. What I gather from his writings is that townships in the United States were founded on a set of strong, clear, meaningful ideas (equality among all citizens, decentralized decision making, citizen ownership of the rule of law, and trust within communities and governments). I notice that the arguments being put forth by the current leaders in the United States are all loosely based on small remnants of these ideas, but the bigger picture of how all of them fit with each other is being lost.
Halfway Down
This is my first blog entry ever, so here is the ubiquitous one liner that tries to sum up my feelings or intentions:
I didn’t grow up on the Internet, but I’ll grow up here.
This first blog entry I am exploring why I spent more than a year developing the ideas of the Document Project (dp) before discussing the concept with the web community, before talking to possible end users, or talking to potential investors, even though these things are very important to creating successful websites.
What is the point of asking? We have recently been approached by a US State Senator that is interested in evaluating the dp to see if it is a useful tool to connect with the senator’s constituency. This made us realize that our first market could be constituent services offices at all levels of the US government. Constituent services is a good market since they could benefit from a new technology that allows the collective voice of a constituency to be expressed in document form, similar to the bills and resolutions that are debated in government, and similar to petitions that are written to a representative. It may be advantageous for first adopters at all scales (town, state, country) to advertise in campaigning that they are using such a tool, and the size of the groups using the tool can naturally scale with the development of the technology.
