The world is long overdue for a completely new system of governance. The need for political representation or a paternalistic and opaque authority has been removed by technology. Governance by nation states is now as arbitrary and illogical as city states were earlier found to be. Corporations have the freedom to live in a world without borders or social responsibility, to own property no individual can claim and to control a one world government and legal system, with insupportable consequences for the world's resources and individual rights. To effect the change we require in 2012, to give individuals control and responsibility, to bring regional systems under regional governance and protect the heritage of future generations, we need a new political model.
Individual Rights
In any system where groups have power, individual rights are always at risk. Both pure democracy and communism have brought human rights horrors every bit as reprehensible as fascist states; in order to guard against genocide, torture, and other persecution of individuals in the name of the greater good, a system must safeguard individual rights above all other authority.
Read the rest at Wikileaks Central
A proposal for governance in the post 2011 worldSubmitted by Heather Marsh
I'm a bit befuddled by these proposals. How do these "user groups" actually enforce their decisions about the governance of the systems they claim as their purview?
ReplyDelete"each user group should consist of all people affected by the system and no people not affected by the system."
Who decides who is affected by a system and who isn't? What if someone not affected by the system decides to contest the user group's claim to sovereignty over the system and tries to control it anyway? What does the user group do then?
And I'm really put off by the kind of dangerous techie elitism that sits behind the idea of the "core group" that is somehow recognized as the natural and meritocratic expert masters of the "systems" these user groups claim to control.
"Anything which is not only of global interest but also does not belong to any one generation cannot be destroyed and cannot be claimed as the property of any individual, group, corporation or government."
Great. How is the protection of the global commons organized so that the commons is not appropriated by anyone who wants to walk right in and take some of it.
It seems to me that the author has failed to come to grips with the most fundamental challenges of governance in the real world.
Who exactly is going to govern me and my family in this wonderful new world of user groups? "Anonymous" maybe? A bunch of hackers who act as a self-appointed vigilante group to destroy the information systems of people they decide they don't like? I'd sooner be governed by this brat:
http://youtu.be/_C34g5mz1ZQ
@ Dan K
ReplyDeleteWell it is only a single page post. Perhaps she has though this through a bit more.
What I find particularly interesting is that the digital generation has started thinking about applying technological innovation to governance.
Fair enough Tom. There definitely are opportunities there.
ReplyDelete