Emergent Democracy Essay

The world needs emergent democracy more than ever. The issues are too complex for representative governments to understand. Representatives of sovereign nations negotiating with each other in global dialog are also very limited in their ability to solve global issues. The monolithic media and their increasingly simplistic representation of the world can not provide the competition of ideas necessary to reach consensus. Emergent democracy has the potential to solve many of the problems we face in the exceedingly complex world at both the national and global scale. The community of toolmakers will build the tools necessary for an emergent democracy if the people support the effort and resist those who try to stifle this effort and destroy the commons.

This is a very nice essay on emergent democracy. This is my hope for the future. I really only think technology will be able to solve the problems we face today, they are too deep-seated.

Given the tools, we can band together and solve problems that are in our area of expertise. The problems of today are too complex to expect a single representative to grasp. So they don’t grasp them, they are “educated” by lobbyists, which gain access by donating money. How can my representative be expected to know about cloning, foreign trade, economics, and education? They can’t be. But together, relying on our own strengths, we can fully address these topics. With the right tools we may even surpass what we, as individuals, think is possible.