Some reflections on "lightweight governance" by Josh Skolnick

Hey, I do recommend Barack's List, which draws parallels between the emergence of self-governing systems, on the Net, and for countries:

If one day we find that we are "intimately familiar with the power and the pleasures of government services," it would be pretty much a 180 degree turnaround from our normal conception of government. The government that Reagan railed against was a government that was impersonal, unsustainable, and distant. If Obama can get us to trust government like we trust Facebook -- that is, to trust both it's power and it's empowerment -- he'll go a long way toward defanging Reagan's old anti-government arguments. If he does that, he'll set the groundwork for an entire generation to trust government again.

Comments

[Wholesale]

Good thoughts, nice blog, thanks

[j_norton]

Yeah, that's assuming government is ever TRUSTWORTHY at some point in the future. You don't just set up a couple of websites and everything is hunky dory in DC. I love this new, social government stuff, don't get me wrong; but there's a lot of stuff going on in the shadows that aren't going to come out of those shadows just by posting some financing stuff online and asking the public for a few thousand suggestions. People have lost faith because our government lets corporations run a muck with us and steal our money and saturate our lives with advertisements; they've systematically destroyed our food system, alongside our manufacturing sector; the FDA is a joke and isn't protecting anyone but pharmaceutical interests. Yeah, a few websites probably aren't going to fix that right away, but who knows maybe the large volume people involved (I mean the upcoming generation) maybe we can get some real people into various offices and eventually see some change from within.

It's gonna take tiiiiiiiiime, a whole lotta precious time. And it's gonna take money, a whole lotta spendin' money! (to do it, to do it, to do it)