DEMOCRACY IN THE CLOUD
Filegroup 101907, March 14, 2014, originally posted to NCDD discussion listserv
According to business reports, in 2012 the number of smartphones in use went past the one-billion mark.
That fact is simply stunning, and opens some unbelievable and awesome possibilities for social-change activists who can
get the vision.
REDUCE COMPLEXITY
Can we somehow reduce the high complexity of political dialogue to its lowest common-denominator and effective
mutual-respect/true-creative-listening level, get the basic arguments and concerns and issues cut down to bullet-point
(Twitter) size – and unleash the power of this vast network of directly-interconnected geographically-mobile human
beings?
A NEW CENTER OF GRAVITY
http://www.kosmosjournal.org/
In a new video released on March 11 by KOSMOS Journal, author David Bollier talks with James Quilligan from Kosmos.
David Bollier is the author of Think Like a Commoner, and in the context of many other fascinating remarks, he makes a
critical simple point. In today’s environment, a new “political center of gravity” can emerge under the guidance and
inspiration of “The People”.
http://www.thinklikeacommoner.com/
KOSMOS publisher Nancy Roof says “David Bollier is the most articulate voice in the commons movement today and
James Quilligan, the deepest philosopher of the Commons today.”
https://www.facebook.com/nancy.roof.1
UNITED AMERICANS/WE THE PEOPLE
If can begin to grasp the scope of this vision and this primal call to action, we can look around us and see “pieces of the
puzzle” everywhere in our environment. The time is coming, perhaps soon, when all this philosophical vision will be
transformed into an effective action-path for universal transpartisan organizing on every issue of concern, in the full
context of human diversity.
A year or so ago, NCDD member and activist/organizer Michael Smith put together a project called United Americans,
and issued a really great video. His vision: integrate the American political landscape using smartphone polling
technology.
Take a couple minutes with this video. It too is brilliant and right-on.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVYyQXRM2VA
United Americans is putting us on the right track. Now, let’s build up the power level…
COMPLEXITY, BOILING FROGS, AND THE PERFECT STORM
About a month ago, economist and current Common Cause president Robert Reich published a brief piece on income
inequity, entitled “Why there’s no Outcry”
http://robertreich.org/post/74519195381
His point: it isn’t “apathy” that is crushing the response of voters on this issue. There are solid reasons, and he lists
them.
For my money – we can generalize on his theme a bit. Why is there no outcry? My answer is – people are stunned and
overloaded, and there is no clear action path. The general principle applies across the board.
Two years ago, Occupy exploded – supposedly in response to Wall Street – but more realistically, as a catch-all response
to every sort of voter disaffection. In Santa Barbara, every political annoyance in the county had a representative in the
local Occupy group – and not only leftist/progressive/greens. There were libertarian and Tea Party people there too –
everybody with a different problem and issue – and nobody pulling in a common direction beyond annoyance and
general-purpose fist shaking.
Occupy exploded across the scene – and then – I think I can say – fizzled.
Why? There are different opinions – but mine is: it was too diverse, too scattered, entirely lacking in national
integration, and (unlike the Tea Party) had no clear action agenda (“demands”). Occupy was not so much a “movement”
(everybody going in the same direction) as an explosion of anger and frustration and blame about many things – much
of it quite justified one way or the other.
The explosion was a solid indication of motivating power. And that raw frustration, the motivating energy for a
transformative political movement, is still there today. With Congress at 13% approval, there’s a huge “underserved
market” for a political vision that works.
If the motivating energy for a political movement was there when Occupy burst on the scene – the agenda, the
technology, the methods and clarity and the organizing principles required to get people pulling in the same direction –
were not.
The Tea Party, on the other hand – had their internal complexity reduced to a couple of bullet points. Stop Obama, stop
spending – and for many, “government is the enemy”. An agenda like that places no undue strain on the grey matter.
Scribble your talking points on the palm of your hand. That’s all you need, the people will love you…
But today – for the progressives and liberals and greens and “commoners” – it is increasingly clear that our crisis is
critically hydra-headed and multi-dimensional. It’s not one issue, or two or three issues. It’s hundreds of issues – highly
interconnected/interdependent issues – system problems, moral/ethical failures, bad processes, and sheer inability to
decide “what we should do” (like on immigration). It’s a “perfect storm” – all the worst factors hitting at the same time,
and pushing us to our absolute limits.
So – the net result for the average American voter is either naïve over-simplification and anger, or critical psychological
overload. It’s too much too fast, and too complicated – and too interdependent and all-over-the-place – and the impact
on most attentive voters is too-commonly a universal brain fog. Even the well-intended voter/citizen is caught in the
“slowly boiling frog” syndrome – numbed by the complexity and overlapping simultaneity of our situation, tempted
sometimes to simplistic moral outrage, and then often numbly changing the channel and hoping somebody or
something comes along to fix it.
(Herbert Simon was a Noble-Prize-winning cognitive psychologist, social scientist and economist)
It’s information overload that accounts for most “voter apathy” – and probably the core reason that “60% of Americans
can’t name their senators” – much less talk intelligently about a complex and controversial issue. Simple moral highground is too often a thing of the past (e.g., integration of lunch counters). Today, even the best of us can’t be sure
what we should do on tricky issues. We’ve got to work this out together – carefully, respectfully, with cool.
A LOW-BANDWIDTH INTERFACE TO A HIGH-BANDWIDTH NETWORK
If people here have ever started pushing Google through its paces, it should be immediately obvious that their system is
one super-incredible set-up. That place is in sheer sky-drive, with massive potential to support highly articulate whitelight-driven social change -- IF we can figure out how to set it up….
The idea today is – program the apocalypse on a dime. Reduce the complexity to the lowest possible dimensionality –
bullet-point the entire vision of transpartisan politics – and also, to the extent feasible – the great objectives of Living
Room Conversations – and the NoLabels activist program – and get this framework on somebody’s smartphone as they
are sitting at the table in a Conversation Café or Living Room Conversation.
Reduce complexity, maximize holistic inclusion (as they are doing on KOSMOS journal), and get “everything connected
to everything else” – in one simple smartphone key-pad format – and somehow get that potential moving in the world.
Want to do some “political triage”? Make it simple – make it “clickable”. Reduce the noise, get rid of the “prose” – and
get the click-storm moving…
MULTIPLE INTERCONNECTED ISSUES
Each of these categories has many “sub-crises” within it, and many are serious. Think about the overlap in these issues.
Are you telling me that ecology and economy and climate change are not connected?
ACTION
Think about this “new center of gravity” idea. We don’t need “permission” and we don’t need to attack anything or
anybody. We can turn our backs on “blame” and get into “responsibility for the whole”. We don’t need to curse the
darkness. We need to turn on the lights.
All it takes to create a meaningful political force – is enough people pulling in the same direction.
The direction we need to be headed – all of us together, white brown red green blue yellow – is towards common
ground – the foundation of the new world – a “world that works”.
REFERENCES
Joe Klein: Politics Lost: How American Democracy was Trivialized by People Who Think You’re Stupid (2006)
Ronald Brownstein: The Second Civil War – How Extreme Partisanship has Paralyzed Washington and Polarized America
(2007)
Juliet Eilperin: Fight Club Politics – How Partisanship is Poisoning the House of Representatives (2006)
Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson: Off Center – The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy (2005)
Lanny Davis: Scandal – How ‘Gotcha’ Politics is Destroying America (2006)
E.J. Dionne: Why Americans Hate Politics (1991, 2004)
E.J. Dionne: Our Divided Political Heart – The Battle for the American Idea in an Age of Discontent (2012)
Jonathan Haidt: The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (2012)
Franca Baroni: On Governance (2011)
Dee Dee Meyers: Why Women Should Rule the World (2008)
Bill Bishop: The Big Sort - Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart (2004)
Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein: The Broken Branch – How Congress is Failing American and How to Get it Back on
Track (2006)
Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein: It's Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided
With the New Politics of Extremism (2012)
Herbert Simon: The Sciences of the Artificial (1969)
George Miller: The Magical Number Seven Plus or Minus Two https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magical_Number_Seven,_Plus_or_Minus_Two
Robert Reich: Why There is no Outcry - http://robertreich.org/post/74519195381
President Obama – the Human Rorschach Test - http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/167455-obama-thehuman-rorschach-test-faces-huge-2012-challenge
Alvin Toffler: Future Shock (1971, 1984) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Shock
NOTES AND DETAILS
NCDD: The National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation is a network of thousands of innovators who bring people
together across divides to tackle today’s toughest challenges. NCDD serves as a gathering place, a resource
clearinghouse, a news source, and a facilitative leader. http://ncdd.org
Living Room Conversations: An activist program developed by Joan Blades, MoveOn.org founder, for creating
constructive (“transpartisan”) conversations among people with substantially different political views
http://livingroomconversations.org