Current Revision is Nine-Tenths of the Law
Last week, prompted by some news article that I no longer recall, I was joking with some various folks that the United States of America should just put the entirety of the US Code up on a wiki and let Americans directly edit it into the form that We The Fucking People actually want. Wikipedia routinely demonstrates that a large enough body of people who Actually Care can and do shepherd massive chaos into something converging on consensus.
Then I started looking around for tools by which I could import the US Code into a wiki myself and post it up somewhere and let the experiment actually start.
But that slow dicking-around process has already been obsoleted, because in New Zealand they're reviewing the Policing Act and, well, go have a gander at the public wiki.
Direct democracy worked when it was a few thousand Athenian rowers, but it hasn't scaled well to massive populations, and nations have resorted to secondary systems of government to filter and support vox populi into something manageable. I find myself thinking we may actually see that change in this century. If it does, it will probably be the single most significant development in human politics... maybe ever? Maybe ever.
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For consideration: at least, until the software systems that will manage the filtering and support learn to become as self-interested and corrupt as the human politicians who currently do the job
Then I started looking around for tools by which I could import the US Code into a wiki myself and post it up somewhere and let the experiment actually start.
But that slow dicking-around process has already been obsoleted, because in New Zealand they're reviewing the Policing Act and, well, go have a gander at the public wiki.
Direct democracy worked when it was a few thousand Athenian rowers, but it hasn't scaled well to massive populations, and nations have resorted to secondary systems of government to filter and support vox populi into something manageable. I find myself thinking we may actually see that change in this century. If it does, it will probably be the single most significant development in human politics... maybe ever? Maybe ever.
------
For consideration: at least, until the software systems that will manage the filtering and support learn to become as self-interested and corrupt as the human politicians who currently do the job