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Home: America 2076
Excerpts from the Book America 2076 by Ralph Perrine
Introduction: Implications for the Future of Democracy”All of this has some very interesting implications for democracy. The point of this book is that we are at a unique juncture in our history. The advent of powerful low cost technology provides a critical opportunity to strengthen our American democracy for the challenges of our future: The opportunity to improve our ability to leverage collective intelligence for collaborative national planning. To my thinking, if our democracy follows a path of decline and decay it will be because we failed to recognize and capitalize on this critical opportunity. This book is laid out in three parts which are described in the paragraphs that follow.
Part One: The Problems (Chapters 1-2)This section addresses the fundamental problems that currently reduce the effectiveness of our democracy, and threaten its future. Some participants (namely, citizens) are not able to participate as effectively as they could, while other participants (politicians, corporations and others) participate with full and perhaps inappropriate powers. Part Two: The Opportunity (Chapters 3-5)This section explains how and why we are at a unique point in our history. Pop technology promises access to new tools and ideas that could allow significant improvements to the participation of citizens in a democracy. These communication and collaboration tools could allow us to take citizen participation beyond simply voting and listening to/reacting to broadcasted viewpoints. Tracing the probable evolution of these tools into the future, it is a relatively conservative prediction that pop technology will make feasible, perhaps for the first time, the truly effective mass participation of citizens in collaborative national planning. Part Three: A Starting Point (Chapters 6-15)This section of the book lays out a proposed solution that could leverage the power of pop technology to alleviate the problems described in Part One, while taking advantage of the opportunity described in Part Two. It is a starting point on the path to a better future democracy. Rough around the edges, and described with inconsistent detail – but I hope enough detail to prove that it actually could work. The ideas in this section would require much refinement, and significant investment to be successful. My motive was to lay out in as much detail as I could, a (soon to be) feasible idea for how pop technology might be harnessed to improve the future potential of our democracy. I hope others will see the potential of this idea, and shape and reshape it into what it ultimately could be. The idea cannot be taken to its full potential by any one person. When fully implemented it might bear little resemblance to the specific technology solution described in this book. If it achieves improved participation of American citizens in our democracy, and facilitates collaborative planning, it would be a crowning achievement on the part of those able to bring it to reality.
Ralph Perrine is author of 12 Drawings That Will Change Your Life and other works. |
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