The most transformational inventions will not be technological but social. For example, Ben Franklin was proudest of his social inventions. He created the first fire department ever, and the first public lending library in America.
I believe the next great social invention will be the political means for distributed decision making. We already have the technology, but social-political constructs are still catching up. In primitive societies, political decision-making (and authority) was tribal. In agricultural-feudal societies, it was hierarchical. In industrial societies, it was representative — it doesn’t matter whether it was capitalist, socialist, or communist — if a society was industrial to any degree of success, the politics were built on a system of electing or selecting people to go to a central location to make decisions on behalf of the society.
Now, in the information age, there is decision overload. Society is too fast-moving and complex for decisions to be made at the center. Yes, coordination and standardization is needed; the information systems our society is building require common interfaces and regulatory stability the same way the power grid needs standard plug-ins defined. But the world of information is much more complex than choosing 110v and 220v power and standard-gauge railroads; there are now social and technical decisions with that level of complexity and more being made on a daily basis, in every industry, and sometimes in every city or school district as we explore new models of education and self-government. We want to be involved in these decisions because we care, and we can. We have access to information and we expect the personal power that comes with knowledge, the power of choice. Rightly harnessed, that power of participation can be and will be a great good.
The necessary political environment will require collaborative and distributed systems that have yet to be built, which both encourage innovation around flexible interactive standards and discourage stifling monopolies. Structures need to simultaneously empower the masses for distributed common good, identify and consolidate the fruits of distributed expertise, and provide checks against both a lowest-common-denominator tyranny of the majority and the back-room dealings of powerful special interests. This political invention must allow for diverse political choices for diverse constituencies and communities, down to the individual neighborhood with its unique covenants, codes and restrictions. For example, people who like a broken down vehicle parked on their lawn can choose to live in a neighborhood that allows that freedom — or not. As more information-age communities are “virtual”, that same flexibility of regulation may need to apply to shared choices that are not specific to geography.
In our economic and educational structures, the common man is realizing that “one size fits all” is no longer necessary as we leave behind industrial age assumptions; citizens will expect the same flexibility in their political systems. Binary choices in voting may be joined by the means for sorting and ranking of priorities and options. A two-party system will seem quaint and outdated. A multiparty parliamentary system seems more relevant but even that falls short of capturing the fluid nature of alliances and interest groups that will develop. Federalism, the sharing of power between central and local governments, is only a glimpse of how power and decision-making will be distributed and diversified. Some very important decisions will be made by ad hoc gatherings of experts and citizen working groups — maybe dozens, hundreds or even millions will focus on a specific issue that requires research, complex analysis and deep reasoning and their decision will stand for the whole populace. Other decisions may be made by a series of consensus-building votes by the whole citizenry, which capture and incorporate the interests of different groups into a shared solution. Other, more administrative decisions may be left to elected representatives or even — gasp — bureaucrats who keep the wheels turning. But the fundamentals of political decision-making will and must change to satisfy the expectations and complexities of our informed world. And things may look as different as feudalism to the current represent-o-kit.
In my opinion, this political invention — call it participative or distributed government – may look like a blend of the concepts of social networking and jury representation for when complex deliberation is needed. But that’s just a guess.
Go ask a medieval monarch if he could picture what was coming.
Mobilize 