Something New Under the Sun

Part 1 in a Series of Essays onGovernment

The right to swing my fist ends where the other mans nose begins. - Oliver WendellHolmes

The big debate in politics is, and has always been, about the appropriate size and role of government. The polarized state of todays debate is exemplified by Fox Newss overly strident critiques of seemingly any government solutions to shared problems, and MSNBCs apparent defense of activist government in many areas of life through their ongoing series of lean forward blurbs featuring their star TV personalities. These two relatively new TV channels also exemplify the growth of separate spheres of facts and opinions, or filter bubbles, enjoyed by those on the left and right, which is itself a majorproblem.

TamHunt

Fortunately, a new approach to this perennial debate is emerging, which marries the best of left and right. This new approach arises from the increasing power of networked and crowd-sourced solutions to many of the collective problems we face in todays world. The rise of crowd-sourced solutions is, in turn, based on our new tech-based society, in which information is rapidly becoming free and access to that free information is rapidly becominguniversal.

There is a risk in naming this new approach to political philosophy, but some have suggested peer progressivism or progressive libertarianism. I have also used the term wiki democracy to describe the outcome of this new philosophy and these new tech tools that are rapidly enhancing our democracies around theworld.

Im going to use the term isocracy, however, in this essay because it lacks the freight of the other labels mentioned. Isocracy means rule by equals, which pretty much sums up the gist of this new political philosophy. What to many people sound like contradictory philosophies (progressivism and libertarianism) come together under this new approach. Isocrats believe in small government, but also that were all in this together and we should help others where wecan.

This really is a new political philosophy because it rests on truly new technological tools. As our technological tools change so should our politics and ourphilosophies.

The basic idea of isocracy is that a lot of things that government has often done can and should be crowd-sourced that is, performed by the crowd, the masses, rather than by government or corporations. This is different than the historically right-wing tendency to want to privatize government, but it is nonetheless a type of privatization. Rather than privatizing by selling off government assets and responsibilities to corporations, however, crowd-sourcing looks to a broader universe of entities than just traditional corporate interests to take the place of traditional government. Crowd-sourcing generally relies on regular people like me and you, but it can include a variety of entities as part of the crowd, including individuals, civic groups, corporations, and government entities, all working together to find creative and efficient solutions. We are increasingly crowd-sourcing government and we should be actively looking for ways to accelerate thistrend.

An innocuous but useful example: Boston pioneered the adopt a fire hydrant program, which allows any individual, business, or community group to adopt a fire hydrant and ensure that it remains accessible to firefighters in winter by shoveling snow after a storm. This saves firefighters the trouble of doing this themselves, on a city-wide basis. Chicago, Buenos Aires, and Honolulu (for tsunami sirens instead of hydrants) have followedsuit.

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Something New Under the Sun