With the immediacy of the mess of the financial sector and their quite brutal control of the rest of the economy, I haven’t had the opportunity to write much about other issues which I consider just as important, if not more so. At the top would be the politics of technology, which in the end is of vast greater importance than our greedy financiers, though even less understood. All new technology brings its own politics that shape society. As Marshall McLuhan stated, first we shape technology and than technology shapes us. If some other being from some other planet touched down in Los Angeles, or many other places in America, and wanted to know who was in charge, their first impression might very well be the automobile, and that wouldn’t be so wrong. The politics of technology is little commented on and even less understood.
In the last 20 years, networked electronic information technologies have burst onto the scene, and we really have little understanding about their impact. They are rapidly re-writing the rules of commerce, politics, government, and education. Old power structures, institutions, schools of thought, and technologies are grappling to remain in control, trying both to co-opt and stop these forces. One really important issue for democratic society in relation to these new technologies is the question of how information is controlled. An important tool the established powers, our great mega-corporations, are using is copyrights and patents. A dozen or so years ago, Lawrence Lessig wrote some good books on this matter, and started a group called Creative Commons. Lessig spent a few years working in DC trying to help our elected officials understand the importance of these issues and how the powers that be were shaping the laws to protect themselves. A couple years ago, to Lessig’s great credit, he quit the charade, and started a new group with Trippi called Change Congress. Their simple message, our politics are broken, and if we don’t fix, it doesn’t matter what issue you think most important, our government is going to not simply be ineffective, but rigged against you. Lessig has a good piece on our broken politics in the Nation, which I recommend. I will add, it’s not just the money in politics and its impact that is the problem, but the same technological forces that Lessig has written about so well impacting copyright and patent law, have also made the idea of 535 people sitting in a building, in the middle of some old swamp, supposedly representing 300 million people, simply incredulous.
Also, The Nation has another good piece by Tom Geoghegan calling for the Dems to let Reps filibuster, good idea. But, I do wish Tom would write about what he knows to be the real problem, not the filibuster, but the Senate, which is the most archaic part of an archaic government structure. We need a lot of new thinking if self-government is going to be a reality in the 21st century. We really should start.
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