Self-organizing systems: Can we govern?

“Us Now” is an interesting full length documentary about computer-based social technologies, trust, bottom-up and self-organisation. Finally “wisdom of the crowd” appears and all connected to the question, if we all together could govern? The leading question of the movie is: “In a world in which information is like air, what happens to power?”

“New technologies and a closely related culture of collaboration present radical new models of social organisation. This project brings together leading practitioners and thinkers in this field and asks them to determine the opportunity for government.”

digitaltools.node3000.com...

I think that's a difficult issue. First "government" exists historically as protection degrading to a protectionist racket. We are constantly inundated with the need for government because of the facilitation of violence coming either as local, national or international arranged threats. To "Govern" ourselves means first and foremost not to have a huge amount of distracting information but to fundamentally be able to clean up the existing corruptions that result in 90% or so of the violence. This means a force that doesn't just react to violence as an control and income opportunity but finds the true cause and arrests it.

Second herding/peer pressure drives many groups to propagandize the society around their cause. On ATS we see the pro homosexual lobby constantly promoting conformity and acceptance as enlightenment and virtual when it represents nothing more than a manipulative approach. The point is we need less government and a clearer definition of what the rules and limits and duties of real government are. Perhaps that can be hashed out by a technological process but more likely it will result in the click of most dedicated manipulators (the technology bullies) ruling, come hell or high water, simply because they have the strongest motivation to be in charge (and greatest inadequacies to overcome).

We need less government, more clearly and correctly defined, that people really understand and accept with likely flaws and limitations. What is the norm, is for a lack of clear agreeable understanding resulting in perpetual fixes that originate from deceptive motivations. Would the vast majority of cattle populations want that? No they want what offers them the most for the least and that will always be in the hands of the manipulators not the just. Still, it serves society to have a healthy dialogue such as it might come to exist. But it the idea is to impose governmental change by internet consensus? I can't imagine the results.