Musing on Emergent Democracy, Full Report To Come

I’ve had, for many years, a real faith in democratic power of technology. So strong is this faith, in fact, that I’m considering making my thesis for my interdisciplinary major essentially a big picture proposal of how to use the Net to empower American voters. But right now a number of popular technologists and sundry worldwide contributors are working on something more international and grand in scale: the Emergent Democracy manifesto (and to a lesser degree, the Minimal Compact proposal). When I first read both of these, in midst of an overwhelming stack of political and economic theory texts for a class, they both seemed somewhat naive and disappointing attempts to offer cutting edge technological developments as solutions to the perpetual problems of representative democracy. I intend to read them in more depth and offer my comments both here and to the authors. Just to let you know I’m not slacking off ^_^