Upgrading Congress For the Future
Personal Democracy Forum and TechPresident recently sponsored an essay contest:
When the Framers met in Philadelphia in 1787, they bravely conjured a new form of self-government. But they couldn’t have imagined a mass society with instantaneous, many-to-many communications or many of the other innovations of modernity. So, replacing that quill pen with a mouse, imagine that you have to power to redesign American democracy for the Internet Age. What would you do?
Below is my blue sky response, which was selected for publication. You can order the whole book from Amazon.
NOTE: The first three paragraphs below were inserted post-publication and do not appear in the printed version.
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Richard Feyman—possibly the most brilliant physicist of his generation—once said that “nobody really understands quantum physics.”
We’ve had the Web for 16 years, and I think I can safely say that nobody really understands it, either. Sometimes we think we do, but then it surprises us with something new. We know a lot about what it’s done so far, but none of us know what lies ahead.
In spite of this, here we are, proposing Constitutional changes based on our elementary knowledge of the Web. Such changes would become obsolescent as quickly as the Web churns out new surprises.… Read the rest