The idea that there could be a global medium where anyone can send data to anyone else, and only the two ends know what to do with the data, has been the source of wave after wave of cultural freakout, from mailing lists to the web to Napster.
The end-to-end principle is one of a very few ideas in human history that are permanently radical — ideas that always provide leverage in the fight of the interesting versus the dull. Competitive markets are permanently radical, literacy is permanently radical, the First Amendment is permanently radical, and now we can add end-to-end to that list.
Clay Shirkey, 2002
Let's put aside labels like employer, employee, entrepreneur, worker, job-maker and job-taker for just a moment. Let's even put aside all monetary considerations for just a moment. In its rawest form, what PajamaNation does is act as an end-to-end conduit that helps people organize projects. It's an engine of creation, a real wealth (actual value as opposed to symbolic monetary value) generator.
It has also been conjectured by Walter de Brouwer and others that PN could be an agent of identity and community. People doing projects that do not need to take place on location in a "bricks-and-mortar institution" (this can include the neighborhood flower shop) -- and that are outside the realm of corporations and states – form a new and growing cohort group whose interests are still not frequently represented by organized society. When you go to a doctor's office and fill out a form, when the neighborhood cleanup crew starts making mind-wrecking noise outside your house at 9 am, it often becomes clear that the operative assumption is that all busy, productive people have left their homes to "go to work." And, indeed, it's still scary to walk down a suburban street on a weekday mid-afternoon and experience the place as a kind of privileged ghost town. Hasn't anybody gotten the message yet? 9-to-5 downtown is supposed to be dead.
Clearly, the micropreneurial work-at-home evolution is still only just emerging. But it's not too early to meditate on the implications of a "PajamaNation" as a nation -- and, in fact, as a global nation with more potential citizens right here and now than any other nation in the world.
If we emphasize the nation aspect of a PajamaNation, a whole new discourse -- and a whole new and exciting set of possibilities -- appears on the horizon. This aspect of the PajamaNation doesn't require that all its members have to be trying to hook up for projects. This conception of a PajamaNation has the potential to function as a sort-of people's decentralized "United Nations." By situating all of us participants in a cyberspace nation – by calling to us as people who – through mediated space -- are as close to one another as we are to our physical neighbors (or maybe closer), we may be on the new edge of the most important socio-political phenomenon of the 21st Century.
Think about it. Many idealists have tried to impact – with limited success – intractable social conflicts (Israel v. Palestine comes immediately to mind) through person-to-person diplomacy. The results have frequently been emotionally satisfying but the inability to get enough people together and talking to each other in physical space severely limits any real political impact that this strategy might produce.
By combining networked communication technology with an emergent new identity as a member of a global nation who is immediately connected to everybody else (they are all one click away), we could find ourselves at the forefront of a movement that replaces ideology and the interests of various elites with actual human needs and desires, as expressed by individuals, one signal at a time.
I had an epiphany the other day as I reviewed some angry comments left on a site in one of those endless, hostile political discussions that permeate the web. As I thought about it, I put aside some qualms and decided I was very much in favor of radically increasing Direct Democracy.
Most of the comments on this site (from all perspectives) were frankly objectively ignorant and illiterate. Some were semi-literate but fundamentally irrational – ideas didn't really follow one from the other, even though the commenters assumed that they did. Even the few comments from sophisticates –- the Marxist deconstructionist or the Ayn Randian free market advocate – seemed to me fundamentally incoherent, in content if not in style. As I thought about this, I was struck by the thought: We are all either part of an elite or we are yahoos. (Webster's defines yahoo as "a boorish, crass or stupid person, but that doesn't quite cover the implications that the word has taken on. It also means somebody who is clueless; someone who is unsophisticated because he or she is outside the zone where the sophisticates are privileged to be.) Don't be insulted by this. I'm a yahoo myself.
So why would I conclude that we should give these ordinary folks – yahoos like you and me and the several billion others -- more power over political policy decisions? Because this is the only way that we will grow up.
Today, the elites who make real policy decisions – whether they are elected representatives or hold power through other methods – are the sole possession of a certain kind of wisdom (although clearly, by their actions, it's a very limited wisdom.) They know, at a very fundamental level, that their thoughts and political positions have consequences because they will be acted upon. They may not be operating in the interests of all people (probably not), and they may frequently do stupid and dangerous things (obviously), but they know that the consequences of their actions will eventually be measured. This engenders a sort of sophistication that – while it does produce its own kind of blinding arrogance –- tends towards something like coherence. (I'm obviously not talking here about the nonsense that politicians feed to the yahoos, or even necessarily about political office holders. I'm talking about the policy elites who actually administer nation states, and who also tend to work with and for corporate and other moneyed elites.)
As outsiders, "yahoos", we rant and rave freely because there is very little consequence. In fact, under the current dispensation, it may be sort of healthy that some of us take extreme and angry and possibly even crazy positions within the mediated net-world because it functions as a shout from the edges that might just work its way into a larger sort-of meta-dialectic (for example, anti-globalization riots play a role in bringing about debt forgiveness, etc.). However, if we were to actually emerge into a situation where – through direct, mediated democracy -- we actually had power over policy, a more considered and sophisticated discourse would likely emerge, as people begin to actually consider and then even experience the consequences of their ideas. A sophisticated and flexible politic that combined common interests with flexible, personal autonomy and agency would hopefully emerge, eventually
A PajamaNation -- a global person-to-person nation mediated by cyberspace – might be at first a practice space for gaming the consequences of direct democratic decision making. Later, it might prove to be an emergent phenomenon that gets credit for making peace between conflicting groups as the result of direct contact and person-to-person negotiation. Ultimately, it may be an emergent structure for real world democracy during a century where we no longer need to send representatives to a far away place to make our decisions for us. We are -- all of us – now close enough at hand to govern ourselves, both alone and together.
No comments:
Post a Comment