Chapter 13
The Technology, the Dream, and the Task at Hand


Chapter 13a
The Technology


We all realize that digital communications technology has had profound effects on our lives. In the span of little more than a single generation, it has transformed the economy of the entire world, and human life along with it, in ways both good and bad. It has facilitated globalized economic development that would not have been possible without it. It has brought widespread prosperity to people whose parents never dreamed that such prosperity was possible.

But digital technology has also caused great upheaval in billions of human lives. It has been used to centralize wealth and power in the hands of those who have first harnessed it. They have used it to facilitate the free and rapid movement of capital to where labor is cheapest. This has driven mass migrations of hundreds of millions of people from their homes in pursuit of new opportunities, and has often engendered widespread suffering when those opportunities have moved much faster than people’s ability to move with them. Uncountable millions of people, in local communities all over the world, have watched their economic base, their jobs, suddenly move to distant locations, leaving them with the despair of broken lives, shattered families, and obliterated dreams.

Surely we all can see that the great economic ‘powers-that-be’ recognized the potential power in this technology from its inception, and wasted no time at all in seeking to develop that power to their advantage to the greatest degree possible. Untold billions of dollars have been invested to harness this new technology to serve them. They have used this inherently decentralized technology to centralize ever more power into fewer and fewer hands, and the lives of most of us, to this point, have been held hostage, to one degree or another, to their self-serving intentions and designs.

As we have tried to present in this proposal, we believe that digital technology’s greatest potential to transform our lives has not yet been tapped. We believe that the power of interactive and decentralized digital communications technology, if properly developed and put to use, can give us the ability to take control of our lives, through the power of True Democracy, in ways that were never possible before this technology existed. We believe that there is nothing stopping us from fully developing the potential of this awesome degree of democratic ‘power for The People’ that is lying, quite literally, at our fingertips.

We have, of course, already exploited the democratizing potential of digital technology to a considerable degree. We have used the power of decentralized channels of digital communications to partially break the lock on media ownership by a mere handful of very powerful entities. Everyday people, be they carpenters, teachers, nurses, parents, students or retirees, or any working people or professionals who serve the economy with little power to affect its course, have taken up the ability to digitally amplify our thoughts and voices, (and quite often our complaints), and broadcast them widely through this technology.

Uncountable millions upon millions of people, all over the world, actively communicate with untold millions of other people in far-flung locations every day. This ongoing and vitally active daily communication is taking place between people who never could have had any contact with each other at ALL before this technology made it possible.

We dig into the ever-expanding pool of constantly proliferating information that the technology puts at our fingertips, and we trade the news of real events with each other. Much of this is news that is often suppressed by the centralized mass media. More and more people each day are using this new medium to become better and better informed.

Besides sharing the news, we discuss and argue our opinions and ideas concerning the events that matter to us, both in the world at large, and in the circles of family, jobs, schools, and friends that make up our lives. Everyday people easily build networks to widely broadcast our voices to circles of influence that this technology allows us to create. We use the technology to form ourselves into affinity groups that broadcast organized points of view. These uncountable millions of people are doing all these things, and much more, every day, and we would never have had the ability to do ANY of this without interactive digital technology.

But even considering all these things we have done, even recognizing all these ways that we have begun to make this technology work for us, once We The People open our eyes to the full scope of what decentralized and interactive digital communications technology gives us the ability to accomplish, once we understand how it can allow us to unite our energies and resources through True Democracy, we cannot help but realize that we have hardly begun to scratch the surface of its full potential.

In writing this proposal, we feel completely inadequate in our ability to covey the full scope of the potential power that this technology offers us. We believe that large numbers of people see this potential quite as well as we do. We can only hope that this proposal, to develop this True Democracy Project, might serve to fire people’s imaginations, and perhaps act as a catalyst for the active and focused development of this awesome power that is lying at our fingertips, just waiting for us to pick it up and use it.




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