It ends with a plea for devolving power to a decentralized network of cities
and counties!
Excerpts:
In exchange for an obscene cornucopia of material goods, Americans basically
abdicated most of their political power.
However, we may very well be at a point of fundamental questions neither the
New Deal or Neoliberalism care to ask. For in the end, New Deal and Neoliberal
political economy are simply two sides of the same coin. They are a political
and cultural school of thought that seeks one end, economic growth. Both
ultimately depend on growth in the creation of jobs, growth in the production
of goods and growth in consumption each year. They are a school of thought that
depends on infinite resources from what every year becomes increasingly clear
to the collective mind of humanity is a very finite planet.
The question becomes, is the world entering a new era, one where the doctrine
of unlimited growth has met its limits?
There are several fundamental pillars in reforming political economy:
1. Ending the idea of infinite linear production and consumption in the closed
system that is the earth.
2. Moving away from a fossil fuel based energy system.
3. Corporate and government reform.
We must realize on a closed system like the earth there is no such thing as
waste or garbage. We must look at everything we produce as recyclable, and if
it presently isn't, it must become so.
An ethic must be developed of not wanting more, but simply wanting enough --
the system as whole must embrace this ethic. People must be enabled to work
less and have more time to do other things than just consume.
The real value of information technology lies in design, that is, eventually
creating more livable societies that use less stuff.
American energy use is an extravagance of historical magnitude.
The American economy must be redesigned not to use the most energy possible but
the least, and for this, industrial society has no value. In large part, it
requires information to be released from the constraints of market valuation
The Internet has provided the model for a workable horizontally distributed
network. Opposed to millenia-old traditional hierarchies, the Internet has
shown that order can be gained not just from centralized control, but through
distributed simultaneous actions. To this point, the Internet has been used
most effectively as means to consolidate corporate power, which is a little
ironic. It should be a warning that we have long way to go in understanding how
to make this work. Yet the simple answer to begin corporate reform is to break
them up, all corporations should face a limit on their size.
Power needs to devolve from D.C, not to the states, but to cities and counties,
then connections must be made between the cities and counties.
It will call for people to take time previously given to the production and
consumption cycle and devote it to what might best be defined as an expanded
role of the citizen.
Citizenship must be stripped of the notion that is voluntary and must be
understood to be necessary. It must be looked at not as shining and exemplary,
but more like work, much of the time simply an unavoidable drudgery, with the
inescapable sad but nonetheless enlightening conclusion that the nirvana of
democracy is meetings.