*Date:* Sat, 6 Nov 2010 10:07:30 -0700 (PDT) *Subject:* cyberdemocracy *From:* Kaczmarczyk Andrzej *To:* wddm@world-wide-democracy.net
Dear DD-ists,
I’m avid follower of DD. With some completion: I don’t perceive DD as a
pure political phenomenon, but as a technology driven occurrence that
can come about through civilization changes; I do perceive it as a
specific EDD, being associated with e-civilization and Information Society
development. Present parliamentary democracy is more than two centuries old,
has been tailored for territorially-oriented nation-states, has arisen when
democratic rulers exercised power only over muskets and sabers, not over
nuclear weapons’ push-buttons (soon about forty of them!). Neither there
were ubiquitous global socio-economic phenomena, nor global threats related
to biosphere, climate, energy resources. This all appears in full scale right
now, together with knowledge and technology unimaginable in times of
parliamentary democracy’s founding fathers. A course of transformation can be
deduced from observable trends of change in many areas of human activity,
and of use of artifacts of e-civilization in it. On the threshold of
postmodernity, characterized by social life regulation from its interior,
exercised by “flexible and fluctuating” networks rather than by structured
institutions, the old democratic paradigm loses its utility. Traditional
organizational structures are substituted be new ones, more flexible, more
participatory and more decentralized — taking advantage of self-organization
and “the wisdom of crowds”, so naturally affined to DD. Information and
knowledge become instantaneously accessible, transportable and can be
simultaneously distributed to an unlimited number of users. A new democratic
paradigm — which I call “cyberdemocracy” — should be compatible with this
altering world, so must be a participatory, flexible, and networked one.
And this is why cyberdemocracy won’t be an elegantly designed, simple entity
with its schema easy to absorb even for a child. It will arise in a
natural, evolutionary way, by the efforts of its distributed architects.
However it can be, and ought to be, a “user friendly” system, meaning it is
easy to use, not necessarily easy to understand; we are daily users of a
multitude of such systems. I’ve written a book about the phenomenon, titled
“Cyberdemocracy. Change of democratic paradigm in the 21st century”
(accessible in Amazon). The book includes seven chapters. The first six of
them present “as are” issues essential for the future cyberdemocracy,
i.e. current state and development trends of the Information Society,
the cyberspace, electronic democracy with its key tool in the form of
electronic voting, DD as cyberdemocracy’s key component, and additional
factors which can help the cyberdemocracy to cross the gate of history.
The final chapter presents a vision of the “would be” cyberdemocracy,
derived from those previous considerations. Each chapter includes its
ummary and conclusion, and all these summaries together form a digest
of the book. Greetings Andrzej Kaczmarczyk