Many to Many

How do we invite democracy to emerge? How does spontaneous cooperation happen? How can humanity self-organize in more useful ways? How can we make our civilization more synergetic?

I am here particularly interested in how we can use our existing or almost existing technologies to arrange our information and our means of communicating in such a manner as to invite these things to happen.

My instinct is that our society could be organized in a drastically different way, from the bottom up, in a way that will allow just about all of us to do productive work that we are happy with, and in a way that is vastly more productive as a whole. If we just knew how.

I believe our information networks could provide some core leverage in getting us there, but they aren't yet. It is kind of like we're almost ready to operate collectively at a much higher level, but we're still communicating with tin cans connected with string, and we all have paper bags over our heads, so we can't do anything very complex together, except for rather clumsily and haphazardly. more >