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.The members of this delegation will have equal status with allother members of the House, including voting rights and committeemembership.The DFI will bring something new to Congress: ample represen-tation of future concerns.Congress has always been a reactive body,responding to what happened yesterday instead of foreseeing tomor-row s problems.Its members are unfamiliar with new technologies andthe problems they present.It shows in the backgrounds.Of our 100165 166 C ON GR E S S R E L O A DE Dsenators, 56 are lawyers.Nineteen are lifelong politicians with littleother professional or research experience.Zero senators have sciencedoctorates; only four congressmen do.And according to the Congres-sional Research Service, the current Congress might be the oldest ever:only eight of 537 members are under the age of 35.We trust this bodyto keep our democracy up-to-date.We shouldn t.Our population includes people much better suited than your aver-age politician to keep democracy in touch with the future: scientistsengaged with emerging technologies that will define how we commu-nicate and work in the future, and the young people eager to embrace,understand, and challenge these technologies.Just as seasoned lawyersbring historical perspective to our legal code, scientists and youngpeople could bring foresight to important issues for the future of thecountry.Just as our armed forces are run by military experts, and oureconomy is regulated by economists, so should our science and tech-nology policies be guided at the highest levels by those with expertise.Creating the DFI is a low-tech response to an essay prompt that isladen with high-tech overtones.Opportunities abound for web-basedcitizen engagement platforms and crowdsourced, or collaborativelytackled, to unearth government corruption.But no matter what widgetwe create, and no matter how we customize the Constitution for today sInternet, three things will certainly happen in the next 100 years:" Both the widget and the Constitutional changes willbecome obsolete" One or two more technological revolutions will pass us by" Those revolutions will pose new challenges to our democracy,challenges that our generation will never foresee.Challengesthat will require their own essay contests.In short, no Net-centric solution to our problems will last long.Even if such a solution is an extraordinary success, the chances aregood that it will be short-lived: our understanding of the Internetn Mat thew Bur ton n 167undergoes a radical shift at least once every election cycle.High-techsolutions may sound sophisticated, but they are ultimately limited bytheir focus on the Internet.My DFI proposal may not make for themost exciting reading, but it is adaptable beyond the current definitionof the Internet.When today s problems are long gone, the DFI willstill be relevant.That is what we must seek when changing our democracy: stay-ing power.Major changes to a democratic system take decades to rootthemselves into the public consciousness.By then, the nation mayhave forgotten what inspired the changes in the first place.Our job isto make sure that when that day comes, our changes are still relevant.My solution may not be custom-built FOR the Internet, but itis certainly inspired by it.The Internet has taught me a lesson: whenchallenged by a new technology, our democracy convulses for a fewyears.(It hasn t yet taught me what happens after that.) If given oneredesign opportunity, we should heed that lesson and try to solve theroot of the problem: a lack of foresight by our leaders.Technical solu-tions can certainly help; that s why I spend most days trying to hackAmerican politics.But the DFI will help us not only through today schallenges but tomorrow s as well.Let s reboot for the future, not justfor the Internet.About the AuthorMatthew Burton is formerly an intelligence analyst with the Departmentof Defense.Burton left the government in 2005 to attend NYU s InteractiveTelecommunications Program.He is now building a web application thathelps the Intelligence Community share information and collaborate.He created and maintains two government transparency projects:ReadableLaws.org and Speechology.org.He lives in New York. BE YOND WA RGA MESDouglas RushkoffOur nation is both a functioning nation and a model for a functioning nation. henever democracy and computers show up in the samesentence, I can t help but flash back to some early ColdwWar simulations conducted by RAND corporation.If webomb Moscow and then they bomb Phoenix, and so on.&.Basiczero-sum game theory, applied through the paranoid schizophreniclens of Beautiful Mind mathematician John Nash, yielded the no-winDoomsday scenario eventually satirized in the cyber-action flick WarGames.The underlying assumption of these early computer simulationswas that people and, by extrapolation, nations, behave with their ownstrategic interests in mind.Humans and nations are presumed tobe fearful, self-interested, and hyper-rational.The solution of thesekinds of prisoner s dilemmas was Mutually Assured Destruction:creating nuclear arsenals big enough to ensure that everyone dies ifanyone attacks.168 Doug Rushkof f n 169Even Nash has subsequently admitted that this way of applyinggame theory was based on his own paranoid delusions.While themath works out, the logic is hopelessly polar.In short, the paranoiaplus binary technology equals an insane, oversimplified, and unstablestand-off.Differences and conflict are exacerbated because the com-petitive game is an underlying assumption.There s no possibilityfor reconciliation, compromise, or collaboration.It s my computeragainst yours.To me, the most exciting thing about a networked computing erais the opportunity to model new kinds of games.More than anythingelse, computers are modeling systems.They let us model the functionof a typewriter, a spreadsheet, or a paste-up board, not to mentionall sorts of social and fantasy interactions.The most advanced mod-els right now are the ones we re developing in forums, from MySpaceto Second Life, Facebook to World of Warcraft [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
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.The members of this delegation will have equal status with allother members of the House, including voting rights and committeemembership.The DFI will bring something new to Congress: ample represen-tation of future concerns.Congress has always been a reactive body,responding to what happened yesterday instead of foreseeing tomor-row s problems.Its members are unfamiliar with new technologies andthe problems they present.It shows in the backgrounds.Of our 100165 166 C ON GR E S S R E L O A DE Dsenators, 56 are lawyers.Nineteen are lifelong politicians with littleother professional or research experience.Zero senators have sciencedoctorates; only four congressmen do.And according to the Congres-sional Research Service, the current Congress might be the oldest ever:only eight of 537 members are under the age of 35.We trust this bodyto keep our democracy up-to-date.We shouldn t.Our population includes people much better suited than your aver-age politician to keep democracy in touch with the future: scientistsengaged with emerging technologies that will define how we commu-nicate and work in the future, and the young people eager to embrace,understand, and challenge these technologies.Just as seasoned lawyersbring historical perspective to our legal code, scientists and youngpeople could bring foresight to important issues for the future of thecountry.Just as our armed forces are run by military experts, and oureconomy is regulated by economists, so should our science and tech-nology policies be guided at the highest levels by those with expertise.Creating the DFI is a low-tech response to an essay prompt that isladen with high-tech overtones.Opportunities abound for web-basedcitizen engagement platforms and crowdsourced, or collaborativelytackled, to unearth government corruption.But no matter what widgetwe create, and no matter how we customize the Constitution for today sInternet, three things will certainly happen in the next 100 years:" Both the widget and the Constitutional changes willbecome obsolete" One or two more technological revolutions will pass us by" Those revolutions will pose new challenges to our democracy,challenges that our generation will never foresee.Challengesthat will require their own essay contests.In short, no Net-centric solution to our problems will last long.Even if such a solution is an extraordinary success, the chances aregood that it will be short-lived: our understanding of the Internetn Mat thew Bur ton n 167undergoes a radical shift at least once every election cycle.High-techsolutions may sound sophisticated, but they are ultimately limited bytheir focus on the Internet.My DFI proposal may not make for themost exciting reading, but it is adaptable beyond the current definitionof the Internet.When today s problems are long gone, the DFI willstill be relevant.That is what we must seek when changing our democracy: stay-ing power.Major changes to a democratic system take decades to rootthemselves into the public consciousness.By then, the nation mayhave forgotten what inspired the changes in the first place.Our job isto make sure that when that day comes, our changes are still relevant.My solution may not be custom-built FOR the Internet, but itis certainly inspired by it.The Internet has taught me a lesson: whenchallenged by a new technology, our democracy convulses for a fewyears.(It hasn t yet taught me what happens after that.) If given oneredesign opportunity, we should heed that lesson and try to solve theroot of the problem: a lack of foresight by our leaders.Technical solu-tions can certainly help; that s why I spend most days trying to hackAmerican politics.But the DFI will help us not only through today schallenges but tomorrow s as well.Let s reboot for the future, not justfor the Internet.About the AuthorMatthew Burton is formerly an intelligence analyst with the Departmentof Defense.Burton left the government in 2005 to attend NYU s InteractiveTelecommunications Program.He is now building a web application thathelps the Intelligence Community share information and collaborate.He created and maintains two government transparency projects:ReadableLaws.org and Speechology.org.He lives in New York. BE YOND WA RGA MESDouglas RushkoffOur nation is both a functioning nation and a model for a functioning nation. henever democracy and computers show up in the samesentence, I can t help but flash back to some early ColdwWar simulations conducted by RAND corporation.If webomb Moscow and then they bomb Phoenix, and so on.&.Basiczero-sum game theory, applied through the paranoid schizophreniclens of Beautiful Mind mathematician John Nash, yielded the no-winDoomsday scenario eventually satirized in the cyber-action flick WarGames.The underlying assumption of these early computer simulationswas that people and, by extrapolation, nations, behave with their ownstrategic interests in mind.Humans and nations are presumed tobe fearful, self-interested, and hyper-rational.The solution of thesekinds of prisoner s dilemmas was Mutually Assured Destruction:creating nuclear arsenals big enough to ensure that everyone dies ifanyone attacks.168 Doug Rushkof f n 169Even Nash has subsequently admitted that this way of applyinggame theory was based on his own paranoid delusions.While themath works out, the logic is hopelessly polar.In short, the paranoiaplus binary technology equals an insane, oversimplified, and unstablestand-off.Differences and conflict are exacerbated because the com-petitive game is an underlying assumption.There s no possibilityfor reconciliation, compromise, or collaboration.It s my computeragainst yours.To me, the most exciting thing about a networked computing erais the opportunity to model new kinds of games.More than anythingelse, computers are modeling systems.They let us model the functionof a typewriter, a spreadsheet, or a paste-up board, not to mentionall sorts of social and fantasy interactions.The most advanced mod-els right now are the ones we re developing in forums, from MySpaceto Second Life, Facebook to World of Warcraft [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]