Jim Moore’s blog: Innovation, Strategy, Public Policy

Question #1:  How can we raise a billion dollars for the
digital progressive cause, and invest it to increase citizens’ individual and
community capacity for critical thinking and intelligent
decision-making about national issues?

Question #2:  How do we deal with the counter-force of
established, non-democratic power as we seek to nurture
non-established, emergent democratic power?

Question #3:  How do we bridge the “dialogue divide” in addition
to the “digital divide?”  That is, how do we take blogging and
dialogue beyond a narrow elite, and make it central to global life in
the 21st century?

(click the question links for more detail)

[see all three questions at http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/jim/2004/02...]

Question #3:  How do we bridge the “dialogue divide” in addition
to the “digital divide?”  That is, how do we take blogging and
dialogue beyond a narrow elite, and make it central to global life in
the 21st century?

Ethan  Zuckerman and Joi Ito will be running a panel on this topic
tomorrow at the O’Reilly Emerging Democracy Teach-In.  Ethan has written a
valuable introductory essay exploring what it will take to bring the
elements of emergent democracy to people in the third world.

But the problem is not limited to the third world.  Working for
Howard Dean’s candidacy, I hoped to engage Iowa bloggers in order to
better understand people of the state (my home state, by the way) and
to help promote political discussion.  But there are precious few
news-oriented political bloggers in Iowa–right, left, or center! 
BloggerStorm and the Iowa Caucus News, both experiments in “swarm
coverage” of the Iowa political scene, had to depend on less than twenty
bloggers.

The problem is that just being online is not enough.  The digital
divide can be bridged, but people often still use websites mostly to
consume broadcast content–from  news to weather–rather than
generate it themselves.  And generating content is, in my view,
vital to a person being a critical thinker about the other content that
he or she consumes.  Once you deal regularly with structuring your
own
content, you realise the degrees of freedom that others have.  The
sorts of dialogue that you and I are a part of (given that you are
reading my blog or an RSS feed of it) is limited to a very few folks.

So how do we make it easier for folks to more deeply
participate–especially, to create their own content?  And how do
we evangelize the tools and services we already have?  I wish, for
example, that I had gone to Iowa months earlier, and worked with
elderly folks to turn them on to blogging.  Would this have
worked?  Who knows–but it would have been a very informative
exercise in seeking to expand political participation.

[see all three questions at http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/jim/2004/02...]

Question #2:  How do we deal with the counter-force of
established, non-democratic power as we seek to nurture
non-established, emergent democratic power?

I think that too often we idealistically imagine that the world wants
emergent democracy.  Or rather, we envision emergent democracy
springing forth on a landscape of political power that is open and
fertile and uncolonized. 

But the reality is that most of the political landscapes worth fighting
over are already well settled by ecosystems of a different
structure.  Our emergent democracy initiatives will be fought by
these establishments.

For example, when insiders are candid about Japan, you hear about the
conspiracy between the Liberal Democratic Party and the Yakuza–i.e.
Japanese organized crime. 

Look at US media concentration.  ClearChanel funded rally’s for
the invasion of Iraq.  Viacom looks forward to millions of dollars
of Republican political ads, on top of billions of dollars of
sympathetic corporate money.  Any surprise that the same network
that refused to run the MoveOn commercial at the SuperBowl–CBS–was
also the network that pulled its Ronald Reagan special?  Any
surprise that the television establishment played Internet-candidate
Howard Dean’s “scream” 700 times, in order to create a “telling moment”
and finish off his candidacy? 

The ecology of power in the United States is richly layered with
non-democratic structures, ranging from monopolistic robber baron
business (big media, big medicine, big telecom) to feudal family (the
Clintons may have failed with their candidate, Clark–but the Kennedy’s
have done quite well with theirs, Kerry).

How do we both nurture democratic participation and decision
making, and also effectively address (defend against and undermine) the attacks that established
powers will unleash upon us?  How do we expand our formal model of
emergent democracy to take into account that it almost always
challenges an existing power structure?

The definition of “disruptive technology” assumes that a pre-existing
technology will be rendered obsolete.  Do we need a similar
concept of “disruptive democracy?”