All Posts Tagged With: "future politics"

Over the summer I have watched as America’s political discourse has become Idolized. No, not idolized as in idolatry, but idolized as in “American Idol.” At first I thought it was funny, cute, and slightly sexy. After the fourth iteration though, it’s becoming a little old.

It all started with Obama Girl’s “I’ve Got a Crush on Obama.”

http://youtube.com/watch?v=wKsoXHYICq

That was cute. It was clever and funny. It poked fun at the Obama candidacy and made politics sexy. Everyone in my office at the a political organization thought it was a riot…well the guys liked it at least. The women were split.

Then came Hott 4 Hill. I think this one was actually done by an American Idol contestant.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=-Sudw4ghVe8

Admittedly the singing was better, but jeez the video was terrible. The rhyme scheme was poorly done and it just didn’t have the novelty or sexiness that made the original Obama Girl video such a hit.

Next came Obama Girl vs. Giuliani Girl. This one was made by the same people who did the original Obama Girl video.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=ekSxxlj6rGE

Again it was hot, but not nearly as novel and cool as the original. A respectable sequel. Although you have to feel a little bad for Dennis Kucinich as his “Kucinich Girl” is laughed out of the video…

And last comes a spoof on Mitt Romney. It’s an exposee that attacks Obama girl, but really just sort of pokes fun at Romney’s Mormonism and perceived flip-flopping.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=gXyl39kgBh8&mode=related&search=

Actually the official song is due out shortly, but the aryanlite triplets will undoubtedly take some rather tasteless jabs at Mormonism and the Democratic candidates.

So anyway, the point here being that I was wondering what you, our readers, think about these developments. I mean on one level it’s clever political satire and reaches out to a broader audience than the typical debate crowd. On the other hand it cheapens political debate to a sub-par reality t.v. show like American Idol. It all comes down to who has the hottest women pulling for him and who’s got the cleverest song (the song part I’m ok with actually).

When I was replying to Hanno’s recent post about the pathetic turn-out of Republican front-runners, I off-handedly mentioned that I didn’t expect the United States to exist in its current form twenty years from now.

Prescott asked me (against his better judgment, it seems) to please elucidate on that statement of mine, so this piece is in reply to his request.

It all comes down to information storage and dissemination, it seems. The Internet is a big part of yesterday’s future, and Moore’s Law is still in its geometric phase for the cost of collecting, storing and retrieving data.

Surfers were recently shocked to see street-level shots of their houses in San Francisco instantly accessible on Google Maps. At the time of writing, there are cars loaded with equipment spreading out across the country to extend this information to, eventually I imagine, every address in the USA.

This is not the end, but the beginning of the recording of every second of everyone’s life within the datawebs of the ‘Net. As this Materials Today article shows, carbon films can be used to increase storage for bits of data to the quantum level. Very soon, zeroes and ones could be represented by atoms of Carbon-12 and Carbon-13 within a crystalline diamond lattice.

What does this mean? Not only will the collected knowledge of humanity be available through the Open Library Project and Project Gutenberg, but every lifetime word and facial expression of someone running for office from the 1st District of a given state will be on file and available for download. Our lives are about to be referenced and cross-indexed.

There will be available instant information on any subject that has interest to an individual or an organization, whether it be the floor plans of an engineering building at a university or the necessary genes to splice from botulism into e. coli to turn the latter into a WMD.

Add to this the instant communication possible from devices like the iPhone, or even mere laptops in widly wifi’d areas, and groups would be able to instantly coordinate actions by members.

An early forerunner of this happened in the last two months with the Immigration Bill before the US Senate. Senior members of both political parties, the President, the Wall Street Journal and most of the Industrial complex of the United States had united to push through legislation in a traditionally underhanded manner.

This time it was different, though. Bloggers and other politically active internet dwellers used informants within the Senate staffs to find vulnerable Senators and pressure them into voting in ways that would insure the defeat of the Bill. Let me make an analogy for this, since the impact and precident for this event cannot be understated:

Normal means of influencing members of Congress involve faxes and phone calls to their offices. Thinking of this in historical military terms, this is the equivalent of WW2 bombers attacking a German ball-bearing factory and missing most of the time. What happened with the ‘Net’s involvement this time was the equivalent of a laser-guided bomb used in 21st Century warfare.

Information that was gathered by individuals on the ground was transmitted instantly to those who could take advantage of it and precision-targeting of communications was setup for the legislators who would be vulnerable. The bill went down to defeat, despite the efforts of the old 20th Century power-blocs.

There’s a darker side to this, however. Did you ever think hard about why 9/11 happened? For God’s sake, the hijackers used box-cutters. They succeeded because they understood the vulnerablities of the system and how best to take advantage of it with the element of surprise.

Folks, if every bit of data on everything is available, it will include ways of subverting the systems to cause events that will make 9/11 look like a Sunday picnic. Very shortly, the continued existence of civilization is going to depend on the good-will of script-kiddies.

So, now that we’ve got the technical background for this demonstrated, here’s the gist of my argument:

The current power structure cannot abide with this quantity of information available to the general public. The amount of control that the government and the military-industrial complex currently wishes (for good or ill), is impossible to sustain when the means of subverting that control is available to any intelligent person with a simple mouse-click.

Nobody gives up control lightly.

There are two paths emerging from this fork. The first I call the China model, the second the Rational Anarchist model.

The power-blocs that currently exist within our country will fight the diffusion of power with every ounce of their being. They even have a model to use as an example–the Chinese. The Chinese are attempting, with some moderate success, to completely control citizens’ access to information on the Internet. They’re doing this by government control of web browsers and severe prosecution of anyone caught violating government protocols for allowable content. While there is still a bit of doubt about the final outcome, it is undeniable that search program creators have been cooperating with this censorship and many citizens have been denied information that they could use to challenge the present power structure.

In order for this to happen in the United States, the First Amendment (as it applies to online information) would have to, for all practical purposes, be set aside by either legislation or judicial writ. The struggle will be fierce with ‘Net folks using the kind of tactics I outlined above from the Immigration bill…

unless there’s a WMD incident.

In a situation where such an incident occurs, the government can use it to push Patriot Act-style restrictions onto the Internet. It is quite likely in that case that a frightened public would back such restrictions and be willing to forgo freedom of information in exchange for perceived security.

If there is not such an incident in the next decade, the game is over for the current power structure. The empowerment of the individual citizen will accelerate, giving the citizens the ability to self-educate, create new professions from scratch, trade goods and money without them being taxable and circumvent even the most rudimentary methods of police enforcement.

For all practical purposes, the Federal, and to a lesser extent, State and City governments will find themselves as ineffectual as they have been in their current attempts to keep the southern border of the US closed and process thousands of new US passports. Government and major corporate bureaucracies, since they are traditionally conservative about adopting new technologies and paradigms, will find themselves lagging behind at a time where even being a year or two out of date will render them powerless.

The current state will diminish to a point where all that it will be able to do is a bit of interstate commerce, keep the road infrastructure going and defend itself against other nations. All of the rest of the power will be in the hands of “Interest Clubs.”

In either case, the nation that we know will be gone, Prescott. I do not know which fork we’ll actually end up on, since, to a large extent it depends on the success of irrational individuals’ plots. Britain seems to be going the way of the former, but their history of free speech is not as firmly entrenched as ours.

Living on the second path would be exhilarating, but ultimately more dangerous than our present situation. I would find a trade war between Animal-rights activists and Second Life members to be interesting, however, especially when it escalated to tactical nukes.

Tom