“The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.”
William Gibson
The microcomputer revolution put computing into people’s hands in the 1970s and 1980s. The Internet revolution started connecting all those computers in the 1990s. Neither of these revolutions have reached and been fully integrated into the task of popular oversight of our governments.
If they had, the world would be a very different, much better run place. Our politics would be very different.
In 2100, both these revolutions will likely have completed and integrated into the way we elect and manage our governments.
Today, we legislate the creation of governments to do things by certain criteria, then judge their performance and retain or replace elected leadership based on that performance. Every part of the last sentence has an element of guesswork in it. We do not have a comprehensive list of all our governments. We do not routinely get a list of what each of them does. While a government probably has performance metrics to judge success or failure. The standard is not routinely shared with the public, and the current values of performance known inside the government is also not routinely shared.
In the future, not only a comprehensive list of governments will exist but they will be mapped so that you will know which governments claim jurisdiction where you are or at any particular place in the country. What each of them do will be routinely made available (with reasonable exceptions for legitimate state secrets), the standard for successful performance, and the current performance data will be routinely shared, computer to computer. A simple to understand but dense data presentation will be available so that the metrics an individual voter cares about will be presented along with whether performance is adequate for each metric monitored by the standard of the individual voter. A routine daily review might take a minute over breakfast.
All of this is possible with today’s technology. Some of it is even a reality today. Citizen Intelligence is committed to making it reality for all governments so citizens can monitor them easily and affordably.
If this idea of easily, quickly, and cheaply keeping tabs on all governments interests you, please comment below or send us a message.
[[Repost from the Citizen Intelligence Facebook page – February 6]]
Where does the graft come in ?
You can’t have government without graft.
The recent hysteria about repealing internet privacy rules was really about ending the bureaucratic overlap between the FCC and FTC. The decision a couple months ago to overturn Obama’s regulations against natural gas drillers flare-offs ended the overlap between the EPA and the Interior Department over the matter.
I’m sure there are many more agencies with jurisdictions that are redundant. We’re only scratching the surface of government streamlining.
Given current data-mining and smart phone/GPS technology, this is just a matter of programming effort. The data is there.