How to Secede in Politics Without Really Trying

[athelind]

After my post about the possibility of a non-violent dissolution of the Union, and particularly in light of this comment about a Disunited States restructuring itself as a North American Union along the lines of the EU, two posts on Futurismic jumped right out at me.

The first raises the idea that the U.S. is just too big to govern with a top-down model, and as the amount of information involved increases, and transparency increases, it simply overwhelms the systems. Some of the quotes sound like knee-jerk Luddism, until you realize that the guy saying "The political system is broken partly because of Internet" is the founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the guy saying that releasing more government information would harm politcial debate and paralyze the government was Lawrence Freaking Lessig, one of the founders of the Creative Commons. When that hits, it turns everything around: they aren't critiquing the new technology; they're critiquing the established governmental systems, and actually suggesting new ideas.

(Again, a recurring theme in Toffler is that "second-wave" institutions are are a poor match to an economy driven by "third-wave" technology. Is that The Other Shoe I hear?)

The article about Post-National Identity is also Relevant To Recent Discourse, but it's one in the morning, so good frakkin' night.

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Comments

[tombfyre.livejournal.com]

Hmm, lots o' good points right there. Such a situation wouldn't exactly be far out there in the grand scheme of things. Other countries have started splitting up because they got too large, all through history. Or at least the size expanse covered definitely had something to do with it.