WE’VE BEEN GIVEN THE TOOLS, BUT SO FAR WE DON’T KNOW HOW TO USE THEM

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THE PAINFUL MARCH OF IDEAS

Buckminster Fuller, inventor extraordinaire, wrote a great deal about innovation and about how frustratingly long it can take for breakthrough ideas to be accepted.

In his eyes, the major villain was the housing industry, where he said it took at least a generation for even the best idea to win acceptability; but he listed other fields where progress was resisted with near similar success.

Perhaps the best example of the latter was the automobile industry which only now is being dragged kicking and screaming into utilizing fuel efficient technologies; and which has actively fought new thinking – and any notion of doing something which favors the Public Good - for decades. In fact the U.S. automobile industry is a textbook example of the downside of unfettered capitalism. Until legislation, safety and fuel efficiency were largely ignored and hundreds of thousands of Americans died as result; and millions were injured. The carnage continues, of course, but at least it has been lessened.

Bucky died in 1983, so largely missed the extraordinary surge of innovation that has accompanied the introduction of digital technology, but I suspect he would have been delighted. On the other hand, there is no doubt he would have been appalled by the near complete lack of progress within our political system.

A POX ON BOTH PARTIES

Indeed, particularly where the Republican Party is concerned, we seem to have reverted to the late Nineteenth Century when Robbers Barons and Trusts ruled with scant opposition. And when it comes to innovation, it’s hard not to conclude that the Democrats are little better; and they are certainly much worse when it comes to communicating with the electorate. Since communication is fundamental to winning acceptance of ideas, that is a devastating weakness which, so far, the Democrats seem incapable of accepting, let alone remedying.

THE ANSWERS ARE OUT THERE; BUT SO ARE THE ICEBERGS

I hold to the view that although the U.S. is currently faced with a devastating array of problems, and is in active decline, we have never been better placed to solve our problems. The answers are out there.

Why so? How so? Because we now have in our hands the most powerful tools yet known to mankind to leverage our combined societal knowledge, yet our politicians are not even asking the right questions. Instead the Right have mastered the art of pressing the emotional buttons of the electorate, while having no real policies – except to make the Rich richer; and the Left have retreated into pained incoherence. 

Meanwhile, this TITANIC NATION of ours gets ever closer to the icebergs.

THE FORCE MAY BE WITH US, BUT WE DON'T KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH IT

My sense is that most of us don’t yet adequately appreciate the extraordinary power of what has been created and therefore haven’t yet made the intellectual leap to try and harness this force for good or evil which is at our disposal. But we need to, because it is all too clear that our conventional political structures and policies are no longer up to the task. Simply put, changed circumstances demand different structures and solutions.

My vision is of an interactive system where the digisphere is used to tap into the combined brainpower of society as a whole in order to deal with our various issues and solve our problems. That is likely to mean that government, as currently constituted, will eventually cease to exist only to be replaced by a digisphere based version of Athenian direct democracy.

But we don’t have to wait for such drastic change to take place to utilize the digisphere right now. Instead, we could achieve a great deal by merely framing the issues in question in the right form so that the American people could respond.

The right person to do that is the President.

George W. Bush failed dismally in this regard and, so far, Obama has proved little better. He has an extraordinary resource at his disposal but seems to lack the imagination to make use of it. He doesn’t seem to understand that the main role of the politician of the future will be to ask the right question, and to insure the mechanisms that allow society to provide the answer are in place and accessible.

A NATION OF THE NONPLUSSED

We have the tools – truly astonishing tools of unprecedented power - but we are a Nation of the Nonplussed.

Google, Amazon, Facebook and similar corporations may be exceptions; but, given the current imbalance in favor of corporate power at the expense of the individual, do we really want government by Google?