(2012-11-07) Shirky Internet Democracy No Vs Go

Clay Shirky notes the fit between the Internet and Democracy. *The thing that most changed my mind was a book by Pierre Rossonvallon called Counter Democracy, which unearths the aspects of democratic participation that are about citizen suspicion of the state. Rossonvallon says that the ways that we stop the state from doing certain things are not only an underappreciated part of democracy, but logically and historically exist prior to establishing mechanisms like voting and parliaments.

The grain of the Internet seems to favor coalitions built on the intersection of people's goals, not the union of those goals. This makes it good for movements and bad for political parties, at least as historically conceived. So I'd say we should expect to see a lot more knocking down of existing structures, while the work of building new ones based on deep integration remains as hard as ever.

Given the number of really bad existing structures, this is still a huge net win for humanity.* (Occupy Wall Street)