NF

I liked the premise of this book, and the idea of peer progressivism in general. Particularly appealing ideas are those around the delegation of local spending powers to local communities and Lawrence Lessig's proposal for the democratic reform of the way politicians' campaigns are financed. I was less convinced by the notion of 'liquid democracy', which was (to my mind anyway) only vaguely defined and without obvious benefits. ( )

The case for progress in a networked age

This book was not exactly what I was expecting. Lots of insight into how technology is shaping society, but at the end there was more political advocating that I would have liked. The political review would have been fine if it had been less opinionated. ( )

Steven Johnson outlines an idea of social and political organization he refers to a the "peer progressive" philosophy. There are two main components to this concept: 1) a belief in the possibility and reality of social progress, and 2) a principle of organization based on a decentralized network through which information can flow freely and problems can be solved in a distributed way. This second point, of course, describes how the internet works on a technical basis, and also how such internet-based projects as Wikipedia function, but it need not necessarily be technological. For instance, some corporations function along these lines, to varying degrees.

Johnson believes this can also be a valuable strategy to use in government, and, indeed, views it as a new political movement. It's one that he sees as unaligned with either the traditional Left or Right, but rather as a completely different way of conceptualizing things, one that believes that neither government nor corporations should exert the powerful top-down control they are currently wrestling with each other over, but that sees an essential role for both free market competition and government oversight.

It took me a little while to really click with what Johnson is saying here. For a good chunk of the book, I found myself, somewhat paradoxically, alternating between thinking that he was talking about things that were trivially obvious and thinking that the ideas he was discussing were so nascent that there really was not very much to be said about them yet. But somewhere in there, I started to find myself nodding a lot and saying, "Hey, that's actually a really good idea!" Prizes instead of patents as a means of incentivizing pharmaceutical companies to develop new drugs? Damn, that's a good idea! A strategy of campaign finance reform that allows taxpayers to designate some portion of their tax money to fund the campaign of the candidate or party of their choice, and forbids candidates who accept that money from taking donations from elsewhere? Hey, that's got to be better than what we have now!

Other proposals, such as the "liquid democracy" scheme in which voters can essentially transfer their votes to people they believe know more about the issues than they do, strike me as considerably more dubious. Still. the ideas here are very much worth giving some thought to, and they're presented in Johnson's usual lucid, engaging, and extremely readable style. ( )