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Rebooting Democracy is licensed under a Creative Commons
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ISBN: 978-0-9817509-0-3
Printed in the United States of America
Con t en ts
Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Foreword . 5
Esther Dyson
Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Introduction 11
n PReFACe
reporter earlier this year about the Iraq war by saying, “You had input.
The American people have input every four years, and that’s the way
our system is set up.” In other words, the people had their say at the
election booth (a vote that may or may not have been recorded and
counted accurately, by the way) and now it’s our turn to run the coun-
try as we see fit, away from the watchful, interfering eye of citizens.
As we have seen, this kind of thinking and behavior is dangerous for
Americans and for American democracy.
On January 21, 2009, a new tenant will occupy the Oval Office,
and that person will be wise to continue to build on the public input
and participation that helped to put them there. Returning to business
as usual will be an enormous missed opportunity for both the new
president and the American public.
America’s wonderful, messy experiment with a republican form of
democracy is a work in progress, an unfolding story of astonishing
possibilities and periodic disappointment. The storyline of this new
century is the yawning chasm between the passion that Americans,
particularly young people, have for a fair and just society, with the real-
ity of near permanent incumbency for elected officials and a gridlocked
political system.
Voting is our most visible political activity; it’s easy to see and mea-
sure, but it’s only a small part of the spectrum of political activities that
form the backbone of our democracy. Political campaigns have begun
to use an array of social media tools to connect with potential voters,
but there are far greater uses for these tools beyond campaigns and
elections. Social media and broad, enthusiastic participation together
can profoundly affect governance and policy development, who runs
for office and how, the communications between elected officials and
citizens beyond elections, and the loosening of the death grip of mon-
eyed, interests on politics and policies.
This jarring juxtaposition of our political reality against the poten-
PReFACe n
tial for great political change is vividly revealed in the awful uses of
technology (e.g., touch-screen voting machines or microtargeting of
voters by what beer they buy) versus wonderful uses of technology
(e.g., cell phones used to mobilize voters or live-blogging of politi-
cal events that engage thousands of people in direct conversation with
candidates). Rebooting America is dedicated to understanding these dif-
ferences and providing a vision of how we can realize our collective
hope for a better future.
We invited a variety of interesting, creative thinkers spanning the
political spectrum and the generational divide, and from a variety of
different professional perspectives, to write essays for this anthology.
We also posted a general call for essays at the Personal Democracy
Forum website, and three of those submissions are included in this
volume.
The essays are naturally as varied as the participants. They range
from revisiting the need for checks and balances within government
and between the government and its citizenry, to a radical reinter-
pretation of the public’s “right to know,” to the exponential power
of many-to-many deliberation to shape public policy. These essays
confirmed our optimistic sense that the political system is due for
substantive changes. Undoubtedly there are many more voices and
thinkers whom we failed to engage, and we apologize for those over-
sights. It is our hope that Rebooting America will continue as a living
document online, and to that end we are publishing all of the essays
at rebooting.personaldemocracy.com and inviting public comment
on (and off) the site.
We hope that, you, our readers and participants, will help to jump-
start conversations about increasing citizen participation in gover-
nance, opening the doors of government wider and making the walls
see-through, and unleashing our collective creativity to help solve
technical problems and break through long-standing entrenchments.
Visit https://ebookgate.com today to explore
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n PReFACe
Our future does not have to be a continuation of the past or the pres-
ent. We can create a new and better course—we just need to imagine
it first.
—Allison Fine
—Micah L. Sifry
—Andrew Rasiej
—Josh Levy
F oRe WoRD
Esther Dyson
n FoRe WoRD
Each of the essays has a unique central idea. There are common
themes of citizen participation and empowerment, but within those
broad brushstrokes are interesting areas of convergence and divergence.
David Weinberger discusses the critical importance of echo chambers
to the conversation among citizens that powers our democracy. danah
boyd points out the need to break through these silos to broaden the
conversation about community life, but also cautions about the poten-
tial of today’s social networking sites to produce big changes in political
behavior. Glenn Harlan Reynolds discusses the fallacy of trying to protect
people’s privacy in the Internet Age, arguing that we should instead focus
on fostering greater transparency around (and through) government
institutions. Martin Kearns argues the opposite, that more protections
of individual privacy and data are needed to provide people with a sense
of personal security in order to engage civically either online or offline.
Some essayists focused on lessons from the past (Julie Barko Ger-
many, Harry Boyte), others zeroed in on improving the present (Steven
Clift, Newt Gingrich), and a few gave us a view from the future (Ellen
Miller, Zack Exley). Several essayists proposed a radical restructuring of
our entire system of government (Aaron Swartz, Nicco Mele and Jan
Frel, and Douglas Rushkoff) and others dwelt on the need for individu-
als to act outside government to propel change (Scott Heiferman, Susan
Crawford). And, of course, the radical libertarians call for the radical
restraint of government (Avery Knapp and Tennyson McCalla)!
Esther Dyson n
i t’s one thing to have an idea, and quite another to have the where-
withal to bring it to fruition. We are enormously grateful to the
Schumann Center for Media & Democracy for their financial
support for this project.
Of course, without our essayists, our volume wouldn’t be very
voluminous. Their enthusiastic willingness to share their creative ideas
without remuneration and on an impossible deadline was enormously
gratifying. And this gratitude extends to our online essay entrants who
courageously shared their ideas with the world; we wish we could have
selected more of them for inclusion in this first volume of essays. We
hope we have done justice to all of the contributors and their ideas and
are delighted that we will have the opportunity to share them widely.
We birthed this entire project in just a few months’ time, a ges-
tation period that usually spans several years. This was only possible
with team members who were extraordinarily flexible, enthusiastic,
and talented. We feel so fortunate to have been introduced to Julie
Trelstad and her team at Plain White Publishing. Julie is pioneering
the iTunes paradigm for publishing and we’re delighted to be along
for the ride. Her colleague Russ McIntosh of Studio McIntosh showed
0 n A C K n o W L e D Ge M e n t s
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