[governance] SOPA or no SOPA

[Garth Graham]

On 2011-12-15, at 11:53 PM, Daniel Kalchev wrote:

> Yet, there is the other type of people, like those that McTim refers to, who often make decisions contrary to their "special interests" (by the way, it is mostly US concept that you need to make money at any cost). Those people built the Internet. Those people kept, keep today and will continue to keep it all together in the future.
> These people are unique in a way, because they are not only very deep into technology, capable of inventing things and code their ideas in software, but they also are social enough, can see "trough the peoples image deep in their soul" and therefore are very, very hard to be confused to deluded by some con artist.
> 
> These people are not very many, but they don't need to be. They have their very special interests --- the Internet.
> They will use any tools available to see their special interests are met. And, they have been successful for these 20++ years, because they to posses unique qualities.
> 
> As I commented in earlier threads, none of these people work for Governments. Or if they do, it is on a contractual basis, as isolated as possible. This is, I believe because this kind of people do not tolerate politics.

I like the wisdom of this observation a lot.  So let me see if I can improve it a bit.

1. In the literature on online communities of practice, those unique people are called "stewards of community-based use."  Such stewards are now everywhere, eroding the modes of governance structuring institutions and organizations (In ICANN terms, you'd say they were "at large.").  So, while I'd agree the constituency for the core politics of Internet Governance is not large (and maybe not yet large enough), there is a way of looking at the demographics that beefs it up a bit.

2. If those unique people weren't, in fact, HIGHLY tolerant of politics as the art of the possible, we wouldn't have the Internet.  The messy method of dialogue and feedback they use to improve things is exactly the way that pure democracy works.  It's bureaucracy they don't tolerate.  Government bureaucracy uses technocracy for decision-making, not politics.

GG

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