[governance] Re: CIRP+

Mon May 21 12:24:22 EDT 2012

Dear David and Jovan,

It seems to me that so often bad things happen because ‘we’ the ‘masses’
abdicate our responsibility to look after ourselves. ‘We’ are, or should
be, the ‘checks and balances’ that create balance in the system. Instead of
that we allow ourselves to be distracted by smoke and mirrors and dust in
the air. The jury is still out over whether the smoke mirrors and dust in
the air are deliberate distractions or an accidental product of the current
state of the world – a by-product of information overload.

Mantras can be dangerous. Mantras are supposed to “create transformation”
but mantras are sometimes the place where the ideas get stuck, as a type of
self-defining infinite loop. Things that seem valuable to me are not to
stop questioning, never to forget the need for balance, and to think
comparitively, to try as much as possible to look at things from more than
one perspective. In the end both a network and a hierarchy are probably
necessary for success.

Deirdre

On 15 May 2012 04:56, Jovan Kurbalija <jovank at diplomacy.edu> wrote:

>  It is a good point questioning some of the IG mantras. I wonder if one
> could argue that the online world is more hierarchical and territorial than
> the 'normal' world. A few points...
>
> The term 'hierarchy' is used so loosely, mainly in a negative context. It
> is a part of a government-bashing trend. But, hierarchy was not invented by
> bureaucrats as I heard at one recent conference in Geneva. It is a natural
> (or even mathematical) principle of making order. In human society, the
> main question is what the nature of the hierarchy is. Is it fixed and
> blocked by political, family, or economic reasons or open to newcomers? In
> the online world, you have hierarchy everywhere.  How many followers do you
> have on Twitter or Facebook? How does your website rank on Google? The
> possibility that you may start your online business anywhere does not work
> easily in practice. Zuckerberg had to go to Silicon Valley and identify
> various hierarchies (venture capital, engineers, marketing) that helped him
> to make Facebook a great success. In many cases hierarchy is not explicit,
> but this does not mean that it does not exist. Paradoxically, in a way,
> governments are honest by making their hierarchies explicit (military,
> diplomatic and diplomatic ranks)?
>
> Another modern mantra is the 'end of territoriality'.  You know the usual
> arguments that you can hear in IG parlance... the Internet is free from
> territorial bonds, etc. Is it true? Not necessarily.  Our location can be
> easily identified via geo-location, GPS, and other devices. The fact that
> we can be ANYwhere (virtuality) does not mean that we can be NOwhere. And,
> when we are SOMEwhere we are more territorial in our online worlds than in
> our traditional worlds.
>
> Should we revisit these - and other - mantras?
>
>
>
> On 5/15/12 12:28 AM, David Allen wrote:
>
> This question - of what might be some new form of governance - is a
> perennial for IGC.  We have circled around it, by now several times.
>
> To note some of points of discussion:
>
> From Wolfgang
> May 13, 2012 4:59:24 AM EDT
>
> a body which is able to produce rough consensus
>
>
>
> Consensus implies legitimacy.  In the case of civil society, that
> encompasses several billion folks.
>
> A handful of individuals, debating on a listserve, just are not - in the
> end - able to proclaim, with any credibility, that consensus.
>
> Very much more to the point - aggregating all the many, many views is one
> crux of the question.  As below.
>
> hierarchical thinking of the 20th century. What we need is a network
> thinking for the 21st century
>
>
>
> Hierarchy is gone, network is in?
>
> Humans have been operating with social networks for thousands of years, at
> the least.  Most decidedly there is nothing new underlying, certainly not
> on account of a calendar system that by happenstance turned a triple zero
> number, 2000 ...  Nor have the hierarchical inclinations, also hard-wired
> into the genome, suddenly gone into hibernation.  Evolution does not work
> that way.
>
> What could be new is some thinking that artfully understood, better, how
> these weave together.  To address, notably, the aggregation of views
> question.
>
> As indeed Parminder asks
> May 13, 2012 5:53:44 AM EDT
>
> tell us clearly what would be the structure of this new mechanism, what
> functions will it perform, and how, what would be its outcomes and how will
> they be implemented.
>
>
>
>
> Then again from Wolfgang
>
> CS was invited to WSIS, now we are here and we want to participate in
> Realpolitik. To give us a seat on the table
>
>
>
> On the one side, Realpolitik alerts that power is the underlying issue.
> Those who have it - governments, particularly of the North; increasingly
> BRIC countries et al,; several large private actors; among others - will
> not be ceding that power without good reason.  As the interminable
> discussion of EC illustrates.
>
> At the same time on the other side, the prospect for some new, more
> suitable arrangements - as Wolfgang brings up - do turn it seems on an
> appeal to “more democracy.”  A shibboleth that may, because its claims are
> sound, be more than a rallying cry for change.  Power may actually shift.
>
> A robust democracy, built from understanding the mix of hierarchy and
> network, one that actually achieves legitimate aggregation of views - in
> other words, this could be a democracy that actually moves toward lofty
> goals.
>
>
> As Paul Lehto has said more than once, but once again here
> May 8, 2012 2:28:06 PM EDT
>
> the "stakeholder" stuff can at most only be seen as an intermediate and
> transition-state to real democracy.
>
>
>
>
> WSIS Forum week, MAG, IGF consultations, EC the end of the week - these
> will all take our time.  In the meantime these large questions will not go
> away.
>
> David
>
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-- 
“The fundamental cure for poverty is not money but knowledge" Sir William
Arthur Lewis, Nobel Prize Economics, 1979
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