[governance] "US Exceptionalism" (was Re: Bloomberg - The Overzealous Prosecution...)

[Garth Graham]

On 2013-01-20, at 7:18 AM, Norbert Bollow wrote:
> Does someone here have an opinion that fits neither of the two categories proposed above?

>From time to time, I've attempted an argument for re-framing the context of the debate that's at right angles to most of the content of the IGC list.  I haven't succeeded in breaking many icons, but here's a synthesis.

A digital culture now exists. It emerged from a relational worldview founded on the principles governing self-organizing systems.  Because of that worldview, digital culture holds a different perspective on governance and Internet Governance, one that does not include the industrial age social construction of society as divided into three groups – governments, the private sector and civil society.  In digital culture, the primary unit of social organization is the self-organizing community.  But it’s a community that does not transcend or submerge autonomous individuals into some kind of collective. Dwellers in digital culture will not allow themselves to be mobilized.  And they are not concerned to reform or globalize existing structural arrangements.  Within those communities, the functions of structural organization are "distributed," and power resides in a shift in the norms and patterns of individual behavior towards interdependent learning through practice. There are community-based change agents now working to realize that understanding of how the world works.  The way forward involves sharing what those agents are learning rather than step-by step reform of global institutions via a “multistakeholder model” that identifies stakeholders in the wrong way.

GG


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