Ted Talks. Clay Shirky: How the Internet will (one day) transform government

The bigger problem is power. The people experimenting with participation don’t have legislative power, and the people who have legislative power are not experimenting with participation. They are experimenting with openness. There’s no democracy worth the name that doesn’t have a transparency move, but transparency is openness in only one direction, and being given a dashboard without a steering wheel has never been the core promise a democracy makes to its citizens T.S. Eliot said, “One of the most momentous things that can happen to a culture is that they acquire a new form of prose.“ I think that’s wrong, but - I think it’s right for argumentation. A momentous thing that can happen to a culture is they can acquire a new style of arguing: trial by jury, voting, peer review, now this. Right? A new form of arguing has been invented in our lifetimes, in the last decade. It’s large, it’s distributed, it’s low-cost, and it’s compatible with the ideals of democracy