The issue may not be in the scalability of system that allows the 30M to participate, but in the scalability of the system that allows a few roles to hold so much control over so many things–or need to make decisions about so many things “at once.”

The wonder of the internet to me seems to be the ability of citizens to interact with each other and for that reason it carries great promise as a democratic tool. The internet allows forums of like-minded citizens to evolve, and creates debate and clarification of views by allowing citizens to read and respond to the opposing claims of other citizens. It disseminates a more comprehensive spectrum of these views than even the editorial views of 100 cable news channels. A site like RealClearPolitics Collects and disseminates these views from local publications into a globally accessible format.

More important than bringing views together is the ability of the internet to bring people together as evidenced in the success of the Obama campaign in their use of the internet to create a community of supporters and contributors. I am always suspicious of top-down hierarchical structures and would suspect and fear that government could use the internet as the tool to consolidate power and opinion and further its partisan non-democratic agendas. The internet seems the antithesis of government itself and I see the promise of the internet as that tool which can protect the citizens from the abuses of their government.

I think that it is interesting that the internet is part of an evolutionary globalizing movement at a time when there is a simultaneous evolutionary localizing movement. I use the example of agriculture. For so many years we extolled the ability to purchase and eat fish from Chile, apples from New Zealand, and and to drink coffee from Columbia. The new agricultural movement is toward CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) with its mantra of “Buy Local”. Support local farmers, save transportation costs and therefore energy, and eliminate the profits of retailers and distributors that drive up the price of food. Choose organically grown food and non-genetically modified meat, support small family farms, and undermine the devastating economic and environmental effects of corporate farming and their utter disregard for animal rights and welfare.

Perhaps systems of communication can be designed that allow extensive global listening to be combined with extensive local speaking. Just as the globally available sunlight, water, and atmosphere are shared resources that need to be combined with locally rich soils to produce successful crops, perhaps globally available truths, opinions, and ideas can be combined within fields of citizens whose roots are in regional communities. The internet allows citizens to broadcast as well as receive. We may not have to broadcast to everyone at all times as the television media we grew up with has done. But we can find each other and certify that our intuitions, which seem so opposite to the prevailing trance induced upon us, are indeed authentic and credible.

In David Korten’s 2006 book, The Great Turning, he reminds us that “our word democracy comes from the greek word ‘demokratia: literally people power.”
The internet is a tool that can increase the power of the people through self organization, and can help turn government into a system for the benefit of its citizens. The internet is a product of human evolution that is as yet incomplete but moving toward self-organization and away from hierarchy. Korten writes “The contemporary phenomenon of global civil society may be an early manifestation of the human capacity to actualize on a global scale Aristotle’s ideal of a society able to achieve coherence primarily through nonhierarchical self-organization (Korten 152). I would add that this global civil society is being created by the people with the aid of the internet and not by governments or corporations.