joshmaurice

At http://www.change.gov/page/s/yourvision the incoming Obama administration invites us to submit suggestions. I sent this:

As technology continues to remove barriers to communication, I expect we'll experience dissolutions of political barriers on many levels, culminating in a system of direct rather than representative democracy that will largely transcend current nation-state borders. Personally I strongly suspect that this new form of planetary governance will emerge as a political reality before the end of President Obama's first term.

As of a few months ago, over half the planetary population owned a mobile phone, and the trend lines for adoption of the newest communication technologies continue to follow exponential growth curves despite the recession. I expect the 18-month-old microblogging monopoly Twitter to give way to decentralized de facto microblogging standards. These new standards will incorporate media-rich exchanges such as video blogging, which Twitter currently lacks, and will in turn evolve into ever subtler, more efficient ways of routing information and thereby coordinating activities, with the direct participation of ever greater portions of the world population. So I see a bright future, if we can avoid catastrophic flare-ups of hostilities in this transitional period.