Era of personal responsibility

The web could lead to less government, less politics, less corporate control and usher in a new era of freedom and personal responsibility.

There's a growing realisation that people are able to self-organise without leadership (something inconcievable a few years ago!) and create powerful waves of ad-hoc consensus to tackle concrete problems without politics or ideology to provide the impetus.

The terribly destructive big guiding ideas and solutions for humanity, -isms etc that raged through the last 2 centuries could start to disolve and give way to far more practical, common sense approaches at very local right up to global levels.

There is an opportunity to collectively regain control over much of what is handled by intermediaries who are locked (perhaps quite naturally) in a dynamic of forever increasing their grip on us. Over the decades they have stripped society of self-reliance and created huge structures of dependency, whether government or corporate.

Through the web we can increasingly both make "small government" a reality and restrict the entaglement of corporations in all aspects of our lives by bypassing alot of what they offer. The result could start to look a lot more like freedom than anything Western society has seen in a long time.

Less government means less taxes and bureaucracy and less corporate intervention means a better quality of life and a more balanced more local economy, with more inventiveness and resourcefulness. In sum, less of the tedious uniformity and manipulation that characterises the output of both sides who are notionally pitted against each other in false opposition.

This practical apolitical way forward would also hopefully finally kill off the outdated concepts of left and right, this other absurd dialectic that to this day continues to paralyse the political imagination.

The idea that people in large modern societies could finally, to a far greater extent, be able to collectivedly assume responsibilities and take charge of their own destiny unmediated is tremendously exciting. Of course it creates the problem of a new dependency - on the internet itself. That malfunctions, or becomes too controlled and it ruins everything. If the internet is the only means for this to be conducted, it will get hijacked. There is no sinecure. Most people in the world have no internet access and its hardly desirable that the precondition for being an active citizen is being connected to the internet. It is more a question of the internet enabling new structures of organisation and disintermediation that can evolve in the real world after incubation, as it were, on the web.

Electorates feel a powerful sense of entitlement coupled with effective powerlessness, two contradictory forces that tend to keep people locked in a permanent state of indignation and makes democracy seem absurd. This may disolve when there is no longer anyone for people to point a finger at but themselves - a new era of personal responsibility.

Follow the link before to get a sense of the steps being taken in this direction: http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/05/gov-20-week-in-review-1.html?

update 15.05.10: saw this today - and amazed by how it echoes the ideas in this piece!
"perhaps the next political movement is a practical rather than an ideological one"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/video/2010/may/12/ethical-living-real-big-society-two?