>NEW YORK CITY-- Technology enthusiasts on Monday gathered at a jazz concert hall in Manhattan to plot ways to increase government transparency and accountability.I think the whole philosophoical underpinnings of this orientation are self-contradictory. It woud isolate communities, pulverize them electorally, and individualize citizens. From this the idea of every citizen forming an opinion on everything and voting on every issue, the very idea is exhausting. The model of "citizen" here is a super-informed and/or super-manipulated everyman, with no delegation of representation by voters who instead themselves must look at everything (transparency) and v?o?t?e?. Quite a notion of voter to be sure. So, having the notion of "open government" linked to that of "direct democracy" (so-called) is not only anti-representation but also anti-democratic except in the most extreme philosophically individualist concept of democracy. It only puts total responsiblity on everywoman/man, a responsibility I for one dont want to shoulder. This presupposition of "total individual responsiblity" in government, your responsiblity for everything that can happen or has happened in the governing of a given country is quite pernicious and intellectually dishonest. It is the preferred drug of activists, presently left activists, but if enacted woud become also the drug of r+twing activists. My point here: the direct democracy approach favors activists who have illusions about how much responsiblity they can take-on in an advanced h+ly-differentiated democratic society. So, under the transparency movement, beware of the other presuppositions of this advocacy that are the reverse of democracy, by destroying the importance of representation.
The young and technocratic audience at the sixth annual Personal Democracy Forum -- virtually every participant was working on a laptop or iPhone or Tweeting -- generally gave the Obama administration credit for moving the transparency ball forward with sites such as Recovery.gov and Data.gov.
The speakers, however, agreed that the new platforms are only the first step in a revolutionary change that will sweep across government in much the same way Craigslist and Wikipedia changed the private sector.
"We need for transparency to be the default government," said Jeff Jarvis, a columnist and blogger and the author of What Would Google Do? (Collins Business, 2009). "We need a government that is searchable, clickable and linkable."
Now, representation does require reform. What we have now is representatives who dont even read the bills they compile. We've been lied to about a basic facet of transparency where a legal provision of posting on an accessible webpage woud protect us from tyrants who woud slip by us absurdly-written (rather, compiled) legislation, never posted a week in advance, and therefore opaque. Not transparent, not translucent.
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