The New Renaissance

Douglas Rushkoff

In this keynote “invocation,” which opened the second day of Personal Democracy Forum on June 24, 2008, Doug argues that there is no such thing as “personal democracy” and genuine democratic discourse can only be participatory and collective. The power to write and publish, he notes, may finally be in the hands of everyone (after centuries of domination by religious and political elites), but real democracy isn’t just blogging and commenting, it’s treating the entire world as “open source” and remarkable by direct participation.

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asa • • Jul 12, 2008

Can you specify what you mean at the end when you request that the government "create the conditions by which we can finally start doing these for each other?" In what way will individual rights be preserved in your particular vision of a “cyber” collective? How are such rights compatible or incompatible with your proposed system? At the beginning you assert that individualism leads to susceptibility to tyranny and that a strong collective would fight tyranny. Socialist and fascist (collectivist) movements over the last 100 years produced death on the scale of a 100 million, and a wider scope of misery. Each such movement promised decentralized authority over the collective but always results in the opposite outcome with truly horrific results. How will your desired political changes avoid such outcomes?

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