Fantasies, in the general sense of the word, can sidestep the "you can't get there from here" problem.
It might be a bit of handwave-suggestion, but the politics of the real world may have become trapped in a local maximum. It's a closely-associated cluster of peaks, and some of the ideas of political structure of the last couple on centuries aren't in that cluster.
The current "Arab Spring" is in part about struggling across a valley.
For an example from RPGs, there is Traveller, which used an ordered nobility and the trappings of Empire to govern a vast territory affected by slow communications. It's a little like our world. before the electric telegraph.
The mechanical telegraph systems of Napoleon's time allowed the French State to centralise authority, and the emergence of the electric telegraph—not only using Morse code, though that was the vital development—gave central authority the tools it needed to dominate, whether that authority was a King or a Parliament.
The Internet doesn't really change that.
We have politics based on 18th Century models. A TV broadcast is a faster version of one of Ben Franklin's pamphlets. Even with blogs, an erratic and sometimes bewildering 2-way conversation, the core mechanism is the elected representative with a carte blanche until the next election.
At least there is the Recall Election, but why do the representatives have to go to some central place to meet and debate and decide? Maybe the Internet, through some sort of virtual world, allows something different to happen.
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branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2011-09-03 11:42 am (UTC)It might be a bit of handwave-suggestion, but the politics of the real world may have become trapped in a local maximum. It's a closely-associated cluster of peaks, and some of the ideas of political structure of the last couple on centuries aren't in that cluster.
The current "Arab Spring" is in part about struggling across a valley.
For an example from RPGs, there is Traveller, which used an ordered nobility and the trappings of Empire to govern a vast territory affected by slow communications. It's a little like our world. before the electric telegraph.
The mechanical telegraph systems of Napoleon's time allowed the French State to centralise authority, and the emergence of the electric telegraph—not only using Morse code, though that was the vital development—gave central authority the tools it needed to dominate, whether that authority was a King or a Parliament.
The Internet doesn't really change that.
We have politics based on 18th Century models. A TV broadcast is a faster version of one of Ben Franklin's pamphlets. Even with blogs, an erratic and sometimes bewildering 2-way conversation, the core mechanism is the elected representative with a carte blanche until the next election.
At least there is the Recall Election, but why do the representatives have to go to some central place to meet and debate and decide? Maybe the Internet, through some sort of virtual world, allows something different to happen.
But can you get there from here?