{ Monthly Archives }

July 2006

The Sovereign Nation of New York City

Source: BBC NEWS | Magazine | Are cities the new countries?

LondonThese cities are bigger than many industrialised nations. And they are growing at a dizzying rate, sucking in workers from rural areas.
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Economically, many of the world’s great cities are already divorced from their nation-states, with their main streams of investment come from other great cities.
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Shanghai has so much power and autonomy it has been described as effectively a city-state, within China only in geography. And on Thursday London Mayor Ken Livingstone was handed a raft of new powers over planning, housing and the environment.

He joked: "Having been to Singapore and seen how successful it was I think anything short of a fully independent city state is a lost opportunity, with its own foreign and defence policies thrown in."

There was a great series of sci-fi novels back in the ’50’s by James Blish collectively titled “Cities in Flight”. The premise was that as Earth’s infrastructure collapsed, the big cities, aided by an anti-gravity technology called “spin-dizzies”, took to space, where they mined asteroids and traded with other space cities. I don’t remember the details of any of the stories, but remember reading them with delight at their inventiveness and detail of plot and character. Beneath Blish’s sci-fi conceit was the recognition that the major cities of Earth, even at that time, had more in common with one another than they had with the population of whatever countryside they happened to have grown up in.

2006 07 14

clip
observe the passing scene

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Participatory Democracy

Jimmy WalesThe inestimable Jimmy Wales, founder of the invaluable Wikipedia, about which I’ve blogged in the past, has launched a new venture in citizen participation, the Central Campaign Wikia. In his Mission Statement, Wales explains his purpose:

I am launching today a new Wikia website aimed at being a central meeting ground for people on all sides of the political spectrum who think that it is time for politics to become more participatory, and more intelligent.

This website, Campaigns Wikia, has the goal of bringing together people from diverse political perspectives who may not share much else, but who share the idea that they would rather see democratic politics be about engaging with the serious ideas of intelligent opponents, about activating and motivating ordinary people to get involved and really care about politics beyond the television soundbites.

This is what I was hoping to do when I created the pdparty.us site, but I had neither the software engineering skills, the time, or the position within the blogosphere to get any traction with that effort. Jimmy Wales is in a better position, at least with regard to the first and last of those characteristics, and I think what he’s begun has a decent chance of evolving into something as important as Wikipedia, and even more beneficial to our society. I’ve put a link to the pdparty.us site up on the Campaigns Wikia site, and I’m going to get the reverse link up as well. If I can figure out how to do it, I’ll try to integrate some of the ideas from the pdparty site into the emerging ideas on the Campaigns Wikia site.

I’ve joined the Campaigns Wikia mail list, and I’d urge you to do so as well. Register at the site, learn how to contribute to the discussions, and let’s see if we can get something going here that will take shape before the politicians and big media get a chance to grab it and throttle it.

I’m excited, and I’m encouraged.

2006 07 06

take part

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