Posts tagged government
The context for public innovation is changing rapidly – where as the mainstream discourse over the last 5 years was focused on service & experience redesign in a digital age, increasingly we are recognising the need for a more foundation shift in the creation & nature of public good itself and thereby a necessary shift also in the nature of the public institutional infrastructure itself.
via https://provocations.darkmatterlabs.org/the-challenge-of-public-innovation-labs–58020c7be7ea1
From the Australian government’s new “data-driven profiling” trial for drug testing welfare recipients, to US law enforcement’s use of facial recognition technology and the deployment of proprietary software in sentencing in many US courts … almost by stealth and with remarkably little outcry, technology is transforming the way we are policed, categorized as citizens and, perhaps one day soon, governed. We are only in the earliest stages of so-called algorithmic regulation — intelligent machines deploying big data, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) to regulate human behaviour and enforce laws — but it already has profound implications for the relationship between private citizens and the state.
via https://medium.com/world-economic-forum/rage-against-the-machines-is-ai-powered-government-worth-it-d003a0488f02
Yet to be convinced that one can build a working parliamentary majority on hedge wizards and psychogeographers:
via http://momentumnorthants.org.uk/alan-moore-statement/
What kind of oligarchy? As Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan explains, Gilens and Page’s findings provide support for two theories of governance: economic elite domination and biased pluralism. The first is pretty straightforward and states that the ultra-wealthy wield all the power in a given system, though some argue that this system still allows elites in corporations and the government to become powerful as well. Here, power does not necessarily derive from wealth, but those in power almost invariably come from the upper class. Biased pluralism on the other hand argues that the entire system is a mess and interest groups ruled by elites are fighting for dominance of the political process. Also, because of their vast wealth of resources, interest groups of large business tend to dominate a lot of the discourse.
http://www.policymic.com/articles/87719/princeton-concludes-what-kind-of-government-america-really-has-and-it-s-not-a-democracy
Knowing how the government spies on us is important. Not only because so much of it is illegal – or, to be as charitable as possible, based on novel interpretations of the law – but because we have a right to know. Democracy requires an informed citizenry in order to function properly, and transparency and accountability are essential parts of that. That means knowing what our government is doing to us, in our name. That means knowing that the government is operating within the constraints of the law. Otherwise, we’re living in a police state.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/06/government_secr.html
All disruptive technologies upset traditional power balances, and the Internet is no exception. The standard story is that it empowers the powerless, but that’s only half the story. The Internet empowers everyone. Powerful institutions might be slow to make use of that new power, but since they are powerful, they can use it more effectively. Governments and corporations have woken up to the fact that not only can they use the Internet, they can control it for their interests. Unless we start deliberately debating the future we want to live in, and information technology in enabling that world, we will end up with an Internet that benefits existing power structures and not society in general.
https://www.schneier.com/essay–409.html