By viewing history as a series of techno-economic waves with accompanying socio-political responses it is possible to understand how new technologies shape human society.
As Brian Arthur has successfully argued, the information technology wave has reached the golden age. While the global infrastructure build-out marches on, the socio-political impact of IT continues to gain momentum.
The growing emergent democracy movement provides an excellent example of how IT's latest innovation, social software, is reshaping the political landscape. Yesterday's digital democracy teach-in at E-tech used social software to share and capture the latest emergent democracy issues in the US, developing nations, and across the world.
While the political ideals underlying emergent democracy are crystallizing quickly (e.g. emergent democracy is not direct democracy) it has yet to define or adopt an economic framework to compliment its goals. One perspective that shares some similarities is participatory economics, or parecon.
Parecon is being touted as an economic alternative to capitalism and socialism. According to Michael Albert's recent treatise, Parecon: Life After Capitalism, a participatory economy is a democratic economy. "People control their own lives to appropriate degrees. Each person has a level of say that doesnt impinge on other people having the same level of say. We impact decision in proportion as we are affected by them." (see case studies from the Balkans and Argentina.)
Parecon is built on four key values:
Solidarity: Economies affect how people interact. They affect the broad attitudes people have toward one another.
Diversity: Economies affect the range of options that people have in their work and in consumption.
Equity: Economies affect the distribution of output among actors. They determine our budgets or what share of the social product we receive.
Self-management: Economics affect how much say each actor has in decisions about production, consumption, and allocation.
It is important to note that I have many problems with Albert's vision of parecon, including: the innovative capacity of job complexes; the effective implementation of cross-cultural resource allocation mechanisms; and his static view of human nature (just to name a few). However....
Evolving social software represents the technological glue that can tie emergent democracy and participatory economics into a functional political economic alternative. Indeed, both participatory economics and emergent democracy inherently depend upon a global information infrastructure that supports transparent information exchange and collaborative decision-making across multiple social and geographic scales (i.e. social software).
So while social software continues to prove itself within businesses, its impact on our political lives in only just beginning.