Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Monday, August 01, 2005

The Short Version

A friendly critic ribbed me for yesterday's post, commenting:
Forgive me, but this is a very American-centric debate. Universal health care is seen as a basic right in some countries and the issues that pervade the American debate on this matter are peculiarly American.

It's true my programmatic post yesterday was full of that awful, special defensiveness that anticipates with endless dread the inevitable host of know-nothing objections to any sensibly social democratic proposal that arise out of the awful, special lunacy of market fundamentalist assumptions and rhetoric defining much of the "mainstream" neoliberal to neoconservative spectrum of American politics today. And of course this market fundamentalism is exaggerated in the extreme in the default culture of tech-advocacy and enthusiasm -- which, frankly, amounts to little more than a libertopian noise brigade in many quarters.

Still, I do want to point out that my heath care recommendation was not only for universal basic health care but for a stakeholder grant in enhancement medicine, which has not yet achieved comparable status as a basic entitlement anywhere as far as I can see except in little bits and pieces.

My proposals that technoprogressives demand both a basic income guarantee and an enhancement stakeholder grant are conjoined to the claim that each of these entitlements would enlist world citizens in incomparable peer-to-peer projects to establish justice, ensure local tranquility, provide global security, and promote general welfare:

1. as citizen-critics on global networks, providing media oversight, free creative content, surveillance/sousveillence, policy deliberation; and

2. as consensual experimental citizen-subjects, "data-points" in global experiments to hasten and regulate emerging rejuvination and enhancement healthcare.

I don't think peer-to-peer has been connected to social democracy in this specifically technoprogressive way as a matter of course anywhere at all, though I happily admit that such is my own goal.

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