Anticipatory democracy

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I first began working with the Tofflers on the early 1970s on a concept called anticpiatory democracy... the intersetion of history and the future which is the essence of politics and government at its best... a future-concious politics and popular understanding that would make it easier for America to make the transition...necessary to enter the Third Wave information revolution... [to do so] underline the parts you find useful, wander around your community looking for kindred spirits, and begin to develop a few small projects, you will be shocked in a few years at how much you have accomplished - Newt Gingrich, January 1995, preface to Creating a New Civilization: The politics of the Third Wave, 1995, Alvin and Heidi Toffler

In the generation between 1995 and 2010 a wide variety of techniques became standard best practices in wildly successful businesses. For instance, prediction markets, scenario analysis, full-force feedback, and use of ranked ballots inside organizations to set priorities and choose officers became extremely common. In contrast to the dilemma of the frustrated voter or the activist shareholder faced with absurd barriers to radical transparency agenda that advances real market values, professionals inside advanced organizations were relatively empowered. Organizations that suffered from bad reputations (both deserved and not) were often able to aggressively promote certain values such as Wal-Mart's drive to cut waste and cut energy use, making itself appear 'green' to offset its generally anti-labour reputation.

Some political parties, notably the California Republicans under Arnold Schwarzenneger and UK Conservatives under David Cameron and Democrats under Barack Obama, made similarly aggressive positioning moves to present themselves as more future-aware. Some substantive moves, such as the appointment of Nobel Prize winning physicist Steven Chu as Obama's energy secretary, and the aggressive promotion of mediawiki monoculture in intelligence agencies, and (on the infrastructure front) smart grid and national broadband initiatives, suggest motion in the directions Gingrich once suggested. Newt Gingrich's official entry into the US presidential election, 2012 in May 2011 suggested his intent to focus on Obama's deficiencies in these areas, to refocus the debate (and perhaps save the US Republican Party) on issues Gingrich took strong positions on (e.g. efficient US FEMA making much more use of citizen emergency response teams and social media).


[edit] tech tree rationale

Anticipatory democracy is actually discovered by factions seeking influence in existing organizations; They find ways to cooperate that are radically more efficient than those used by competitors. Applying those methods to entire economies and polities follows. For instance, political parties employing ranked ballots to choose leaders have lost all moral argument against use of such ballots by the public to choose ordinary legislators, and eventually must cease to support first past the post (and thus gerrymandering).

The detailed polling and consultation necessarily implied by these methods and the need to rapidly find common ground between factions, leads to evolution of a wide range of online deliberation technologies to represent not just the positions with intellectual integrity, but less rational voter sentiments. The cost and expense of the high-stakes game of developed-nation democracy justifies simulation already extant in serious games and the calculations required for vote swaps.

Since logic is fragile, active suppression of irrational and zero-integrity and interest-group-funded politial movements, e.g. astroturfers and the use of crapflood via talk radio, etc., initially useful for factions to come to power, is required in order for them to implement their advertised mainstream agenda.

Anticipatory methods used for nation-scale decisions such as smart money forces focus on safe/fair/done, we/will/must, in/up/down/out and other basic relationships and conceptual metaphors from the enactivist canon, and thus changes the perception of commitment, control and roles. This makes it much easier to pursue science-based approaches to economics, health and education. agree on uniform process semantics (commit terms, etc.) - and justifies the teaching of political virtues to get beyond politics as usual. This opens the door to cognitive democracy in the long run.

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