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Themes and Quotable Quotes                               (Top)

"A New Force Takes Hold in American Democracy -- PEOPLE!"  
  Larry Boyd, Pasadero, Inc., Tempe, AZ, August 30, 2003

"The paradox of the ailing American democracy is that the remedy is more democracy and more democracy is prohibited by guardians of the status quo." Larry Boyd, Pasadero, Inc., Tempe, AZ, August 30, 2003

"The United States government is not serving the purposes for which it was ordained.  Instead, there has emerged a "shadow government" that responds primarily to big money and mega-corporate power and generally serves the ends of special interest groups at the expense of the general welfare."  William  Boyd, School of Law, University of Arizona, August 1, 2003

"The confluence of an ailing political system, a large population of computer savvy professionals and the coming of the Internet, is changing politics as usual and portends the first major institutional change in the American political system since the advent of political parties." Larry Boyd, Pasadero, Inc., Tempe, AZ, August 30, 2003

"Large-scale participation enabled by the Internet holds the key to making American political institutions work again without a constitutional convention or radical reform."  Larry Boyd, Pasadero, Inc., Tempe, AZ, August 30, 2003

"Professionalization of American society and the development of Internet technologies make large-scale political participation possible - an ailing political system makes it imperative."  Larry Boyd, Pasadero, Inc., Tempe, AZ, August 30, 2003

"The world has become so complex and things happen so fast that decision-makers NEED wide citizen participation and such participation is in fact absolutely essential."  William  Boyd, Law College, University of Arizona, August 1, 2003
   
"Participatory Democracy as large-scale engagement of citizens in politics is the only antidote to big-money distortions of traditional democratic institutions." Larry Boyd, Pasadero, Inc., Tempe, AZ, August 30, 2003

"We are optimistic that a participatory democracy can emerge to correct the course of the nation and this can occur without the need for changes in the basic structure of the U.S. government."  William  Boyd, School of Law, University of Arizona, August 1, 2003

"The world needs emergent democracy more than ever. Traditional forms of representative democracy are barely able to manage the scale, complexity and speed of the issues in the world today. Representatives of sovereign nations negotiating with each other in global dialog are very limited in their ability to solve global issues. The monolithic media and its increasingly simplistic representation of the world cannot provide the competition of ideas necessary to reach consensus."  Joi Ito, http://joi.ito.com/joiwiki/EmergentDemocracyPaper

"... we must explore the way in which this new form of democratic dialog translates into action and how it interacts with the existing political system. We can bootstrap emergent democracy by using the tools to develop the tools and create concrete examples of emergent democracy. These examples can create the foundation for understanding how emergent democracy can be integrated into society generally."   Joi  Ito, http://joi.ito.com/joiwiki/EmergentDemocracyPaper

"Is the burst of participation that came with the Internet the solution to the problem of creeping power concentrations and abuse in democratic systems that has alluded philosophers for centuries because they simply could not have foreseen today's army of educated, informed, and technically savvy citizens and the Internet?" Larry Boyd, Pasadero, Inc., Tempe, AZ, August 30, 2003

"...  it can plausibly be argued that the political system we have and have had for decades was not designed for a large-scale population of well-educated, skilled, informed, rationally self-interested people who (because of their origins) are predisposed toward an open, inclusive, progressive system and that system has not evolved to accommodate this important development.  True, the system has evolved with experience in some meaningful ways, but it is still heavily engineered to "protect" the masses, who are thought to be generally passive, uninformed, unaware of their best self-interests, and often irrationally motivated, against themselves.  It is fair to ask whether we have outgrown our system in key respects." William  Boyd, Law College, University of Arizona, August 1, 2003

"Rather than the metaphor of a single epidemic as in the ideavirus, the spontaneous process behind the public service network is better pictured as great bunches of separate epidemics competing and mutating and converging into one public opinion." Larry Boyd, Pasadero, Inc., Tempe, AZ, August 30, 2003

Public Interest democracy provides a more level playing field for the match between an entrenched government and corporation alliance and a concerned citizenry."  Larry Boyd, Pasadero, Inc., Tempe, AZ, August 30, 2003

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