With Broadband Internet, is Traditional Government Becoming Irrelevant?

If you have read a few of my favorite books, such as Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi and Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software by Steven Johnson and finally, The Wisdom of the Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations by James Surowiecki all highlighted in the Books and Whitepapers section of this website, then this development should not come as a surprise to you.

So what pearls of wisdom do these sages offer up to us in these times of crisis? First, Barabasi shows how networks have come of age and have become the defining organizational construct - those who grasp this fundamental realignment and know how to put it to use have tremendous power, while those who don't, are left working with yesterday's tools and yesterday's paradigm (Homeland Security and FEMA, are you listening?). Second, Johnson compares decision making among ants (who are considerably less pensive than humans), with traditional hierarchical decision making as practiced by bureaucracies. When faced with an unexpected circumstance, emergent systems with a few simple rules can be more effective than traditional pre-programmed systems. With a few simple hormonal communication signals, for instance, ants can be highly effective at dealing with unplanned disturbances to their status quo, demonstrating the concept of emergence, or bottom-up decision making. Finally, Surowiecki shows that believe it or not, a roomful of fairly well informed average people make better decisions than your proverbial panel of experts, with statistically relevant consistency. And anyone with cable television was apparently better informed than the government "experts" were last week.

As I relate in the whitepaper I put together a few months back, On Structural Change, we have fallen through the Alice in Wonderland rabbit hole, and the Internet has launched us all on a new path, whether we like it or not, by moving power out to the edges and away from large central planners. Napster was no fluke, Peer to Peer has arrived. With broadband connectivity and digital information, smart actors out on the edges are empowered and can act quicker than can bureaucracies.

The idea of a centrally-planned disaster response may be seen in a few years as the wrong way to approach the idea of Homeland Security. It may be that government should instead provide monetary assistance after the fact as FEMA traditionally does, and facilitate a response with military resources and equipment via the National Guard, but that we should depend on each other for immediate response with a more distributed disaster recovery methodology.

We are at the very early stages of analyzing what worked (not much) and what didn't work last week in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Some will argue that government should have executed their responsibilities better (what an understatement that is!), and others will point to the failure of either the federal or local government branches. Let us hope that our policy makers and political leaders take a step back and reconsider the paradigms and assumptions they are using. We have more resources at our disposal than multi-billion dollar agencies and programs, and money does not solve all problems (although it does feel good to give it and to get it). Rather we should look at how we can harness all of our available resources for rapid response, including individuals with networked computers far from the disaster, to work more effectively together, like the ants do when I step on their anthill, as I am wont to do while mowing the yard.