for
11/11/2000
I have a question to ask. Where is the bandwidth we were promised?
Remind me to make a prediction the next time I don't want something to happen. I couldn't have been farther from the mark last week as I declared that the results of the Presidential Election would be clear in a manner of hours. It's been six days now, recounts continue in Florida and other states, and, while it still appears to be a Bush victory, it clearly ain't over 'til it's over. Gore leads in electoral votes among the states that have been counted, but that lead is by fewer than will be assigned to the winner of Florida--a state which appears almost evenly split between the two candidates.
And so people ask why the Electoral College process is needed. Why, in a democracy, shouldn't the popular vote alone decide the President? Indeed, they've gone beyond that.
Why, some have asked, do we even need a President, in an age of instant messaging and thought-fast electronics? It is one of the planks of former candidate Ralph Nader's Green Party, in fact, to abolish the Senate, it giving equal representation to states of all population sizes. Why are there these apparent circuit breakers on the popular will?
I'll come back to that.
Amidst all this debate, I've been enjoying, this past week, the first seven episodes of the series "Serial Experiments: Lain." This lyrical, sometimes terrifying, always beautiful animé tells the story of a middle school girl (Lain), and her entrance into an electronic world in which little is as it seems--including her--and the boundaries between reality and the wired are becoming increasingly diffuse. It's a well-placed coming of age story, wrapped up in a thoroughly engrossing puzzle with detours into meditations about simulated reality on par with David Cronenberg's eXistenZ, which manages to create a realistic (future?) internet.
Ironically, I've been viewing the series in small, compressed RealPlayer files, which I downloaded from the internet with a Napster-style exchange service. Even though a friend has promised to borrow for me the DVDs from her video store, viewing these tiny files seems strangely pure. Where are we going with the internet? What will computers be and do in 10, 20, even 5 years? Indeed, the Navis in the series--systems by a company that seems to have cornered the desktop and handheld computer market enough to become synonymous with it--are usually veiled references to Apple products like my Macintosh.
Why does a 56kb/second modem mean peak download speeds of 15kb/second? Why am I thrilled to get a 52 megabyte video file in 45 minutes (19.3kb/sec average) on a network linked to a T1 line, one of the fastest connections available? The world of "Lain" seems to be largely devoid of bandwidth restrictions, the only apparent limit being the speed of the Navi. The problem is that the real internet bottlenecks frequently. Information packets can only go from server to server in a number that can be processed, and only so many can be sent to and from one every second. Multiply the occasional overload by an entire internet, and you have the Space Toast Page's load time.
There are always circuit breakers. And it's using this analogy that new internet-supported reform parties like the Green Party can build their position:
Democratic government should not be in the hands of any group, but in the hands of the many--that way there are no bottlenecks holding back the popular will. The people should make the country's decisions directly, from a local level, and government decentralized.
There are problems with this theory of government. First and foremost that it assumes that we are living in a Democracy.
The United States is a Republic. It makes the business of certain democratically elected officials the task of regulating the nation and its relations to others. The popular will is all-powerful, but in check with the will of the elected. This is brilliant.
In a theoretical True Democracy of the information age, governmental officials are obsolete, and each person is allowed one vote on all issues before the government. This would be very similar to a true Communist system. It is the duty of the people to be well informed on all issues, a task well beyond the scope of all but the most idle. Information on all these issues needs to be compressed down to one, perhaps two hours of media each night. This begs the question: who does the compressing?
As throughout human history, it will be the people smart enough, vocal enough, and driven enough to catch the eye of the people. People like those who choose to run for office today.
There will always be titans. The only difference between your system of government and most others is that you're allowed to become one.
Checks and balances, ladies and gentlemen. The media checks the government checks the people checks the government checks the media. Three branches of government, each with their own functions and lengths of time in office. Twelve Supreme Court Justices. Two houses of Congress. And finally, as an outgrowth of this, the Electoral College. Does that make it a proper institution? Hard to say. But hopefully it does place it into the proper perspective; the College isn't a cancer on this nation, it's its child.
But all of this is unimportant. As information begins to flow more and more like in the "Lain" wired, where will Democracy really go? Will we have online voting? Almost certainly (although the cryptography necessary to it will face a real challenge when quantum computers break from the chalkboard to the cracker's basement). But what else? Where, I ask for the second week in a row, will the American system be on all possible charts in the deep future? What is this country's history to be?
Above all, I'm not worried.
The system is complicated and it's best not to forget, in the age of "simple" electronics, that complicated is not equal to bad. Thank you for voting last Tuesday, and congratulations, from the Space Toast Page, to whomever wins.
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