What Values Should A Millennial Manifesto Include?

I think a statement of principle is that Public Institutions maintain accountability and fulfill their role of Public Service by being as transparent as is logistically possible, and by producing high-quality, accurate and fungible data products, and by becoming interactive with the citizens in their processing of this data. This runs counter to three or four centuries of bureaucratic tradition, and amounts to a more or less complete recapitulation of the nature of the State.

Trying to distill what I’m getting at here, I think part of our premise is that government can do a much better job at serving the Public Interest, and that on of the ways it can do so is by opening up significantly and becoming a participatory network system rather than a closed institutional hierarchy.

The follow-on statement of intent is to remake the mechanisms of the State in the manner outlined above. This can be accomplished by attaining executive power, or the ear of the executive, and instituting what amounts to a “reorg” of the government. It could also be accomplished/assisted through legislative changes in administrative law, although without executive leadership the legislative path is likely to lead mostly to a stalemate with existing institutional/bureaucratic forces.

The practical outcome is to have a State apparatus which reflects the increased levels of efficiency and service which are now possible in the 21st century. In addition to radically opening up the decision-making and budgetary processes of government, the general G2C (gov to citizen) service layer can be completely reformed. Interactions with the state (from voting to paying taxes to dealing with the DMV) can and should be simplified and streamlined. Long-term civil servants who’s roles in the outmoded paper-powered information works can be bought out with early retirement as new classes of public service — the Public Project Manager, the Public Engineer, the Public Designer, etc — are created.

I’d also add that it would in some way reassert the positive role that government can and does play in our lives. This might be tied up in other things like the Public Domain - Public Sphere or Commons might be a better, more root value than either of these things. Reinvigorating the idea of the commonweal.

Basically, the idea that there are some things that we are better off sharing and doing publicly - building roads, funding schools, etc. Add in more New Deal type stuff - Social Security, right to accessible, quality health care, etc., and that’s something we’re rapidly losing and need to revive for the 21st C.

After Katrina, I think we’re ready for something like this, and it’s like Al Franken said in his announcement speech - (paraphrase) “I believe in personal responsibility and that we need to lift ourselves up by our bootstraps. But first you’ve got to have some boots.” Thats what government is there for, to provide the basics without which nothing else is possible - no matter how smart or entrepreneurial you are.

is this an American manifesto? a “global North” manifesto? or a truly global manifesto? (and what would truly “global” be???)

while i think we will always need local manifestos as well as national manifestos, the twenty-first century also calls for manifestos that are global in scope (it also calls for our local and national manifestos to be global in context). by “global” i mean one that would include the local, national, regional, and international together, allowing each its own domain and authority while connecting them together in their interdependent relationships. It would be one in which the power dynamic and information flow is spread throughout. (I’m sure many of you can clarify this even further.)