Communication, Technology and Cultural Change Book

Lévy has some excellent criticisms of current modes of governance, mainly centering around the fact that the world is changing too fast for current modes of governance to be able to keep up with. He advocates digitally mediated direct democracy using cyberspace technologies, which is not without its set of problems. However, the book was written in 1994, before the world wide web explosion, so I have to give him a little slack here.

Much of the book was written in this lofty, ethereal style that was more like poetry than prose, and was pretty much incomprehensible nonsense. ("Divine acts and human rituals are the gestures and songs that support the world.")

He argues that a knowledge space is emerging (on top of the earth, the territorial space, and the commodity space) where collective intelligence is possible, which is the interaction between human beings in real time that is digitally mediated. I think that this space has indeed emerged, and is evidenced by such innovations as Wikipedia and others. In this sense, Lévy was somewhat visionary.

The challenge now is how to make systems of direct democracy possible without abuses of power and without oppression of the minority. Lévy tends to brush these criticisms aside, but they need significantly more analysis and critique.