Category: democracy

In around 2009 I started a twitter account to get what seemed a direct line to gossip coming out of parliament house. In those days there didn’t seem to be any trolls. But it quickly got sordid. Soon i had my...

Looking back at some of my writing this website, I am coming to realise how naive I have been about human nature.  They might sound outlandish, but I really was genuinely imagining future societies with interconnected internet democracy, a secular yet...

The sound track to this post is Anton’s new track “not blowing smoke up your ass” .. you should let it play in the background. Modern society is like a carefully calibrated engine.  After centuries of experimentation, by the mid 20th...

Despite his ineffable charm, Trump has again been shown to be unpopular. What this suggests to me is that if his strategy is to remain in office past the next election, then he is not going to be able to rely on...

The challenge for humanity in this century is to coordinate itself into a single organism.  With the internet we now have the beginning of a central nervous system and are able to be conscious of the state of ourselves as a...

A meritocracy is a kind of evolution, a social evolution. Like biological evolution, its business is to reward the survivors, and winnow out the weak. It is a hard game but the rules are set by Nature herself. For all its...

So here we are. This morning I woke up feeling optimistic for the first time in months. So I revisited this old draft post, and decided to make it live, even though things are moving on already. I live on twitter...

Freedom is a very basic personal instinct. I think all creatures want to be free, free from fear and desire, free from hunger and pain. The protection of key personal freedoms has been central to the rise of civilisation, and this...

Last night I saw the Right Hon Malcolm Fraser speaking at the ANU about his new book, Dangerous Allies, about the US influence in Australia. He described the current diplomatic core and bureaucracy as having been “duchessed” by the US, for...

The internet mind is growing. It is sorting the threads of sticky intelligence, categorising memes, getting to know itself. There is not yet much policing of the internet. When it is established (probably after many turf wars) will it come from...

I was lucky enough to hear Bob Brown, former Senator and Leader of the Australian Greens party, speak at the ANU Crawford School yesterday evening. I always admired Bob’s lonely contributions of sanity to parliamentary debates and have always voted Green...