Link.
Commentators will be quick to assess the importance and the magnificence of an online petition system which can – and has – drummed up support for initiatives as diverse as opposing Bank of America, obtaining support from Apple for its Chinese workforce and ensuring that lynchmob justice prevails in the bizarre Trayvon Martin case.
Yes, the selfsame commentators who laud the arrival of the phenomenon on these shores I doubt will like to see the millions of signatures appended to populist petitions for member states to quit the EU (now inevitable), for death sentences to be handed out to child killers and for immigration to be stopped dead.
Democracy – genuine democracy, i.e., populism – is a rollercoaster and must not be confused with our current staid system of politics. I’m talking about managed democracy, with its quinquennially-elected professional politicians, who are under no obligation to vote how their constituents want them to, which is like a centrally-planned version of democracy in a similar way that ‘managerial capitalism’is the centrally-planned version of entrepreneurial capitalism.
As the internet is a threat to managerial capitalism, so change.org could be a threat to managed democracy.
But if they think they can waltz into China they’ve another thing coming.
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