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"WATCHING STEVE JOBS unveil the Apple iPad, what came to mind was something that Neil Postman, the most influential media critic since Marshall McLuhan, once said. Our future possibilities, Postman thought, lay on a spectrum bounded by George Orwell at one end, and by Aldous Huxley at the other: Orwell because he believed that we would be destroyed by the things we fear; Huxley because he thought that we would be undone by the things we love. As the internet went mainstream, the Orwellian nightmare has evolved into a realistic possibility, because of the facilities the network offers for the comprehensive surveillance so vividly evoked in 1984. Governments everywhere have helped themselves to powers to read every email or text you've ever sent. And that's just the democracies; authoritarian regimes are far more intrusive."

An initiative that aims to use the wiki model to "nominate a presidential ticket that answers directly to voters" in the USA. An ambitious project, but not without critics: http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2011/07/26/the-problem-with-americans-elect-2012/ lists some reservations.