re-inventing democracy

"REYKJAVIK, Iceland (AP) - From seafaring Vikings to digital dissenters, Iceland has always attracted outsiders. This North Atlantic island nation has welcomed eccentric chess master Bobby Fischer, WikiLeaks secret-spiller Julian Assange and the online freedom advocates of the Pirate Party. Could its next guest be Edward Snowden, the American intelligence contractor who leaked secrets from the National Security Agency? In an interview published Sunday outing himself as the source behind stories about the U.S. spy agency's online surveillance programs, Snowden floated the idea of heading to Reykjavik. He told The Guardian newspaper that he was inclined to seek asylum in a country that shared his values - and "the nation that most encompasses this is Iceland.""

" The steam engine sparked the Industrial Revolution, shifting the world from handcrafting to mass production. The assembly line and mass production transformed industry after industry and gave birth to the middle class. And cheap, standardized shipping in the 20th century catalyzed a truly global and interconnected economy."

"The U.S. Pirate Party plans to create a new social network that will let Americans communicate without the National Security Agency spying on them, one of the party's "captains" told Business Insider."

"The recent revelations by journalist Glenn Greenwald and whistleblower and former NSA contractor Edward Snowden have shed a welcome light on the mass surveillance program of Americans and people in other countries by the National Security Agency (NSA) and its private contractors."

" Democracy is the gold standard for good governance in modernity. Modern democracy is also fantastically expensive. After all, you only have to write a constitution, establish legislative, judicial and executive branches in permanent opposition to each other, ensure that they have enough assistance to understand the issues they're dealing with, build a civil service so that actual work can get done, regulate that civil service so it can't take over, establish a market sector to deal with everything the government shouldn't do, regulate the market sector so it can't take over, build a media infrastructure to ensure the people in whose stead you govern understand what you're doing, hire more government aides to talk to the media, regulate the lobbyists who talk to the media, hire more aides to talk to the lobbyists… "

Thomas Fazi's critique of the "Democracy in Europe Movement 2025" satellites around the one big challenge that has been envisioned by political innovators, coming from grassroot, anarchic, socialist or just persistently democratic thinking ever since at least 1968, that only now is becoming realistic to address, the idea of a continental or even global assembly of humanity to work out policy together.

The information revolution is disrupting every aspect of society. Newspaper sales plummet. Television watching declines. Book publishing is being transformed. Networks expand and proliferate throughout our workplaces and our everyday lives. Politics is also in line for a major disruption. The new norms of participation, inclusiveness and open communication are infiltrating democracy and the era of politicians is coming to an end. The time is ripe to remake democracy for the twenty-first century.

With an election around the corner, a brand new political party has been born The Flux Party has no policies, no platform. Instead, members of the public would vote 'yes' or 'no' on each bill before parliament via the Flux app, which would instruct the party's senator how to vote.  The party was founded by tech-savvy Max Kaye and Nathan Spataro, who have experience working in the Bitcoin industry. The 500 members required for AEC registration were recruited, largely through social media, in a matter of weeks