Silence and Catastrophe: New Reasons Why Politics Matters in the Early Years of the Twenty‐first Century

Megaprojects are systems of highly concentrated power whose footprints, or radius of effects, are without precedent in human history. Once upon a time, even under imperial conditions, most people on our planet lived and loved, worked and played within geographically limited communities. They never had to reckon with all of humanity as a factor in their daily lives. Whenever they acted recklessly within their environment, for instance, they had the option of moving on, safe in the knowledge that there was plenty of Earth and not many others. Whenever bad things happened, they happened within limits. Their effects were local. The politics of megaprojects radically alters this equation; it poses new questions about the governance of risk and the nature and limits of democratic politics. The politics of megaprojects—put simply—raises fundamental questions about the ‘life and death of democracy’.     

THE POLITICS OF RETREAT

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China's Labyrinth: The Rise of Monitory Democracy

The new element in governance is social media. Inexorably, its fertile networks of shared information shift power from authorities to citizens and amateurs, including to the “unknown” experts in the “dorm rooms and edges of society” who drive innovation. Tweets may bust trust and undermine authority, but can social media also be a tool for building consensus through deliberation and negotiation among interests? When it comes to governance, is crowd‐sourcing any better than populism at generating collective intelligence instead of disruptive “dumb mobs?” Can networks aid the self‐administration of society, or does that take institutions with governing authority? In this section, leading Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, technologists and network theorists from Google, Microsoft and the MIT Media Lab join with political scientist Francis Fukuyama and top thinkers from Asia to address these issues.