At today’s ACC DIY seminar Jon Taplin compellingly outlined how DIY ethics and technologies are part of the driving force behind California’s bold move away from the broken federal system and toward a decentralized state-based system.

In “The Bear Flag Revolution; California’s Experiment in the New Federalism” he writes:

I believe that this coming age of reform will bring about a positive transformation of American society as we grapple with the meaning of “the end of scarcity”.The old guard of the defense and extraction Industrialists who have done so well with two of their own running the country (Bush-Oil; Cheney-Defense contracts) will work extremely hard to hold on to power and they have a commanding old style media megaphone run by interested parties to put out their story (the war is going well, the economy is great, etc.). But the Industrialist model of Big Media is failing in the age of the Internet and so the voices of digital democracy will be heard. The task is to redefine the notion of national security and purpose around two basic principles. The first is that in the networked society, U.S. influence will flow from our global economic and cultural power as opposed to our military power. The second is that as the sources of leadership innovation and change in this new world come from decentralized, networked, bottom-up forces of the Digitalists, the American political structure will have to adapt to a devolutionary notion of power. States and Cities will become the important sources of leadership and the Federal Government will start shrinking.

You can read the whole paper here and view the slides from his talk here.

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