Basically there is justice in western democracies. But the machinery tends to fail, when the circumstances don’t fit the system. We live in times of change and thereby there are a growing number of misfits.
We surf through one of the most defining “fin de siècle’s – we are wading in paradigm shifts – technology almost takes us to the brink of singularity. For a growing number of people its liberating times – for some it’s the AGE OF FREE; but:
Dread is loose, international crime and terrorism flourish, the world is being turned upside down, great values are being created and great divide between have and have-nots is spreading at viral speed, the number of democracies is falling, international law is a village in Kirgizstan –
• Terrorism is indirectly (through weak, stupid and/or evil minded politicians and pundits) putting pressure on democratic structures
• Individuals and entrepreneurs who challenges the systems seeing new possibilities are met with jurisdiction made for the industrial society
• Technology is forming new patterns that are met by the institutions, text- and law books of previous centuries. This is creating deep cracks between societies continental shelves. Individual are being swallowed between those shelves - examples being numerous from young Muslims with a kinky urge for bomb manuals to kids with downloaded material on their computers being raided, patent-sharks, termination of entrepreneurs by dinosaur monopolists etc.
• Everybody is under surveillance 24/7/365
• The list is endless
Basically INDIVIDUALS ARE UNDER SIEGE as democracy is being undermined both from within and as the number of democracies are decreasing…
Lots of NGOs and individuals addresses these challenges – Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Digital Rights, Citizen Rights etc.
But they all operate in an atomized way.
We need a bigger and coherent framework in order to learn how deep the wounds are and how fast the democratic institutions are bleeding…
At the same time media is suffering – dread is mostly flying under the public radar!
The purpose of this talk is to introduce a perspective, to launch a few suggestions and hopefully be getting fruitful feedback (workshop) for the next steps
June 25 and 26, 2009, Copenhagen, Denmark
bigger framework
I am really curious abut your ideas/concepts for such a kind of framework, because in deed for me as well it is a key question to answer. I still promote a constitutional state as a model of framework - for me still the state of the art - but changes/improvments are always necessary.