This is an early draft and exploration of the ideas circulating in my head on the evolution of government.

Problem:  Government is old. We need to upgrade it and evolve it. Humanity’s continued evolution and development will be stunted until there is a place to live with a modern technologically advanced government that is able grow with its 21st century citizens rather than repel them.

6 Ideas:

1) Increasing Pace of Change As The Fundamental Driver of Governmental Evolution

2) Why Change Will Not Come From the United States

3) The Skillset That Creates Political Power is Changing

4) Speculation on the Future of the United States

5) If Government is not going to evolve in the United States where will it occur?

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1) Increasing Pace of Change As The Fundamental Driver of Governmental Evolution

Technology has caused the global pace of change to dramatically increase. A technologically incompetent government cannot adapt fast enough to be effective in today’s world. 

2) Why Change Will Not Come From the United States

The United States is too old and has too much baggage to become a forward looking technologically competent government. We should abandon our nationalistic allegiances and worldviews and bet on a new horse. 

The United States is a 235 year old dysfunctional monolithic system. It is unlikely a system with that much legacy structure will be able to adapt as fast as emerging countries with far fewer social and political constraints and tradition to preserve. When change is afoot, it is speed and agility that wins, not wealth or the size of your warchest. If you have a nationalistic worldview you’ll stay in the United States and go down with your assumed motherland. Personally I don’t have any allegiances to the United States as my mother land. We are all generals on Buckminster Fuller’s Spaceship Earth.

Earth is my motherland.  The universe is my great-grandmotherland. Bacteria are my grandfathers, trees are my uncles. A nationalistic worldview is maladaptive in today’s globalized world. It’s not necessary for the purpose of this post, but I’m pushing for making our decisions from a kosmocentric worldview, a perspective successively deeper than ego centric, nation centric, and world centric worldviews.

In the business world, transformation rarely comes from the entrenched No 1 player. When a No. 1 player is able to reinvent itself, it requires a visionary CEO with almost complete autonomy. There are only a few examples of market leaders who have been able to disruptively innovate in new markets: IBM (Louis V. Gerstner, Jr.) , Apple (Steve Jobs), Amazon (Jeff Bezos).

Amazingly the people of the United States, elected a Visionary leader into office in 2008, in President Barack Obama, but the structural constraints of dealing with an uncooperative congress and powerful special interests groups have blocked him from being able to get almost anything done. Did Steve Jobs have to get approval from a legislative branch to start working on the iPhone? No. He was free to reorganize Apple’s internal resources to make it happen. The problem is not that Obama is not tough enough or that his ideals are impractical. What is impractical is making transformational change in our governmental system.

It is actually extremely inefficient to make transformational change in our government by design. The United States Government and Constitution were designed to change slowly and be very hard to change so that the DNA of our country could be insulated from the passion of the moment and impulsive reactions from the general populace. Stabilizing the core DNA or “thesis” of a country is a problem every new government will have to solve, but calculated inefficiency, like the way we have it, won’t cut it in today’s fast moving world. The solution to stabilization can’t undermine a country’s ability to adapt.

3) The Skillset That Creates Political Power is Changing

Today’s political puppet masters and powerhouses are not very evolved people. Currently political power is won through money, seniority, propaganda and attack campaigns. The people who win this game are people like Karl Rove and Dick Cheney who are political mafioso thugs in well groomed politically correct sheep clothing. They want money and power and are willing to cheat and put hits on anyone who stands in their way. Modern Vito Corleone’s. But the battlefront is shifting from smoke filled old boy’s rooms to cyberspace. The superstars of this space are not dons and thugs, but a new generation of savvy technologists and hackers who admire knowledge and reason over power. They think in systems and want a thriving society, rather than seeking to maximize the size of their off shore bank account. These hackers, liberals and libertarians are shifting the center of gravity to Yellow along the Spiral Dynamics spectrum. Rebel hackers will leverage rogue bot networks to perform denial of service attacks on primitive, reactionary candidates. Television and Radio attack advertising will lose their audience. And winning campaigns will use authenticity not money to spread their messages virally around the web.

4) Speculation on the Future of the United States

Before turning attention to what we should be placing our bets on, what are reasonable expectations for the future of the United States?

I believe the Occupy Movement in the United States is a natural response of a subtle socioeconomic immune system that is trying to notify us that our current paradigm of government is no longer adaptive for the globalized, technology driven information economy we now live in. Transformation is inevitable. It is “when” not “if”. We can choose to heed this early warning call and start engaging in the right kind of reform now in the United States, or we can ignore it at our peril, and there will be revolt and revolution on the way down. If the government remains reactive, defensive and hostile towards the movement, we can expect the financial sector the continue to rape the rest of economy, Washington to continue to be run by money from the countries wealthiest corporations and individuals (of which sadly there’s no legal difference for campaign donation purposes), congress will remain gridlocked, only ineffective legislation will be passed and unemployment will spike above 25%. The United States economy has the potential to never recover, although we shouldn’t confuse this with the end of the world. It’s just the end of the United States as we know it. The world will no doubtedly find a way to eventually rebound with a digitally informed government reimagined for the times. At best the US makes the necessary reforms to live out its last days as a world superpower with grace and style. At worst we have the effect of a series of asteroid collisions, wiping out a significant portion of life. Which will be eventually followed by a kind of Cambrian Explosion, as the old has been cleared out to make room for the new, with significant parts of science and technological infrastructure still intact, ready to pump the global macro socio-economic ecosystem with exponentially more diversity. I’m not sure what the time frame is on this collision course. My alarm bells to pay more attention started going off when a few of my friends told me they were anxiously building up their survival skills in preparation for cataclysm in 2-3 years. I think 5-7 years is more likely.

5) If Government is not going to evolve in the United States, where will it occur?

The most obvious choice is China, because it’s growing so fast, and hyper-growth creates a breeding ground for experimentation and radical new ideas. But while China’s population size is seen as an asset from an economic perspective, I think it will be a liability from a governmental evolution perspective. They are growing so fast the economic leaders will probably just try to keep government out of their way. The scale also makes it difficult to take risks with new forms of governance because so much is at stake for so many people. That is unless more special administrative zones are created and small localized regions are allowed experiment with new forms of government,  with early examples in Hong Kong and Singapore.

This would lead to what I believe is the most promising structure for future governmental evolution: The Rise of City States.

This push towards greater decentralization is sorely what is needed needed. And the timing is actually right. The driver of the pendulum swing from centralization towards decentralization is usually enabled by advances in information and communication technology. Over the last 7 years we have seen the Internet mature before our very eyes. From a systems theory perspective this also makes sense, because systems can only grow in complexity when more autonomy is given to the parts and there is greater connectivity between the parts, creating a smarter whole. An increase in complexity is important because quantum leaps in adaptive ability usually require quantum leaps in complexity.

The question is, where are these city states going to exist, when every inch of land is already claimed by one of the world’s 212 countries? My friend Patri Friedman created Seasteading in response to this dilemma and hopes to experiment with new forms of governance on autonomous barges out on the high seas. I believe this approach has potential, but at some point we are going to have to redistribute land on earth.

But countries will not relinquish their land easily, so what will drive this shift?

To overcome the friction and inertia required to create new countries, there will need to be a very strong economic tailwind. I believe most of the world’s GDP growth will increasingly be driven by the creation of new information technologies. Therefore my bet on what will cause the creation of new countries, is either new innovation clusters or the succession of existing ones.

The dominant innovation cluster in the world right now is Silicon Valley, and it is getting stronger by the minute. An insane amount of money and talent is flocking to Silicon Valley right now, and with a Facebook IPO on the horizon we haven’t even hit the peak yet. Silicon Valley is on track to produce a majority of the country’s new jobs and wealth in the future, in stark contract to almost all other sectors, which are reeling.

Recently I’ve been wondering if Silicon Valley will create so much wealth, and have such a different culture from the rest of the United States, that a few billionaires will band together and decide to secede. Why do they need the rest of the United States leaching on the ever more powerful, lavish party? Then maybe other tech clusters will decide to secede, too. New York City can be run by Michael Bloomberg and Jay-Z. Los Angeles can be run by Mark Suster and Ashton Kutcher. The Bay Area can be run Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Peter Thiel and Ron Conway. I’m kidding, but only kind of. These City-States should be run by entrepreneurs because that’s what we need. Governments need to act more like startups. Try a new technology or legal structure and see if it works. If it gets traction and crosses the product market fit threshold, then scale it. Then they need to be managed with the same accountability as large companies.  If you don’t like the city state you’re in, drive 30 minutes across the golden gate bridge to Marin “Country” run by a Deepak Chopra look alike. Or you could drive up a few more hours north and settle in a city-state run by Larry Harvey. The possibilities are endless. The creativity boundless.  People would now have viable methods to vote with their feet and wallets when they don’t like their government that is ruling them. Right now we don’t really have an option to stand up and walk away. Where are we going to go? But that’s the right thing to do in life when you have an argument with a former significant other that can’t be reconciled. Don’t scream at each other and make each other miserable for the rest of your lives, just walk away and go your separate ways. You have your life and I have mine.

I don’t know what is technically needed to perform a secession or what buttons would need to be pressed for the Silicon Valley elite to start scheming such a thing, but it’s a fascinating thought to entertain.

Maybe if the government seriously interferes with the ability to create a successful companies. I don’t see that threshold being crossed for Internet companies, but I do think the US government is very likely to handicap the development of the world’s next great innovation cluster on the horizon, which will most likely emerge once biotechnology becomes a full fledged information science. When that happens it will unleash a global transformation even bigger than the information technology revolution that has occurred over the last 40 years. But I don’t think there is anyway the primary Biotech innovation cluster emerges in the United States. The regulatory environment is simply too slow and too conservative. So if secession doesn’t happen, this revolution on the horizon is potentially the huge economic tidal wave that could trigger an era where the city-state becomes the dominant geo-political unit.

On a side note, my personal goal is to live in what ever city in the world has the greatest creative energy, innovative companies, and influx of talent. Right now that city(state?) is the Bay Area, so I’m staying put.

6) Ingredients of A More Evolved Government

Most of the thoughts in this post have been about the current deficiencies of status quo, how things will break and where the solution will emerge, but little about what the solution will actually look like. To be honest, I don’t have a very concrete picture in my mind at this point, I’ll need to think about it more, but here are a few guiding lights.

– All government services should have an online interface and be as seamless to use as Facebook and other Web 2.0 apps.

– More innovative projects. There are many things government can do that entrepreneurs in the market can’t. Projects like SF Park, which connect all parking meters to the Internet and broadcast the availability of parking spaces in an iphone app, are step in the right direction.

– Open data so app developers can create things like SF Park without the assistance of the government.

– Much more transparency of government finances in an online interface like Mint.

– Tax payers allocating a significant portion of tax dollars to specific projects.

– Supporting new forms of digitally enabled decision making, like Deliberative Democracy and Distributed Democracy. Two friends of mine, Bobby Fishkin and Micah Daigle are working on solutions and are on the right track.

Final Thoughts:

Exciting times we live in. Few people get to go through such transformational societal changes in their lifetime and have a chance to do their best to positively affect it.

Bottom line: Government needs to evolve and will evolve. It’s just a question of how and when.