I did a really fun interview with (my favorite indie comic) Fart Party creator Julia Wertz this week, and she posted it on her blog simultaneously with its publication in Vice Magazine . I'm linking to it because the interview ends up addressing a whole lot of the issues brought up in the comments sections here over the past decades has been the necessary endgame of the scenario. Today, in essence, the central bank lends money to a federal bank, which loans it to a regional bank, and so on, each bank paying interest to the bank above, and charging more to the one below. By the time the person or business who needs the money gets it, they're paying an awful lot of interest - so much, that it amounts to a drag on their ability to respond to the needs that come from the bottom up.
Then, just this summer, I was invited to deliver an "opening invocation" at the Personal Democracy Forum this summer. It's a collection of essays offering ideas of how to energize democracy in the age of the Internet. My contribution is atypical and maybe less useful than the others, because I argue that the behavior we learn on the Internet is best a metaphor for participatory democracy than its ultimate realizations. But there are entirely more practical and immediate strategies offered by politics and net luminaries from Craig Newmark (Craigslist), Howard Rheingold ( Smart Mobs ) and Scott Heifferman (Meetup.com) to Newt Gingrich and Clay Shirky ( Here Comes Everybody ). Best yet, the entire book is available online here .
