Gov IIX

It's difficult to imagine how one could have a "Gov 2.0" in analogy to a "Web 2.0" without massive decentralization and disintermediation, two critical aspects of Web 2.0. But that's not happening. Power continues to centralize in DC and we continue to step-by-step lurch ever closer to the sort of failure you get when you completely centralize all power.

At best, transparency is an enabling step towards Gov IIX, perhaps even a necessary step, but right now I see no evidence that any aspect of our Gov is actually decentralizing or disintermediating (since after all it would be disintermediating itself). Until that happens, "Gov 2.0" talk is just "Gov 1.0"'s attempts to rhetorically dress itself in the glory of the Web so it can use it as cover to grab more power while telling credulous webbies that it's actually them getting the power.

Kind of getting closer to the ideas in the original essay, the interesting question is whether the 2.0/IIX social forces will sweep away the current governmental structure even if it doesn't like it and actively fights it. Obama's election involved the left coming together in a 2.0 style to elect him, though the coalition seems to have fallen apart after that, and the Tea Party is no more and no less than the conservatives and the libertarians in temporary alliance doing the same thing, but in both cases just feeding their energies back into Gov 1.0. Neither of these forces are going away, even if they're still only starting up in fits and starts on the year scale. At some point, do they become so vital that they begin to truly control the government, and truly start forcing it to decentralize power? There are some good ways that could turn out, there are some bad (localized tyranny-of-the-majority is still a tyranny-of-the-majority). Or will Gov 1.0 finally centralize enough power in the industrialized western world to completely shut that down? (Are they "on the clock"?)

Interesting times.

Not to mention that the whole "gov 2.0" movement is at best a 0.1 level update. It adds new functionality, but doesn't break backwards compatibility with previous versions.