Bureau-cut

I have been grappling with the political system for a couple months now. A few weeks back, i came up with a random proposal for personalized democracy. While i was right in choosing the words, the content was mis-directed. I have been reading Toffler's Third Wave among other things.

Toffler talks of a version of personalized democracy that didn't cross my mind:
SPECIAL INTEREST GROUPS

Our most visible NGOs, discussion forums on the web, groups  on yahoo / orkut / facebook, etc are all a visible version of a special interest group. Toffler describes how we will increasing resort to special interest groups (SIGs henceforth) in order to channel our voice / frustration / complaints, etc. It is the simplest form of a gathering, and yet so powerful. My projection of a personalized democracy shall run as follows:

- instead of having a large bureaucracy filled with babus, we are already using ngos & regulators (an official SIG, so to say) in order to smoothen our daily administration. The power of the political system is diminishing before the strength & voice of such gatherings / SIGs. This will only be magnified in the future, leading to regulators for every large & small thing / service / idea, etc. The marked change will be that instead of being appointed by politicians, these systems will be largely self-reliant. Regulators will be chosen by the general vote of special interest groups and so on.

- the second phenomenon that is increasingly becoming general is self-reliance. We resort to self-help more than ever, instead of calling in the expert. We have idiots guides to everything now. So, instead of electing one representative to solve all our problems, who will in turn appoint competent persons to do the work while he supervises them on behalf of the voters, we will remove the representative himself! We will, each one of us, become regulators, appointing competent persons in each field for each issue, and monitoring the problem on a real time basis. Our collective voice / participation shall lead to a direct interest & responsibility to each issue. 

But, in a life busier by the day, how can this be envisaged? Busier is a relative term. We are busy with what we are concerned with. And yet, we have time to fix our own cars / phones / computers, etc. These smaller tinkerings take up all our time. Now imagine a person beginning to tinker with his neighbourhood issues....

Not convinced? Take the times of india Teach India / Lead India campaign, Clean Ahmedabad (or your city) campaign, etc. Instead of complaining as usual, people are participating to make a difference.

I completely agree when anyone points out to me that these things have existed since decades / centuries. Yes, but the scale of these events is now so large, thanks to the technology & lesser work times (please get a perspective with worktimes of peasants / industrial workers to those in service sectors). We have more time to be involved in things other than those which directly earn us our daily bread. The government / bureaucracy is being replaced, piece by piece, by a series of SIGs. 

I believe the direction is right, but no rules of the game exist for now. We are in a stage where mass democracy is being phased out, but a personalized one is not yet implemented / envisioned. It is this phase that will be the hardest, and today, we are directly in its path...