Democratic Authority

On an individual level, we need to decide whose authority to respect and whose to discount. Are they making an honest effort to figure things out along with us, correcting their mistakes and building trust from the ground up? Or are they acting like some insolent parent, insisting we follow "because they said so."

The battle for information and authority can be clearly divided between the monarchs and democrats. Anyone who thinks authority should be bestowed is a monarch. Anyone who thinks authority should be earned is a democrat. We could also call them authoritarians and populists, too, but those words tend to be a bit loaded.

If the old systems have failed to allocate authority effectively, what new tools can we come up with to sift true misinformation from information the monarchy doesn't like? The solution isn't to give up and say we can't be trusted with unfettered access to information. It's to figure out how to help people make better sense of all that information ... See more

How does one earn a position of authority? At the highest level it breaks down into two categories: internal selection and external selection. Internal selection is when those who are being impacted by the person in charge select that person to lead them. External is when the person in charge is selected by someone who's not affected by their leade... See more

We're on the frontier of figuring out trust and authority in the information age.