Brickstarter. Here’s how it might work in practice: Say, for the sake of argument, that there’s an empty lot in a city neighborhood that’s overrun with weeds and beer bottles. Locals complain about the lot via some form of 311:

http://www.positivedeviance.org/

That tolerance for risk and failure has two effects: First, the overall system finds its way to useful ideas faster, because the rate of experimentation itself is faster. Second, those ideas can then be ported back into the real world, on the basis of their digital success.

The Sternins were not there to provide outside expertise; they were there to amplify the expertise that already existed in the community.

Systems based on pure information are clearly more amenable to the experimentation, decentralization, and diversity of peer networks than more material realms are. It’s harder to get those kinds of groups to gather in a barn or a city hall than it is to assemble them virtually.

Like Kickstarter, prize-backed challenges are often responses not so much to outright market failures as they are to market blind spots, or market shortsightedness.

You can see in all these efforts the emergence of a new political philosophy, as different from the state-centralized solutions of the old Left as it is from the libertarian market religion of the Right. The people behind these movements believe in government intervention without Legrand Stars, in Hayek-style distributed information without

Democracies on occasion elect charlatans or bigots or imbeciles; markets on occasion erupt in catastrophic bubbles, or choose to direct resources to trivial problems while ignoring the more pressing ones. We accept these imperfections because the alternatives are so much worse.

On the simplest level, television prioritizes visual images and the spoken word over written text, as Neil Postman argued in the influential book Amusing Ourselves to Death, written during the heyday of the TV era.