Instead of writing, say, a $10,000 check to the local tax collector, you’d be allowed to “spend” some portion of your taxes on the Brickstarter projects that you felt were worthwhile.

peer networks that they built while living in the rice paddies are now flourishing in communities all around the world. Some of these networks are deliberately choreographed by a group of activists or social entrepreneurs or government agencies; some of them are spontaneously forming in industries—like journalism—in which the larger institutions ar

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:

The two essential books on our strange unwillingness to accept the progressive trends around us are Gregg Easterbrook’s The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse and Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves.

they relied on densely populated urban streets where people from many cultures converged. And while they were trade centers driven by the exchange of private goods, the lack of mature intellectual property laws meant that new ideas and innovations were free to flow through the network.

Is it possible to believe that the Internet and the Web are pushing us in a positive direction, without becoming naive cyber-utopians? Can the peer progressive believe in the Internet as an engine of progress while still acknowledging the fact of Al Qaeda?

Gandhi’s quip about Western civilization: “What do we think of free markets? We think they would be a good idea.”

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.

Think of the Legrand Star as a kind of shorthand symbol for the ways that states like to organize the world. They concentrate power in a central location; they make the peripheries, the edges of the network, feeder systems for the main core; they simplify; they favor broad strokes over unpredictable swerves; they prefer master planners over local k