"Congress has always been a reactive body, responding to what happened yesterday instead of foreseeing tomorrow’s problems.”
The House of Representatives should expand to make room for a new at-large delegation: the Delegation for Future Interests (DFI). These seats will be restricted to scientists and people under the age of 35. The representatives will be elected by a nationwide vote with no geographic apportionment (after all, the candidates for these jobs will be familiar with the decreasing relevance of geography). The members of this delegation will have equal status with all other members of the House, including voting rights and committee membership.
The DFI will bring something new to Congress: ample representation of future concerns. Congress has always been a reactive body, responding to what happened yesterday instead of foreseeing tomor-row’s problems. Its members are unfamiliar with new technologies and the problems they present. It shows in the backgrounds. Of our 100 senators, 56 are lawyers. Nineteen are lifelong politicians with little other professional or research experience. Zero senators have science doctorates; only four congressmen do. And according to the Congressional Research Service, the current Congress might be the oldest ever: only eight of 537 members are under the age of 35. We trust this body to keep our democracy up-to-date. We shouldn’t.
Our population includes people much better suited than your average politician to keep democracy in touch with the future: scientists engaged with emerging technologies that will define how we communicate and work in the future, and the young people eager to embrace, understand, and challenge these technologies. Just as seasoned lawyers bring historical perspective to our legal code, scientists and young people could bring foresight to important issues for the future of the country. Just as our armed forces are run by military experts, and our economy is regulated by economists, so should our science and technology policies be guided at the highest levels by those with expertise.
Creating the DFI is a low-tech response to an essay prompt that is laden with high-tech overtones. Opportunities abound for web-based citizen engagement platforms and crowdsourced, or collaboratively tackled, to unearth government corruption. But no matter what widget we create, and no matter how we customize the Constitution for today’s Internet, three things will certainly happen in the next 100 years:
In short, no Net-centric solution to our problems will last long. Even if such a solution is an extraordinary success, the chances are good that it will be short-lived: our understanding of the Internet undergoes a radical shift at least once every election cycle. High-tech solutions may sound sophisticated, but they are ultimately limited by their focus on the Internet. My DFI proposal may not make for the most exciting reading, but it is adaptable beyond the current definition of the Internet. When today’s problems are long gone, the DFI will still be relevant.
That is what we must seek when changing our democracy: staying power. Major changes to a democratic system take decades to root themselves into the public consciousness. By then, the nation may have forgotten what inspired the changes in the first place. Our job is to make sure that when that day comes, our changes are still relevant.
My solution may not be custom-built FOR the Internet, but it is certainly inspired by it. The Internet has taught me a lesson: when challenged by a new technology, our democracy convulses for a few years. (It hasn’t yet taught me what happens after that.) If given one redesign opportunity, we should heed that lesson and try to solve the root of the problem: a lack of foresight by our leaders. Technical solutions can certainly help; that’s why I spend most days trying to hack American politics. But the DFI will help us not only through today’s challenges but tomorrow’s as well. Let’s reboot for the future, not just for the Internet.
About the Author
Matthew Burton is formerly an intelligence analyst with the Department of Defense. Burton left the government in 2005 to attend NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. He is now building a web application that helps the Intelligence Community share information and collaborate. He created and maintains two government transparency projects: ReadableLaws.org and Speechology.org. He lives in New York.