Off the SOPA Box and Into the Town Square

If we want our democracy to belong to the modern era, we need to create this common good capacity for them. In the tech world, context experts and specialized judgment are seen as knowledge curation and high reputation filtering. These are two new roles for citizens in a modern democracy. Other roles are network node, data validator, visual mapper, opinion consolidator, knowledge broker, engagement sherpa, community amp, institutional translator, storyteller, civic convenor and on and on.

In many ways, Internet freedom is both a domestic and global challenge for the United States. Who are we and where are we going in the world? Both here at home and in our global presence we need to go away from coercion and toward persuasion, away from exclusion and toward participation, away from borders and toward networks, away from secrecy and toward transparency, away from reaction and toward resilience. This last one is the most important lesson for Internet freedom. It’s what we should be talking about after the SOPA-PIPA defeats.

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