Prem has some worthwhile points as a response to the pandemic, but I question the idea that “local government is the core.” Surely an effective international system, rather than the hodgepodge we had, would have dealt better with an international crisis such as the virus and its spread. Local governments have clearly been shown quite often to be utterly incompetent or downright evil in countering the disease toll.
While I doubt that a vibrant economic recovery is at all likely, again, a truly internationalist mindset would be the best guarantor of it. Every locality for itself would only make matters worse. Rather than delegating upwards, effective downwards delegation would make far more sense. Of course, I recognize we have no such (viable) system to fall back on. But we don’t have anything approximating the upwards delegation system either. Best, Michael ------- Michael H. Goldhaber mich...@goldhaber.org > On May 4, 2020, at 2:41 AM, Prem Chandavarkar <prem....@gmail.com> wrote: > > 3. Local government is the core: > > The pandemic has shown that feet on the ground and on-the-spot assessment are > crucial in creating resilience. This is the only means by which the situation > can be dealt with, whether it is in providing healthcare or in making the > assessment to classify neighbourhoods by the extent of spread of infection in > order to devise containment strategies appropriate to context. While > aggregating data at a larger scale is important in discerning wider patterns, > the reliability of the data and the successful implementation of any response > is only possible by a close linkage between governance and citizenry at a > decentralised and localised level. The last mile problem > <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_mile > <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_mile>> is not confined to communication > networks, also applies to government, and can be resolved only by resilient > localised systems. # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
