Decentralize Tomorrow

Written on Sunday, August 3rd, 2008 at 5:51 pm | by cocoy

We all recognize that there is a disparity existing today. We have a growing, mobile, and young society that is increasingly questioning the flawed policies of the generation that sired them. We have an aging culture of traditionalist with a subset of their own— one that plays the insider back-room game that is how big business is done in the country and another subset that is completely removed from Internet time.

Much of our traditional way of doing things is expressed in the centralized and hierarchal society existing in the country. Every infrastructure development must go through the corridors of power in Manila. An analogy exist in current computer technology. everything in your computer talks to the Processor. Everything is serial.

Like clockwork, every State of the Nation Address by every president in the country has seen protest in the street. The cynical and the jaded point out that that is the normal scenario being played out. Some may bitterly chortle that this is how these groups earn their living. Yet at the back of everyone’s minds, there is some truth in this expression of grievances. One has only to cross a railway track to see and pause for a moment. In the same breathe we can also ask, what are we to do with many of our countrymen who sit all day telling each other stories? Who drink and gamble and live in an environment of what appears as hopelessness. It is therefore quite easy to despair.

Look into our schools today. Is the Class of 2008 capable of drawing insights and putting multiple vectors of data, particularly from Google, Wiki, and from social networks and transform it into something creative, and new and awesome?

Amidst all this, there is a great chasm separating a digerati subculture, and the rest of society so clueless as to the awesomeness of the digital world. It doesn’t stop at age. There are many who are quite advanced in years who completely understand technology and there are those who are quite young who have not stepped beyond the entry level of texting, yahoo mail and friendster.

In the same way there is a chasm between Internet time and the 20th century way of telling time.

In the face of a global energy crisis— among other things, our society today is asking if it is at all justifiable to tax oil products and where do trillions of pesos go to? Quite naturally, this loops infinitely back to the back-rooms of power and leads of course to the fundamental question, “what society are we shaping ours into?”

decentralized

The Global Business Network drew the above image. In the coming decade, one of the more plausible scenarios that will take place is a decentralized, networked and bottom up world. This is a plausible scenario in that we see it emerging all around us. On the Internet. On how software is made. On how governments and political systems are. What has decentralization have to do with how the Philippines does business?

Our nation today has been debating on the merits of Federalism— as it has from throughout our Republic’s history. Our country today is a centralized bureaucracy. Will the seeds sowed in Mindanao set the stage for a Federal Republic?

The recent debate on Federalism stems from the case that Manila is too Imperial. This massive centralization and hierarchal nature of our political structure is the underlying root cause for questioning where trillions of pesos from tax revenues are and how it is consumed. It spurs the debate on taxes and misappropriation of funds and the lack of quality education and short universal healthcare. It creates this massive need for country-wide dole-outs. It creates this incessant desire by government to intervene in markets, in business when it shouldn’t and avoid engaging the market when it ought to.

This massive centralization and hierarchical political structure and our very culture of “pakikisama” has given birth to the need for consultants and operatives. They fight tooth and nail— foot-soliders, pawns and lieutenants in battlefield back-rooms where governance and the business of the highest and most profound level in the country is truly conducted. It is a culture predominantly led by who you know and less on the merits— perfectly human and perfectly Filipino.

Needless to say, normal people can not understand this language of the back-room. They have a sense of it. They taste it every time a scandal appears on national television but can never really construe it. Normal people in light of scandals like ZTE and Meralco, hope and pray it changes the game. Our people fall into the trap of hoping then being heartbroken, disappointed.

On the other hand whenever there is debate such as on Oil and VAT, which all too frequently becomes, “I just want cheaper gasoline”. This strata of our people, just want cheaper rice. They just want cheaper transportation. Do they want to know the form or shape or even care? Do their hearts need to be won over?

We must redefine our notion of what government is.

In a speech he gave at the Annenberg Center for Communication, Jonathan Taplin spoke of The Bear Revolution: California’s Experiment in the New Federalism. He said:

“the bottom-up networked revolution must also redefine our notion of what the government is. And that is the idea that “the states are independent as to everything within themselves and united as to everything respecting foreign nations.” That’s what Thomas Jefferson wrote. And needless to say, in California we’re seeing that these wonderful local solutions are flowing but the federal government, trying to retain it’s top down power is resistant to our clean car laws, our stem-cell research laws, our digital privacy laws. All of theses are being challenged by the federal government, who thinks that they’re too progressive.” 

If this quote is to be judged, then perhaps, there is something more we can learn about the American experiment.

Everyone has the notion that government can deliver on its basic promise of security and social programs, if only it was more efficient in tax collection and had less corruption, i.e. fewer “consultants”. Would you say that more and more, our government is too complex? Where we to adapt decentralization and parallelize development— what would that do?

What if every city can be allowed to chart their own destiny? For example , when crime is rampant, the mayor can not be entirely blamed. He doesn’t have a police force to control. It all comes from the national government. Local projects are delayed because there isn’t any money and requires appropriation from the national treasury. But what if— every city, and every province and every region had the power to tax on their own and keep it all to build infrastructure on their own, to write laws and forge deals without the overhead of the National Government?

What if every town could decide on their own, because they have the money to have universal healthcare for their residents? What if every city is left to run their own schools, however free or however high the tuition fee? To determine on their own merit where to focus education to. Perhaps we can pump in creative and critical thinking in tomorrow’s Filipino. In return, people of every city can determine on their own, whether or not a local official has done his part in delivering the services we come to expect from government.

it all sounds good on the web, doesn’t it?

Computing has multicore processors and clusters that parallelize activity to solve problems faster. Can this be adapted to solving the problem of a nation-state like ours? Will a decentralized country with clusters of cities finally be efficient enough to move resources where they ought to be? Will services finally reach the people? 

If the last hundred years of the American experiment is to be judged, even a federal government can be willed to be centralized. If peace in Mindanao does lead to a federal government, will future states be decentralized enough to be independent of everything save those when dealing with foreign nations? if Mindanao’s peace does lead to a federal republic, will it be Arroyo’s vision of Federalism that will prevail?

The most plausible scenario in an Internet-paced world is rapid everything. A plausible scenario is that tomorrow will be about creative destruction and massive decentralization. And our people seriously needs to get a handle on education to meet that future.

Do we seriously need to transform into a Federal Republic to allow greater decentralization? Will less complexity, greater decentralization and more accountability allow every city, and every province to deliver services that the National Government today can not? However the answer is, clearly in order to transform this society, however you call it and however shape it must take, is to win the primary theater of war— the back-room game. Everything else is window dressing.

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About The Author: cocoy Mac. Linux. Tech. Comics. Free Market. Politics. New Media. Coffee. Geek. He hangs out on twitter as @cocoy, on Plurk, FriendFeed and blogs at Big Mango.

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16 Responses to “Decentralize Tomorrow”

  1. cvj on August 3rd, 2008 7:16 pm

    Cocoy, i’m a fan of bottom up (and emergent systems) myself but i’d like to point out that we have to put things in context of present class structures found in the Philippines where decentralization + inequality = feudalism, don’t you think?

    Using an analogy from the internet, the reason why the web is what it is, is because of a combination of unified & end to end character where even an ordinary blogger like you (in Philippines) and me (in Singapore) can connect and have the same access to the more or less the same backbone.

    Imagine an alternative scenario where the internet did not open to the public and consumers were instead walled off in various private networks (what they call ‘Value Added Networks’ or ‘VANs’ in the 90’s) ala AoL where various Corporations (e.g. AoL, IBM, Microsoft) more or less sets the rules which are most likely based on commercial criteria. Would you rather have been in such a decentralized (and balkanized) environment?

  2. cocoy on August 3rd, 2008 8:33 pm

    cvj, i think our current setup is feudal in all but name. centralization and inequality itself i think fuels it. i think decentralization, free enterprise, free will, free speech— emancipation and education i think are tools to combat inequality.

    why do i think we’re a feudal society? no one moves with anything significant without a go ahead from the palace. congressmen stay with the administration because they need money to fund their project. if you’re not cozy with her excellency, no funds. no funds translates to no chance for reelection.

    have the VP visit some far away province and he’ll be greeted like a visiting prince.

    if i could draw a cartoon, i’d have gloria on a throne and everyone from the vp down to the poorest man is paying homage to her.

    if i am not mistaken the reason why we have a national police instead of many local police was the fear you’ve highlighted yourself— that’ll it’ll lead to local chief executives transforming themselves into little warlords.

    well the last 20 years has seen the rise of lots of local powers arming themselves. so it hasn’t stopped anyone from arming.

    Value Added Networks are not decentralized. they’re balkanized, closed off and controlled by central authority— companies like AOL. Whereas the internet is a savage, decentralize place where no one entity is in control. Google certainly isn’t. Microsoft isn’t.

    In fact, isn’t net neutrality the core challenge the internet is facing? Governments want to regulate the internet. companies want to control portions if not all of it.

    Given today’s free flowing of information, i.e. news spreads fast via text for example. our democracy is made richer by that. the core ethos of decentralization, i think— is reducing the power of the palace and giving greater accountability to local governments and thus stimulate growth. i think most of our people know enough about their local officials to be a better judge of character.

    Personally, i think that we don’t need any charter change to do so. in fact i think within our present setup there is still much room to grow. is that good enough? i think that is why people debate and talk about it.

    You’ve already spoken about the beauty of unified and end to end. do you think we can do something similar to cities and provinces and people because at its core they’re nodes to networks and are networks themselves too aren’t they?

  3. cvj on August 3rd, 2008 9:45 pm

    Cocoy, no argument with you on the feudal nature of today’s society. If you would notice, it’s the congressional leaders who have been at the forefront of Charter Change efforts because it would help them preserve their fiefdoms. Gloria Arroyo, although she’s supposed to hold the center together, mainly draws strength from that feudal order.

    We both want change for the better. I just would not frame it in terms of ‘centralization = bad, decentralization = good’.

    Where decentralization would be useful is in terms of conducting simultaneous experiments at economic development whether it be in the form of business enterprises, NGO initiatives, government programs & policies or a combination thereof.

    Where centralization would be useful is in efficiency of feedback, the transmission of information resulting from the above experiments to enable the quick replication of successes and/or lessons learned from failures. From network design, you know that fewer intermediate nodes means less hops that could become bottlenecks.

    Beyond the issue of centralization or decentralization is the issue of system-wide coordination, specifically, the question of where should the control function reside. There are those who favor a ‘top-down’ type of direction. I recently had a discussion in my blog (as well as in Manolo’s blog) with those who are hoping for a ‘philosopher-king’ to turn up, or even hoping that Gloria is that philosopher-queen. IMHO, in the age of the Internet that aspiration is naive, not to mention outdated. At the very least, i don’t think they are familiar with the potential order that can emerge from a Complex Adaptive System.

    Then again, you have those who believe that in our system, ‘control’ should reside only on a subset of the nodes, a view common among elitists in the upper and middle class (not only here but also in Singapore and Thailand where you have the ‘New Politics’). These people still hold a pre-modern view of Society as being a hierarchy composed of superior and inferior people, when in fact, Modern Society is a functionally decomposed system that needs specialists (and generalists).

    IMHO, the above are the main obstacles to the bottom-up revolution that we hope to unleash.

  4. Bencard on August 3rd, 2008 11:31 pm

    whether centralized or decentralized, modern or “pre-modern”, there is need for society to have an overall authority to establish, preserved and maintain order. the alternative is unbridled anarchy. left to its own individuality without control, humanity cannot endure.

    there will always be superior and inferior “generalists” and “specialists”. its a sad fact of human existence that equality of intelligence and ability is non-existent.

  5. cvj on August 4th, 2008 12:59 am

    Bencard, there is a distinction between ‘identical’ and ‘equal’. There will always be differences between individuals but there is no way for such differences to translate to superior or inferior in the absence of a specific context. Difference (not sameness) is the basis for equality. We are all equal not because we are identical but because we are all different in ways that cannot be placed on a ’superior’ to ‘inferior’ scale.

    In specific disciplines, maybe you can say that there is a superior lawyer and an inferior lawyer. However, you cannot do the same sort of ranking to an individual with respect to his place in Society.

  6. Bencard on August 4th, 2008 1:52 am

    here you again at your best in playing with words and changing the path of the discourse. who is making an issue on the difference between identical and equal. where did that come from?

    you were the one who who is making “novel” pronouncements about society being ‘decomposed” into one without superior-inferior dichotomy but only needs “specialists” and “generalists” regardless of natural competence.

    in a free society, ranking is determined by what an individual accomplishes for himself - not what society or government bestows upon him/her. you are an i.t. specialist due to your own effort, not because some powerful entity made you one.

  7. cvj on August 4th, 2008 4:24 am

    Bencard (at 1:52 am), i was responding to your statement above:

    …it’s a sad fact of human existence that equality of intelligence and ability is non-existent. - Bencard

    Such non-existence of identical intelligence and ability does not mean that people should not be treated as equals for the reasons i stated above (at 12:59 am). There is no universal value ‘x’ with which to rank a person’s place in society so in the absence of such a ranking, everyone should be treated equally.

  8. Bencard on August 4th, 2008 4:38 am

    no matter how you treat two persons “equally”, their innate disparity with respect to intelligence, looks, ability to sprint a hundred-meter distance in 10-second flat, or shoot a basketball from outside the perimeter, remains. “treatment” you can control, while one’s superiority or inferiority is something you have no power over.

  9. cvj on August 4th, 2008 5:06 am

    Bencard, you are assuming that there is a universal measure of a person’s intelligence (such as ‘IQ’) by which to determine ’superiority’ or ‘inferiority’ which is not the case. Read through this explanation by Cosma Shalizi on the myth of ‘g’ and you’ll see what i mean (that is, if you’re intelligent enough).

  10. Bencard on August 4th, 2008 5:56 am

    cvj, i don’t care about what another blogger says about it. superiority and inferiority are
    God-given, and whether or not i’m “intelligent” is none of you (or shalizi’s) concern - there’s just absolutely nothing you, or he, can do about it.

    btw, i’m not assuming a “universal measure”. an individual’s performance vis a vis another is the “measure”.

  11. cocoy on August 4th, 2008 6:49 am

    on August 3rd, 2008 9:45 pm, cvj we actually agree. wow.

    yes. i totally agree that to characterize centralization = bad and decentralization = good in absolute terms is flawed.

    just look at Metro Manila. it is a federation of cities.

    One can argue that there should be a powerful central force— a governor of manila who is elected, who has the authority to shape it, who is respected and who can take charge over the elected mayors. instead we have decentralized “federated” cities, each with their own idea of what traffic conditions should be, what garbage collection should be. and you have an office of mmda that the mayors don’t respect.

    yet one can argue that being so close to each other– there really shouldn’t be any borders between quezon city and manila, pasay and qc, etc.

    thus— “independent on everything except certain things like pertaining to foreign nations” is the core of federalism. As the American experiment tells us— you can still have a huge central authority in Washington and have federated states.

    no one person is identical— we each think differently. we each can do things differently. some of us are smarter than others. The notion of equality, imho draws on the idea that all men should be given equal opportunity. each person starts from the same starting line whether or not they both have the same level of intelligence or is rich or poor. a rich man and a poor man will have the same laws applied to them.

    freedom of speech and expression. freedom of religion. freedom from want. freedom from fear are all applied fairly on everyone. i mho that’s equality.

    as for federalism, decentralization and the shape of any government or future— i don’t think we should end any debate on it.

  12. cvj on August 4th, 2008 10:07 am

    Cocoy, i’m glad that we agree. With respect to Metro Manila, i also agree with you on the need for a governor. A case can be made that a set-up similar to Metro Manila is what we will get with Federalization both in terms of its advantages and disadvantages.

  13. benign0 on August 4th, 2008 4:43 pm

    Where decentralization would be useful is in terms of conducting simultaneous experiments at economic development whether it be in the form of business enterprises, NGO initiatives, government programs & policies or a combination thereof.

    Cocoy, I think the above part we are counting on seeing in a decentralised environment is the assumption that will be severely put to the test in the Philippine setting.

    We are, in effect, counting on the scenario of initiative to “experiment” spontaneously arising at each node or component of said decentralised system.

    It is contrary to my hypothesis about the general predisposition of Pinoys to simply muddle along in mediocrity when left to their own devices - a demonstration of the time-and-again-proven Juan Tamad archetype coupled with the famous pwede na yan attitude that succinctly describes our culture.

  14. cocoy on August 4th, 2008 8:17 pm

    benign0, most true. i think pushing forward with “true” federalism would be like brain transplant.

  15. Filipino Hearts Federalism Equals Peace in Mindanao? | Filipino Voices on August 12th, 2008 11:14 am

    […] few days ago, I had written a post on Federalism, “Decentralize Tomorrow“. In it I wrote these lines:  If the last hundred years of the American experiment is to be […]

  16. A Just War | Filipino Voices on August 20th, 2008 6:20 pm

    […] Wasn’t it just a few days ago we were talking about Federalism? The Jester had been commenting on the Pimentel Proposal. I even blogged about an Articles of Republic and Decentralize Tomorrow. […]

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