Don't listen to me, Dave, listen to My Mum

Parliament must listen to the blogger in his pyjamas - Cameron

According to The Register:

A Conservative Party task force examining democratic participation proposes that online petitions should help set the parliamentary agenda. The four proposals above are just some of the open petitions recently accepted by the No.10 Downing Street website. In other words, these are the sensible ones: over 10,000 have been rejected. (This one, for example, was quite inexplicably deemed to be outside the scope of Government.)

"I would like to see a system whereby, if enough people sign an online petition in favour of a particular motion, then a debate is held in Parliament, followed by a vote - so that the public know what their elected representatives actually think about the issues that matter to them," said Cameron in a canned statement.

Which drew the Reg's acid tongue:

Gentlemen - start your scripting engines.

What is it with geeks and acid tongues?

Look, Dave, I don't want to be at the head of the 'being listened to .. ' queue just because I can log on and participate. There are 15 million like my Mum who aren't near the starting blocks. Talk that one up for a change.

A piece from today's Guardian Technology seems apt to link to:

• How we have been fooled by utopian visions of the future Christine Evans-Pughe

Since the 1960s, politicians and pundits have predicted the imminent arrival of a digital utopia in which robots would do the washing up and we would live in peace and harmony in an electronically connected, global village, thanks to the net.

So why are the utopian visions of 40 years ago strangely similar to the ones we hold today? Because business and political leaders have consistently pushed a carefully orchestrated fantasy of the future to distract us from the present, says Richard Barbrook, who explores the subject in Imaginary Futures - From Thinking Machines to the Global Village.

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He is particularly interested in exposing the "nonsense of technological determinism", which he describes as "the theory that someone builds a machine, the machine sprouts legs and runs around the world changing it".

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