If you were in ancient Rome watching for signs of the empire’s big fall, you wouldn’t look at the headlines. Instead, you’d have to look closely for small signs, faint signals. Big things start small.
That’s roughly what Eric Schnurer argues in “Why Local Innovation Is the Answer,” which is his reaction to a James Fallows article on Rome and the Dark Ages.
Starting with grains of sand
Small things, writes Schnurer, often have “large-scale effects but play out on the level of individual grains of sand.” Those “grains of sand” work in ways unknown or disbelieved by those who believe in “major change and progress coming in large-scale, centralized, and particularly federal efforts. This is a warping effect that the civil-rights and Vietnam eras, with a dose of coming-right-after-the-FDR-era, has had on our understanding of U.S. history.”
The enlightening place to look is always local. If you want to know where the world is headed, you need to find the unknown lunatics toiling away in a lab in Menlo Park, New Jersey, or a patent office in Basel, or a garage in Menlo Park, California, or the mayor’s office in South Bend—not what the world leaders and experts are saying …
Local is where most people always choose to get involved: It’s not just the current dysfunctionality that channels most people into school-board meetings instead of seeking to draft new national legislation. Some small number of crazy people like you and me are drawn to the latter, but that’s a distinct minority, always has been, and always will be.
My work has brought me into contact with people all around the country who were thinking about productive little ideas about how to improve their neighborhoods, their kid’s school, their small business and how it affected their workers, etc. … My contribution has been largely in recognizing them and thinking, Hey, that would make a great basis for a “program” that my candidate could propose, scale up, and fund as governor!
I eventually concluded—as has anyone I know who has thought about government systems from the standpoint of achieving results instead of promoting one’s career—that what state and (ESPECIALLY) national governments do is simply to fund to-scale solutions someone else has discovered, tested, and proved at an “atomic” level …
The way to make a contribution is to go start a school that works, or a neighborhood organization that solves a problem …
Or, he might add, to build an app that improves city life.
Schnurer is describing here what’s often called “civic tech,” the use or cultivation of indigenous or small-scale knowledge.
Networking fundamentally changes “local”
So, you ask, how is it different today? Rome was a community, but cities today are communities plus networking. Networking fundamentally changes the nature of communities.
It undermines territorial structures like nation-states and the new world order—in that way, Brexit, Scottish devolution, California and even cities going their own way on the Paris accords, cities globally becoming the players rather than nation-states, etc., are all foreseeable developments …
I think we will start developing worldwide “communities” that are not physically connected, but rather are “localized” in the sense of being nodes of innovation or communication or consumption or whatever in a non-physically-contiguous/nonphysical network …
Stay tuned and watch for faint signals.