Role of Information in Our Society

Pundits tell us that we live in the information age.

Since we live in the information age, it seems to me that people occasionally talk about the role information plays in our society. This discussion should include debate about the distribution of information.

Most of the data that affects our lives was collected by big government agencies and big businesses to serve big government and business.

I question if this is a healthy trend.

If there were other people on this planet who considered the centralization of data an unhealthy trend; then people should talk about ways to break apart the centralized databases.

My current kickstarter campaign is to produce a book about a tax reform plan called "The Object Tax." It is named after Object Oriented Programming.

From an information perspective, the goal of the reform is to break apart the centralized database held by the IRS into Massively Distributed Database which is hosted by independent application service providers.

The Object Tax replaces payroll withholding with a thing called A Tax Aware Account. These accounts would be hosted by third party providers. Workers will pay their taxes when they withdraw money.

Economists would note that the reform just transformed the tax system from a production tax to a consumption.

I am hoping that computer programs and system engineers would notice that the reform just transitioned the tax collection system from being a centralized database into a massively decentralized object database.

Personally, I think we can look at the form of databases in our society to see if our nation is on track.

If our society is dominated by centralized database, then we are on track to creating a highly centralized class society. If the databases are highly distributed, then we are retaining a free society. IMHO, replacing a centralized database with massively distributed database is a good thing. The hard part of my job is convincing people that this type of thing matters.