“The Internet was not a cure-all; it was a role model. It wasn’t the solution to the problem, but a way of thinking about the problem.”
So, people working together to make decisions. Democracy, right? Not in this case.
Typical democracy elects one group of people to make all decisions. Thus, regardless of promises, you now have a group in power that does what it wants. Steven Johnson argues there’s a better way — and he calls it “peer progressivism.” It’s not left, not right, not libertarian. It’s something else entirely.
In Future Perfect, we have votes from citizens on what makes the most sense for them. Citizens vote on whether they want a new playground or a new business center. Citizens can either contribute a vote towards a decision, or money.
Similar to Kickstarter, people vote with their wallets, and things happen.
And honestly? After reading this book, I started looking at the internet differently. Not just as a place where people argue about nonsense on Twitter — but as a FRAMEWORK for how large groups of humans can organize, fund, and execute ideas without waiting for some bureaucrat to give them permission.
The Peer Progressive Vision
Johnson’s core argument is that networks — decentralized, bottom-up, peer-to-peer networks — consistently outperform top-down hierarchies when it comes to solving complex problems. He’s not talking about anarchy. He’s talking about structured collaboration where the crowd is genuinely smarter than the individual.
Think about it. Wikipedia has no central editor, yet it’s the most comprehensive encyclopedia ever created. Open-source software runs the backbone of the internet. Kickstarter lets strangers fund projects that no bank or government agency would touch.
These aren’t flukes. They’re patterns. And Johnson makes a compelling case that these patterns should extend into governance, urban planning, healthcare, and education.
The old debate was always “big government vs. free market.” Johnson essentially says: why are these the only two options? Networks offer a third path — one where citizens don’t just vote every four years and hope for the best, but actively participate in shaping the decisions that affect their daily lives.
Proximity and Morality
We also briefly touch upon the “pothole paradox,” where things that are closest to you are most important. Someone breaking into your car is relatively more important than genocide in some far-off nation.
This is one of those uncomfortable truths about human psychology that Johnson handles really well. We are hardwired to care about what’s in front of us. A pothole on YOUR street will generate more outrage than a humanitarian crisis thousands of miles away. It’s not that we’re bad people — it’s that our monkey-brains evolved to prioritize immediate, local threats.
But here’s where it gets interesting. The internet is SHRINKING that distance. Not physically, obviously, but psychologically. When you see a video of a disaster in real time, when you can donate directly to a family on the other side of the planet, when you can read firsthand accounts instead of filtered news reports — proximity changes. The circle of what feels “close” expands.
Then we have the distribution of information and morality thanks to the internet. The public has a greater say in what is acceptable when moral pressures are amplified over the internet (even if it’s trolling). This affects institutions, governments, and other large societal constructs, leading to more “consciously acceptable” decision-making.
Johnson connects this to real examples — how online campaigns have forced corporations to change policies, how crowdsourced investigations have exposed corruption, how networked citizens have held governments accountable in ways that were simply impossible twenty years ago. Is it messy? Absolutely. But it’s also incredibly powerful.
Negativity Blindness
Finally, the book actually starts off with a bit of common negativity blindness. If we continuously follow the news and learn that everything is bad, then our perceptions about life will be the same. The “things are getting worse” perception is small-minded and simply perpetuated by mass media (which is driven to make money from one of our simplest emotions: fear).
I’ve talked about this in other reviews — Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist and Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature both hammer the same point. The data overwhelmingly shows that humanity is getting healthier, wealthier, safer, and more educated with each passing decade. Yet if you ask the average person, they’ll tell you the world is falling apart.
Johnson doesn’t dwell on this as long as Ridley or Pinker, but he uses it as the foundation for his argument. If things ARE getting better, then SOMETHING is working. And that something, he argues, is the increasing power of decentralized networks to solve problems that centralized institutions can’t.
It’s a refreshing starting point. Instead of asking “why is everything terrible?” he asks “things are actually improving — so what’s driving that improvement, and how do we accelerate it?”
Where It Falls Short
Now, here’s my issue with the book. Johnson is an optimist — maybe a bit too much of one. He presents peer networks as almost inherently virtuous, and I think that’s naive. The same internet that enables Kickstarter also enables misinformation campaigns. The same decentralized tools that help citizens organize also help bad actors coordinate.
He also doesn’t spend much time on the question of expertise. Sure, the crowd is smart in aggregate, but there are problems where you genuinely need specialists making decisions. I don’t want a Kickstarter vote determining my city’s bridge engineering standards, you know?
The book was written in 2012, and some of the techno-optimism feels dated in hindsight. Social media didn’t exactly turn out to be the utopian forum for rational civic discourse that Johnson seemed to envision. But the core insight — that networks are a powerful tool for collective problem-solving — still holds up.
Final Thoughts
Good book with some interesting revelations on sociological and political theory. A quick read.
If you’ve read The Rational Optimist or anything by Steven Pinker and enjoyed the “things are getting better” argument, this is a natural companion. Johnson takes that optimism and channels it into a specific thesis about HOW networked citizens can drive progress. It’s not a perfect book, but it’s a thought-provoking one — and it’ll make you think twice about the old “government vs. market” debate.
3.5/5 — Recommended if you’re into political theory, technology, and human cooperation.
Thanks for reading.
— Leonidas
