““This is only the beginning of a huge “Copernican revolution” (to borrow a phrase from Matthew Taylor, one of Tony Blair’s advisers) that is putting the user at the center of the public-sector universe. The current centralized state has been shaped by the idea that information is in short supply: It derives its power from the fact that it knows lots of things that ordinary people do not. But information is now one of the world’s most abundant resources: available in huge quantities and accessible to anyone with a computer or a smart phone. As Eric Schmidt, Google’s chairman, and Jared Cohen, who worked for Hillary Clinton, point out in The New Digital Age, this changes the nature of the relationship between individuals and authority. The top-down state may become more like a network that can mobilize the energies and abilities of thousands or even millions of well-informed citizens—or “prosumers,” as one cyberguru, Don Tapscott, has called them.””
