Decentralizing Technology

Jane Hamsher caught my eye with this description of the two conventions:

"There's absolutely nothing interesting about what the GOP is doing here in Minnesota. The party itself is like an enormous cadaver whose funeral is being held in the Xcel Center, and the wakes thrown by its drunken hedonist powerbrokers bear more than a passing resemblance to Roman vomitoriums.

Not that the Democrats in Denver were much more interesting -- more lifelike, to be certain, as the baton of power and pork passed over to them, but completely staged and lacking in spontaneity nonetheless. "

But she really hits it out of the park when she begins discussing the effect that the internet and asynchronous communications have had on the spread of information:

"It was like a million ants scurrying around the city, passing back bits of information that formed themselves into a whole in a completely decentralized manner. Its very nature defied efforts to control and spin and propagandize.

It was the anti-Fox News."

Read the whole thing. She goes into great detail as to how activists used technology to subvert all attempts at checking the free flow of information.

As my friend [Theophanes] likes to say, advances in technology can have either a centralizing or a decentralizing effect depending upon the nature of the technology in question. It should come as no surprise that technologies created by the state and by state-sponsored capitalism tend to have centralizing effects (the internet being a stark counterexample, but just look at how desperately Congress is trying to put that particular genie back in the bottle).

The failure of the ".tv" fad should be evidence enough to show that many still fail to grok the internet. This medium has rules, but its rules are very different from those which govern most traditional media. A few examples:

1. Creation is now the greatest bottleneck rather than distribution.

2. As soon as a creative work is unleashed, it will be altered, re-mixed, transformed, and improved -- with or without the original artist's permission, but nearly always with attribution.

3. Information flows are bi-directional.

4. Censorship is [futile].

I've annoyed many fellow conservatives by saying that the advent of the internet had a far greater salutary effect on American political liberties than did anything coming out of the '94 Gingrich revolution. The idea that voting and campaigning are the only means of effecting political change is truly pernicious -- one can have a far greater effect on the future by inventing something, working within one's own community, or by raising a child with good values.