Skip to main content

Smash the Collective!

It's one thing for Daniel Hannan to have done it.

It's another thing for him to realize that he had done it.

It's yet another thing for him to realize what it means that he had done it.

And it is icing on the cake that he did it with an assault on state-controlled economies.



He managed hurl a single well placed stone, and put a crack in collectivist notions of media, politics, and economy with just one shot. A British libertarian hurling well-pointed words at the Prime Minister may not be common, but it's not earth-shattering either. What's amazing is that it ginned up enough interest on the Internet that I've seen it on just about every news program tonight all the way over here on the other side of the Atlantic. Left to their own devices, the European press would never have covered it, let alone the American press. But, as Hannan writes in his blog today:
When I woke up this morning, my phone was clogged with texts, my email inbox with messages. Overnight, the YouTube clip of my remarks had attracted over 36,000 hits. By today, it was the most watched video in Britain.

How did it happen, in the absence of any media coverage? The answer is that political reporters no longer get to decide what's news. The days when a minister gave briefings to a dozen lobby correspondents, and thereby dictated the next day's headlines, are over. Now, a thousand bloggers decide for themselves what is interesting.
As I said in one of my first posts to this blog, almost a year ago:
When someone talks about the sweeping changes that the Internet is going to bring to politics, they are usually talking about recent or near-term trends like Online voting, scandal scoops from the Blogosphere, or tapping into internet-based campaign contributions. These symptoms are certainly novel, but they are just that... symptoms. The real sea change is occurring in the populace now. We expect to have a voice, not just in the "strongly agree/somewhat disagree" opinion polls, but in shaping and driving opinion and dialogue, and in oversight of a truly transparent government.
I'm getting pretty tired of hearing of this phenomenon as being "viral". With the professional opining class becoming ever more irrelevant, and traditional media lagging behind instead of leading the public discourse, I think we can start calling the old model "stagnant" media, and stop attaching the foul connotations of the epithet "viral" to the emerging media reality. Now that our natural desire to share, produce, comment, and converse has an avenue on the Internet, the time is coming soon when social media waves like this one are no longer the exception, but the norm.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Re-Opening Experiment

We should remind ourselves that, this Memorial Day weekend and the weeks that follow, we are subjects in a grand experiment to see how good we are at social distancing as stay-at-home orders are being slowly lifted. The state's stay-at-home order was never meant to keep you, individually, safe from infection. It was meant to keep hospital's safe from being overwhelmed by too many of us needing them at the same time. In Michigan, the daily new cases of COVID-19 are higher today than they were when we locked down in late March. We are testing whether or not we can open up (with all of our new precautions and protocols) without spiking the rate of spread, but make no mistake: it *is* an experiment, and we *are* the test subjects. Please don't get careless as things start to open up. We need to get our economies back on track, but we are still a long way (and a vaccine away) from being out of the woods. Stay vigilant, folks. Wash your hands. Wear a mask. As has always been the...
Post a Comment
Read more

VMWorld Wednesday

Today I noticed three things: 1) All the good sessions ran today. 2) Lines for everything! 3) You can't do back-to-back sessions all day without burning out. Today's sessions were not to be missed, and everybody knew it because lines starting forming 45 minutes before some sessions. VMWorld has been on their toes, however: I didn't miss any session that I wanted to hit, and the most popular sessions from Monday and Tuesday got added back to the schedule on Wednesday and Thursday so everyone would have a crack at them. This is some very nimble work for a conference this big. Well done, VMWorld! Here's the photolog: My morning run takes me down to ferry building and up the Embarcadero. Here's the view at sunrise. This lovely scene is the hallway in my hotel. Creepy, but swank! Lines! Today was the day of lines! This was the line first thing in the AM for the Labs. More sidewalk art outside of Moscone South. Bean-bag Alley - where people and devic...
1 comment
Read more

You are going to get COVID-19. Now what?

In my best estimation, this is how we should address COVID-19 at this point:  1. You are going to get COVID-19. It's very likely endemic now. Breakthrough Delta infections carry the same viral load in the nasopharynx of the vaxxed and unvaxxed alike. Resign yourself to this fact. You are going to get COVID-19. If not Delta, then whatever variant comes next due to antigenic drift.  2. There is no herd immunity. There is no eradicating this virus. "Zero COVID" is a fantasy. It's too widespread, too mutable, and too contagious. Eventually, this will join the other common coronaviruses in circulation (229E, NL63, OC43, and HKU1).  3. The vaccines shouldn't be considered vaccines. Consider them similar to seasonal flu shots. They are here to make sure that when you get COVID-19 (And let me reiterate: You are going to get COVID-19), you are far less likely to be hospitalized or die.  4. When enough people, vaxxed and unvaxxed, get COVID-19 (And let me reiterate: You are...
1 comment
Read more