Reynolds isn’t deeply concerned about partisan politics, which spares readers Crashing the Gate–style boosterism. He spotlights some bloggers, such as J.D. Johannes and Michael Yon, who run Iraq-based sites that provide news and perspective on military operations and local culture that wouldn’t have had an outlet in the broadcast and print media goliaths. Reynolds doesn’t, however, cover the phenomenon of bloggers consolidating or forming Pajamas Media–style outlets to sidle up alongside the mainstream media. Reynolds himself is a paid “supervising executive editor” at Pajamas Media, a blogger at MSNBC.com, and a regular columnist for TCS Daily. If he had wanted to explore this stage of blogs’ evolution, a good test case would have been Powerline.
Powerlineblog.com started in 2002 as a low-key opinion site run by three conservative lawyers based in Minnesota and Washington, D.C. In September 2004, when CBS News relied on a forgery in a report on young George W. Bush’s service in the Air National Guard, Powerline was the most prominent of several sites that demolished the network’s evidence. At the end of the year, the very Old Media magazine Time named it “Blog of the Year,” and before long the Powerline pontificators were regular panelists on Reliable Sources, a CNN series hosted by Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz. Powerline’s takedown of CBS News was a textbook example of blogs’ fact-checking and humiliating mainstream media outlets. But when the blog earned fame, its writers starting seeking out chairs at the pundits’ table. You could look from MSM to blog, and from blog to MSM again, and it was impossible to say which was which.
The story of blogs only takes up about a fifth of An Army of Davids. In Reynolds’ narrative, they’re one permutation of “the triumph of personal technology over mass technology.” As technology makes it possible for more people to work from home or launch businesses, Reynolds sees the sparks of a “new revolution” that could reduce crime and traffic while strengthening the economy and the traditional family. As more people can get broadband access and work from home, fewer absentee dads will be clogging the interstates getting to the office. As recording equipment becomes cheaper, and as it becomes easier for musicians and filmmakers to upload their wares to the Internet, real talent will be recognized and popularized without the approval of a hidebound entertainment industry. This is all a wind-up for “the approaching singularity,” where change will happen faster than anyone can predict and “capabilities now available only to nation-states will soon be available to individuals.”
This last revelation comes on fast and isn’t completely convincing. Blogging hit the big time, yes. But the last 10 years, especially the late 1990s, were littered with promising, sky’s-the-limit technological leaps that were supposed to bring about the singularity. Reynolds’ final chapters on nanotechnology, longevity, and private space travel are brisk and optimistic, but they don’t quite sell the book’s bold thesis. Summing up the possibilities of human enhancement, for example, Reynolds suggests that abilities “like super strength, x-ray vision, underwater breathing, and the like are not so remote.”
Yet whether or not you agree with Reynolds’ predictions, they contain a core truth. For every innovation that makes it easier for a presidential candidate to take advantage of the blogosphere, there will be a tool that allows less tech-savvy people to publish one-man journals, upload photos, and post videos to share with complete strangers. The amateur, grassroots quality that excited so many people at the beginning of blogging will always be around in some form. There are many more contemplative diaries by awkward teens than spotlight-craving political blogs; in between there are sites devoted to everything from cooking to cars to Christianity.
But the Bible tells us what will happen to a lot of those would-be Davids. It didn’t take long for the original Goliath slayer to start building an empire and shacking up with Bathsheba. It doesn’t take long for a rebellious blogger to enjoy the taste of influence either. When that happens, ax-grinding politicians from Pete Hoekstra to Howard Dean should take note: These guys would love to help, as long as they can feel like they’re overthrowing something.
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