The Internet and Gulf War 2
Interesting piece in the SF Chronicle by Dan Fost and Carrie Kirby about how the Internet changed the experience of the war in Iraq. A snippet:
"Three (things) have changed," said Howard Rheingold of Mill Valley, author of "Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution." "One is access to information and news. Another is the ability for people to publish their own views. And finally there's the ability to organize action in the physical world."
(Reason's Jesse Walker interviewed Rheingold a few months back; it's online here).
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Indeed, a very interesting article. It is difficult to imagine where the world of 24/7 instant infotainment is taking us.
So in the end, I believe it is IDEAS that will triumph over brute force. By ?the end?, I mean many decades down the line ? when the rest of humankind has been elevated to the sophistication of the better-informed developed world.
With a stroke of the pen, the world was given a better way, back in 1776. Since then, a good part of the world has witnessed and been a participant in human well-being unequaled in the centuries that came before. This is not to say that the Declaration and the ten Amendments were solely responsible for this, but they set the stage for many other writers to come along and bolster those documents ? Adam Smith, Von Mises, F.A.Hayek, etc., etc.
Any violence and coercion that still remains with us today, is partly because the better ideas have not yet trickled down to where they can take effect.
But that time will come. And when it does, such enormous expenditures of destructive energy will be blessedly re-allocated from a coercive focus to an unimaginably prosperous, benevolent, and creative one.
The written word is, and will always be, mightier than any tool that smites.