On Blogs, Democracy, and The Capitalism of Ideas

A strange thing happened during this election cycle. Major stories were first reported, refuted, held-up, and invalidated by blogs.

Is this surprising? In an age when photos are beamed electronically and news anchorpeople are nothing more than talking heads reading the AP-newswire, why shouldn't we share information - person to person?

Let's imagine the year 2025 for a moment. (these predictions are always wrong, hear me out)
Assumptions:
* At least 75% of people in the developed world always carry wirelessly interconnected devices on their person with more power, interconnected ability, and human-interface capability than a computer of today.
* We've found a way (already have this today, perhaps perfected) that people can communicate in any language of their choice - i.e. language is no longer a barrier in the free exchange of ideas.
* These devices people carry will be able to broadcast the media format of the time, likely far advanced from today's 2D video.
* Several breakthru ideas in human-computer-human communication will take place in the next 20 years.

Prediction:
Technology will enable people living in 2025 (give or take a decade) to communicate instantly, effortlessly, and with computer-aided *interaction on a global scale. The fundamental ideas behind today's blogs and community moderated sites (eg. slashdot.org ) will live-on and likely expand. Imaging a world in which a real-time conversation takes place between a billion people an a commercial entity? Imagine Apple computer having a single converstaion with a million customers? Even with today's technology it is concievable, and with tomorrows I say it is a near certainty.

On the Capitalism of Ideas. The Internet as it is today consists of data islands (Websites) with large numbers of contributors. Sites have grown to have moderation (slashdot, craigslist) and many now have meta-moderation (slashdot) where users can contribute a moderation on other users moderation. In this way, particularly when there are millions of contributors, it becomes possible to have both differences in ideas with moderation of quality and rationality.

Here are two different political scenarios in which this kind of community discussion might likely have changed the outcome of world events in the past decade.

1. The Submarine Kursk tragedy. I would bet on it, that if there were any honest, idea-capitalism based discussion amongst Russian civilians during this incident, the US rescue effort would have been allowed to proceed. There is no guarantee that they would have been successful, but they would have tried. Today's line is that hindsight is 20/20. Tomorrow's line for someone aligned with a failed idea might well be that "I wish my idea lost".

2. US-Iraq war. Without taking a stand at the moment, could you imagine a forum of 1/10th of the US population actually discussing the war, the options, the goals, and coming to an agreement? It's tough, really tough given that long and ugly election season we just went thru.

But imagine it for a few seconds, either scenario, people on their lunch breaks, commute home, interacting on a massive distributed scale. Politicians would be forced to listen to the ebb and flow of this kind of communication medium more than any poll of the past.

Revolution is coming, but unlike anything Mankind has ever seen since the invention of Fire and Language. People are for the first time communicating with people they do not know and may never meet for the sake of promoting their ideas and opinions. It will be impossible to seperate the population into a dual system of left and right, red and blue, as ideas will win and lose.