2008: World of Tomorrow

So freezing cold, 24F out there with a steady life-sapping breeze. Inside I am and reading the data stream from Google Reader.

Stock markets, Fed interest rates, Russian missile tests, new drugs, new diseases, science discoveries, claims of breakthrough-inventions, political games, political flames, political names, political blames and the weather.

So many forms of tyranny. To use Mr. Putin's retro-cold war military disco dancing as an example. How gauche! How passé! Mr. Amadenijad, Mr. Bush, Mr. Chavez, Mr. Putin; these are all tyrants in the technical sense. They exercise power with their choices over their people and the world, for better or worse. Like most humans their focus of attention is narrowly jammed into their specialty, the use of power. The cost of this narrowed focus is that like the rest of us they will occasionally overlook the storm shift that is coming towards their focus.

There is a distinct knew agent acting in the human world easily overlooked.

It's all the rest of us.

The internet and assorted webs built on it connect more people than any one country is populated by. All of those people have access to the same uniform information resource (except for a few who haven't figured out how to easily and safely circumvent government interdiction). Our responses to this information form an ever growing, involving and evolving zeitgeist wherein we sift, sort and mull the assorted truths.

As hours, days, weeks, months go by this "Internet country" ferments these truths into global policy plans and decisions. These choices are largely indifferent to strident demands of the old tyrant system and since they are taken into affect by a diffuse and ubiquitous membership these policies are largely irresistible. Due to their diffuse and pervasive source, the decision are also largely uninfluencable.

No wonder Putin and the rest are acting all psycho. They've recently been warned and are still getting over the shock of having to change their drawers.