The second superpower

While I am generally inclined to criticize the airless self-congratulatory atmosphere of the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference (for that is where I am this week), there are plenty of very interesting streams of thought emerging. One of these is the notion that there may be two superpowers after all – the US and world opinion. This is a pretty idealistic assertion, but it is certainly true that, in some cases, the public are no longer an inert audience. They are organising and coalescing around Net technologies such as blogs and wikis, which have given them a voice. Destinations like Moveon.org and Meetup.com enable distributed, organised advocacy which, some day, may be influencial enough to be able to score a significant victory against institutionalised American interests.

Posted by monoman at 03:00 PM on February 11, 2004