As I sit in front of my computer blogging, I wander a small, friendly world of hobbit-y bloggers. But if I pick up a newspaper, the real world is run by Republican orcs. Don’t we want to change that? If so, we have to get beyond Tolkienesque wishful thinking about how powerful we already are.
Yes, webloggers “outed” the Republican astroturf scam. But Republicans are still running our country and scaring the heck out of everyone else’s country–and Bush is very popular with voters. James Moore’s vision of bloggers as a second superpower is a lovely fantasy we’d like to make true. (Of course, there are some bloggers scarier than Dick Cheney, but in a fantasy, I get to choose which bloggers end up with power.)
Even in our little web-world, who is winning–bloggers or the orcs of PR-advertising-spin? The bloggers I know all agree those spin-orcs tremble at our power:
“…the Internet provides the public relations profession with the opportunity for a rigorous self-examination. Straightforward practices based on full disclosure, genuine participation, honest listening, and real contributions to the net community will earn the community’s trust and permit a high level of useful two-way communication. Anything else will provide the net community with an opportunity to trash some manipulative PR people, which it will happily do. The choice is up to you.”
That reads like today’s consensus on the future, but in fact it comes from a 1995 online journal, The Network Observer. The “manipulative PR people” are still making money and plenty of it–the Network Observer died in 1996.
Check out James Surowiecki’s analysis of the Battle of Helms Deep: most battles are won by the side with power, not people with cleverness and “heart.” There are elections coming up, elections which will result a gigantic transfer of real-world power. Big business is throwing big dollars into Republican campaign funds, hoping to make the world safe for extended copyright, unregulated corporations, and even more tax breaks. The Left needs money too. We need to build infrastructure. And could we please stop telling each other how great things already are?