Can you feel that weird sensation in the pit of your stomach? That’s future shock. We’ve toiled 15 years through the Web era, building up tool after tool after tool to make it easier for people to connect, communicate, share, trade, and coordinate. We have systematically removed every bit of friction our culture has ever had that prevents people from coming together — to whatever end. So now they do. Some create the nearly endless factuality of Wikipedia, others want to pop some pills and watch the pretty colours.
Government — every government, everywhere in the world — is in roughly the same position the recording industry occupied in early 1999, just as Shawn Fanning unleashed Napster and changed media distribution forever. Now it’s power that’s being shared — power that states have held onto zealously, power which increasingly slips through their fingers, because it has become a slippery, digital quantity, and governments are fundamentally unprepared for this. Just as the record companies were unprepared for filesharing — via redwolf.newsvine.com
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