Utopia and the Interwebs

A very interesting piece by Evgeny Morozov in Foreign Policy called Think Again: The Internet, where he argues that the Internet has not ushered in world peace or done many of the things that it was supposed to. My instinctive reaction to the piece as a self-described Net evangelist is "hell, no". But when I read the article through he's made good points and qualified most of the negativity. I think the problem is with perception - the Internet is like any other technology in that it can have an impact, but it can't do miracles (though the real-time nature of Net is miraculous enough for me).

Perhaps this is a good time to pimp (again!) my article in the Times of India, Shackling the Net. This is in the context of Internet censorship, but there's definitely some overlap.

It only takes doomsday

... to get us interested in particle physics. I love how the Large Hadron Collider has suddenly become a household name. We might not fully understand what's going on, what scientists are looking for or why we might die, but its been built-up enough to glue us to our TV screens, no matter where in the world we are. Take that, Beijing Olympics! Cern is more interesting than you.

Onto more earthly matters: While reading a review in Salon on a book about knowledge, called Reinventing Knowledge, the reviewer said this at the end:

McNeely and Wolverton state that the Internet's various outlets for self-expression, "if anything, make the pursuit of reliable, authentic knowledge more, not less, difficult online, by drowning out traditionally credentialed cultural gatekeepers. Relatively few networked forums provide a truly democratic alternative to the focused, substantiated, reasoned -- and elitist -- debate that still governs the disciplines." Them's fightin' words to many proponents of Web 2.0, but the truth is that more of us would agree with that statement than not. Most of the people who distrust scientists or the "MSM" on a pet topic or two, like the safety of aspartame or what really happened on Sept. 11, believe them on a host of other things, like the benefits of exercise or the Russian invasion of Georgia.

Without a doubt, we've entered an era when the official truth is easier to challenge than ever before, but do we really want to live in a world without any established truths at all, or where every fact must be democratically elected by a horde of individuals whose judgment may not be informed or trustworthy? Do we want to let the cranks who care enough to make the biggest stink on a subject be the ones to have the final word on it? On the other hand, can we afford to write off all of them as cranks, knowing that every so often a crank turns out to be a prophet? Somehow, we'll have to sort all this out. And when we do, McNeely and Wolverton will have their revolution.

A lot of this I agree with. In fact, I don't think you can disagree that information on the internet, while readily available, is more suspect. But it becomes a half-full/half-empty thing; whether you think it is ok to give up some veracity for more information and greater democracy, or not.

Oh, and according to an NYT story about the Frannie Mae and Freddie Mac bailout, Paulson said to his friends in August that he "felt like a dog who'd caught a bus and didn't know what to do with it." He's the Joker, then. It's official.