Borepatch 101: How the Internet is changing politics

The Internet has disrupted all sorts of business models, so it's no surprise at all that it's reshaping how politics is played.

As a quick disclaimer, my politics is summed up as I'm not a conservative, I'm not a liberal, and I'm not a Libertarian.  I'm not really much of a joiner, it seems.

Your starting point for what follows is here, about the Long Tail of the Internet and how it is changing - or eliminating - old political "Gatekeeping" roles.  Naturally, the gatekeepers don't much like this, but business has been disrupted like this for fifteen years.  It really shouldn't be much of a surprise.

The Internet is massively decentralized, and information is now impossible to control.  This decentralization is driving a political decentralization, as the Top-Down models of the 20th Century collapse under the exposure of their repeated incompetence.  What's interesting is that the view of the Founding Fathers - a fragmentation of power - is getting a new boost from this process.  And "incompetence" is precisely the right word, and the voters know it.

Neither political party knows how to handle this transition.  Both are Top-Down relics of the Industrial Age, and don't know how to deal with the Information Age.  Their model has been not so very different than the ancient barbarian kings, but that doesn't map well to an era when information is freely available.  This flow of information makes it easy to see that the people who supposedly are helped by the current system are actually screwed by it.

So what comes next?  It's hard to say, but culture matters.  The United States will do a lot better than Europe, who is very likely screwed.  As always, history tells us a lot, if we'll just listen.