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By Root 843 0

new societal norms the internet fosters, my greatest hope is that future generations will enforce a doctrine of free speech with governments and institutions. The internet is the First Amendment brought to life. It abhors and subverts censorship—for whatever speech is tamped down in one place can and will arise somewhere else. That is the positive force of global communication. The danger in this globalism, however, is that our freedom could be reduced to a lowest common denominator of speech as dictated by the worst regime, whether that is through government repression, pressure groups that object to TV shows in America or cartoons in Denmark, or regressive libel laws (which some say are outmoded now that everyone has the means to respond). We must expect powerful forces such as Google to use their economic, cultural, and moral influence to pressure censors in China, Iran, and elsewhere to value and protect speech.

Whatever causes they take up, Generation G will be able to organize without organizations, as Shirky wrote in Here Comes Everybody. That ability to coalesce will have a profound destabilizing impact on institutions. We can organize bypassing governments, borders, political parties, companies, academic institutions, religious groups, and ethnic groups, inevitably reducing their power and hold on our lives. In an essay in Foreign Affairs in 2008, Richard Haass argued that the world structure is moving from bi-and unipolarity (i.e., the Cold War and its aftermath) to nonpolarity (i.e., no one’s in charge). We now operate in an open marketplace of influence. Google makes it possible to broadcast our interests and find, organize, and act in concert with others. One need no longer control institutions to control agendas. Haass chronicles the dilution of governments. Bloggers Umair Haque and Fred Wilson have written about the fall of the firm, and earlier I examined the idea that networks are becoming more efficient than corporations. In my blog, I follow the crumbling of the fourth estate, the press. One could debate the stature and power of the first estate, the church. What’s left? The internet is fueling the rise of the third estate—the rise of the people. That might bode anarchy except that the internet also brings the power to organize.

Our organization is ad hoc. We can find and take action with people of like interest, need, opinion, taste, background, and worldview anywhere in the world. I hope this could lead to a new growth in individual leadership: Online, you can accomplish what you want alone and you can gather a group to collaborate. Being out of power need not be an excuse or a bar from seeking power. That may encourage more involvement in communities and nations—witness the youth armies that gathered in Facebook around Barack Obama, a powerful lesson for a generation to have learned.

Early in its rise, I wondered whether the internet would be inherently liberal or conservative. Conventional wisdom says that broadcast TV, serving the masses, was the medium of the left, whereas talk radio and cable TV, serving large niches with the ability to hammer contrary messages, were the media of the right. What is the internet, then? At first, I thought it was libertarian as that was, disproportionately, the ethos of so many early political bloggers. It made sense: The internet champions and enables personal liberty. But as time went on, I learned that the internet is neither a monolith nor a medium. In industry and politics, it disaggregates elements and then enables free atoms to reaggregate into new molecules. It fragments the old and unifies the new. It obsoletes old orthodoxies and old definitions of left and right and provides the opportunity to make more nuanced expressions of our political worldview. It was then that I saw the internet not as left, right, or libertarian but as the connection machine that brings together any and all worldviews.

I pray that Google and the internet will change, spread, and strengthen democracy. Google’s moral of universal empowerment is the sometimes-forgotten ideal of