That picture of the soldiers in Iraq was hilarious, but think about how
Technological change always has unforseen side effects, cultural and
political. The invention of movable type printing was one of the great advances
of all time, but most people don’t really understand just how much political and
cultural change resulted because of it. Protestantism happened because of the
printing press. Two centuries of war between Catholic and Protestant countries
happened because of it. The printing press is responsible for the rise of what
we now think of as "nationalism" in Europe. And the printing press was
responsible for converting Latin from the international language of Europe into
a dead language. The printing press was the proximate cause of a drastic
increase in the rate of change of, well, damned near everything.
We’re on the cusp of a comparable change, being brought about by a comparable
advance in communications technology. We just had a really remarkable example of
that come by today.
On Monday at a rally in California, John Kerry stuck his foot in it with a
lame joke that he loused up (he now says). Today
this picture is all over the Internet, and the resulting horse-laugh at
Kerry’s expense has caused him to abjectly retreat. Yesterday he pugnaciously
declared that he would never apologize. Today he
did apologize, or
apologized in his name.
It would seem that he was against apologies before he was for them.
The picture is hilarious, but think about the process: a handful of smartass
soldiers currently serving in Iraq (from the Minnesota National Guard) created
that poster, and someone used a digital camera to take a picture of 8 others
holding it up with (deservedly) big grins on their faces.
Then the picture was downloaded into a computer and, I assume, emailed to
someone in the US. I haven’t got the slightest idea where it first appeared, but
it spread like wildfire and at this point I’ve seen various versions of it on at
least five sites, and many others have linked to one or more of
those. Within just a few hours of when that photograph was taken in Iraq, at
least a million people in the US, halfway around the world, had seen the
picture and laughed at it. Probably by now it’s many millions. And that’s
without any participation by TV or magazines or the newspapers who, considering
the prevailing political bias in such organizations, probably wouldn’t have
given it any exposure if they could possibly manage not to.
One of the reasons that the
invention of printing press was such a seismic event was that among
the earliest things to be printed in quantity were translations of the Bible
in the local vernacular. Instead of listening to the local Priest read
Biblical passages in Latin (which you didn’t understand) and then having him explain to you
what they meant, and what you had to do because the Bible Said So — in Latin,
which you didn’t understand — you could now read it
in your own language. And you could come to your own conclusion about what it
really meant and what you needed to do. You didn’t need the Catholic Church any
longer for that, and that meant you didn’t have to follow the priest’s orders.
That’s a big part of how and why Protestantism happened.
Something like that is happening now. We no longer need Television and Radio
and Magazines and Newspapers to tell us whether something that’s happened is important. We
uneducated ignorant peasants can do it for ourselves. And we can do it faster than the
MSM can. They
fancy themselves to be gatekeepers, but we’re kicking holes in the fence and
going around the gates now. In fact, there isn’t any fence any longer; the gates
stand lonely and alone, and the gatekeepers are
going out of business.
A huge number of unrelated technological lines all coalesced at the same time
to make the printing press possible: advances in metallurgy, paper making, ink
making, jewelry, glue, and many others. The printing press
itself, for example, was an adaptation of a wine press.
And a huge number of only distantly related technological lines coalesced to
make it possible for you to see that picture today. Most of these are in
electronics, of course, but it included development of the CCD, advances in
storage battery technology, modern CMOS-based microcircuits, wide area networks,
communication satellites, and the rockets which put them into orbit, and on and on.
Arrogant patrician John Kerry was humbled today by a squad of Minnesota
smartasses, a digital camera, a notebook computer, a military communications
network, many huge civilian communications networks, and hundreds of bloggers.
And it happened at breakneck speed. (Kerry’s neck.)
We no longer need the priests of the Main Stream Media to tell us what the
news means, and to tell us what we should do.