Points of inflection

The interesting times in history are the points of inflection – the points at which, for some reason or other, the rules change. There were protesters before Martin Luther, but when he nailed his 95 theses to the church door in Wittenburg, the power of the new printing medium made them rapidly accessible throughout Europe, magnifying his influence and sparking the Protestant Revolution. The invention of the cannon (in the Western world) changed military strategy profoundly. The English invention of monetary policy enabled a smaller England to defeat the much larger France of the Sun King, and allowed the English to take over superpower status from the French..

I recommend an article in the June 2008 issue of The Atlantic Monthly entitled “The Amazing Money Machine” (pg 52), about how Senator Obama has been using the internet to raise so much money with so little effort. Obama himself is not the inflection point (not yet, anyway), but he has been the first major politician to recognize that an inflection point has occurred and to take advantage of it.

When the internet first begin to get wide public use, I thought two things were true (1) the invention of the internet would in the long run be as important as the invention of the printing press, and (2) it would be generations before we really learned to use it to its fullest. Already the early internet and the early uses to which it was put seem primitive, much like the early cars that were built, literally, as “horseless carriages” – an attempt to adapt a new technology to the old ways of doing things with as little change as possible. Things get more interesting when a new generation, not locked into doing things the old ways, begin to take advantage of the change. And fortunes are being made every year in Silicon Valley by (mostly young) entrepreneurs who are expanding and exploring the possibilities inherent in social networking in an on-line world.

Senator Obama's use of the social aspects of the internet to raise money and generate support are profound enough, and will no doubt change political campaigns from here on. What I find even more intriguing are the author's speculations on how this nation-wide (indeed, world-wide) social networking may change the very nature of government.