One of the biggest obstacles to overcome in convincing authoritarians about the benefits of a free society is their inability to accept the fact that order can can be an emergent property of individual action. For them, all facets of life have to have some sort of grand blueprint implemented by expert soverigns. The[y] cannot conceive of the economy, culture, infrastructure, morality, or society itself as a bottom-up result of billions of autonomous individual actions. Yet, the blogosphere is a vivid example of how wrong they are.
They each had knowledge of their particular time and their particular place - David Sifry, the programmers at Movable Type, N. Z. Bear, Jason DeFilippo - and in pursuit of their own ends, they took action that resulted in complex, mostly unintended, morphological properties of the blogosphere. Even without a central command apparatus, the blogosphere, rather than being chaotic, is a dynamic, living, breathing, adapting, and most of all, structured organism.
Morality from the bottom up. That what I've been trying to say for a while now...
Posted by Walter at November 29, 2003 09:06 AM