The internet is good for politics, a welcome addition to aging machine organizations, broadcast campaigning, a moribund press corps and the "infotainment" of 24-hour cable news. Even though many lament the "coarsening of the discourse" and the sharpness and vitrol you can find in the online "fever swamp", it's not as if this is actually new. Talk radio is famous for this, and countless other subcultural media -- mostly on the right, but some on the anarchist or communist fringe -- have been at it for years. It's just out in the open now, which, if you want to address the problems of divisive politics, is a necessary first step.

The internet is good chiefly for two reasons:

1. Lower Barriers to Entry and Decentralized Authority: basically anyone who meets a minimal (and increasingly ubiquitous) set of requirements can take part. This widens the circle of participation, prevents or at least counteracts stale and unhelpful assumptions (aka "conventional wisdom"), and creates more competition to deliver good results. Win win win.

   Also, the open playing field means that authority -- and by that I mean both who's "an authority" on something as well as who's the boss -- becomes decentralized and harder to work for. You're an authority because you put out something that builds a community of consensus, and in an open system it's hard to do that without transparency and hard to build a consensus around lies if you can't be opaque. Again, people will and are using this for evil as well as good, but the good is far more prevalent, and net/net it's a much better ecosystem for civilization than the Hurst empire.

2. Transparency and Accountability: As mentioned above, getting the hot air out in the open, while not pretty, is a good/necessary thing to move forward. There's nothing to be gained by keeping this stuff underground. Lance the boil. Let the puss ooze.

   Transparency also drives accountability, which critical for democratic systems to work. Check out this roundup of posts by right-wing megastar Instapundit on the Iraq War. It's cherry-picked for sure, but the truth is that this guy shouldn't have any credibility until he can explain all this nonsense. We've all made wrong predictions, but looking at these collected works, it's hard not to see propaganda. This is a new thing, and it's going to cause a shakeup, both in terms of exposing people who are consistently unhelpful, and also in setting more realistic expectations for how often any one voice can be correct.

This has been your daily reminder to believe that things are getting better. Enjoy!