Monday, February 9, 2009

Future Politics

The internet acts as our generations giant cloud memory for things we commit down for the world to see.
How, perhaps, is this going to play into the future of politics?
In the past, it has been easy for political handlers to clean up an official's past by simply taking them out of that situation, and spreading the 'official word'. This revisionist trick does not work any more, as was demonstrated in our last election. Every time they tried, anyone with an itch and bandwidth pulled up the facts almost as fast as the politicos could lie.

These are more visible and immediate effects of the prevalence of the infortubes, but what say... twenty years from now? Will we find out that the presidential candidate was livejournal user darkXblood who wrote awful poetry? Will President BunnyLord's blog come back to haunt him from his days as a confused teen?

The answer as far as I can see it is: yes. No amount of revision is going to delete Google's cache page, or the cache's of any other number of sites. No amount of the party line will wipe away the incriminating MySpace photos.

I just toss this out there as food for thought. I personally am looking forward to it. It might bring us to a whole new level of transparancy in government... one we wished we had never seen.

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