For a decade, I have argued that a golden age is dawning because of the internet. My reasoning has been that the internet will cause the world population to become educated, and thereby create an engine of individual liberty that no terrorist or tyrant could push back.
Michael S Malone has an essay today on edgelings in which he speculates on the question: Could the Internet Have Prevented WWII? His discussion is interesting. Essentially he sees the power of the internet to prevent trouble as a matter of creating public awareness. He speculates at one point:
. . . the Internet, had it existed, might well have stopped Hitler. Imagine ten thousand blogs and websites, all exposing the excesses of the Nazis: breaking leaked information from Hitler’s circle, showing cellphone videos of the horrors of the SA purge or Kristallnacht, showing how Hitler’s poisonous vision in autobiography and speeches were now unfolding across Germany – and pointing to its obvious conclusion. Most of all, giving persecuted Jews, Gypsies and homosexuals a voice beyond the increasingly Party-controlled media. All of this would have embarrassed Hitler and the Nazis in a very different way than Le Clezio suggests, but it might have been much more effective. In showing the Nazis for the low-rent thugs they were, the Internet might have created enough doubt among the German middle class to take away the votes Hitler needed to take power.
I remain convinced that very soon the multiplying mobiles in the hands of the world population will elevate literacy and learning. Stopping the Hitlers of the future will be one of many benefits from this truly profound global change.
