For What It's Worth

"There's something happening here, What it is ain't exactly clear" - Stephen Stills, For What It's Worth, 1966

I was reading Moneyball this morning which is a really great book about baseball statistics and how so many "known facts" about them are dead wrong. There's this part in the book where a collection of regular fans got so disgusted with the way that statistics were collected, reported, and analyzed by the professionals that they started to go to games and collect thier own statistics, and eventually some of them started a company called Stats, Inc that tried to sell these new and better stats to the teams to no avail, and then finally with the advent of rotisserie baseball a market developed for these better stats. It's a long story and if you are interested in it, go get the book.

But it started me thinking about the "revolution of the ants" as my friend Mark Pincus likes to call it.

Conventional wisdom is that this "bottoms up" revolution was created by the Internet. But I don't think so. Clearly it was happening back in the 1970s when Bill James and Dick Cramer and others decided to take control of baseball stats. As David Kirkpatrick points out, it's happening on American Idol and all the other reality TV shows.

It's clearly happening with blogging and open source software and Internet-driven political fundraising.

So, for what it's worth, i think something is happening here and what it is isn't exactly clear. But it's big and its important.

Comments

[MattS]

Listen to our radio show, the Blogging of the President. It's on at 9pm-11pm, and we're talking about what is happening.

It's hosted by Chris Lydon. More details are here.
http://www.bopnews.com/archives/000213.html#000213

[BillG]

Fred, I agree. The 'bottoms up' revolution wasn't created by the Internet...but it is certainly facilitated by it.

During the the '60's there was a popular saying: 'power to the people' that symbolized this concept. With today's technology, we are enabling it to happen on a far grander & accelerated scale.

[MattS]

The VCR was a revolutionary technology without a revolutionary idea behind it. The internet is a revolutinary (set of) technologies with a revolutionary (set of) ideas behind it. But what's happening isn't all net, it's human. The net is a catalyst.

[Peter Liang]

something big is happening here....

train - people's goods
car/airplane - people's body
internet - people's mind

so where to we do from here?
i wonder what technology will bring people's heart closer?

[Bill Rhoads]

something happening here

we started out
with such high ideas
and grand schemes

big plans

to do better
to be different
from the generation
before us

no more excuses
no more bullshit

singing songs about
4 dead in ohio
and carrying on

talking about
seasons of love
inside new societies
with bold brave
futures

but somehow
it came out
just the same
no matter how hard
we wanted it to be
otherwise

there is something wrong

when children
wearing the uniforms
of soldiers
are dying everyday
on the streets of Iraq
for reasons
that were never
what they appeared
only excuses
for preemptive strikes
and ulterior motives

which is exactly
what the real enemy
planned on

with just a passing mention
on the evening news

while some
on her way out
pop diva superstar
gets front page headlines
and is the big news
on all the entertainment
shows
for flashing her tit
in a staged pr move
during the half time show
of the superbowl

and no one even cares

yes

there is something wrong

or in the words
of a time gone by

‘something’s happening here
what it is
ain’t exactly clear’
(Stephen Stills)

but then
it never was

was it?

let’s hope
the children of today
finally get it right

before it is to late