Back in 1999 a document called the ClueTrain Manifesto was released that discusses 95 theories of how the world of communication between customers and business has changed. See: http://www.cluetrain.com/

It is inevitable that the same change would occur in Politics. Evetually, there would be a change as more and more people realized the power of conversation that is open to them today fueled by the inexpensive and ‘free’ tool available to them online today. Today, there is no need for people to ‘get their message’ from the media, just as there is no longer a need for politicians to pander to the same MSM to ‘get their message’ out – everyone is empowered to ‘go direct’ to the masses, or the masses direct to you.

‘Politics 2.0′ is no longer about one to many conversations, its now about one to one conversations occuring many many times in many many places, sometimes all at once. The message is the media.

Don’t forget the Internet was created by man and is controlled by man. He merely perceives the world through it. (Blake’s “mind forg’d manacles”). The physical world is a different matter altogether. We have little or no say in that matter and Nation States are in many cases intertwined with this immutable fact. Whether England is ruled by Common Law or Sharia, it is still an Island and a unique entity.

Don’t build your own Tower of Babel.

Look at the US’s experience in Iraq and Afghanistan — a classic example of the LIMITS of military might. When facing “atomized & distributed” threats (eg: insurgents or terrorists), you cant simply bomb people into submission. our military strength seems to work as a disadvantage…in many places, we are perceived as bullies and the terrorists are viewed as “freedom fighters.”

Our military strength is important….when deployed as a guard against potential national threats (eg: preventing China from invading Taiwan or India, or Russia from invading Georgia or one of the “Stan’s”).

In our “post national” world, an individual’s identity is defined and people are organized in different ways – by workplace, industry, interest, hobby, neighborhood, ethnicity, lifestage, etc, etc….because online, we can find people literally across the globe who share our identity in these different ways, I think our “national identity” as “americans” becomes less and less relevant.

The big question, though, is whether or not this “atomization” is good or bad…does it give people a sense of purpose, or does it isolate them? Who gets left behind, and how do they adapt? I think these are big questions we have to wrestle with….

The reason that the disaggregation of content control can occur is the loss of traditional media’s guarantor of power: a small supply of distribution channels. When distribution was centralized, the big companies who controlled that distribution could control content. With decentralized distribution comes a decentralization of the control of content.

The guarantor of a nation’s power is still military might. It always is and always will be. Now you could certainly argue that military strength is, in the long run, determined by relative economic power, and given the decentralization of economic concentration there will come a decentralization of military power. That’s a valid argument to make. But to suggest that a nation’s power stems from anything other than military power and the ability to project that power to areas of national interest would be incorrect. That is why America is the most powerful nation on Earth. We have the most advanced armed forces in the world and control the world’s oceans and thus are capable of projecting power wherever we see fit.