Kill The Internets! Another Dinosaur Bemoans the Long Tail Market

Do you want to see the face of the totalitarian impulse in total, soul-baring meltdown?

Hoo, boy, do I have a treat for you.

Sunday’s issue of The Dallas Morning News has a column that is just – damn. Individual words fail. So I will use many.

But it boils down to an bitter, angry demand: Godammit, Listen To me!

A lawyer for some environmental tax dodge, Dusty Horwitt, is actually saying that too many people have too much access to too many outlets of information. Think about it — millions and millions of people minding their own business and pursuing their own interests online instead of listening to their betters. It’s just horrifying, ain’t it?

Let’s jump.

Horwitt claims blogging and other online media are hurting democracy, which he defines as needing limited mass media in the hands of a select few and anointed ones to direct people towards desired ends. Distractions should be eliminated. I can’t find that definition for democracy except in the now defunct “people’s democratic” states of the old Eastern bloc.

His argument, put simply, is that it’s a Bad Thing (TM) that people can’t be cajoled or convinced into doing what he considers important unless they’re forced to hear a unified, single message. His solution calls for (surprise, surprise) raising taxes on energy so that it would be too costly for us lowly, unenlightened plebians and proles to own computers and host websites.

In short, he wants to kill the Internets.

Horwitt isn’t even trying to hide his contempt for the marketplace of ideas or the latest technology that helps it run – i.e. the Web. He also admits that he’s angry that people are now so hard to manipulate, and thus control. I think he’s getting the inkling that people aren’t buying whatever brand of man-made global warming doomsday scare he’s selling.

To achieve their goals, political movements need to reach and influence tens of millions of citizens.

Whether those tens of millions want to hear them or not. You know who else wanted to control the conversation and influence tens of millions of citizens and make them wear flair?

Which highlights the larger problem: The overload siphons audiences and revenue from newspapers and other outlets that can spread important information, forcing these media to shrink and rely increasingly on advertising to stay afloat.

Heavens. Capitalists in cyberspace are coming for your women!

“It’s much more difficult [to reach people] today – and much more expensive,” said Steve Eichenbaum, creative director of a Milwaukee-based marketing firm that helped engineer Russell Feingold’s upset U.S. Senate victory in 1992. Among Mr. Eichenbaum’s innovations was an ad that ran only once in every TV market in Wisconsin – yet helped Mr. Feingold win the Democratic primary. Mr. Eichenbaum doubts that Mr. Feingold’s underfunded, underdog victory “could ever happen again.”

Considering Feingold was one half of the duo that gave us the largest violation of the First Amendment since Woodrow Wilson silenced protests against World War I, I’m not seeing a downside.

Moreover, viewers seem more distracted, and it takes more ads before pollsters see any effect in tracking polls, says David Hill, a Houston-based Republican pollster.

Or, taken another way, people have more access to information and don’t anymore solely rely on 30-second ad spots to make their voting decisions. And this is bad?

The opportunity to educate millions of citizens, so essential to significant movements of the past, has dwindled.

One man’s “education” is another’s propaganda. So again, what’s the problem?

If an idea is sound, it should stand on its own regardless of competing ideas or those opposed to it.

Tell me what you think of anyone who thinks the opposition simply has to be silenced.

Rather than call for government regulation of technology itself, perhaps the best way to limit the avalanche is to make the technologies that overproduce information more expensive and less widespread. It could be done via a progressive energy tax designed to keep energy prices at a consistently high level (while providing assistance to lower- and middle-income Americans).

And this is where I breathe a sigh of relief.

Even if this guy is serious – and it reads more like a parody from Ted Stevens than anything real – if that’s his solution, we’re lucky his ideas will get lost in the cacophony of voices that he’s bemoaning.

Look, I know the Long Tail market is scary for some people. It’s changing my own profession, but for the better — at least for those of us fast on our toes and who aren’t looking for tenure and security, but rather opportunity and more freedom.

But looking even bigger picture, if it’s the Internets that’s going to make it harder for demagogues like Horwitt to unify people into masses and even harder to control, rather than free, access to information — then so much the better.

Horwitt’s headline is “If everyone’s talking, who will listen?” And what he really wants is for everyone to shut up and listen to him.

Yeah, I understand that. I have a 5 year old.