An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths
5th April 2006 by Sean
| Author: Glenn Reynolds |  |
Glen Reynolds’, the voice behind instapundit.com, most recent book, is one of the most optimistic books I have come across in a long time. The book gives a big-picture view of how tachnology is making the little guy matter a lot more than he has in a long time.
Reynolds’ optimism is infecting. Any aspiring blogger, entrepreneur, or anyone starting out on their own, especially in the content-creation and online publishing areas, will be greatly inspired by this book. It’s a refreshingly positive outlook of the future.
What Arianna Huffington says.
While touching on the seemingly endless arenas in which technology is decentralizing power and transferring it away from giant corporate entities to individuals — including the arts, business, politics, music, and even space exploration — Reynolds is especially engaging on the profound shifts in the way news and information are disseminated (not surprising given his place in the blogging vanguard).
“Power once concentrated in the hands of a professional few,” he writes, “has been redistributed into the hands of the amateur many… Millions of Americans who were once in awe of the punditocracy now realize that anyone can do this stuff — and that many unknowns can do it better than the lords of the profession.” Bob Woodward and Tim Russert take note.
An article in US News and Report.
Another Article from Human Events Online’s Robert Bluey.
What Macleans.ca says.
Of course, as Reynolds concedes, “technology empowers the bad people as well as the good. Take terrorists, for example.” With some ATM cards, cellphones and box cutters, a nut in a cave in Afghanistan was able to pull off what neither the Nazis nor Commies could: mass slaughter on the American mainland. Yet even here Reynolds is an optimist. One of the ideas he’s promoted most assiduously since 9/11 is the virtues of “a pack not a herd.” That Tuesday morning, the herd mentality — big government wedded to 1970s hijack procedures — failed spectacularly. On the other hand, on Flight 93 a pack — an ad hoc coalition of fast-thinking individuals — figured out what was going on, acted swiftly, and at the cost of their own lives prevented that fourth plane from reaching its intended target.