“I’m not,” I replied.
A couple of years ago, the libertarian blogger Warren Meyer was asked why there were so many, well, libertarian bloggers. His reply, in a nutshell, was that the Internet is a libertarian space. “Libertarianism resists organisation,” he wrote. Libertarians tend to be “suspicious of top-down organisation in and of
itself. Blogging is therefore tailor made for us — many diverse bottom-up messages rather than one official top-down one.”
In many ways, the online world is like the beautifully functioning free market that governments have never allowed in meatspace (the ‘real’ world). To begin with, the Government does not pose an entry barrier to individuals who wish to have a presence online. You want to start a blog? It’ll take you three clicks to set one up. You don’t need a licence for it, and you won’t have inspectors coming over and scrutinising your methods of work.
The blogosphere is a meritocratic space. Each blog finds the audience it deserves. If you like economics, you’ll find tonnes of good economics blogs, often much better than anything you’ll see in the mainstream media, because they’re written by specialists, not generalists. You want gardening? Literature? Technology? You’ll find content in any niche you can think of.
There is a lot of junk on the Internet, but readers navigate through it easily, and soon settle on a few sites they regularly visit. Information percolates so quickly that a good new blog doesn’t take much time to build a readership. You write something nice, people who like it link to you, their readers check you out, and so it grows. Marketing and hype are generally wasted, and everything is viral. If you provide compelling content, readers come. If you write rubbish, readers go. Competition is the best regulation.
The blogger Ravikiran Rao once speculated on what would happen if the government decided to protect users from ‘bad blogs’, and regulate blogging. If government babus started deciding what content was appropriate for audiences, good bloggers would be intimidated...
