A really fascinating read:

"The political system is broken partly because of Internet," Barlow said. "It's made it impossible to govern anything the size of the nation-state. We're going back to the city-state. The nation-state is ungovernably information-rich."

I like it because it challenges the notion that the 'new media' is always inherently good or 'better' than it's 'old' media counterpart. It's not a universal truth. It never was. It will never be. It's not exactly revolutionary to say that:

1. Many people lack the rubric to assess the quality of information being presented

2. Many information outlets put at least a little bit of english on the presentation of information.

3. The internet has the ability to couple tons of information at high rates of speed

4. Even in the social media, social influences drives the discussion to the point where dogma of whatever stripe is the only acceptable discussion

You mix it all together you have a whole lot of people consuming a whole lot of information while repeating it in these echo chambers. It's not difficult to say that the noise generated by this can be a bit deafening for anybody trying to accomplish something.

As an aside, I'm usually pretty suspicious of libertarians that push the whole local-is-better utopian garbage. That usually pisses off older conservatives who fellate the ghost of Ronald Reagan because they don't understand the differences between the small government the big tent was about vs the small government that the paulbots was about. Though in this case, I don't get the impression that Barlow is campaigning for libertarian jackassery, rather I think he's just extending the small government thing as the only logical solution to the problem he brings up.