The End Of History

When I first heard Time magazine was putting a mirror on the cover for their 'Person of the Year', I scoffed like many others. As I reflected on their intent (an individual's ability to create and share information on a massive scale) I admire their choice more and more (I haven't read the issue, I'm just interpreting their cover).

Last night, I discussed YouTube with a computer savvy associate (webmaster, network manager, and so forth). It is a simple page, started in February of 2006, which allowed visitors to create, upload, and share video files, while also easily accessing files from other users. The company's most prescient problem was lacking the capital needed to expand as it irrupted, fueled by an army of mobile video uplinks carried by every user with a cell-phone. The company, started by three former PayPal employees, was hemorrhaging money until Goggle purchased the site for $1.65 Billion in November 2006.

In November of 2005, I wrote about the power of mobile-internet video concerning a modern 'Tiananmen Square' occurring in China and YouTube seems to validate my impressions. History has traditionally been written accounts with an inherent bias from the author. It’s a very modern concept for a citizen to easily capture and transmit an audio/visual recording, allowing mass distribution to other individuals, letting them see events firsthand and interpret them without an intermediary. The documents are still subject to manipulation, incompleteness, and being taken out of context, but they are the most accurate form of documentation (straight from the horse's mouth, so to speak).

Once again, America's dynamic approach to democracy is creating the tools of freedom for democrats around the globe. Authoritarians will try to close the shades, leaving their people in near darkness (sometimes literally), but the power of ideas lives on in perpetuity. We should never apologize for singing the praises of freedom loud enough for the entire world to hear.