Tony Blair's outgoing chief strategy adviser fears the internet could be fuelling a "crisis" in the relationship between politicians and voters.
Yeah, that's the problem. It's the internet, not that horrific war George Bush and Tony Blair started.
Cartoon by Steve Bell
Cartoon by Steve Bell
Matthew Taylor said the web could be "fantastic" for democracy but it was too often used to encourage the "shrill discourse of demands" that dominated modern politics.
He refers to our shrill demands for investigation of Bush and Blair's secret memos, foreknowledge of the lack of WMDs, foreknowledge of the abscence of nuclear threat...
He must also be referring to our shrill demands for a war crimes tribunal for Bush and Blair.
But he said more needed to be done by the web community in general to encourage people to use the internet to "solve problems" rather than simply abuse politicians or make "incommensurate" demands on them.
Poor politicians are being abused by bloggers. Boo hoo. I guess Blair and Bush are feeling tormented, even tortured by the unkind words of bloggers. Poor things.
"We have a citizenry which can be caricatured as being increasingly unwilling to be governed but not yet capable of self-government," Mr Taylor told the audience.
We're increasingly unwilling to be used as cannon-fodder for imperial wars launched by frat-boy aristocrats. We're working on the self-government.
Like "teenagers", people were demanding, but "conflicted" about what they actually wanted, he argued.
Yep, we're all thirteen year olds living in our mom's basement.
But rather than work out these dilemmas in partnership with their elected leaders, they were encouraged to regard all politicians as corrupt or "mendacious" by the media, which he described as "a conspiracy to maintain the population in a perpetual state of self-righteous rage".
Whether media was left wing or right wing, the message was always that "leaders are out there to shaft you".
Yep, the mainstream media is the reason we don't respect our political representatives. The media made the bloggers despise the politicians. Couldn't have been the illegal war or the all-pervasive corruption.
And why would we get a silly idea in our heads that our leaders were really are out to shaft us? What could possibly give us such a silly idea?
"It seems to me this is something which is worth calling a crisis."
For Tony Blair and George Bush, it's a crisis.
"What is the big breakthrough, in terms of politics, on the web in the last few years? It's basically blogs which are, generally speaking, hostile and, generally speaking, basically see their job as every day exposing how venal, stupid, mendacious politicians are."
But that is an honest blogger's job and politicians are venal, stupid, and mendacious(whatever that means).
Part of the problem, he added, was the "net-head" culture itself, which was rooted in libertarianism and "anti-establishment" attitudes.
Those damned hairy geeks give the whole internet a rotten attitude. Guilty as charged.