The Register's googlewash example takes what it considers a 42-day old meme that began with a New York Times op ed. The Times took a look at the massive global protests against the war in Iraq and declared that world opinion was becoming a second "superpower."

I hadn't read the op-ed, hadn't heard the phrase two days after it premiered. But Gerd Leipold, our Executive Director, in one of his rare visits to the web-team crows-nest high on the sixth floor of GP HQ, mentioned the Times piece and the coining of the term in passing. I thought it was a great phrase, great concept, and a couple days later sliced it into a communication I had been working on about the Uniting for Peace resolution to our cyberactivists. It was only AFTER I'd written it that I went back to source and read the Times piece on the web.

The Register cites the Greenpeace article, followed by a subsequent use by Kofi Annan, as evidence of the vigorous propogation of a potent phrase among NGOs and the peace movement -- the rise of a meme. (Cool. Thanks, Andrew!)

I'm fascinated by memes -- how they spread, how they move, how they warp. I remember reading a study of children's communication in England back in the 70s, and how a new song or joke could leap from mouth to mouth and playground to playground to the point that something which started in Sussex could pop up in Scotland in four days -- unassisted by the web, telephone communications, or anything other than the communication tools available to school children.

What I like about the "Second Superpower" example is that I can personally attest to how that phrase got into the Greenpeace article -- and it was only secondarily due to the web -- it went from web to casual face to face conversation and back to web. (Unless of course Gerd read the original in a real newspaper, in which case the link gets even more extended out beyond the technosphere.)

But the core of The Register story is that the phrase then got murdered by an essay entitled "The Second Superpower Rears its Beautiful Head" by James Moore.

Essay is too kind. Orlowski calls it a "mound of feel-good styrofoam peanuts." (Fact: Styrofoam is manufactured by Dow Chemical)

Moore's essay hijacks a powerful, apt description of the anti-war movement, this particular anti-war movement, and boils every bit of life out of it, turning the phrase into a highly saccharin, American, depoliticized vision of a zippy web community. There's no edge, no conflict, and the essay seems to occupy that dreamy space which considers itself radical-left but has no real argument with anybody, and no real agenda other than to pat itself on the back. It sits effortlessly in the status quo, claiming the mantle of opposition not by action or hard personal choice, but by right of enlightenment and membership in a club. This is precisely what drove me nuts about the so much of the American disarmament movement in the 80s. The love of being the underdog was such a disempowering force, and led to so many missed opportunities. For too many people, the object wasn't really to win, it was to whinge.

"Revolution Lite" sez Orlowski, noting that all it took was a few well-placed weblog links and discussions to make Moore's definition primary in the eyes of Google's PageRank ® technology: Google now gives priority to the definition of "Second Superpower" as nothing more than another breathless "gee ain't the web just great" vision of how we're all part of this beautiful, peaceful, networked mind. The first reference I found to the original Times description is five pages of bloglinks back; a wilted meme.

Much of the blog community is outraged at the suggestion that they've been part of "dumbing down" the phrase. But Andrew's right, as far as I can see, about the effect of Moore's article, though I don't see intent. (Greenwash is pretty deliberate, usually the product of a spin campaign by a PR company, this to me looks like the simple Herd Effect on language. Moore didn't set out to mangle the phrase, he just found a larger audience with a soap-opera version.)

But the Superpower we saw on February 15th and thereafter isn't a pretty, anodyne scrap of political wallpaper rhetoric. It's the real thing -- a change in the power relationships of the world. Seeing it wake up was like watching an infant who has been waving her arm around aimlessly, smacking herself in the face, suddenly realise that her hand is connected to her, and she can move it at will. What we've seen so far is only the faint recognition of power, not its expression.

The second superpower isn't a technological infrastructure -- it's a bunch of human beings at this moment in history who had the moral clarity and the will and the determination to try to stop an unjust war, no matter what their leaders fed them and how much propoganda they got bathed in, because they knew there was an alternative.

The war began despite those voices. But that doesn't mean we're going to go quiet.

There's a storm brewing, and it's rumbling out there in the night at the edges of the Empire, a bit beaten down at the moment, but learning that it has strength. When it starts moving again, you can bet there's already a few people thinking about how they're going to stay out of its way.

This ain't the garden of Eden. This ain't the summer of love.

--b