FREDERICK TURNER ON RATHERGATE:
A week or two before the issue of the supposed National Guard memos on President Bush’s military service came up, I speculated on this site about the emergence of a new cyber-public in response to the discrediting of many of the traditional news media. Luck made me a prophet: the exposure of the memos as forgeries was a textbook example of what I had been talking about. . . .
What we saw was an extraordinary example of what chaos and complexity theorists call spontaneous self-organization. Out of a highly communicative but apparently chaotic medium an ordered, sensitively responsive, but robust order emerges, acting as an organism of its own. Suddenly a perfectly-matched team of specialists had self-assembled out of the ether.
Read the whole thing, which is very interesting. (But InstaPundit is “venerable?” In Internet years, yeah!) It’s also worth reading this piece by Cathy Young from the Boston Globe, and this essay by Andrew Sullivan from Time.
Pajamas are mentioned in all three.