It’s true that, in many ways, the Internet is bringing power to the people. Scandals have been brought to light, atrocities have been put in the public eye, and anyone can be famous for fifteen seconds. To some, the Internet is a utopia, an unregulated environment in which fearless crusaders battle the dragons of today. And it is, I guess, if you're one of the eight million people who play World of Warcraft. But in the real world, that's not how things work. “Power to the people” is great, but only if the people aren't total fuckwits.   Now, I'm the first person to say that more freedom of expression is a good thing. We've managed to create a decentralized information network in which anyone can say anything they feel like, and that's good. There's no editorial control or government censorship – usually. But there's also no quality control. There's a lot of good stuff on the Internet, but it's overwhelmed by the amount of sheer dreck. For every real scandal exposed, there are a thousand wildly implausible conspiracy theories, slanderous accusations, and over-the-top blog rants.   The good thing about traditional media sources is also the bad thing about them: Editorial control. Editors decide whether something's newsworthy or entertaining or otherwise fits the criteria for distribution. Without that control, it becomes a lot harder to find useful information among the deluge. That's where viral marketing comes in. You can't hope to slog through a million videos in search of some overlooked gem, but you can bet your ass there's a million people out there scrounging for entertainment or dirt, and when they find it, the gears start turning. They post it to a blog, or send it in an email. Great. That’s what power to the people will get you.   Guess what? Marketers are on to your tricks. How many of those funny videos turn out to be ads or guerilla marketing campaigns? Lots. Ad execs know that Internet-people fetishize the obscure and the bizarre, and they tailor their campaigns right to you. They create corporate sites with “edgy” graphics, or fund “real” bloggers to promote their products right to you, the info junkie.   It gets worse. Who owns YouTube? Blogger? LiveJournal? MySpace? Hate to break it to you, Internet fans, but it's The Man. The Man puts his legal disclaimers and his privacy policies and his fair-use agreements all over your beautiful user-generated content. If you still own your material (double-check those user agreements!), it's still distributed via his model, to his surfers, using his bandwidth, and the advertising dollars go right to him. And if someone complains about your content – your vicious exposé, your parody ad, your fanfiction – they don't bother complaining to you. They go to the Man who's hosting your media, and BAM! Takedown. Oh, and content hosted on U.S. Webservers is still liable for American slander and libel laws, as well as being open to civil suits from inside the U.S. or out. Power to the people, indeed.   I'm not denying that the Internet is a powerful agent for change. It is. There are literally thousands of examples of the positive impacts of the vast interwub. Just to name one, Wikipedia is a fabulous reference, but it's hardly authoritative. If I need to know about World of Warcraft, sure, you can get some mileage from the Wiki world, but not if I want an academic treatise on why the Napoleonic War ultimately turned out the way it did. I don't want that, fortunately, so I use Wikipedia all the time.   I just take issue with the utopian dream that the Internet is the new voice of the proletariat, and the Powers That Be are powerless against it. People thought that way in the early '90s, and with much better reason.   I know I'm a huge grouch. I'm also a huge hypocrite. I spend way more time on the Internet than is good for me. I read blogs and webcomics like a madman. I write blogs - as in, more than one. I have Flickr, Gmail, MySpace, a Xanga, Facebook (obviously), a WordPress blog; hell, I even own multiple URLs and have a far bigger webhosting package than I know what to do with. (Ladies, feel free to subtract “webhosting” from that previous phrase.) But I don't have any illusions about what I'm doing. I know that nobody but my friends reads my blog entries, and that's for the best. I barely use my Flickr account or my MySpace. I'm not under the impression that I matter to the Internet. God, don't get me started on MySpace. The Internet is the single greatest contributor to my ADHD.   But my Internet habits have had one good side. You see, I don't like to brag, but TIME Magazine just named me its 2006 Person of the Year. You can bet I'm putting that on my résumé. What did I do to earn that honor? Turns out, nothing. You have it too. And if you have it, you can bet a whole lot of really stupid people have it too. “If everyone's special, nobody is.” So thanks a lot, TIME, for lumping me in with Numa Numa guy and the people who post YouTube videos of them ghost riding the whip. I tried it once and ran over my friend Ian. No joke. You, and me, and everyone we know are the people of the year. We've changed the way the Internet does business.   See, in the old days, a business that wanted to make money on the web had to do three things. First, it had to have a navigable design. Second, it had to have content worth viewing. Lastly, it had to have a way for people to find out about it. No longer! Some twisted West Coast genius hit on something truly revolutionary: Why go to the trouble of creating content, when we can make the users do it? The Web 2.0 sites, the ones that made you People of the Year, all run on this model. The company provides the users with a navigable design and free bandwidth. The users channel their creativity and their will to be famous on the Internet, and provide all the content the owners could ever desire – and terabytes that they probably don't. That's step two. Step three is that they post on their blogs or email their friends to tell them about this amazing new video or photo. Hey presto! Traffic galore. And all the site owners have to do is sell ad space, and pretty soon they're raking in the dough. Not bad, eh? The users feel like they've got the power, and the Man laughs all the way to the bank.   So yeah. Upload videos, publish confidential documents. Take fabulous photos. Unlock your hidden drag queen. Blog about it. Tell your friends. But please, please don't assume you're being revolutionary. Your new power model turns out to be their new business model.   Nathan Edwards would like you kids to get off his damn lawn.  Tell him what a grouch he is at n-edwards-1@northwestern.edu.