John Kerry says the internet makes it harder to govern

  Yesterday at the U.S. Embassy in Brazil John Kerry said the following:

I’m a student of history, and I love to go back and read a particularly great book like [Henry] Kissinger’s book about diplomacy where you think about the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the balance of power and how difficult it was for countries to advance their interests and years and years of wars,” Kerry said to a gathering of State Department employees and their families.

“And we sometimes say to ourselves, boy, aren’t we lucky

  Okay, nothing wrong there, we are lucky to live in a world where it is much easier for countries to communicate with each other. But apparently the Secretary of State does not see it that way for he continued:

Well, folks,” he said, “ever since the end of the Cold War, forces have been unleashed that were tamped down for centuries by dictators, and that was complicated further by this little thing called the internet and the ability of people everywhere to communicate instantaneously and to have more information coming at them in one day than most people can process in months or a year.

“It makes it much harder to govern, makes it much harder to organize people, much harder to find the common interest

  First he says that dictators were able to “tamp down” any “forces” which were “unleashed” but that it was complicated by “this little thing called the internet.” You would think that this was a good thing as well but then he laments the fact that we the people have too much information because we are basically too stupid to process it all at once, and because we have this information it makes it harder for the elitist political ruling class to govern because the people are more knowledgeable about what is going on. Does he actually believe that “tamping down” is governing? That is what it sounds like he is saying.

  The elitist political ruling class would prefer a less knowledgeable electorate who simply fall in line with what we are told and so the information streams must be controlled if they are to remain in power, so is it any wonder that the political class has a problem with the internet and the information available to the people? We know the Federal government longs to gain control over the internet and now we know why.

  At least that is what I took out of this, am I wrong? Did I misread or misinterpret something?

  Bunkerville has also written a post about this, I recommend checking it out.