Carver: Disempowerment vs empowerment

At the moment a lot of people feel disempowered by technology. If they are not connected to their email, then they're not connected. Even if they are connected to their email, who's spying on them, who's tapping their telephone is Big brother out there. And after 9/11 a lot of people feel that perhaps someone should be out there tapping telephone calls and perhaps bugging houses. And they begin to give up - sometimes - their only human freedom, and they begin to feel disempowered as a result. I think the greatest challenge that we all have is fear. And the greatest fear is fear itself. I think people are beginning to realize that actually they are incredibly powerful. And in some ways perhaps the fall of mighty organizations like Enron, actually gives people some hope. Because they realize that these organizations are not half as clever as they thought, and then they begin to realize that they were run by human beings, and human beings are just as fragile as any other human being. And they can make mistakes. And therefore we are all subject to our own humanity. This idea that there are stunningly clever master races out there pulling strings and feeding us the right data... People realize it is not so, and we all can control our own lives. And the internet, although it has disempowered some people, has empowered others. You see in many campaigns that are not government funded, that are not done officially, that the internet has led to some phenomenal successes. And the small people, who thought of themselves as the small people, realize that they're not the small people. And that we're all equally as powerful if we want to be. As Nelson Mandela said: "Probably one of our greatest fears is the power within us." And what we can do frightens us more than what we can't do.