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+---
+title: Person of the Year 2006
+layout: post
+---
+
+If you need a fun fact for a corporate icebreaker activity, you can always say,
+"I was *Time* magazine’s Person of the Year in 2006," then stand around
+awkwardly waiting for someone to Google it.
+
+The
+[official announcement](https://time.com/6258607/you-time-person-of-the-year-2006/)
+of "your" accomplishment makes for good reading in 2025. In tech circles, we
+often regard the early days of Web 2.0 as a time of naivety when we thought that
+letting anyone post on the internet would democratize media and unlock an era of
+creative expression. Of course, we know now that it isn't so simple—that open
+platforms can amplify extreme views, for example, or serve as vectors for
+misinformation. But apparently we *also* knew this then, in the earliest days of
+YouTube and Facebook:
+
+> Web 2.0 harnesses the stupidity of crowds as well as its wisdom. Some of the
+> comments on YouTube make you weep for the future of humanity just for the
+> spelling alone, never mind the obscenity and the naked hatred.
+>
+> But that’s what makes all this interesting. Web 2.0 is a massive social
+> experiment, and like any experiment worth trying, it could fail.
+
+Obviously, the course we chose twenty years ago led us to the world of today.
+But we didn't select this path arbitrarily, or without regard for the challenges
+it would present; we examined the risks and decided the experiment was worth it.
+
+I got a similar sense from reading Thomas Friedman's *The World is Flat* (2005),
+which lays out a theory of globalization based on the convergence of
+technological development (the internet) and trade liberalization. Some of the
+passages feel quaint:
+
+> If there is a skilled person in Timbuktu, he will get work if he knows how to
+> access the rest of the world, which is quite easy today. You can make a Web
+> site and have an e-mail address and you are up and running. (Ch. 3)
+
+(In the ebook, I commented, "Taxes? Immigration law?") But elsewhere, Friedman
+anticipates critiques of globalization which have now become standard:
+
+> In the flat world, the balance of power between global companies and the
+> individual communities in which they operate is tilting more and more in favor
+> of the companies, many of them American-based. These companies command as much
+> if not more power than many governments. (Ch. 13)
+
+Not to mention "What the world has never witnessed is an old-style pandemic in a
+Wal-Mart world," later on in the same chapter.