Back from Sweden.

There the blogosphere is a mighty force in Swedish society. In a country of a bit more than 9 million people there look to be nearly 250,000 blogs.

It looks as if the government there are struggling to work out how to deal with this formidable citizen firepower. They are caught between several huge forces:

  • demands from Hollywood and eg France to limit free music downloads – see this recent high-profile case
  • military and EU pressure for greater monitoring powers over Internet and email traffic
  • the Justice Ministry trying to impose some sensible rules but erring on the side of caution
  • the Enterprise, Energy and Communications Ministry having the lead responsibility for IT and related issues and looking very unhappy about it
  • and the public, not least Sweden’s turbo-charged liberal young people, who do not want to be pushed around and demand a say in all this

But even if a government wants to give a full say to the blogosphering public, how best to do it?

Online consultations seem unmanageable to the conventional bureaucratic eye.

Inviting some leading bloggers to a media briefing risks opening great new rows about favouritism and potential bias.

Not inviting them means leaving the ailing mainstream media in charge of setting the formal framework for public debate – what’s fair about that?

Meanwhile remember Ezra Levant in Canada, an editor grappling with the horrible Canadian Political Correctness apparat?

Here he describes how the Internet helped him mobilise 600,000 viewers on YouTube plus raise money for his defence via PayPal – the scale of the ensuing public obloquy against (and mass mobilised scrutiny of) his persecutors forced them to slink away from the battlefield:

In short, the Internet saved me. In that sense, my story isn’t just about free speech. It’s also about the way new technology has leveled the playing field between big government and private citizens.

Government in its current form is basically an extreme Information Management Disorder, with the gap growing fast between what governments want and what people are prepared to accept. This is especially obvious at the EU level, posing deep legitimacy questions for those structures as now ponderously constituted.

But any ‘nation state’ too is vulnerable, with the most open ones such as Sweden being the site of the most noisy battles over what government actually is – and what it is for.

The only way forward is a new political model based on Creative Libertarian Realism.

Maybe Sweden will get there first? But only by their hard-pressed government system showing us the pain of doing it the hard way?