When Power to the People Makes Things Worse

I like Bill Gates. He's charitable. He remains a 100% genuine nerd, despite his money and fame. But when he appeared on The Daily Show the other night, he said something truly chilling. It's not a revolutionary thought, given where the nexus of technology and individual control has been taking us (in fact, it's already here in the way we use the Internet and TiVo), but to hear it uttered so nonchalantly by someone with as much power as Gates has...

It comes at the 7:27 mark of this clip, when Gates is discussing the interactive potential of television. He told Stewart (italics mine, obviously):

Say you're watching the news...it would spend more time on the topics that you're interested in, and spend little or no time on the things you don't care about.

Great. Plenty of newscasts already spend very little time on complicated or depressing issues. One day we'll just be able to skip past those parts! Ah, the manifest destiny that is our collective ignorance.