My friend, Jim Pinkerton, passed along a NYT article last week about a Chinese student at Duke who got mixed up in a life-threatening Internet frenzy. A freshman confounded by the pro-Tibet/pro-China demonstrations on her campus, she decided to play George Mitchell and broker an accord between the two sides. After she failed, soon thereafter, directions to her parent’s home in China emerged on the Internet, followed by death threats (even threats of dismemberment) delivered by email. The Washington Post takes this further and claims that such stories demonstrate a trend where nationalist sentiment is so ablaze on the Internet that it frequently degenerates into violence (or threats of it) to anyone perceived as insulting China.

Not wanting to test that hypothesis here, I mention the Duke story to showcase how the Internet has impacted geopolitics – politics in general. It reminds me of the profile on Howard Dean from two years ago in The New York Times Magazine. The story focused on his insightful, if not elegant, view of things to come in politics as a result of his master plan (at the time, and still ongoing I believe) to foster “direct communication between local activists and their leaders in Washington,” wrest power from party elders and place it into the grassroots. Given his own grassroots-driven candidacy for President, Dean’s plan to disintermediate the Democratic Party isn’t at all that surprising.

What binds the Dean and Duke vignette is the Internet, and I remain convinced that no one has yet to fully comprehend the impact that the ubiquitous, superfast, more-powerful-by-the-day Internet is having on our society/the world. Howard Dean looked like a genius for using the web to raise money in ‘04, whereas in ‘08 Barack Obama seems to set a new record for web-raising every month. Will the Chinese Communist Party be undone by the World Wide Web or be able to tame it? Every week, it seems, the “Internet” claims another victim, another middle-man, on its way to guaranteeing its monopoly on being the new middle man between man and everything else that surrounds him.