Here, let me explain it to you, Nancy. And I've just been thinking about this today reading about this guy taking over New York State communications with a left-of-center agenda, making yet another unelected tekkie responsible for moving the agenda instead of elected representatives, when as a whole, these "democratic" bodies haven't even had a chance to debate what the implications of new technology:
http://www.mixedrealities.com/?p=1687

And then I saw your column, and I also thought about the life cycle of the invention of the telegraph, and also thought about the well-known story of how the Bolsheviks took over with a ragtag army using the telegraph, and how not a single employee at the 3,000 member staff of the telegraph station was even a Bolshevik follower.

See, what happens is, all these nerdy tekkie geek dudes (it's mainly dudes, but occasionally there are dudettes, too) who are wired and Facebooked and twittering with like almost as many followers as Scoble, have found various government jobs or influential think-tank jobs with government contracts, even creating the newly-minted position of "chief technology officer" or "strategic communications officer" where they describe themselves as tech-savvy, "empowering people," "bringing transparency to government", "bleeding edge" fighting others who "suffer from FUD" etc. You know the drill. The annointed ones.

But...These people constitute a kind of networked fifth column, in a way, cadres highly disciplined, memed, aggressive, and heavily trained at all kinds of gov 2.0 bootcamps and barcamps and such. It's not a conspiracy in the old sense because it's so open as to be hidden in plain sight lol. Yet it's not accessible in quite the same way as your congressional office. So this Unelected Wired, if you will, imagine themselves as "the truth" and "the way" and, being true believers in the geek religion, don't like representative government, don't believe in democratic institutions, etc. They just think everything should be a wiki -- and that they should get to code and moderate that wiki ostensibly open to all.

So, what happens, then, is that one of those zealous and often arrogant types steps in and just does stuff like contacting Twitter, because for them, the devs at Twitter are more respected bosses and influential power leaders than their own supervisors at the State Department, and for them, their status as a leader in Twitter Nation is more important than their following their supervisor at State. So, sure, they use the power of the U.S. government to bang on Twitter over when it should schedule its maintenance. Wouldn't you? Of course you would -- if it were just a cooler issue you felt more comfortable about.

Er, Twitter didn't schedule any maintenance during the crucial last days before the Obama election, did they?

So *all that happened* is that this particular 27-year-old staffer, who was hired by Condi and therefore tainted with the Mark of Cain in your book, didn't get the meme memo, didn't obey his Seth Godin tribe, didn't listen to Scoble (who has been rather indifferently covering the events even with an Iranian wife), and got all zealous on you on behalf of the Iranian students in ways that the Unelected Wire haven't quite dictated as "the right position" on this issue.

That wasn't *quite* politically correct for you all at central committee, because you're just not sure that you want to REALLY take up the cause of the Iranian students because you're ambivalent about what it means to try overthrow an entrenched nuclear-aspirational rogue power that wants to wipe neighbours off the map and you hate the idea of America even *seeming* to rattle bombs to stop such a thing more than you love the Iranian students' democracy. And that's ok -- it's the sort of ambivalence that is rightly debated in a liberal democratic society.

But -- you can't have it both ways. You can't be seeding all your own gov 2.0 people into power all over the place to just network and do their thing and serve as a parallel government to elected power via Twitter and Tumblr, and then bitch that other people slightly to the left or right of you are doing the same thing.

Because even though the techlibs of Silicon Valley tried really, really hard to weld their worldviews into tools like Twitter, they can't keep them under ideological control, other ideologies besides the approved technocommunist-to-technolibertarian spectrum do get to use them, too. At least for now!

Keep working at it though, with enough bootcamps and barcamps you may be able to create the networked disciplined memed troops that you need to keep in power against others of not-approved ideologies.

It's not that something got "anthropomorphized". It's that you are trying to create a parallel government through informal networks and this particular cadre was out of line and didn't go to the right bootcamps. Er, the *left* bootcamps. Had he been your own facebook friend or had he reliably follow-Fridayed you over enough months and illustrated to your satisfaction that he hated Palin and loved net neutrality (your ideological tests) and kept to the program, you'd be crowing right now not about how Washington got "anthropomorphized" but how people were using new media to empower citizens -- blah blah.

Next time a staffer or congressman *you like* uses Twitter to put out views that *you approve of* I'll wait for this same editorial to pop up about how awful it is when new media leads to "anthropomorphizing" of governmental institutions.