In a previous essay, “Isaiah’s Digital Job,” I wrote about Albert J. Nock’s classic 1937 essay, “Isaiah’s Job.” I argued that the World Wide Web is the digital incarnation of Nock’s vision of how the Remnant operates. I want to expand on this thought briefly.

I got my first full-time job in 1971, when I was hired by the Foundation for Economic Education, located in Irvington-on-Hudson, New York. I suspect that more people back then knew FEE more by its odd-sounding location than by its full name. FEE was Leonard E. Read’s foundation, the midwife of all libertarian organizations. (The mother was the William Volker Fund, but that’s another story.) Read established it in 1946 with a loan from the Volker Fund. A decade later, FEE acquired the rights to the name of Nock’s old magazine, The Freeman. It became FEE’s flagship. FEE was better known for The Freeman than for its name or its address. (Recently, The Freeman‘s name was changed to Ideas on Liberty, the magazine’s old subtitle, which I regard as comparable to changing the name “Coca-Cola” to “Dark Sweet Fizzy Water.”)

The Freeman became the entry-level monthly publication for tens of thousands of libertarians and conservatives, back when there were no right-wing think tanks or computerized mailing lists. In 1971, Jerome Tuccille wrote a little book on how a lot of people got into libertarianism. It was titled, It Usually Begins With Ayn Rand. He was wrong, even though the book was fun to read. It usually began with The Freeman.

When you talk to someone with gray hair, who begins jabbering about the bad old days in the ideological trenches, pre-Reagan or even pre-Schlafly, ask him how he found out about free market economics. More than likely, you’ll hear, “Somebody handed me a copy of The Freeman. I don’t recall who.” It’s not that Alzheimer’s is making an early appearance. Almost nobody remembers who did the deed. (I do, but she was memorable: part of a feminine cadre in Southern California famous for their obscure book collections, their newspaper clippings with underlines, and their car-less garages stacked with old Congressional Records. She had trained many of those women. Then she trained me. You may have heard of the little old ladies in tennis shoes. She bought me my very first pair of nut-case Keds. They fit just fine.)

The Freeman became the premier tool of the libertarian Remnant. People selectively handed out copies to a few of their friends. One by one, readers gravitated toward what Read called the freedom philosophy. The ones who really understood Read’s philosophy remained low key. This is why almost nobody can quite recall where he got his first copy.

The Masses

Understandably, Nock had little use for politics. Politics requires votes. Votes require campaigns. Votes require mass appeals to the masses. In his essay, Nock contrasted the Remnant with the masses.

As the word masses is commonly used, it suggests agglomerations of poor and underprivileged people, laboring people, proletarians. But it means nothing like that; it means simply the majority. The mass-man is one who has neither the force of intellect to apprehend the principles issuing in what we know as the humane life, nor the force of character to adhere to those principles steadily and strictly as laws of conduct, and because such people make up the great, the overwhelming majority of mankind, they are called collectively the masses. The line of differentiation between the masses and the Remnant is set invariably by quality, not by circumstance. The Remnant are those who by force of intellect are able to apprehend these principles, and by force of character are able, at least measurably, to cleave to them. The masses are those who are unable to do either.

Nock was convinced that it was futile for someone with a new, path-breaking idea of merit to attempt to persuade the masses of its truth. This is not how good ideas spread and take hold of a culture, he said.

Read used to say, “You know you’ve been successful when someone quotes one of your ideas back to you, not knowing where it came from.” This is why he refused to exercise copyright control over The Freeman. All you had to do was to say where you got the article, and you could freely reprint it, unless its author had requested copyright protection. Some did. Most did not.

“Don’t Call Them. They’ll Call You. Maybe.”

The Remnant is the proper target for really good, really innovative ideas. But members of the Remnant are not easily identifiable. In fact, Nock said, they are invisible.

You do not know, and will never know, more than two things about them. You can be sure of those — dead sure, as our phrase is — but you will never be able to make even a respectable guess at any else. You do not know, and will never know, who the Remnant are, nor where they are, nor how many of them there are, nor what they are doing or will do. Two things you know, and no more: first, that they exist; second, that they will find you. Except for these two certainties, working for the Remnant means working in impenetrable darkness; and this, I should say, is just the condition calculated most effectively to pique the interest of any prophet, who is properly gifted with the imagination, insight, and intellectual curiosity necessary to a successful pursuit of his trade.

This brings me to the topic at hand: the Web. The Web was invented by. . . . you don’t know, do you? Well, maybe you do. It was an application for the Internet that was developed by Tim Berners-Lee in 1990. He even named it. But he did not patent it. He gets no royalties from it. He is not well known. He does not own 80% of the shares of a billion dollar dot-com. He is, in the best sense of the word, a member of the Remnant. He invented what is probably the ultimate tool of the Remnant: a digital place that is not a geographical place, where the Remnant’s members can pursue ideas without calling attention to their presence.

Hierarchies of power are being quietly undermined by the Web. The Establishment hardly knows what to do about this. A case in point: late Saturday evening, on January 17, 1998, a high school drop-out named Matt Drudge sent an e-mail to his mailing list regarding a Newsweek article about an unnamed White House intern. This article had just been suppressed by a Newsweek editor — “spiked,” as they say in the industry. Drudge sent out e- mail follow-ups over the next few days, also posting them on his Web site, www.drudgereport.com. From Monday through Wednesday, the White House’s Press Secretary did his best to keep a lid on Drudge’s report, making it difficult for reporters to report on it, but by Thursday, it was the hottest news story in America.

A funny thing, though: salaried reporters in the conventional media were not impressed with Drudge, or so their silence implied. On Wednesday, January 21, Michael Isikoff, who had handed in the original article about the unnamed intern only four days before, wrote a detailed, hot-off-the-digital-press account about why there were perfectly good journalistic reasons why the Monica Lewinsky story had been spiked. Yes, he had been working on the story for a year, but he had needed more time, more confirmations. Somehow, he also failed to mention Matt Drudge’s role in the news distribution process. Isikoff wrote the following on Newsweek’s America Online page: “On Tuesday, Jan. 20, the story began to leak out to a number of news organizations.”

Leak out? This is reminiscent of Wilford Brimley’s great lines in “Absence of Malice,” a 1981 movie about journalism and government officials who get caught in a scandal. Brimley, who plays a senior government lawyer with a down-home, country-boy accent, confronts the panicked lower officials. They tell him that their sincere, well-intentioned efforts had been undermined by a leak. His response: “A leak? You call what’s going on here a leak? The last time we had a leak like this, Noah built hisself a boat.”

How was Drudge able to do all this from his apartment? No one really knows, including Drudge. It surely was not planned. As Adam Ferguson put it 250 years ago, this was one of those events which was “the consequence of human action, not of human design.”

Today, there is no other Web site even close to his in the size of its dedicated readership. Why is his site the first choice daily for who knows how many tens of thousands of readers? Who puts up the money to keep it on line? It has two unobtrusive banner ads. There is no mailing list. Yet the day after the undecided Presidential election was held, 70% of those who tried to access his site could not get through. It jammed up.

Spontaneous Order

There is a Remnant out there. There are many Remnants. They have search engines and cheap access to the Web. They send out brief e-mails with addresses embedded or Web pages attached. They develop mailing lists of interested people. They leave few traces.

No one organized this. It is what F. A. Hayek called the spontaneous order. It has happened in a 60-month period. It has already changed the world. The changes have just gotten started.

What do we see so far? E-commerce? By the billions. Price competition beyond anything imagined five years ago? It’s here. Political recruiting and mobilization? Of course. A universal, free encyclopedia? Yes. But, far most important, and without much awareness on the part of social theorists or news anchormen, the Web has become the impersonal digital tool of highly personal groups of people, who, one way or the other, find out about a site in much the same way that people found out about The Freeman four decades ago. “Somebody sent me a link. I can’t recall who.”

Lenin sought to create the ultimate transmission belt of political power. He wanted to push here and get a predictable result there. He believed that Communism’s hierarchical structure, coupled with terror, would provide this. Some version of this has been the vision of every builder of every top-down empire in history. The vision is misguided. The systems always fail. Life is not structured in terms of a transmission belt. But fools who think they can create one always adopt the transmission-belt model to gain control over the flow of information. The Web is the greatest technological veto in history against a centrally planned flow of information: links and networks and free e-mail newsletters — set up in a foreign jurisdiction, if necessary.

A. J. Liebling’s line is appropriate: “Freedom of the press belongs to the man who owns one.” The Web is one giant printing press — without paper, ink, or a huge capital outlay. We have been present at the creation of something new in man’s history: publishing without gatekeepers. This will shake the foundations of all those institutions that have relied on information gatekeepers to retain the support of the public.

There is something else worth mentioning: the enormous power of humor to undermine important people and institutions that rely on solemnity and grandeur to successfully maintain their public images. Consider the French Revolution. Standard history textbooks fail to mention the fact that a lewd joke about Robespierre was what toppled his seemingly iron rule in a matter of days. (Otto Scott, Robespierre [1974].)

There are some very clever, very funny, and quite unawed people out there. A cartoon, a poem, or a joke can now spread to millions of people in hours. The “Forward” button on 110 million American users’ e-mail programs accomplishes this feat. Balloon-popping humor that you would never see on TV or in your local newspaper’s editorial page is in your e-mail box on the day the item is created. A recent Web-based image, “Voting for Dummies,” which imitated the bright yellow cover of one of those Dummies book, is a good example of effective political humor. Even better was the conversion of the Gore-Lieberman campaign logo to the Sore-Loserman logo. That bit of creative image-shifting appeared first on FreeRepublic.com, and it spread everywhere, fast.

It used to be believed that a widely distributed, anonymous, mimeographed cartoon of a scowling Richard Nixon — “Would you buy a used car from this man?” — probably cost him the very tight 1960 election. What if it had been on the Web?

Conclusion

Who, six years ago, would have foreseen a one-second indexing system for over 1.3 billion pages of information sitting on his desk? And who would have imagined that it would be called Google?

Who would have believed that e-mail would replace first-class mail in the United States, except for Christmas cards, window-envelope monthly bills, and warnings from lawyers?

Nock’s vision should be ours. Forget about the masses for now. Let others worry about transmission belts. Let us stick to our digital knitting.

(Note: you may want to forward this article. Feel free.)