My favorite kind of leadership, and an example of the (double-edged) sword of instant communication: people can be rallied around time-sensitive causes, like SOPA or posterous shutting down.
I know this seems a little obvious, but it's striking how rare it actually seems to be. I'm curious why. Maybe it's just my perception and it's happening all the time. Certainly people are doing great things, but I'm curious why we haven't yet seen more specific, directed actions like this. Does it depend on relatively homogeneous communities like Reddit (SOPA) and HN (this)? If there is a proliferation of such communities, say subreddits or otherwise, could we expect this to happen more frequently? Do we want it to happen more frequently, or do we run the risk of, say, DHS running a pro-search campaign like China's 50 cent army? I'm just curious about why this seemed so striking to me.
This also fits in with an article I'd been meaning to read by Fukuyama[0] on social capital written 15 years ago.
The vice of modern democracy is to promote excessive individualism, that is, a preoccupation with one's private life and family, and an unwillingness to engage in public affairs. Americans combated this tendency towards excessive individualism by their propensity for voluntary association, which led them to form groups both trivial and important for all aspects of their lives.
Perhaps we'll see more of these spontaneous actions as voluntary associations are easier to make as the infrastructure that supports them (e.g. reddit) becomes more well known and fine-tuned.
[0] http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/seminar/1999/reforms/fuk...