Liberal Talk Radio

Listening to this Mother Jones Radio episode on my walk home today, it occurred to me that there’s another consequence of the wired world that may give smaller, local businesses an edge.

They were interviewing Michael Pollan (whose blog is great, and, unfortunately, behind the TimesSelect firewall), food author, and Joel Salatin, a farmer that Pollan profiles in his latest book. Salatin does these amazing things with polyculture farming that you can read about here, but the point is that this kind of local farming would have been much, much harder in the pre-internet era. Our current industrial food system (indeed, our whole industrialized economy) thrives mostly because of specialization: you end up with a lot of middlemen who get very very knowledgeable in one specific task.

But the internet changes all of that, and allows, say, a couple of morons from Seattle to start their own political podcast with no experience and no money! It also allows a small polyculture farmer to link up with lots of other farmers and trade information and knowledge pretty freely. This makes all those middlemen less of a competitive advantage, which means that other advantages can emerge: the fact that the food is fresher and consumes less gasoline to get to your dinner plate.

I know this is not revolutionary stuff here, but it does make me think that there’s perhaps more than one way to achieve neo-localism.