It is a folly of too many to mistake the echo of a London coffee-house for the voice of the kingdom.
— Jonathan Swift, The Conduct of the Allies
I wish that were so, but Kristian Niemietz has been making the counterargument for some time that “Twitter is the real world,” and I’m afraid he may well be right. To paraphrase Margaret Mead, “Never doubt that a small group of monomaniacal fanatics can change the world.”