I’ve just noticed that the sweeties at think tank Demos have given me a heart-warming credit on their new weblog. ‘Inpired by Steve Bowbrick’ it says. This is in lieu of payment you’ll understand…

Bloggers are fixating on ‘power laws’. I’ve read all the stuff (including Clay’s perfectly sane starting point) and it’s obviously useful stuff with plenty of predictive power but it’s dry as dust. Now this dreary economic concept is going to be rattling round the blogosphere for months and we’re going to have to get used to listening to a thousand second-rate interpreters flattening it out and applying it way outside its useful scope. Nothing inherantly reductive about the concept – but something very human and inevitable about its cooption to a simplified mechanical worldview. The reductivists are a bit like the ‘pub Darwinists ‘ I mentioned earlier – expending way too much energy shoe-horning reality into their favourite model. There’s something autistic about this obsessive focus on one of the many factors that produce a web site’s popularity, currency, connectedness, influence, personality…

I wrote about this ? and Richard Sennet’s excellent the Formation of Character in a World of Inequality – in my column for today’s Guardian.