In his Human Nature column on Slate.com, William Saletan ticks off why the love of technology is pre-occupying the world populace more than their love of Obama or any other world leader or government or country. Perhaps this is the dawning of phyles or cliques, the new tribes of affiliation driven by social media. Saletan makes an interesting observation that Hillary may finally upstage Obama, in the grand pageant of history:

If this week ends up being remembered for a political speech, it won’t be Obama’s. It’ll be the speech Secretary of State Hillary Clinton delivered Thursday. Clinton denounced Internet censorship around the world as an “information curtain” akin to the Iron Curtain of the Soviet era. She championed the “freedom to connect”—an updated, online version of freedom of assembly. And she outlined a place for politics in the march of information technology. “On their own, new technologies do not take sides in the struggle for freedom and progress,” she observed. “But the United States does. We stand for a single internet where all of humanity has equal access to knowledge and ideas.”

And so began the vestiges of the first war of the global internet.