You don’t normally associate Valleywag with profundity, but damned if they didn’t go there today:
This is why geeks shouldn’t try to change the world. Nor should they be held accountable, as Scoble’s trying to do to Kaplan, for not changing the world. They aren’t equipped to. They are ignorant of the real world. They live narrow, insular lives defined by their monitor screen, a reality that has very little to do with the outside world. It’s a world that they cannot learn about by searching Google, and a world they can’t change by writing a blog post.
I’d have to agree with that. Geeks (and other sheltered, middle-class children) don’t have the knowledge of the real world to effectively change it. That’s the problem with things like political blogs and idealistic blogger conferences. Bloggers gravitate to causes with snappy labels on them, like “net neutrality”, not to causes they understand.
And you really can’t help until you know what you’re dealing with.