Intellectual ability and political interest probably follow a normal distribution, so it's not surprising that the majority of any age group prefers distraction

Intellectual ability and political interest probably follow a normal distribution, so it's not surprising that the majority of any age group prefers distraction to active political engagement. Intellectuals complain about "sheeple" in every time and place, after all. For every Snowden, a million young people happily divulge their entire lives on Facebook and don't care whether NSA is reading it. Doesn't matter, because we don't need a million Snowdens. The only thing that matters is a statistical anomaly that distinguishes the next generation from the last on election day. Every kid who tweets about her 9th-grade teacher's inappropriate joke is a whistleblower in the making. 0.001% of them might go on to work for a three-letter agency, and 0.001% of those who do might eventually leak something incriminating. Then some men in black will go through her school records and find that she's had a long-standing "problem with authority". Who knows? Even Snowden, until 2009, believed that whistleblowers should be shot in the balls [1]. Subtle, deeply ingrained assumptions like "the Government says so, so it must be true" or "white men are more trustworthy than blacks" only show up in large-scale aggregate data. It might be so un-obvious that a whole generation of sociologists could make a living studying the tip of the mysterious iceberg. But that's how societies change all the time, it will have tangible political consequences in the long term, and that's all I'm hoping for. [1] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/06/exclusive-in-2009-ed-snowden-said-leakers-should-be-shot-then-he-became-one/3/ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/06/exclusive-in-2009...