The post is about a mother with a newborn who went through two months of Hell trying to get her brand new washing machine fixed. But that isn't really what the post is about. The details of her purchase and repair history is background for the result.
The result is that after an exhausting battle to get her new and expensive washing machine repaired, she resorted to complaining about the company on Twitter. That Twitter lashing worked.
For decades, most people were helpless. They had no recourse and no power to spread the word about bad customer service or a company failing to live up to its obligations. Social networking sites, like Twitter, have given the ordinary person the ability to get the attention they shouldn't need to get, just to get a company to do what they should do, without sounding an alarm that can be heard by nearly everyone in the world.
When Thomas Jefferson looked to the future of America, he hoped that a Free Press would enable citizens to call attention to failure, to Charlatans, and to a time when everyone had a voice. It took us over 200 years to develop the mechanisms whereby every citizen had the ability to publish truthful reports of their experiences, but it was worth the wait. Thomas Jefferson was focused on the people having the power to shed light government actions, but I think he'd be just as thrilled with these powers being used to further the experiment of an empowered people:
"No experiment can be more interesting than that we are now trying, and which we trust will end in establishing the fact, that man may be governed by reason and truth. Our first object should therefore be, to leave open to him all the avenues to truth. The most effectual hitherto found, is the freedom of the press. It is, therefore, the first shut up by those who fear the investigation of their actions."- Thomas Jefferson, 1804
"The selfish spirit of commerce... knows no country, and feels no passion or principle but that of gain."Everyone now has a voice and access to a Free Press, and if that's what it takes to reform American industry, to make them accountable for what they do and what they sell, great.-Thomas Jefferson, 1809
It shouldn't require the Herculean efforts Mrs. Armstrong went through. Companies should have a moral code that prevents them from putting their customers through Hell. But they don't. But we'll make them restore that moral code and we'll use whatever lawful means necessary to do so.
It may seem like a trivial thing, making a stand about a faulty washing machine, but these things matter. They matter in big ways, because for too long companies could get away with this sort of thing... but they can't get away with it anymore.
We have the mechanisms to shed light on their failures. The Iranian government attempted to shut down communications through Twitter. The dissenters in Iran used Twitter and demonstrated that it is possible to use these tools as a communications organ to coordinate an organized, justified revolution against a tyrannical government. It is also possible to use these tools for evil. Using them to shed light on injustices, however grand or bland, is a power for the good, and we'll take the bad, because the power to do good is so much more valuable.
We have power unlike any we've ever had before.
Cross posted at From the Maenianum Secundum (comments are open there).
H/t Instapundit.
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