You, Specifically

Time named its Person of the Year for 2006 and the answer was "You." Literally—a mirror on the cover, the collective internet user as protagonist of a new participatory age. It’s a gesture that manages to be both genuinely insightful and completely insufferable, which is an impressive combination and yet here we are.

The obvious implication, which I am choosing to take personally: I am Time’s Person of the Year. The competition was real—Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Al Gore, Condoleezza Rice, each with defensible claims to having shaped 2006—but the people have spoken and they have chosen me. I accept this with the grace and humility the moment demands.

The real story is funnier than the award. Wikipedia’s page on the Person of the Year was deleted within hours of the announcement by someone apparently so offended by "You" winning that they expressed their displeasure by erasing all record of the category’s existence. Which is, of course, exactly the kind of user-generated democratic participation the award was meant to celebrate. The internet eating its own tail in real time.

The CNN piece they ran at the time is worth reading—the editors laid out the thinking coherently once you strip away the triumphalist framing. The point wasn’t flattery. It was that the centre of gravity had shifted, that the people making and sharing and talking back were doing something that hadn’t happened before at that scale. Whether it turned out to be as transformative as promised is a question neither I nor Time could answer then.

I still think it was me, though.