The Internet, or at any rate my corner of it, is misbehaving just now. I assume that it's the war, and the huge surge of Internet traffic that the war has triggered, and the various rearrangements that have been made in response to this surge.

My long term faith in the Internet as one of the most important things now happening in the world is unshaken, but let's just say that, from where I sit, the thing still has some way to go. Computers are always frustrating when they don't work. This is because when they do work, which let's face it is most of the time, they do miracles.

I spent last weekend in Poland, at a Libertarian Conference in Krakow, and I've already put up three postings (this about Auschwitz, and this and this about Polish education) concerning and deriving from my stay there, in Krakow. And what a lovely city Krakow is by the way, untouched at its jewel of a centre by the Second World War. What happened was that the Russians, smarting from their bad press in connection with how they handled Warsaw, went round, but left a gap for the Germans to escape through. Which the Germans did escape through, despite Hitler's stand-and-die orders. Thus was Krakow saved.

But back to the Internet. Why all of a sudden am I taking it upon myself to expound the obvious, namely that the Internet is very important? Well, having been at that conference, I can now add something.

You know how you spot changes in a place by not living there, but just visiting from time to time. I live in London, but if I want to know what the big changes in the appearance of London are, I ask people who only drop by occasionally, like me visiting Paris (because it's Paris) or Bratislava (where I have friends). Has London got any cleaner lately, or busier, or noisier, or prettier? I ask visiting friends to tell me. I don't know.

I've spoken at plenty of other conferences at various times over the years, but not at an exactly similar one. Well, it's over a decade since I have actually spoken at one of these Libertarian International conferences, apart from the one last autumn in London, which is a different experience and thus doesn't quite count for these purposes. Going to Tallin, or Norway, or Brussels, is not like staying in London and attending one of these conferences, but it is like going to Krakow for one.

And in Krakow it hit me. There I was, talking away about how I wanted libertarians to think, and in particular to think about "culture". And there was this little clutch of young Polish faces staring intently at me, like baby rodents surprised by a nature documentary camera team. And it felt important. It felt like it mattered what I said, and that what I said might count for something, and maybe quite soon. Why? Because the Internet has now empowered people like this. I was no longer placing a long-odds bet that what I was trying to persuade these young people to think about might eventually count for something, when one of them became a professor or a cabinet minister. People like this could immediately, if what I said had any effect, go to their rooms or their internet cafés and register this effect by typing it into their computers, just as I'm typing now.

It was the huge time gap between going to Krakow and going to the previous foreign part that I went to to participate in one of these things that caused me to register this transformation so strongly. Thinking about it, the last of these conferences I journeyed to was in Tallin, in 1991, over a decade ago. The Internet was then but a gleam in the eye of a few Americans, who in any case regarded it as a substitute for good writing rather than a vehicle for it and whom I therefore ignored. As far as I was concerned, the thing did not exist, and thus people like me and like those who typically attend Libertarian International conferences had no direct means of telling the world how we felt and thought about things. Bothering to even talk at such an event was an act of faith, that eventually something would come of it. Now, no such faith is needed.

That sense that any half-intelligent libertarian hack had to have circa 1990, namely that he could well be wasting his time, has gone. I dealt with this fear by simply shutting it out. Others dealt with it by doing something else that made more immediate sense. Now, mouthing off like this does make sense. Just as with that talk I gave in Krakow, you never know who might be listening or what they might make of it, and make of it immediately.

We still might lose, but at least we can go down fighting. The people who show up at those conferences may still be fairly lowly folks, but I no longer fear that any of them are merely people into whom ideas go, there to die. Even the lowliest of them can say things around a dinner table which could show up the next morning in some Internet pronouncement, such as this one. The Internet has blown away the stink of defeat.

I'm not saying that having the run of the New York Times op-ed columns is no better than writing Brian's Culture Blog or Brian's Education Blog, or writing for Samizdata. I know my place in the pecking order and it is a lowly one. But it exists. I have my little attic room in the city, and the key to my own front door. I can enter, sit down, and say what I like. And so can all my friends. We don't have to beg any more.

My team is no more likely to win than ever it was. I and my lowly libertarian friends are empowered, but so are hundreds of millions of others. But thanks to the Internet, I am now part of the conversation. I'm no longer just yelling incoherent noises from the touchline, and hoping against hope that occasionally my voice will be heard above the din. The chasm, to pursue this sporting metaphor, that is fixed between the player and the fan, no longer applies to what I do. I'm kicking things around too.

I've known all this for years, of course. Why else would I have become a blogger? But in Krakow last Sunday I saw these same old facts from an unfamiliar angle and in an unfamiliar place, and they jumped out and bit me. This stuff really is as big as printing. You knew that anyway, I know, but I'm telling you again.