So, Dave's been at the Googleplex trying to give an inspiring vision of what the internet can do for us, and especially our relationship with government. I imagine that if the fun-loving boffins at Google made up the audience they will have been yawningly underwhelmed or resorting to bouncing their hyper-activity stress balls off the video screens.

It's a bit of ironic timing though, after last week's debacle over Labour stealing the Tories' or more accurately the Lib Dem's policy clothing, as my speech writers are just putting the finishing touches to the second of my pieces on Revolutionary Liberalism covering a much bolder image of how technology is about to turn our entire way of life on its head in new and exciting ways that twenty-first century politicians are going to have to work with.

The duckies guarding Google from politicians
Originally uploaded by Yodel Anecdotal

Far, far greater change is afoot than simply providing national statistics to end users and citizens so they can chose and make policy in a more informed way, like the challenges of the end of money as we know it, a whole new way of working in the knowledge economy and in international commerce. A world in which the Googles, Verizons and UPSes will be the moderators and media of global trade rather than governments, where the webs of trust that nation states have established to provide the function of guarantors in worldwide business are rent asunder.

A world that has implications for all public services, creating a new era of interpersonal trust and co-operation moved by the power of market information in individuals' hands unencumbered by the protectionism of states and politicians. An era that will have the power, because it will be people based, to usurp the role of international credit markets, so 'dis-credited' in the past few weeks. And it is the geeks in Dave's audience today, not the politicians, who will be leading the way.

Cameron is right about one aspect - politicians have got to learn to back off, for if they don't do so voluntarily and in co-operation with this new world, they will be ignominiously cast aside, redundant - but I will believe that he himself is ready for that challenge when he makes policy to prove it. Some of the greatest steps in concentration of power to Whitehall and Westminster are, after all, only a couple of decades old, coinciding with the growth of the information economy in the late eighties.