Time Person of the Year

off.

You know when Time Person of the Year, they give it to the key workers and stuff.

Oh, fuck off.

Pick a person.

Right, right, right.

How about this guy for Time Person of the Year? And this is the photo on the cover.

Yeah.

Time Person of the Year.

Protesters.

The protester, yeah.

Dude, this is Time Magazine, bro.

Whole Person of the Year.

Yeah.

[laughs] Rags is like, "Well, sorry, which one's Mega Hitler?" You're like, "Uh, well." It's like, it's...

For almost a decade, there was an idea that internet technology, and specifically a new wave of social internet technology, could and even was handing power over to ordinary people.

In December of 2006, Time did its annual naming of its person of the year.

Except this time, it wasn't a single person.

They wrote, For seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game, Times Person of the Year for 2006 is you.

2006, they wrote, is a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before.

It's about the Cosmic Compendium of Knowledge, Wikipedia, and the Million Channel People's Network, YouTube.

Four years later, in October of 2012, it passed 1 billion.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg wrote, Helping a billion people connect is amazing, humbling, and by far the thing I am most proud of in my life.

He ran for president in 2012.

In 1995, he was Times Man of the Year.

Many of you, of course, know him from The Contract with America.

He's also, no less illustriously, a New York Sun columnist and an author of a new book, which we'll get to, America's Golden Age.

And it's the best car that he's driven in a long time.

However... um he did then equally spend some time with the car that he didn't particularly like very much the xpeng l03 which only got three stars and he said was competent but not compelling so there we go exactly one car that did surprise me though this week was yesterday for time magazine As they are attuned to doing, you know, Time magazines, Person of the Year, etc, etc.

They announced with, I presume, their November issue, their best invention of 2026 in design.

And they named the Fiat Topolino.

She returns when the time comes to further travel by boat and by train, carrying with her the same discipline that saw her through 15 days of open ocean, the understanding, hard-won and now fully embodied rather than merely argued, that the crisis she has spent her adolescence trying to name demands not occasional gestures but a whole different way of living inside the world, sustained not for a headline or a single viral speech but for as long as it takes.

Chapter 8, Person of the Year in Pandemic Shifts, 2020.

The call comes through to a small office in New York on a gray afternoon in early December, and the voice on the other end asks a question that will detonate across the world within hours.

Has anyone reached the Thunberg family yet? Somewhere in Stockholm, in an apartment that still smells faintly of the wood stove, Svante insists on lighting even when the radiators work fine, a 17-year-old girl is doing what she does most afternoons.

A raincoat, the color of a Scandinavian sky in October.

An expression that is not quite a smile, because Greta Thunberg does not perform for cameras, even when the camera in question happens to be the most famous single image in the history of magazine publishing.

Beneath her face, three words, Person of the Year.

She is the youngest individual ever chosen for the distinction in the magazine's history, a record that stretches back to 1927, when the tradition began with an aviator named Lindbergh.