My In These Times cover story, “iPower to the People: The perils and promise of point-and-click politics” went online this week, just in time for tonight’s no-doubt painful Republican YouTube/CNN debate.

Writing it was an exercise in the increasing difficulty of crafting long-form pieces in an era of blogs and minute-by-minute updates. But hopefully I captured some larger trends, and tried to give time to both those who have high hopes for participatory online political engagement, and those who find it to be just another form of marketing.

For an impassioned and more cynical view of the whole concept, check out Marty Kaplan’s take on tonight’s spectacle at the Huffington Post. “The faux populism of the YouTube format is an Orwellian leap even for CNN,” he writes, “where anchors are already required to i.d. correspondents as ‘part of the best political team on television.’(Every time Wolf says that, an angel is lethally injected.)”