Three years earlier, he gave this circuitous, hour-long talk, laying out the long-running war between evolving information technologies from the piano roll to the telegraph to the modem, and how the established institutions that are disrupted by those technologies have sought to stifle them.
Mr Romney gave his standard stump speech, laying out - eight days before the vote - not a vision of what the US might be like under his leadership, but instead how he would cut corporate tax rates and scrap deductions and loopholes to pay for it.