The digital barbarians are at the gate. Harbinger Capital Partners, a private-equity fund which owns 4.9 percent of the New York Times, has written a letter to the newspaper's management suggesting that it buy more "digital assets." Scott Galloway of Firebrand Partners, an affiliated investment firm, is proposing an alternate slate of directors for the next board election. The newcomers include Galloway himself, a founder of RedEnvelope and aprofessor at NYU who graduated with an MBA from UC-Berkeley; Gregory Shove, a former AOL executive; and Allen Morgan, a venture capitalist at the Mayfield Fund. Since the Sulzberger family controls the Times through a two-class stock structure, it's unlikely that Harbinger's efforts will succeed. But even the notion of the Times having its Internet strategy dictated to it by technocractic outsiders has to be galling.