They call it the grassroots because that is where spring begins.

The first sign of change is the slight blush of green in the grasses brown and yellow from the winter. As the thaw drifts downward, flowers rise and the change becomes visible in colors. By then the bushes are responding and the first buds and leaves are manifesting hip high. As winter vacates the deeper dirt, the trees finally show the spring has come.

Spring begins at toe level, moves ankle high and grows higher, changing to the waist, then shoulders, and finally past the point that we can reach.

To view where change will come from, note where the thaw is. To observe the future, feel for where creative forces are established and growing. We may not be able to see the thaw, but we can feel its effects.

The American Left is interconnected in ways that it has never been before with almost 30 national organizations able to quickly communicate with local members and receive feedback from their experiences in the field. It is the equivalent of 30 huge oak trees with roots extending, intersecting and influencing a wide group of people. For these organizations, it is still early April. Though the sap is moving, there is little evidence of leaves.

Local Left organizations are budding as their roots warm. These bushes, closer to the ground, are influenced more quickly than the trees. There are literally thousands of them. Still, members of these groups are mostly over 50 years old. They are not participating in the activities of the grasses.

In the way that spring begins with the lowest and moves quickly higher with the thaw, political change begins with the youngest, moves to the older and influences more ancient institutions established over time. Though the trees and bushes of our political landscape reveal interconnections far healthier than has been the case in the past, it is the grasses that reveal an astonishing webbing of interconnections leading to more than just seasonal change. What the young are doing that we older activists are dimly aware of is establishing massive, online, horizontal linking relationships, thereby forming the foundations for future change.

Neoteny is the process by which the features of the youngest or earliest stages of ontogeny or growth are manifested in the later stages of evolutionary descendants. We are observing features of the seamless communication of the cellular structure of a single human being manifesting in the behaviors of young humans communicating across the planet through social networking, new more sophisticated cell phones and the web.

It’s as if the prairies were returning with root structures that have no end. If wisdom comes with interconnection and relationship, then the grassroots will guide us.

Contemporary to Darwin was Charles Lyell, whose work deeply influenced the young biologist as Darwin read and re-read Lyell’s books while on a five-year ship journey around the world.  Lyell gestated and then helped create the contemporary idea of unfolding time and a geologic succession of stages, integral to Darwin’s later formulation of a succession of species.

Darwin died six years before my grandfather was born.  My grandfather lived to see men walk on the moon.

When my son was an infant, I noticed Studs Turkel in the produce section of my local Jewel.  I walked up to Studs, held out my son’s little hand, and asked Studs to shake it so I could tell him later that he’d shaken the hand of Studs Turkel.

Studs responded, “Well, your son has just shaken the hand of a man that shook the hand of a man that shook the hand of a man that shook the hand of Napoleon.  Tell him that when he grows older.”  Then Studs listed the lineage of hand shakers.

I have found it consoling to imagine exactly how much a billion is.  Noting the number of people in a football stadium, I multiply out until I can see in my mind’s eye what a billion people look like.  I embrace a million seconds by noting the number of days it takes to get there.  I make millions and billions, numbers representing quantities, distances and time, immediate and graspable.  I experience the ancient past as present, intimate and familiar.  Evolution feels to be happening right now.

Evolution is a very recent concept.  As evolution is interpreted from a societal point of view, what we understand as evolution is accompanied by three very different ideas of unfolding societal time, each with its own advocates.

There are those that interpret progress in society as a chance or emergent feature of the behavior of humans in groups.  No inevitable direction is implied.

There are those that believe firmly in a forward, positive direction informed by the good works of technology, science and the creations of corporations.  No larger consciousness or deity implied.

There are those that experience the presence of consciousness that informs and guides society and its individuals toward compassion, awareness of interdependence and an experience of peace.  Everything is implied.

It is an old idea, the spiritual principle that the human race is slowly profiting from our individual experiences while we head in a direction where an accumulating good will be realized in a deeply satisfying future.  It’s an idea that gradates into the modern idea of technological progress.  This idea of progress seeps further down into an understanding of social evolution, characterized by no direction, progress as illusion, just the random emergence of features chosen for their adaptive qualities when an individual survives to procreate.

In other words, our ideas of time have their own geologic logic with one concept gradating into the next.

Lyell was not the first Westerner to wrestle with the implications of the impact of an idea of time on our ability to interpret the world around us.  But he was one of the first to realize that changing interpretations of how time flows offer more and less access to the information embedded in our surroundings.  Of the three time styles just noted, I’ve at different times embraced all three.  I have shifted orientations in a day.  Ideas of evolution and time are closely tied.  Just as different theories of evolution can influence society and culture, so can varying concepts of time.

Perhaps it’s time to realize that we choose the time we’re in.  The kind of time that we are attached to may influence the future that we have.

A unique feature of American culture is the presupposition on the Left and the Right that the individual is central to society.  For the most part, this presumption is an unexamined presupposition.  It is not unlike looking in the mirror and assuming the whole world looks like you.  For the Left, it is a problem.  The concept of the individual is often in direct conflict with a new, yet ancient, alternative paradigm or frame of reference.  This new paradigm does not reject, but includes the one we’re in.

Demonizing socialism and liberalism has helped the Right to stigmatize this alternative world view.  The Right elevates a whole cluster of concepts that includes the words “personal, liberty, independence, patriotism and the individual.”  The Right contrasts these concepts with a seemingly different orientation that is contrary to corporate or capitalist interests.  And so stewardship, communal, social, interdependent, interconnected, personal sacrifice and the commons are concepts shamed to the outskirts of discussions as inappropriate to an American understanding of the way the world works.

The Left is having difficulty articulating the emerging zeitgeist, which is a seamless converging or merging of the two.  The Left seeks to represent non-elite interests and put into words what contrasts with Right Wing confabulations of extreme independence.  Instead of representing a fertile synthesis, the Left gets ideologically marginalized as supporting a failed system.

Many of us thought that with the fall of the Soviet Union, Western culture would soon embrace some of the benefits of a communal point of view because their standard bearers were not a threat.  I felt deep relief that fingers were not hovering over buttons anymore.  Corporations estimated ways to harness that relief.  Forces in the West deeply adept at making money by encouraging the purchase of products that champion independence as a frame of reference felt encouraged to further exaggerate the paradigm.

Catapulting a society into a new and different way of looking and being in the world occurs by yanking back in the opposite direction.  An exaggerated Capitalism leads inevitably to a recognition and embrace of what the opposite represents and looks like.  It’s time for the Left to stop articulating only what capitalism is not.  We’re now entering the phase where visionaries are articulating what a world looks, sounds and feels like that reveres both the individual and the commons.

The Left deeply believes in the power of the individual.  We believe that an individual personally and politically empowered can change the world.  At the same time, the Left honors the commons.  We experience that we are all connected and seek to behave in ways that respect the influence our actions have on others.

The elites promote mirrors, not windows.  It’s up the Left to make clear how glass is integral to both.

Some historians of culture have hypothesized that the great flood stories surfacing as early as the Sumarian Gilgamesh epic and later in the Old Testament are the written traces left from thousands of years of oral traditions describing an actual event. The event would be the creation of the Black Sea, when the Mediterranean broke through the Bosporus and created in a geologic nanosecond a huge, new body of water. That geologic moment has been estimated to have lasted perhaps 2 years, the time it took to fill a basin formerly populated by thriving land based ecosystems and, so the story goes, human beings.

Radio and television, democratizing forces before co-option by corporations, offered an experience of the commons. Though these were one-to-many communications, content often served the many instead of the few. There was a shift as the few successfully guided the message of media to be about how profits could be best achieved.

Radio and television learned to encourage a common frame of reference–a personality-based consumer culture–that offered none of the experience of the commons. Producer/advertiser and consumer formed an exhibition/evaluation feedback loop, not unlike the dynamics of runaway sexual selection. Producers/advertisers created mountains of consumables as consumers exercised discrimination choosing amongst what seemed like an infinite display of alternatives.

For almost three generations, American personal empowerment has been about our ability to make choices among the many alternatives we’re being offered to consume. We’ve developed a highly refined sensitivity to nuance and a culture able to serve up content for our craving to materially embrace what was offered. Allowing the corporations the power to mediate the experience has been easy for us since corporations have been so responsive to our signaled desires, yet they’ve controlled the commons. They have controlled the conduits through which communication or information travels.

In just the way that the waters broke through the Bosporus, a commons has come crashing into our consumer culture, interrupting the relationship between producer and individual. Whereas until recently we felt empowered by all the consumables we perceived we were being offered, other kinds of choices are now emerging. The Internet is suggesting a different kind of relationship. Experiencing many-to-many communications, we are having experiences not characteristic of profit-driven, one-to-many communications. We are discovering that there are deeply rewarding features of the commons.

A dam is breaking. Such a geologic nanosecond is the time in which we live. Except, instead of destruction, new territories are being uncovered and explored. Populating spectrum, occupying bandwidth obliterates no species, murders no aboriginals. We bring with us no diseases that cut down civilizations that have no written language. Nevertheless, this is an age of exploration with staggering ramifications for our species and the world.

A new Black Sea is forming, but this time it’s an ocean, with no clear limits to its reach. Millions of trained, highly discriminating, former consumers are being empowered by an ability to create and control content in their own communications; find unique content that wasn’t created specifically to sell to a large number of people; form evaluations unrelated to purchases; and have an experience of feeling mirrored by other individuals, not a message on a screen.

This is a space not controlled by family, church, school, corporations or government. It is the commons. It is where we go to be renewed.

For two years now, the first dandelions of spring popped up amongst the grasses of the Post Office here in Evanston. I noticed the yellow flowers during the ides of April while handing out pie-chart war budget leaflets to taxpayers sending last minute missives to the IRS. It is public property, our local commons, that harbors my favorite flower since there is little budget to pay employees to make sure the grass stays green.

Three miles away on Lake Shore Drive in Chicago is perhaps the greatest dandelion garden in the region. Along both grass embankments on that scenic stretch of roadway are public lands offering sanctuary to a blossom usually despised. The flowers go crazy. Earlier this decade, during an uncannily balmy January that followed a mild fall, yellow dandelions still lingered along the lake front highway. No single experience has so alerted me to the changing weather than the appearance of winter dandelions.

In a society that deeply respects the personal, the independent and the individual, it’s not surprising that this flower that thrives in the commons is so scorned. In addition, the dandelion is not a native but a visitor from overseas. Perhaps if its origins were local it would get respect.

I am fascinated by the commons. Not wild, not tame, these are the places that get little attention in our culture where the alternative, less cultivated perspectives can emerge. Near to where I live, rare prairie seeds and hard to find local species have been uncovered along railway lines and between the ties. These long, thin stretches of unattended wildness covertly connect the various personal holdings across the state.

The commons, those areas that anyone can visit, are places where creativity can emerge. Public mails, rails and roads are integral to a society that requires connection to thrive. Imagine other ways that commons can be encouraged, making it possible for new species of thought, foreign and domestic, to spring up, enhancing the experience of all of us traveling through this transitional time.

Einstein is noted as having said, “I want to know God’s thoughts; the rest are details.”  Einstein presupposed that there is sense to the universe and has suggested that his attempts at discerning those patterns were based upon an assumption of their invention by an artist/god.

How strange that physicists look for larger patterns while traditional evolutionary biologists urge random interpretations of the origin and evolution of the living world.  There are ways that contemporary evolutionary biological theory feels pre-Newtonian.  Both groups have subscribed to a belief that the big patterns are beyond them.  One sometimes says it’s god and way too subtle; the other says it’s random with no overarching structure.

Social scientists seem to defer to the biological rather than to the cosmological frame of reference when exploring the progression of societal stages or cultural transformations.  That deference places the Left at a decided disadvantage as it seeks to establish a paradigm that supports institutions taking responsibility or offering assistance to individuals with poor access to resources.  Social theorists, relying upon classical Darwinian interpretations of experience, tend to think in terms of the theory of natural selection as their operating model for natural systems, whereas natural selection is used to support Social Darwinism, which encourages the elite.  The Left, tending to see the world as largely connected, is left with an evolutionary theory that emphasizes disconnected and random relations, hypothesizing that existing connections are only emergent features of competing forces.  We’re all connected by mistake.

The Left reflexively withdraws from spiritual interpretations of experience.  Einstein’s god, a god that provides theorists guidance on how the universe is structured, is not a god that the Left embraces.  The Left is still suffering from mythic, patriarchal god buyer’s remorse, behaving like spiritual experience is necessarily accompanied by repressive traditions and an uber alpha male interventionist god with a compulsion to make things different in the world of men and be respected for it.

It doesn’t help that the Right Wing alliance between Social Darwinists (neo-conservatives & capitalists) and social conservatives unites those that profit from evolutionary biological nihilism and the post- modern remnants of a mythic tribal god.  Now there’s a marriage made in hell.

So where is the place for an evolutionary biology informed by an artist/god creator that supports and encourages an American Left seeking to manifest in policy and behavior the ideal of brotherly and sisterly love?

Einstein also said, “That deep emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God.”

I would suggest that this same Einsteinian perspective can be true in evolutionary biology, including studies of social transformations, as is the case in Einstein’s god-informed cosmological macro and micro universe.  God can be in all kinds of details, including the biological and social, not just the very large, very small or very far away.

From William Paley over 200 years ago to Ken Wilber today, writers and scientists see spirit in life and eloquently communicate how they experience the divine in the biological everyday.  Still, the pattern detection capabilities that Einstein exhibited, inspired by how he estimated god creates, are not exercised in explorations of the biological and social spheres.  Our theorists are not encouraged to think like god.

The Left has something to gain by embracing Einsteinian interpretations of the biological and social spheres.  Presuppose that the patterns reveal intelligence.  Try thinking like god.  The details might reveal a biological/social paradigm of compassion.

After the 60s, when more female academics began achieving tenure, a nonmale-centric view of human evolution began to form.  Female observers of female behavior began to come to conclusions different from those of their white, male colleagues.  Women theorists hypothesized ancestral serial monogamy based on the time (3-4 years) it takes to wean a child, female control of band foraging patterns, invention of language by females and the choosing by females of cooperative mates, thus encouraging noncombative social environments as a foundation for human evolution.

A female biologist hypothesized that in human beings, estrus, or ovulation, grew hidden as women evolved to control their own procreation opportunities.  Men wouldn’t determine when to mate based on their observation of when a woman was fertile.  The women would decide.

And so began a process that is coming to fruition only now, these last three generations, perhaps hundreds of thousands of years after women learned to hide the best time to have a baby.

It is believed that there are traditions that have carried through this stretch of time.  Remnants of red and ochre coloring are some of the oldest signs of human culture being found in close proximity to early digs.  It has been hypothesized that a tribe’s women would decorate themselves with the red coloring, noting menstruation and emphasizing it was not the time for sex.  Lipstick today may reveal the tail end of a very long tradition whose origins had everything to do with guarding the actual time a woman is fertile, placing choice within a woman’s control.  Women take off their lipstick to make love.

Tribal tradition growing to revolve around female control of procreation is suggested by several factors.  Women living together commonly cycle together.  Women often cycle to the moon with the 29.5 day lunar month often identical to the female’s month.  Gestation often runs exactly 10 lunar months.  Hidden ovulation encourages a tribal culture that uses the moon cycles as a signal for communal sex, putting women at the center of revolving and evolving lives.

It has been estimated that those cycles got shattered with the emergence of stationary agriculture and a shift to a patrifocal orientation.  The advent of the Indo-Europeans 6500 years ago further depreciated the female point of view.  With resources to protect, males wanted to make sure that those resources were passed on to progeny with their own genetics.  With time, male control of female procreation picked up speed.

Until it hit the wall of the 1960s.

Much is made of the 60s failing so many of our expectations.  Though there has been progress in the area of civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights and the environment, American patrifocal forces continue to wreak havoc in this country and across the world.  Yet, where it matters most, we seem to notice least.  Males are giving up control.

It began in the bushes and now ends in the bedroom.  Full circle, the strong, united females have returned.  An appreciation of relationship and awareness of interconnection inform an understanding reborn in the 60s with the pill, LSD, disgust with war and sensitivity to a global point of view.

Culture now has a firm foundation to move quickly forward.  It is in the arms and the firm grasp of a woman that our society is finally coming home.

One could make the argument that the French Revolution replaced one group of overlords with another, after a transitional phase filled with hope and violence. The American Revolution made it possible for the founding father slave owners to further free themselves but not their charges. Clearly, ideals take time to actualize. Revolutions are often hypocritical up close.

Paradigms shift slowly, with exceptions.

Stephen J. Gould and others have suggested that there are ways that nature can rapidly adjust to extreme circumstances. Gould and Eldredge’s Theory of Punctuated Equilibrium, which outlined their ideas in detail, were conjectures that helped explain gaps in the fossil records that confounded Darwin. Gould’s observations of processes described as heterochony, which include neoteny, track the influence of changing rates and timing of maturation on the unfolding of a species’ evolutionary trajectory over time. These rates and timing of maturation can be influenced by social structure.

Between two chimpanzee species, two social structures are represented. The laid back, sensualist, bonobo society revolves around the alpha female, with little conflict between the males in the band. Barriers to sex are few. The common chimpanzee social structure exhibits males struggling to achieve enough dominance to control procreation opportunities. Though sex between band members is frequent, the dominant male achieves more sex with females in estrous.

These very closely related chimpanzee species exhibit very different social structures. Though a gorilla harem social structure would be more extreme, there are obvious differences between these chimpanzee derivations, differences reflected in their physiological structures, such as a bonobo’s slighter build and longer legs.

The ability for species to morph at the biological equivalent of light speed can have a lot to do with modifying social structures to encourage maturation rate adjustments, prolonging or accelerating ontogeny. Chimpanzees and bonobos are now considered different species, though they are only separated by a million years. The bonobo proclivity to select for pleasure could be called a sexual revolution by evolution’s timeline, a biological paradigm shift.

Revolutions up close are peculiar things. In society, they evidently begin with words, and over time result in changes in behavior. Initially, incongruities abound. Hypocrisies fade with time.

On occasion, there are human revolutions that unfold without words, with no declarations, with no humans filled with failings speaking of the way that things should be.

In the course of perhaps three generations, humans are radically changing social structures, doing what our closest relative did in thousands. We are disassembling the primate pyramid constructed and maintained by male Indo-Europeans. We are encouraging women to again take control, elevating the commons, respecting personal pleasure and encouraging creativity. Our societies are doing this work at increasing rates, as is evident in the influence of the web. The old paradigm is not shifting, it is crashing.

We are primates experiencing radical changes in the way we choose our sexual companions. We are changing the way we exhibit to the opposite sex to achieve a partner. Women now control procreation. Is it any wonder why contraception and abortion is such an issue for the Right? No issue has more impact on the shift in power from the old social structure than this new social structure now kicking the Right Wing in the balls.

Revolutions are usually slow, and they start with words. This revolution is happening in a heartbeat, as long as it takes a woman to choose a partner. For a while, the repercussions will not be pleasant. Withdrawal from drugs that opaque reality is humbling and painful. Still, when the crash is over, we won’t have just the pretty words that a revolution offers. After this revolution, we’ll be in evolution’s embrace.

There is a dramatic divide between older activists and younger activists on what exactly a website does. This divide becomes most evident to me when we are developing a website for a brand new Left/Progressive organization. The older users are only familiar with features that support one-to-many communications. Older users do little sharing online and do not look to a website to store their files. They certainly don’t maintain the kind of constant contact that younger users are used to nor can they tolerate as much information on screen as the young adults.

When we (when I say “we,” I usually mean Marcia and I) present the smorgasbord of features available to activists looking to build a site, no small amount of education is involved in the process. Not only are we explaining the features, we are guiding older activists on the power of horizontal communication, user-created content, enhanced communication vehicles and user-created (not just founder-created) actions and online campaigns.

A basic principle is that the more power or control an organization gives up, the more empowered is its membership. Formerly, individuals worked their way into a position of authority over time and were able to create vehicles for change (boycotts, mass protests, etc.) after establishing the connections and allies necessary to enact those changes. With tools available now, organizations can choose to defer to members or users, providing them the abilities to organize without the primate climb.

Among primates, there are the chimpanzees called bonobo. The bonobo troop-leader alpha female is relatively relaxed, with the alpha male often a close relation of the female. Since mating opportunities are pretty much ever present, there is little in the way of male hierarchical demonstrations. This community is a horizontal community, in more ways than one. Bonobos are notorious for their attention to the pleasures of sex.

With the web guiding the culture in the direction of flattening hierarchy and a lowering of the levels of authority to the users and the young, we are seeing a bonoboization of society, with an increase of female influence, focus on individual pleasure and distribution of power to everyone in the band. One-to-many website design encourages a highly hierarchical primate social structure. New web tech flattens authority, bringing into power those that were powerless before, including minorities, the young, women and other members of society that are not older white males.

Web design reflects organizational structure. Organizational structure reflects the distribution of authority. Whereas until recently an organization used to look to a website designer to enhance the ability of an organization to accomplish its goals, the designer is becoming a consultant on how exactly the organization would like to share its authority and provide an experience of personal empowerment for its members.

In a similar way that pollsters often end up integral to the running of a political campaign, website design can deeply inform the structure of a nonprofit or volunteer activist organization. Though this has become evident to me with time, this relationship is not clear to most activists I work with. A result of this hazy understanding has been that very early in an organization’s ontogeny, I’m requesting that decisions be made about how information will be distributed, the specifics of control, degrees of transparency, a need for a clearly defined constituency, organization strategies, tactics, allies, media relations and staffing requirements. Integral to how a website is designed is an understanding of how it will encourage relationships and distribute information.

As is often the case when a volunteer organization is brand new, if there is no authority to make the above decisions, the website designer will guess/estimate what the needs of the organization will be. I have an agenda, so I do more than guess/estimate. I seed the organization with my own beliefs: transparency, diversity, horizontal communication.

I have observed that this design can lead to conflict, which is a bit ironic because the websites I design for organizations have conflict resolution principles built into their operations. For example, whenever possible, I seek to make available on a site the information generated by the organization, such as meeting minutes, listserve records and opportunities to note support by users for different projects. When agreements are made or support is noted, I seek to make the information public. Observing bridges being built encourages their use and the building of more bridges. I design websites for people to note what they have in common and experience their connections.

When the conflict emerges, it is usually because organization founders have looked at the website as an instrument that distributes information from a central summit, whereas what I’ve designed the website to do is horizontally distribute power or control. This distribution can be annoying to activists with an agenda different from my own. I make my agenda clear from the beginning: transparency, diversity, horizontal communication.

In the preceding entry, I described the challenge of designing a website that would encourage the creation and distribution of information on reducing the carbon footprint of inhabitants of a community of about 60,000, Evanston, IL. In 10 committees, 130 citizens with little central authority are seeking strategies to achieve this goal. As the website designer, I find myself designing an organizational structure that encourages a strategy that the website can execute. This task entails estimating staffing needs with job descriptions, budget, hypothetical goals, important constituencies, allies, fundraising sources, etc. In other words, if a brand new organization is not clear on how it will achieve its goals, I have to create a plan to design a website that can reflect the priorities and help achieve the goals of the organization. You need a business plan to start a business. You need an organization plan to build a website.

In the case of the Evanston project, there is no conflict. I have an agenda, but that agenda is primarily to educate interested parties on the alternatives to conventional organizational structure while outlining web design options.

It was a different experience working with the founders of National Assembly.

In December of ‘07, the central organizers of what would be called National Assembly brought together a group of activists to be the coordinating committee or conference planning committee for a national peace conference in Cleveland in June. Marcia and I were brought in as the web design and communications people and placed on the coordinating committee. We put up a website seeded with our usual degree of transparency and horizontal communications features. Then we discovered that “transparency, hierarchy, and diversity” mean very different things to different activists. The meaning of these words to a union activist coming of age in the 1940s is very different from the meaning to someone whose reference is the web.

Once Marcia and I realized that we had been brought in to follow instructions, not to consult or to take initiatives, then it was easier to proceed. The founders of the organization wanted the website as an instrument to engage in one-to-many communications. The founders were unfamiliar with our web-centric interpretation of the meaning of “transparency, diversity and horizontal communication.” Once it was clear that our perspective was perceived to be a barrier to the founders’ organizational goals and ran counter to the philosophy that consensus was for the founders to decide, we withdrew from the coordinating committee to simply execute directions.

Designing websites is designing structure. If an organizational structure is not yet evident, it has to be discerned. It is discerned by observing the character of the relationships within the organization and designing the website to reflect those relationships. In the context of Left organizing, I have a specific agenda. If the structure required or demanded by the group I am working with suggests less transparency, diversity or horizontal communication than I wish to see, negotiations begin. Sometimes I achieve my goals. Sometimes I do not. Always I learn something about structure and transformation.

We’ve learned several things developing over 20 independent online network websites designed to enhance communication and cooperation between activists working within local organizations.  What became obvious right away was that technology alone, without humans integrally involved at almost every level, would be ignored.  On a playground, the slides and swings are great additions.  It’s the humans having fun.

This winter, 130 Evanston citizens gathered to discuss the city, its inhabitants, local institutions and businesses reducing carbon footprints to comply with the Kyoto Accord targets.  People broke up into ten committees to discuss and plan how these changes could be made.  I volunteered to be on the communications/PR committee.

I found myself asking myself the same question many times in different ways.  How could a website best assist people to communicate with one another, encourage one another and provide information to one another in ways that made the process fun?

It’s been coming back to this point.  There are 130 people showing interest in the project.  There are about 60,000 people in this town.  What is the best way to use established networks while nurturing new relationships that connect these 130 people with the 60,000 people?

I sent out a survey to the 130 requesting a list of all local organizations that each of those people is a member of.  Twenty-eight people responded, noting membership in 77 organizations.  In that list of local organizations, nine organizations had 2 or 3 members of the 28.  One person, a human hub, was a member of 10 organizations.

Five categories covered most of the 77 organizations noted:  business, faith, school, sports & recreation, social change/environment.

There are over 100 churches in Evanston.  Three faith-based institutions were on the list.  Almost no African Americans were among the 130 in a community with a large minority population.  Clearly, the model I was forming had its limits.

If we’re looking to be able to receive ideas from the community on reducing our carbon footprint while at the same time share the programs developed by the project, we need a communications network that is healthy, has multiple overlaps and can reach constituencies not initially involved.

And, it has to be fun.

So, looking at the website as a playground, what can we design to behave like swings and slides?

There is this strange way that the abandonment of all rules, ethics and morals is featured by both the enlightened, spiritually accomplished master and neo-conservative, capitalist elite. We as a society are walking both paths. It has to do with an understanding that everything is relative.

Several years ago I ended up at a Leo Burnett executive’s Christmas party in the home of the head of that agency. Our daughter was part of a small high school choral ensemble with the CEO’s son, Phil. Marcia and I had known Phil for maybe ten years. A high school student, Phil was training me in his spare time to design websites. I was starting a business in web design. Marcia and I were offered the opportunity to listen/watch the performance. The music was charming and beautiful.

Still, it felt creepy. But as is usually the case in social situations where I feel foreign to the scene, I concentrated on the food. In the room were some of the most creative people in the United States, artists dedicated to the craft of message-making to accomplish corporate goals. The chorus began singing, beginning with the number “Let It Snow.” At the conclusion of the piece, Phil’s dad looked out the window and exclaimed, “Oh, look! It’s started snowing!” There were guffaws around the room. I looked out the window. There was no snow.

Relativistic Humor.

Leo Burnett has the Army as a client. It is the agency that comes up with military slogans such as “Be All You Can Be” or “Army of One.” A good friend of ours invited us out to dinner. A good friend of his, and that person’s lover, were visiting our friend from Britain. Conversation turned to politics. Everyone at the table was gay except for my wife and me. We all loathed Bush. Then it was revealed that the Brit was a Leo Burnett contractor. In fact, he was the very guy that wrote the Army tag line for Leo Burnett.

I asked him, “How do you reconcile your political beliefs with crafting propaganda for the enemy?”

“This is my craft. This is what I do,” he replied.

Germany has experienced an astonishing succession of social environments over the last one hundred years. It would be fascinating to track the changing, guiding stories or foundation myths as words transformed during epochs of hubris, then horror, then shame, two times for two wars, and then the emergence of the present zeitgeist that might be characterized as a kind of synthesis or wary wisdom.

Evidently there was that period of time before and during WWII when the government propaganda machinery said whatever was necessary to accomplish the leaders’ goals. Ethics, morals, rules were not relevant. There was a purity of communication characterized by there being absolutely no moral barriers to achieve a goal.

Carl Rove’s stepdad lived far outside traditions of established norms. He was a widely respected peon in the exhibition body piercing world, a masochism giant, an innovator beyond the boundaries of convention. Young Carl observed that barriers to behaviors are relative, that morals are choices. Carl Rove became a visionary able to see past the need to follow a rule, adjust to a convention, or regard a moral. Then, he crossed a line. Ethics became relative. Carl Rove could do or say exactly what was necessary to accomplish his client’s goals.

When reality does not constrain, one becomes a relativist. Clearly, the propagandists of our time are relativist thinkers. Incredibly creative, breaking boundaries, they have a feature of their experience that makes their relativistic frame of reference unique.

They are not connected.

American neo-conservative, capitalist elite, Nazi extremists, creative’s claiming no responsibility for the repercussions of their craft, all these people behave like they are not members of a network. They are cut off. They serve either a very small group of people or they just serve themselves. They are relativists, but they are alone. They experience one, not One.

Consider a very similar relativist perspective. Unconstrained by morals, ethics or rules, the wise man behaves according to understandings derived from an internal experience characterized by connection to the world writ large. This person experiences the world as being barrier-less. He or she does not break down barriers to achieve specific goals.

It fascinates me that those most sensitive to the veils of reality are both the war criminal propagandists and the saints. Whereas one feels how we are all separate, the other experiences us as all the same.

Never has society been so capable of changing quickly as it is now.

Twelve years ago, I spent over a year cave-crawling the corridors of dragon mythology, reading many books on the subject.  That adventure evolved to a study of the cultures that were connected to the ancient serpent myths that spawned later dragon tales.  The serpent/dragon cycle of myths and legends began long before recorded time and extends to the present day.  China is the society perhaps most committed to the dragon as metaphor, a society famous for its hesitation to transform.

Clearly, that is changing.

Up until the present day, the stories a society would tell itself anchored that culture, offered solace to its citizens, informed an understanding of experiences society could not easily explain, providing cohesion and a clear sense of community.  Science has usurped much of the power of myth, but our compulsion to use myth or story to make sense of our world continues unabated.  Whereas the serpent/dragon stories retained power to comfort and explain for thousands of years, the stories we tell ourselves now change with economic cycles, news cycles and youtube fads.

A martial artist practices many moves many times until he or she can exhibit spontaneous flexible creativity when responding to an opponent.  An ability to adjust quickly to novel circumstances has everything to do with practicing a wide variety of techniques so that a large selection of behaviors is available when the environment demands a unique response.

Western and now world culture is practicing mythology, like a martial artist practices kicks, in ways unimaginable even 75 years ago.  Commercials experiment with myth and story, looking for a message that snags.  Successful communications are reproduced by competitors until the effect wanes.  Another variation emerges.  Several myths-as-advertising cycles are running concurrently at any time.  Countless demographic subgroups are being targeted and tracked as what is most effective reaching those subgroups keeps demanding revision.

This is like a martial art of story telling, using words as a weapon, except the new moves keep getting invented.  Instead of practicing a tradition, we have evolved a martial art that practices novelty.

TV, song, print, video and gaming and film find themselves modifying in response to an audience demanding more and move novelty in what it experiences.  At the same time, media guide their audience to crave more change.

Runaway sexual selection is an evolutionary process whereby mate selection encourages the exponential increase of extreme features over generations through time.  Usually it is the male selected for something specific, for example, an Asian fish’s long tail.  The female becomes selected for her ability and compulsion to make that selection.  Over generations, the male’s tail becomes longer and longer, the female more discriminating.

Tall tales in our cultures have become the subject of the human compulsion to appraise and embrace, to sexually select just about everything in our experience.  Except humans don’t require copulation to experience satisfaction that a decision between two options was satisfying.  The stories we tell each other, the grounding myths of our culture, have themselves become the subject of our craving for novelty.  Without being consciously aware of what we have been doing, we have become sensitive appraisers of reality, like the female mate of a long-tailed fish craving long-tailed males.  We are moving at astonishing speed into a completely relativistic frame of reference.

We have prepared ourselves to experience profound change at an extremely rapid rate.  Having abandoned the established myths, rejected most of the old stories and demanded new stories at increasingly rapid speeds, we have made ourselves available to any future we could possibly devise.

Could our future possibly offer the option of experiencing the world without story?  Is it possible that in the future, the veil of myth and story will fade and we will consciously be able to choose myth or no myth?

To be able to respect, experience and appreciate the networks that we are a part of–biological, societal, personal–we need to be able to let the scales fall from our eyes.  We are now more facile with story than we have ever been.  Just in time.

I participate in several dozen listserves.  Mostly I observe.  These are listserves for statewide coalitions, statewide networks, local organizations and national organizations.  Primarily, I use listserves to gather information.  As a web developer for almost 30 Left/Progressive organizations, I end up listening to a lot of conversations.

On rare occasions is something said that compels me to respond.  I just read something that made my blood boil, my face flush and my heart start skipping beats.

I am an activist whose primary focus is organizational structure and communications infrastructure that serve transparency, diversity and horizontal communication.  I want to know what makes change possible and create systems that encourage the process.

On the Left there are passionate adherents for specific issues that believe the best way to achieve goals is through top-down, closed-door discussions limited to activists that satisfy specific criteria.

These activists mostly seem unaware of the communications revolution cascading across society, mostly through our young.  What they know is nontransparent hierarchy.  It works for them.  In some cases, it’s worked for them for a long time.

The words that caused the surge of anger that prompted this rumination was my reading a communication that said that the coordinating committee of an organization does not just represent the members of its organization but is the organization.  The author suggested that the nature of organization and the difficulty of managing groups demands that a few people decide for the many what is best for them.

I guess I’ve crossed a line where something so obvious to so many can feel abusively outrageous to me.

I observe, explore and play with networks:  evolutionary biological networks; social networks and their transformation structures; networks within a human psyche; the hub, node and spoke network connections between communications of organizations of the Left.  Immersed in networks, my experience is that everything is connected, horizontally.  There are no walls.

Hierarchy, barriers and segregation of information are processes that reflect fictions or myths that we subscribe to.  We build social structures to manifest a story that is reaching its conclusion.  The time of the few controlling the many is coming to an end.  Listening to the Left, successful strategies that support these changes won’t erupt from the established national Left organizations operating with the old myths or paradigms.

I often hear my colleagues express dismay that so few young people protest in the streets, preferring to engage in keyboard activism.  Observing the Obama campaign, it seems to me a lot of young people are becoming active.  Raising money from a quarter-million contributors in a given month seems pretty active to me.  So, if we might posit that a large chunk of the American Left is at best unclear on the nature of the societal changes underway and that there are a large number of young people ready to be engaged, provided it offers them an experience of networking online, then what would it take for these young online activists to start demanding change?  How will they demand change?

Regardless of the adulation for Obama, I doubt it would be by letting some few members of an organization or a charismatic individual decide.

The Peace, Justice and Environment Project (PJEP) facilitates communication and cooperation between almost 900 organizations in 28 states. Individuals within those organizations post to their state network an action or an online campaign (petitions, boycotts, eletters, fundraisers). Ideas for those actions and campaigns emerge from discussions within those individual’s organizations. The principles that make it possible are biological in origin.

Ideas are often variations of actions and campaigns that have been tried out in other parts of the country. If a project seems to have accomplished its goal, often it gets picked up and reproduced again. Most actions and campaigns are reproductions of ideas used many times before.

The way that information travels on the Left has a lot to do with new technologies and old human networks. Listserves, websites and alternative media distribute information quickly. At the same time, many activists are members of several groups. These people hubs quickly disperse information to the activists focused on more narrow tracks. Perhaps 30 national organizations with chapters or affiliates distribute information quickly across the country while human hubs disperse that information to the nooks and crannies of activists working intently on unique, local projects.

On those occasions when a group creates a unique action or campaign that achieves its goals, information about that project may or may not get distributed to the wider activist community. It depends on whether a national organization finds out about it, or whether the project fits in with the mission of that national organization so that publicizing the event is warranted.

At the PJEP central hub (pjep.org), local actions and campaigns are noted and tracked over time. Online campaigns can be tracked in some detail. Speed, span, depth and breadth are all tabulated and displayed so that visitors can appraise the relative effectiveness of varying campaigns as they unfold across the country. Speed notes how many participants are being added over time. Span tracks the geographic spread of the project, noted by zip. Depth explores the number of degrees of separation or depth of referrals driving the campaign growth. Breadth counts the gross numbers of people involved.

National organizations get to post projects though their chapters only. This system was designed to encourage local actions created by local activists. The system is seeking to nurture creativity at the local grassroots level by providing individuals information and resources so that they can brainstorm new solutions. Activists seek to gain powerful, positive media recognition for issues long ignored. With high quality information and access to new technologies, this kind of leverage becomes easier to achieve.

Individuals are empowered by offering them access to high quality information on the relative effectiveness of actions and campaigns across the country. Local organizations are empowered by having access to online resources and other organizations with which joint projects can be quickly and effectively entertained. With this surge in information and resource access, creativity is enhanced. Actions and campaigns can be more effective. Media can be influenced. Opinions can change.

The Peace, Justice and Environment Project uses principles that drive biological and social evolution to drive social change. Increasing network connectivity, encouraging the exchange of information and providing useful resources form the foundation of healthy ecologies and communities.

The American cult of individuality represents the limit of how far a culture can go and not self destruct as every individual is required to make sacrifices to the furnace of self importance.  We are so focused on protecting the rights of individuals that individual rights are denied to achieve this goal.  Obviously paradoxical, it also seems ironic.  Republicans, with Democrat complicity, demand the sacrifice of the commons that serve individuals so that there are no constraints on individual behavior.  Destroying the commons, we destroy our community and destroy ourselves.

This war against the commons–the environment, social security, world community, social services–to believers in the cult feels like a war against absorption of the individual by the many.  This cult is fueled by capitalists, by fundamentalists, by SUV owners, by Americans that buy the pitch that lower taxes serve all.  Providing the words and pictures that make the stories that prop up the cult are the members of the media, script writers, ad writers, article composers, architects, designers, novelists and artists.

Artists in America and the West have been saddled with a paradoxical profession.  Asked to provide a pathway between where we are and our origins and destination as a culture, the artist has been asked to both portray extreme independence to the point of eccentricity while at the same time depict what connects us all.  Artists in most cultures explore the relationship between being human and that from which we come.  In the United States, artists are additionally required to explore the American obsession with self.  Of course, the artist is a tortured artist.  Experiencing what it is to be alienated or alone, he or she achieves insight into the cult.

The cult is dying.  Art is changing.  Again, the end is looping around to the beginning.

Dance, song and percussion were the original arts, communal arts, arts engaged in by the group.  Encouraged by new technologies and the web, group art is following paths being blazed by horizontal communications, transparency and the diversity characteristic of the Internet.  The medium nurtures experimentation in numerous artists’ media, creating bridges at increasingly rapid rates of expansion.  Bridges span academic and spiritual disciplines, artistic media, cultures and generations.  The bridges connect individuals.  Instead of exploring only what it is like to feel alone, artists can explore the experience of feeling embraced.  More importantly, he or she can engage in this exploration while with people.

Twenty years ago, words were written in a vacuum.  Blogging is a communal activity.  No longer is art about being alone.  America is maturing.  We are headed toward the commons.  America’s artists, working together, are offering their services as guides.

There is a five-step continuum that begins with primordial competition and ends with what may make human beings unique.

Darwin struggled with three selective processes, seeking ways that they could make sense together. He is best known for natural selection. Darwin also discovered sexual selection. In addition, he wrote detailed accounts of how he estimated Lamarckian selective processes influence evolution. Unable to find a way to make the three different processes elegantly nest, Darwin is remembered mostly for his contribution to our contemporary paradigm that believes natural selection is the most important selective process.

I have suggested (see sexualselection.org) that the evolutionary processes themselves have unfolded in their own meta evolution. Natural selection evolved sexual selection and Lamarckian selection. Sexual selection then evolved language and society. I have proposed that society and human split-consciousness emerged as a direct repercussion of dance and art.

The five-step continuum begins with natural selection and then moves to sexual selection, with animals focusing on particular patterns when they choose a mate. Step three begins with a bridging over to human sexual selection, where adept practitioners of novel pattern creation are selected as procreation partners by mates with sensitivity to these nuances. The fourth step is taken when novelty itself becomes desirable outside the partner selection process, and society is compelled to embrace in its productions the infinite nuances of new. In the fifth stage, awareness of the creation process itself becomes a target experience.

The fifth stage offers a looping around to stage one, what we think of as competitive evolution, accompanied by awareness.

1) natural selection
2) sexual selection (selecting for pattern when seeking a mate)
3) human sexual selection (selection for novel pattern when seeking a mate)
4) art (selecting for novel pattern outside of mate selection)
5) awareness of the selection or creative process

When using language and/or art to communicate experiences that transcend or operate outside of the mediums of language and art, the artist uses various tricks at his or her disposal. For example, the artist can use words to create pictures that transcend the single-thread narrative stream, the essence of language. Or, the artist can create a picture that portrays music or words in an attempt to bridge the simultaneous nature of image with the narrative breadth of melody or speech. Wrestling with how best to mold a medium to transcend its limitations is one of the ways an artist in stage four makes a contribution to social transformation.

New mediums emerge, offering opportunities to seek new paths to transcend the constraints of space and time.

These essays often feel like I’m making tinker toy sculptures. Each essay is a circular, wheel-like node or hub. Common themes are the colored stick spokes that connect the different node blog entries. I’m seeking to create a sculpture that reveals connections between explanatory principles, using a narrative tool that allows the visitor to enter ongoing threads at any point and to read in any order.

Blogging as an artist’s medium offers interesting challenges. In the end, solutions will no doubt have everything to do with you, the reader, and how you connect with what is happening here, and the trail you leave behind noting that connection.

Connections characterized by sequence, by loops, by associational grids and by the messages you the reader leave behind are all occurring in the same connective sphere, the same level, level 5, awareness of the creative process.

Specific obsessive compulsive behaviors that focus on repeating patterns often emerge when we are most stressed, when we regress.  The rhythms of the dance are seeded deep inside our contemporary souls.  OCD is often tied to disorders characterized by maturational delay, those individuals exhibiting the older, matrifocal, dance-driven genotype.  Maybe here is a clue as to why rocking is so consoling.

If there is some truth that music and dance are the original arts driving our evolution as a species through the dynamics of sexual selection, then sensitivity to repeating patterns characteristic of the practitioners of these arts could reveal how it is we are so good at intuiting connections.

Evidence of sexual selection in species other than our own suggests that we are not the only ones prepped to pay attention to patterns.  Yet, humans somehow crossed a line.

I’ve heard tell of a story where in an exhibition aquarium with a porpoise show, a trainer was seeking to encourage his charge to learn new tricks.  A young male was the subject of his attentions.  Whenever this porpoise exhibited a unique behavior, the trainer would reinforce it with a fish reward.  One by one, new behaviors were culled out from daily routine, reinforced and reproduced.

One day the subject porpoise again did something unique, and the trainer threw him a fish.  There was a pause.  The porpoise then proceeded to exhibit a long series of extremely unusual, never-seen-before behaviors, one after another, exhibiting great excitement as the creative surge unfolded.

Humans engage in pattern detection and creation in a fashion far in excess of what other animals produce.  It’s like we discovered that the creative process itself is where the fun is, not just the reproduction of the pattern.  But, in a sense, humans participating in the sexual-selection pattern-reproduction process are doing exactly what other animals do.  We just take an additional step to make it into art.

The difference between animal sexual selection and human sexual selection is that in human sexual selection, what we call art, we select for those practitioners that provide a compelling experience that does not necessarily lead to sex.  We discovered it’s not about the fish, but about the fishing.  It’s not about the reward, but about the process.

When I was exploring the possibility of a human genetic precursor that was random-handed with a larger brain encouraged by a song-and-dance-based matrifocal culture, I hypothesized that if representatives of our ancestors were around today, they would have larger brains and difficulty with language.

The premise is that the exponential growth in brain size through the history of Homo erectus and before was driven by the selection for mates talented in dance. An established biological pattern is that predators have larger brains than their prey. More demanding physicality (it’s more difficult to be a predator than to run away) creates a requirement for increased neurological support. Dance may have been a sexually selected physical demand with no upward threshold in satisfactory results. Rampant brain growth may have been the result of males competing for the attention of females in matrifocal societies where males that exhibited neotenous characteristics (creative, playful, cooperative) were the most likely males to procreate.

The best dancers had bigger brains. The best way to select for bigger brains over time was to choose males exhibiting neotenous characteristics. Neotenous males are cooperative males supporting a matrifocal social structure.

When I was first monkeying around with these ideas, noting that studies reported that our brains were growing smaller in size about 25,000 years ago, I surmised that an emergence of patrifocal social structure, right-handedness and a smaller brain might be all related. If this was the case, then there might be representatives of language-challenged, bigger-brained people around. I had worked with autistic children. I investigated the literature for evidence of autistic people having bigger brains.

Autistic people have bigger brains.

I then began to explore the literature for evidence of other signs.

Chimpanzees and gorillas exhibit the extremes of the great ape social structure. Chimp males have large testicles to be able to produce the prodigious amounts of sperm required to sire a child. A female in estrous may copulate with several males in a day. Gorillas have small testicles. The male silverback controls the females by physically dominating the other males. He can copulate at his leisure, relatively certain the progeny will be his. Less sperm required. I hypothesized that in a matrifocal social structure, balls would have to be bigger than in a patrifocal set-up. There was some support of this in the literature in contemporary cultures. Highly stratified patrilineal cultures, as a rule, had males with smaller testes than males with more recent matrilineal connections.

The question was: Did bigger-brained males also have larger testicles? Did ambidextrous males, left-handed males or autistic males–hypothesized to be males with an older genotype from matrifocal societies–have bigger balls?

Culling through hundreds of papers, I was unable to find any studies on testicle size as it relates to handedness, autism or conditions characterized by maturational delay. There was one exception. Autistic males with the condition called fragile X had huge testicles. But these autistic males were a genetic anomaly.

Consider that with the exponential increase in autistic children, we are seeing a resurgence of individuals with no communicative impairments that are close genetic relations to people with conditions characterized by extreme maturational delay or autism. Look for unusually articulate, big-brained, big-balled, cooperative, artistic, left-handed dancers. Those would be the guys who are getting all the girls.

Studies of left-handers have revealed a number of interesting things about left-handed people and the ambidextrous.  Hints of our evolutionary origins are suggested in these studies.

Left-handed people are more maturational delayed.

Right-handed people actually are less capable with their other hand as opposed to left-handed people, who are usually almost equally capable with either hand.  In other words, left-handers are usually more dextrous than right-handers.  Left-handers often have larger brains than right-handers, with less hemispheric differentiation.  In addition, their lobes are more nearly the same size.  The brain connections, for example the corpus callosum, are usually larger in left-handers.

Lefties grow slower, have bigger brains and often are more physically adept.

Left-handed people are usually reversed in their hemispheric organization.  Some have surmised that this reversal alone has provided them a competitive advantage by slightly confusing their associates and peers.  I would suggest that they do have several advantages, but these strengths are innate and are directly related to several factors.

Left-handers have not suffered as extreme a neurological pruning as those of us that are right-handed, when testosterone surges negatively impacted brain growth as a toddler.  In a sense, most of us have been biologically traumatized, and there was a diminishing of the size of one hemisphere, creating a differentiation that seems to encourage right-handedness.

I would suggest that the lefties are an older genetic version of the modern human.  An autistic person would be an extreme, where language use is a profound challenge.  Part way back in time would be the lefties, appearing after language facility was a certainty, having recently bridged over from gestural communication, but patrifocal culture had not yet emerged.

Imagine perhaps 75,000 years ago, before the exodus from Africa occurred, with matrifocal society being the norm.  Children don’t know their fathers.  Males are people-pleasers dancing their way into the heart of the lady they seek to couple with.  Women, who choose their own mates, are strong and focused on selecting cooperative males, males talented in the creation of song and dance.  Maturational-delayed males are the most childlike, the most creative and the least likely to engage in destructive dominance displays.  Maturational delay, neoteny, is encouraged.

Lefties today should reveal these characteristics if this theory or picture of the past is useful.  Lefty males should be adept people pleasers, articulate, creative and not likely to get into a fight.  Lefty females should be strong willed, even demanding, and focused on achieving goals.

We live and breathe within a world of tantalizing hints gesturing to our biological and consciousness origins.  Left-handed people reveal a cluster of clues consistent with some interpretations of how we came to be.  Some males feel compelled to please people.  Some females are compelled to get their way.  It is these folks that often rise to the top.  Before Bush, the previous three presidents were lefties.  Obama is a lefty.  This evolutionary trajectory likely began with a compulsion to please a woman, possibly a left-handed woman.  Possibly a left-handed woman who knew exactly what she wanted.

Three out of four of our last presidents were left-handers. If Obama is elected, it will be four out of five.

Researcher Marian Annett hypothesizes that there is a gene for being right-handed and a gene for being nonhanded or random-handed. One could also say that most random-handed people have a gene for being right-handed. Studies vary, but most cultures show around 10% left-handers.

By Annett’s calculations, about 18.5% of modern populations retain this random-handedness proclivity, with about half of those displaying left-handedness and about half being right-handed. Various degrees of ambidexterity are mixed in.

Random-handedness is genetically inherited, usually revealing close relatives with that same feature. Various social and biological interventions can mask these relationships. My sister was left-handed, broke her arm in grammar school, and ended up writing with her right. Older folks were often instructed to write with their right hand regardless of their natural inclinations. This instruction was common in Catholic schools. Early brain damage or uterine trauma can compel a person to switch hemisphere and, for example, rely upon the left hemisphere for language instead of the right or both, making them left-handed. These folks are not genetically random-handed.

Among the many prejudices and divisive beliefs we’ve been giving up over the two hundred years is the disparagement of left-handers. These biases have built into our language what with sinister, sinistral and the Left being closely associated. In some cultures, one only wipes one’s butt with the left hand.

The random-handed are unique. They display an older genotype and are perhaps the bridge to understanding autism and conditions characterized by maturational delay. Still, they are not easily pigeon-holed, and they often display both remarkable physical and verbal prowess and sometimes impairments in the same areas. Presidents and stutterers are often left-handed.

The random-handed offer clues to both our evolutionary origins and our society’s future path. With another possible left-handed president, perhaps it’s time we explored this once vilified, re-emerging class.

A pidgin is a kind of quasi-language composed of the pieces of more than one language crunched together when speakers of different languages are forced to communicate. Pidgins vary from place to place depending on the languages involved. For example, English in combination with local languages have created several different pidgins around the world.

In some communities, a pidgin gives birth to a creole. If children grow up listening to a previously unconnected smorgasbord of words and phrases, those children will provide those words and phrases grammar, syntax and the other civilized accoutrements of communication. In a single generation, a creole is born. Strangely, this creole is not as unique as you might imagine.

Creoles born of pidgins across the planet use an almost identical grammar, syntax and language structure. It seems that great minds think alike, in this case revealing a universality of thought. But the roots of language suggest a deeper hidden source for this way of thinking. There is only one language in the world with deep structural similarities to creoles born of pidgins.

That one language is sign language.

Sometimes when watching people talk, I become mesmerized by the movement of people’s hands. It’s obvious when watching people on the phone. A show of hand displays for a person on the line that the talker cannot see. Some people exhibit astonishing skills at hand dance. How often are we aware of people with these skills? A genius gesturer could go through life observed, but never noticed.

Very soon keyboards will disappear. Computers will become savvy enough to interpret our idiosyncratic utterances and cameras will be able to decipher our subvocalizations. It’s only a matter of time before reading fades away. In less than one hundred years, world culture will return to one characterized by speaking and listening, as digitalization stores and retrieves everything we hear and say.

And so, another great circle of societal evolution will have looped around so that a beginning re-emerges as an end. The skills and strengths of aboriginals and third world cultures–auditory story-telling societies–will become the demanded aptitude of a world culture demanding creativity and facility in the spoken word.

It is not just a new language that finds itself emerging, like waking from a dream of the future, when a creole is born that can speak the ancient slang of hands. When two humans mate from bloodlines separated by prejudice or geography, the progeny often exhibit features of the ancestor the two parents last had in common. As the world turns toward those who are skilled in communication forms not encouraged for thousands of years, parents will be producing children able to communicate across these great divides.

Watch people’s hands and listen to the melody of their words. Doing so, we’ll be able to grasp both the future and the past.

Dear National Assembly Coordinating Council Members:

For those of you relatively new to the coordinating committee, my name is Andrew Lehman. Marcia Bernsten and I created and maintain the website with the assistance of Mark Stahl. Marcia and I resigned from the coordinating committee in February after realizing that what we seek to achieve as peace, justice and environmental organizers didn’t seem to be close enough to the process we were observing from our positions as members of the coordinating committee. We resigned, preferring to continue in our role as logistical support, rather than as organizers that endorsed a process we did not agree with.

Marcia and I did not want to generate any enmity or create any barriers to National Assembly achieving its goals, so we told Jerry, Jeff and Mark Stahl that we were backing out, but we did not tell the coordinating committee and did not go into the specifics.

Now it seems a good time to go over what we’ve observed. Inconsistent process, behavioral and verbal incongruities and differences in political philosophies have led to the specific consequences of a disappointing conference. I’m hoping that this contribution to the discussion might unearth some issues that would not otherwise emerge.

A primary difference between most activists and us is that Marcia and I focus primarily on process, meaning, the methods by which things get decided and accomplished. As web developers specializing in online tools for the American Left/Progressive community, we seek to enhance communication and cooperation among organizations within a state and across state lines. Through a growing list of volunteers, we work with nearly 900 national, regional, state and local organizations in almost 30 states Only two of these organizations pay for our services. See pjep.org and purplepolitics.org for some detail. Focusing on process, we pay close attention to horizontal (rather than hierarchical) structure, and we pay close attention to transparency and diversity. We seek to understand what it takes for organizations to work together seamlessly and then encourage that process. Integral to seamless process is clean structure. As web developers specializing in making it possible for organizations to work together in a united fashion, we’ve discovered that horizontal/transparent/diverse structure is integral to communication and cooperation characterized by trust.

The foundation of our work is to empower activists. Creating conditions that nurture the emergence of confident, empowered activists, giving them unique and powerful resources at their disposal, goes a long way toward encouraging the experience of national unity that we seek.

It became clear to Marcia and me that our goal was different from the goal of the majority of the coordinating committee. Marcia and I commit large numbers of hours and resources to creating a national infrastructure than can support a united U.S. Left. When we joined the coordinating committee (CC), we thought there was a large overlap in goals. What we discovered was that the CC and administrative committee (AC) had a narrower focus than Marcia and I were used to.

A narrow focus, in my opinion, created a number of barriers to achieving the larger goal of the Assembly. It is difficult to achieve national unity without taking into consideration the various groups and interests influenced by the decisions made while seeking that goal. I believe that the designers of the National Assembly project believed that they were acting in the best interests of the larger community by creating those barriers. In my opinion, these very barriers subverted those goals. The organizers of the National Assembly aimed low. The result was a disappointing conference.

There have been at least four barriers erected by the members of the CC and AC that have inhibited the goals of the conference. In addition, the conference was organized in several ways that disempowered those that attended the event.

“`

Barrier #1: A Stated Goal Limited To Creating A Single Day Of National Action.

The stated goal of the National Assembly was to create an entity that will compel the creation of a widely supported national day of mass action. It was established that the National Assembly would concentrate solely on that mission. The organization does not have to be a coalition or representational of the community at large in a way that the community at large feels reflected, mirrored or represented. Because the goal of the organization is confined to that mission, its ambition to be representational of the Left/Progressive community or to exhibit the features of a coalition is unnecessary.

In our opinion, this belief is a barrier to success.

There was a lot of confusion among many people that I talked to at the conference. These were largely people from the Midwest, folks I talked to among the booths and youth. Many people attending the conference were making an assumption that the conference sought to represent a wide spectrum of the Left/Progressive community and would seek to communicate to the assembled activists that this broad representation was the case. They were not clear that the sole goal of the project was to encourage a successful national day of action and that the organizers seeking to achieve that goal were not striving to mirror to the community at large the issues/geography/age/gender/diversity of those that had assembled. The difference between a network and a coalition, a distinction that the structural proposal sought to make, was not a distinction that was clear to many in the assembly for three reasons.

1) Another meeting was planned for next year.
2) A committee would decide how amendments would be integrated into the action proposal.
3) There were no alternative proposals on the structure of the network.

When we asked about structure early on, we were told that one would not be necessary, that the Assembly was not going to be a new organization in competition to those already established. If the network was important enough to have an elected body post-Assembly, why wasn’t it important enough to have alternative proposals on the exact structure of that network?

If conference attendees were respected enough to vote for those individuals that would influence the course of significant events in the future, why were they not provided the ability to participate in creating the structure that would inform the process engaged in by those elected officials? Calling something a network does not mean that democratic process does not apply.

Barrier #2: With Limited Goals, Limited Democratic Process is Acceptable

Unspoken assumptions of the National Assembly CC and those organizing the Assembly were that: 1) the Assembly itself does not need to work hard to reflect the larger community in terms of the many kinds of groups, ages, interests and geographic locations of those groups, 2) it is OK if the National Assembly seeks to exert influence on the established national peace organizations without specifically representing the various communities of the anti-war movement. Regardless, good-natured attempts to achieve the stated goals of the assembly did not need to be accompanied by a structure that would make it clear how the goals would be achieved. Efforts in these directions without prescribed structure were considered acceptable because the goal of National Assembly was narrow and specific.

Marcia and I are new to the Movement. Our experience is not deep. New to the CC about a month after its inception, Marcia and I made note of the stated policy that proposals for new CC members and workshops could be given to the AC, which would, without culling out proposals, then submit them to the CC to discuss. Marcia and I were confused when we submitted two women leader organizers from a region (the SE) not represented on the CC, whom we believed would have helped to provide some regional and gender balance. We then observed that they were not brought from the AC to the CC for consideration. The same thing happened when we submitted a workshop. Though we were told the process worked one way, we experienced that the process worked another way. I will not enumerate the number of occasions that this type of issue occurred. They were many. We were told on several occasions that democratic process was fully engaged and emphasized a nonhierarchical, transparent, diverse frame of reference. Clearly, we were operating with different definitions of the concepts.

Barrier #3: Deliberately Inhibit Online and Offline Networking

Enhancing networking between organizations and individuals participating in the project was perceived by the AC to be either outside the purview of the project or in conflict with the project’s goals. The goal of the National Assembly was promoted as narrow and specific. An emphasis on networking does not necessarily contribute to that goal.

Online networking tools, integrated into the website, were rejected by the AC. These tools came with the template used to create the Assembly website. Networking tools were rejected, I think, because they were perceived to be outside the goals of the National Assembly as interpreted by the AC. Specifically, the member of the AC dealing with the communications rejected the options for engaging visitors to the site in a number of different fashions – tools that provide an experience of personal empowerment familiar to the young. Organizations could have been offered an ability to form ad hoc coalitions online in order to propose and work on action proposals together. Organizations could have been offered email access to all organizations participating in the conference. Ongoing conversation vehicles were available. Resource storage was available for each organization. These features and other features were rejected.

At the conference, the name tags had only names but no state or city of origin or organizational affiliations. Networking was deeply inhibited by this omission.

There was no time assigned for conference attendees to caucus by state, region or area of interest, a procedure that would have provided an opportunity for folks to meet and work together who might not have been able to before.

There were no workshops on networking, online networking, social networking or working together across states or across state lines despite the fact that the Assembly calls itself a “network.”

There were no panel representatives specializing in this form of organizing, such as Democracy in Action, PJEP, MoveOn or one of the radical collectives.

Barrier #4: Might is Right

Another unspoken assumption of the CC is that old style muscle organizing is integral to achieving real world goals. Nontransparent, nondiverse and hierarchical behavior depends a lot on the definitions of those terms. Marcia and I observed several behavioral definitions in play. Without structure and clearly defined boundaries of behavior, individuals with the most authority invested by the decision-making body make decisions that are not based on agreed-upon-conventions (structure) but upon the conventions of their personal experience. By some definitions of good democratic process, there were ongoing abuses of authority by members of the AC. With these differing interpretations actively in play, there was no recourse, no mediating process available, no structure that could serve to guide. We were left with the primate first commandment, might makes right.

We are not suggesting that those in authority did not have good intentions. We are saying that more than one organizing paradigm was in play. The established paradigm was committed to specific barriers, enforced using specific behavioral and verbal conventions, barriers that inhibited the stated goal of the project, “national unity.”

“`

The Conference that Disempowered

As opposed to feeling empowered by the events of the conference, many there felt disempowered. Several ways the conference was organized contributed to that experience.

1) By being 1.25 days long instead of 3 or 4 days long, the conference provided little time to invest those that attended with an experience that they helped to make the event happen. The conference happened to them. There was little time to reflect back to the attending activists the contributions they came to make.

It could be asked, “What contribution did the attendees make?” Numerous amendments were submitted but not seen or heard. (This is still true. More than a week after the end of the conference, attendees are still waiting to see the document that their “votes” helped to create and may never see all of the amendments proposed by those who submitted amendments during the time allotted for submission.)

2) The website was used as an exclusively one-to-many broadcasting tool but performed that function poorly, with the exception of posting endorsers of the call. Calls to solicit actions proposals were late and not overt. There were no invitations to submit structural proposals. There was no posting of those organizations that planned to send representatives to the conference, which in our experience is the single most powerful tool that drives organizations to an event. Let people know who else is coming. Our requests to address these concerns were rejected by the AC.

3) The cost of the conference was high. I observed no discussion of the cost. The AC made these decisions. Evidently, the desire that the location be a union venue was integral to the decision. The cost of the rooms, after the discount was taken and the taxes were added, was $130 minimum. This cost was deeply discounting of youth and the underprivileged. We raised our concerns about the need to address the cost of the conference and the cost of housing. An allowance was made in the registration fees, but it wasn’t until much later that efforts were made to offer alternatives in housing.

4) Marcia and I observed an ongoing prioritization of a union agenda. This prioritization was one of several examples of this alternative/underlying agenda inhibiting the larger goals. The role of labor in the anti-war movement is very important, but is it more important than the role of any other contingency? For example, there was almost no attention to the perspectives of youth and youth organizing protocols. Youth network online. With the website stripped of online features, youth were disempowered.

5) The composition of the CC was posted late in the conference organizing process. Reasons were given for the delay. Establishing a pattern of less than complete transparency was unfortunate. The principal organizer of the conference, Jerry Gordon, was not promoted as such in any of the materials about National Assembly. It was intentional. With increased transparency comes an increase in personal empowerment. More information provides more opportunity to make informed decisions. Strategic decisions to offer less than complete transparency were an ongoing characteristic of the National Assembly governing body. I believe it was to encourage as large an attendance as possible at the event. The repercussion was that many that attended experienced buyer’s remorse.

6) We observed no efforts to collect feedback from those that attended the conference, on paper or online.

7) Workshops were designed to encourage attendance by important constituencies, with almost no input by individuals outside the AC or CC. Instead of allowing the participants/attendees to influence the creation of the workshops they would attend, the AC and CC decided for them.

) Attendance fell off from over 400 on the first day to almost 250 on day two. A third to a fourth of attendees were not in the main hall during votes, with as many as 100 people in the exhibition section at any time. Many people were not engaged in a way that would suggest that they felt that voting related personally to them.

9) There were almost no restaurants within six blocks of the hotel. An estimated 85 of the 405 registered activists attended the Saturday evening panels and speeches. Most attendees were across town eating super. There were literally no printed announcements and no announcements from the podium of Saturday evening’s events, which included UFPJ and A.N.S.W.E.R. presentations. Bringing these groups together to National Assembly was an important goal of the event and of the project in general as stated in CC communications. Yet literally no message was made to the assembled activists that UFPJ and A.N.S.W.E.R. would be on stage Saturday night.

10) No more than 220 people voted for an issue at any time. There are more than 4000 peace and justice groups in the United States. Those 220 people, instead of representing a fraction of those organizations, instead represented an even smaller fraction of this country’s activists.

“`

Good intentions are not enough to create a good event. Left politics as usual is not an answer. Something new is needed.

As I understand it, UFPJ chose to support IVAW’s request to have exclusive access to a particular stretch of days in March for the Winter Soldier project. There were not many other times to hold a national action at the time of the war’s anniversary given the conflicts with religious calendars. Without UFPJ agreeing to hold a mass action at that time, a national action was unlikely to be successful. That conclusion seems to be the opinion of several other national organizations that sought a united action.

The conveners of the National Assembly began the project seeking to influence the Left political environment in a way that would encourage national mass actions without starting a third national organization. They were seeking influence without an identity. I’m not sure it is possible, practically or philosophically. Still, they gave it a shot and are continuing their efforts.

For many of us, it is not just about a lack of unity among national organizations resulting in a lack of national mass actions. The founders of the National Assembly, seeking to achieve unity accompanied by national mass actions, bring to light the additional problems noted above. Our point is not that UFPJ and other organizations are failing in their positions or responsibilities. The problems are deeper. The problems are philosophical, structural and practical.

Philosophical Anachronisms

Fairly often, I find Left activists noting versions of Darwin’s theory of natural selection as a given when seeking social change. No single belief so deeply inhibits our ability to encourage our society’s transformation. The Left still embraces the origin story of our opponents, a story that has been dissolving for fifteen years. “Survival of the fittest” is dead. There is a new paradigm. It might be described as “transcendence through cooperation.”

Darwin proposed three evolutionary theories. The second and third were published after his theory of natural selection to explain those points where Darwin felt natural selection failed to support his observations. Darwin’s theories of sexual selection and pangenesis focused on the power of aesthetics in mate choice and the impact of the environment on evolution. Evolutionary developmental biology is a new discipline that recognizes the immense impact of the aesthetics and the environment on evolution. By believing that it is a dog-eat-dog, might-makes-right world, we subscribe to our opponents’ point of view. Not even Darwin believed this point of view.

Social Darwinism, which embraces a free market philosophy, is a particular story told in a very specific way, a rendition of Darwin’s work manipulated to support an elite perspective that the elite deserve their larger share of resources because they achieved those resources according to natural laws. The elites in our culture demand that these laws not be broken. It is time we enacted alternative legislation. It is time we tell a different story.

Alternative Structures

The emergence of the web and the embracing of that medium by the young and young activists provide a map of where, as activists and organizers, we need to go. The 60s are dead. The 30s are gone. A new set of tactics and strategies are appearing, championed by the young, techniques that we older organizers would do well to explore in great detail. Not the least of the benefits of these new tools is a whole new way to create and express structure. These new structures support the paradigm “transcendence through cooperation.” These new structures exist now and are providing a cooperation/communication framework used by hundreds of peace, justice and environmental organizations across the country. They are not being used by national organizations.

Horizontal communication, transparency and diversity can be deeply embedded in the very fabric of an organizational structure in ways literally not available before the last two years. One aspect of this new basket of tools, online social networking, is huge. Just this week, hundreds of participants, through the social networking on Obama’s website revolted and set up an alternative, unauthorized thread demanding that Obama reverse his position on FISA. Consider the potential for these tools to drive participants into the streets.

Practical Politics

Established national peace and justice organizations are mostly using old technical tools, such as one-to-many or conventional interactive websites and broadcast listserves. These technologies are almost fifteen years old. How the hell did the Obama campaign outflank the Left using cutting edge technologies? Money was not the issue. The issue was that leaders of our national organizations are stuck in 60s and 30s frames. The National Assembly is not the only organization struggling to find a way to transform the culture using our opponents’ origin myths, our opponents’ structure and outdated politics.

“`

Conclusion

Marcia and I are not technology geeks. We work closely with many Illinois organizations to drive activists into the streets by using conventional, tried and true techniques. Marcia or I have been on the central organizing bodies for literally every large protest event in Chicago for several years. Yes, we have an agenda, and it places technology at its core. Still, we’ve experienced the limits of technology. Integral to the success of the tools we’re promoting are the relationships established among organizers as they learn to trust one another as they seek to accomplish common goals. This communication is not designed or intended to disparage organizers doing their utmost to achieve social change. There are now alternatives available to what national organizations have tried. This email suggests that the alternatives hold promise and that it would be useful to examine them in detail.

Respectfully,

Andrew Lehman and Marcia Bernsten

We are so deeply steeped in story it’s hard to tell which layer of fiction we were last swimming in when it comes time to come up for breath. It’s like we’re deep sea divers that don’t keep track of how many fathoms we’ve descended. Come up too fast and we maybe get the bends.

When I was training to practice therapeutic interventions, one tool was the “As If” frame. I was encouraged to guide a client to access difficult-to-integrate personal resources that could be leveraged to achieve a specific change goal. The idea was to offer a client a novel story. Framed as a story, this alternative point of view was one the client could choose to resist less. Basically, we were making sales pitches, except the therapist was speaking both to the client’s conscious mind and an unconscious that had been engaged in a particular way of doing things for particular reasons. The “As If” frame allows someone that feels like they have limited choices to have additional ways of looking at the world.

Many things did not come easy to me during training. Creating stories was not a problem. Years of relying upon comic books as a safe place to withdraw from a frightening world not only made my mind moist to fantastical interpretations but introduced me to the “As If” frame at an early age. In comic books, story lines often veered off into alternative worlds, dreams, make-believe futures, time changes, hit-on-the-head hallucinations and fever reveries that allowed the heroes to engage in actions that their personas would not allow. I can’t tell you the number of times Superman married Lois, and then the comic ended and he didn’t really marry Lois.

Stories Within Stories Within Stories.

When Gore lost in 2000, I was more than just shocked and disappointed. I felt scared. It felt to me like a story was being created by our American communal mind that required far more drama than I had been considering we’d be willing to endure. It seemed to me that a tragedy was about to engage. It was as if electing someone with good intentions was not enough to motivate the most powerful nation on the planet to face the tidal wave of problems on the way. We had decided to make a story so stark in its lessons that there could be no question of which path it was appropriate to follow. We had decided to elect an idiot as president, a representative of the corporations, and see what happens.

We decided to exaggerate all the warped thinking that created barriers to change, making it obvious where the walls were so we could tear them down. We decided to take the stories that we’d been living by since we started using language, distill them to their essence, and then watch and listen to them over and over and over again.

We were told ghost stories where the purpose of the stories was to feel frightened. We were told cornucopia fantasies that declared that giving the government no money would make the government far wealthier in the end. We were told morality tales that said that corporations and the wealthy, policing themselves, would behave not in their best interests, but in ours. We were told stories of murderers, women who would abort becoming murderers that should not be punished for the taking of a life. We were told the Muslim radicals hate us for our freedoms, that jealousy motivated our enemies and that our own behaviors could never cause someone else to hate us.

We were told the air was not dirtier, the poor were not poorer and that global warming was not a threat. Then, we were told that even though global warming was a threat, Americans did not need to change their behavior to effect a change. We were told we were not responsible.

An ocean of stories many fathoms deep. Stories nested within stories within stories. The outside thread of this ball of yarns was the story that Americans did not have to respond. Our government would fight the war, not Americans. Corporations would regulate themselves; the government would not regulate corporations. The government, corporations and Americans did not need to respond to environmental threats. Individual Americans did not need to respond to anything. The story: Americans don’t need to be responsible.

Gore lost. The repercussion of the loss is now evident in the story pushed by our idiot as King. We now see what happens when we choose to believe the story that we are not responsible.

Not just during this Administration have we been telling ourselves these tales. We’ve been believing these stories as a species since we started using language and thinking in narrative threads instead of associational fabrics. It is our telling stories that we need to stop doing on occasion, at least so we can tell when we’re telling stories.

We’re approaching the surface after deep sea diving inside of stories since the origin of language. Fresh air will at first feel foreign. Being able to have the choice to give up our stories, the air will be clean, not too globally warmed and the ocean will grow no deeper than it’s been.

In 2006, Steven Johnson came out with a unique little book called Everything Bad is Good for You. In this book, Johnson explores the possible positive repercussions of constant exposure to specific elements of popular culture, including gaming, reality TV, online experiences and film. His conclusion is that there might be powerful positive effects from these peculiarly self indulgent endeavors that include increased IQ, sensitivity to associational understanding and an ability to defer satisfaction to achieve long-term goals.

Counter intuitive, indeed. Fascinating, nonetheless.

When I was young, I did not often eat sweets or candy. My eyes were on a different prize. Before I could read, I was “reading” comic books. All my allowances and other monies went toward DC and later Marvel hero comic magazines. On Saturday mornings, I would walk, usually by myself, almost three miles to Winnetka, to the only comic book store in the region. In the 50s, a seven-year-old could wander miles in many suburbs with no concern.

Able to buy perhaps a third of the titles I adored, every week I was faced with a decision. With a quarter, I could buy two comics. Justice Leagues of America was my favorite followed by Superman, then Batman.

Occasionally, I caught wind of how despised my passion was outside the world of boys. Society had concluded that these rags were somehow unsafe and unsavory. We were encouraged to treat our comic books like trash. I was a closet worshipper of story. My closet was filled with sacred texts.

Before the age of ten, I was wrestling with the nature of time paradox, alternative universes, interstellar culture conflict and countless moral and ethical decisions concerning whom to save first during a multiple threat crisis. I was presented with ways to use images and words to tell a story, feeling challenged to find my own ways to do the same.

Comic books became integral to my thinking process as I both learned to walk a narrative time thread while observing the maps to other places that a picture implied. With a picture equal to a thousand words, comics were guiding to me millions. I doodled ceaselessly. Stories, like nearby Lake Michigan, lapped constantly against the beach of my conventional kid life.

It seems to concern parents today that so many of the obsessions of childhood are solitary events. That is changing. Whereas television and gaming have isolated while they’ve educated, children are graduating into multi-player, online communities and television shows that require feedback. Plotlines are becoming astonishingly convoluted. The tube has become literally a window to the world with reality show content generated by American subcultures and cultures far away. With the emergence of self-generated content on Youtube, we have the equivalent of kids composing their own comic books and displaying them for the world to see. I expect that combining words and pictures in video communications requires more access to personal resources than making comics. This medium demands that you be able to work with people.

One of the twists frequently used in comic book plotlines was that the necessary resource, tool or secret weapon was there all the time, introduced in disguise in the first few frames of the story. Despised indulgences of childhood are being revealed as exactly the right training for a future that will be needing skills not yet invented. I would like to see another book by Steven Johnson. Perhaps he could call it I See the Future in the Passions of Our Kids.