“The classified ads (and stock-market quotations) are the bedrock of the press.  Should an alternative source of easy access to such diverse daily information be found, the press will fold.”  Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, p. 207, 1964.

Marshall McLuhan studied the effects of speed and time on social change.  One of his seminal insights was that media mold how we perceive the world, not only by the content that is distributed, but by how specifically media enhance our ability to access information.

It has become evident that the media are about politics.  How we communicate influences the distribution of power and authority.  More powerful than any political manifesto is the way that the words might be conveyed.

There are three foundation, democratizing power centers.  Education controls the ability for an individual to synthesize information.  Voting integrity empowers an individual to act upon the information.  Media enhance access to information.  With fundamental transformations in media, education and voting integrity get a boost.

What we are observing now is an exponential increase in the speed and quality of information distribution.  Everything is changing as a result of this transformation.

Theorists Shirky, Rheingold and others describe the result of barriers coming down with the placement of high-quality resources, such as cell phones and information access, with the formerly disempowered.  A staggering upsurge in creativity results with the belief that an individual can make a difference.  High-quality information can become ubiquitous when it is observed that a system can encourage an egalitarian distribution of high-quality information.  When information stops congregating in the hands of the few, the many feel empowered.

But it’s also the speed.  Information grows stale.  The fact that information becomes available in real time to anyone who can profit from its availability means that the horizontal feels natural.  Why believe in hierarchy when authority is informed by access to information, and information is quick and free?

Eliminate distance and collapse time and we redefine a foundation principle of human nature.  That principle is that there is a difference between being human and being god.  We still mostly believe that the difference between being human and being god is important enough that whether god exists or not, or what stories we have assigned to god, are integral to understanding our place in the universe.  This is changing.

There are no atheists in aboriginal society.  To be a member of the community is to share community beliefs.  We are quickly headed in an aboriginal direction, where society will be characterized by a universality of process.  This is a process not unlike a prehistoric band where each individual has access to all community resources.  A result is deep systemic integration, not alienation, resulting in an experience characterized by synthesis, not stratification.

If “the media is the message,” then the elimination of space and time does away with defining ourselves by what we do or don’t have access to.  Which stories we assign to god or whether he or she exists becomes secondary to the experience that we are not separate.  Eliminate space and time and you eliminate most conflict.  We are talking about the de-alienation of society.

It will take some time for education to catch up with information distribution and provide an ability to evaluate and form conclusions.  Voter integrity will perhaps come faster as it becomes relatively easy to generate double checks by a grass-roots system that combats those places where authority still seeks to congregate.  In the meantime, prepare for the wildest ride a species can engage in.  After having achieved an ability to be alone, be separate, feel alienated, think thoughts and question authority, we are now being introduced to the equivalent of social hallucinogens.  We are being introduced to no time, no space.

This has also been called the eternal now.

Just after the Iran election, Twitter emerged as news.  It seemed not only to be able to share information about what was happening in Iran with folks following events around the world, but Twitter was also encouraging the ability of protesters to congregate spontaneously and keep each other informed of developments in real time.

I work with Left/Progressive organizers across the country, talking with maybe six to ten out-of-state activists each week. In a week I’m in email communication with several dozen. In Illinois, far more.  Over the course of a three-month period, I cycle through communication with almost 600 organizers in 30 states, trying to touch base with each four times a year.  In addition, I consult with In These Times, a revered Left/Progressive print publication.  I mostly work with In These Times as a local expert on the Internet and social media.

So, I have a pretty broad view of ongoing American Left strategies and tactics to accomplish specific goals.  Regarding my area of expertise, the Internet, the independent Progressive movement is at the very beginning of becoming aware of the power of horizontal, online social networks.

Right now, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and the others are enhancing communication…

Mysticism is largely about shifting identity. There are techniques–strategies and tactics–that encourage opportunities to identify at levels alternative to what occurs within one person’s body or one’s imagination. When the opportunities appear, an individual can choose to identify with something different from himself or herself.

People are engaging in such opportunities across society. Mysticism could not be further from their minds.

There was a time in our species’ past, perhaps not so very long ago, maybe as few as 3,000 generations ago, when our experience was not characterized by individuality. One of the several profound differences between then and now was that then we had a far less concise idea of the passing of time. This was true socially and biologically. Socially things just did not change much. There were no fads or fashions. Progress as a concept is barely 250 years old, let alone tens of thousands.

Biologically our brains were not sorting in a narrative, sequential path. When narrative reality emerged and spoken language acquired the ability to parse out past from present and present from future, we acquired individuality at the same evolutionary moment. With our ability to disassociate in time we were also able to imagine…

My fourth profession was as a sales rep selling mostly greeting cards and gifts to shops and chains in the Chicago area.  I’d tried to make it as a girdle and bra factory executive (family business), free lance illustrator and graphic designer and as a publisher of greeting cards (mostly my own illustrations).  The selling of other people’s greeting cards evolved to become a healthy repping firm with several employees covering over a thousand stores across the state.

My undergraduate degree was mostly devoted to fine arts with an emphasis on psychology.  Most of my rep colleagues were about making money, with one exception.

Leo Burke eventually quit repping to eventually become an academic at Notre Dame specializing in alternative business models after having achieved success at humanizing Motorola as an executive specializing in executive interpersonal relations.  A colleague of Ken Wilber, Leo has used his life to offer integrative business models, influenced by Eastern practices of honor and deep appreciation.  Before all that Leo was a sales rep selling greeting cards.

Back in the 1980s, Leo and I were both running repping firms, often both of us selling mildly competing fine arts, post-hippie, new age or aesthetic-driven product lines. …

The Obama Administration is seeking to wrest the economy away from a depression while addressing several interconnected and growing crises.  Borrowing and taxing, we are creating jobs.  Redistributing assets, we are seeking health care for all, a reduction in greenhouse gases and an effective educational system.

And we’re seeking to do this in the midst of a profound transformation of society.

Old conventions are crumbling as our traditional vertical, hierarchical institutions are coming down.  The consumer economy and its evil twin, the free market, are greatly diminished.  The Obama Administration, as it seeks jobs and engages in crisis management, is not concentrating on what institutions might replace those that are disappearing.  At this point in the process, a little vision and a little money might go some way.

Global horizontalization is being driven in part by the rise of the Internet and cell phone technologies.  Conventions have emerged that allow the most visited sites to achieve the most visibility.  The most popular videos, blogs and presentations achieve success in part because there are web applications that allow those presentations that receive the most attention to be rewarded with an elevated status in the form of prime positioning.  At this time,…

In meditation, I sometimes have an experience of an underlying consciousness characterized by a twin identity:  creation and perception.  It’s sort of a pitcher-catcher relationship, like a basketball player that plays superb offense and defense.  It is also called yin and yang.  There is the cosmic artist and the cosmic appreciator.  Each moment is filled with a seemingly infinite intelligence and vast humor engaged in deep play.

I’ve wondered if this dichotomy is a vagary of human split consciousness with our physicality deeply informed by estrogen and testosterone.  Probably so.  Regardless, with the body I have and the instrument of perception that I was granted, that is how the music sounds.

As we have observed the evolution of the web and the dissolution of our consumer economy, it seems as if that music is growing louder.  There is an emergence of creativity and appreciation in purer, less hindered forms as the Internet encourages the pairing up of performers with audience.  Without the barriers of money, geographic distances or even language, new venues have emerged, such as Youtube, that allow a profound proliferation of creative content while training visitors to see and listen with new eyes and ears.

The line between…

What exactly is the neotenization of society that began to become clear to me that night in the convertible next to Marcia riding Highway 75 through northern Georgia? There are human hubs perched within the social networking universe that connect to enough other human hubs that an idea can accelerate though them into the Internet night like a sports car at 5:00 a.m. In just that way, there are idea hubs that connect to and influence enough contiguous influential disciplines that understanding them illuminates the intellectual world like a sunrise at 5:01.

Neoteny is a biological principle that notes that changes in the rate and timing of maturation of individuals over time, generation to generation, influencing the evolutionary trajectory of a species when the characteristics of infants or features of early ontogeny are prolonged to appear later in ontogeny or in the adults of descendants. Draw the features of babies into older and older stages over time and you are neotenizing that ancestral chain. Pubertal timing is also an issue. For example, in humans, if you change the diet of children and encourage puberty to come later, you will often have adults with brains with more synapses and longer legs.…

Friendster appeared and evolved into My Space and another variation, Facebook. Other forms are emerging and filling different niches. Linkses serves the business community. Change.org enhances the nonprofit world and empowers the individual seeking change. Google is seeking to create universal social networking software. Social networking variations are appearing overseas.

It is one of those unique moments not unlike when dinosaurs evolved feathers or when humans began to sing. Social networking has the potential to transform culture in several complementing ways, quickly, in a fashion that allows for deft adjustments to a changing environment.

First, it’s cheap. Second, it’s easy. Third, it encourages participation by those with time, rather than by those with money or resources. Entry level facility can be developed in minutes.

Anyone with specific interests can find others of similar inclination, empowering both by their being members of a group. Human hubs with many connections can thrive in an environment that exhibits this characteristic and offers ways to exercise the gift. The creative can share their creations. The shy can reveal the inner self. The curious can explore. Leaders can lead. The technologists can construct and modify.

Where is this networking headed?

Prepare for a cascade.

Power…

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…

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,…

The revolution has been going on for some time now. It’s moving from the bottom up. As is usually the case, it begins with the young.

Neoteny is the process whereby the infant features of a species emerge in the adults of the descendants. For example, our chimpanzee-like infant progenitors had small jaws, big heads and big eyes, often walked upright and were extremely curious and playful. These features worked their way up in age with every descendant subspecies until, after several million years, they became features of human adults.

How “new” manages to appear later with time is a feature of the various scales of evolution or transformation: biology, society, ontogeny and biography. Very specific hormonal and neurological processes guide these transformations. Though the transformations of neoteny are all around us, perhaps because they are everywhere, they are difficult to see.

One of the most powerful characteristics of newborns and new beings steeped in the matrix of creativity and play is narcissism. This narcissism often masks the presence of the creative. This masking is particularly true when evident in adults, as we tend to pay less attention to the seeming selfishness of those lost in experiences of satisfactory self…

It is not beyond consideration that the web is beginning to exhibit emergent characteristics that would suggest how intelligence evolves. Online, we can assume that consciousness exists. Hundreds of millions of consciousness derivations are behaving, invested in specific personal outcomes. Unexpected synergies are beginning to surface. Observing this online evolution, we might form tentative hypotheses on how earth’s biological infrastructure evolved.

Developing theories of biological evolution that presuppose that consciousness exists is not the same thing as presupposing that a mythological god intervened to both start the process of evolution and makes sure that the process unfolds to his or her satisfaction. Presupposing that consciousness exists, thinking outside the box of not considering god as a variable that you cannot isolate and weigh, you offer space for alternative conclusions. We tend to constrain our thinking by not taking into consideration the very thing that makes our thinking unique, consciousness, and the possibility that consciousness in not an emergent feature of evolution but the very instrumentation with which evolution plays, the ocean that the fish is unaware of.

In other words, instead of beginning your evolutionary theorizing by presupposing that god does not exist nor have influence on biological evolution, we…

I run a small web development firm. There are seven of us specializing in html design, website maintenance, PHP MySQL programming, email marketing, pay per click (Google Ad Words), tech support, server maintenance, email consultation and search engine optimization. Where possible, we try to spread the specialties around.

I’m the search engine optimization specialist. I have little tech facility but have skills in pattern manipulation and recognition. Engaged in search engine optimization (SEO), I weigh the specific variables the search engines use to decide how to rank a website and then design the site and provide links to the sites in ways that encourage search engines to give them higher rankings.

About seven years ago, I sort of fell into this portion of my profession as a result of creating high quality local retail directories for Chicago and local towns. I created the directories, loading them with links to local business websites to funnel traffic to my client websites. I’d give my clients free ads within the directories. The program worked well.

Over time, the directories themselves achieved higher and higher rankings in Google. They commonly ranked #1 in Chicago, making my clients happy, but they were also ranking in…

Fundamentalists and pluralists are in disagreement across the political, academic and societal relations landscape. There is a tendency for a pluralist to agree with some or all of what a fundamentalist believes to be true, with additions. Sometimes the fundamental beliefs get reframed, as Newtonian physics has been absorbed into contemporary physics. Fundamental beliefs sometimes are reinterpreted. For example, Christian origin myths are embraced by pluralists as stories, but not as fact. Often fundamental beliefs remain true or useful but become part of a larger pattern or perspective that suggests or includes far more. Patterns can keep widening.

Even pluralists can discover that their interpretations have been reframed.

There are struggles on the American Left between fundamentalists and pluralists, usually over process and/or strategy, sometimes tactics. Leftist fundamentalists retain a commitment to change and to empowering the disempowered, but they are often utilizing a process almost identical to those that they would replace. Organizational structures are astonishingly nontransparent and are characterized by several levels of hierarchy with limited diversity. White males are usually in control.

For example, many U.S. labor organizations are usually run by elected white guys with an executive’s prerogative to make top-down decisions. Focus in parochial. Jobs…

Marcia and I have noticed that as political organizers focused on transparency, diversity and collapsing hierarchy, we often end up with allies in the far Left. Though we have been fully engaged in the electoral process and have worked for Democratic candidates (working for candidates is relatively uncommon in the far Left), we often find ourselves in disagreement with the Left that works with Democrats. Still, these positions and arguments are an illusion obfuscating a magic underneath.

Within the American Left are several evolutionary waves representing differing stages of societal transformation. There are the Leftists seeking rights and resources for the disempowered in the U.S. These folks–unions, minority-rights groups, faith-based groups–often work with the Democratic Party. They are hierarchically organized themselves, usually with a top-down structure. They’ve been called the soft Left, mid Left or just progressives.

There is another group seeking rights and resources for the disempowered in places far away, in addition to the disempowered here. These activists tend to be less hierarchically-organized, more transparent, though not necessarily more diverse in their makeup. These folks are usually called the radicals, hard Left or the rabble-rousers.

There is a third group, which doesn’t exactly have a name. This group…