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.

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 by increasing the number of people we are in contact with every day while seeking to make those communications clear enough to be useful.  We are provided more and more effective sorts, functions and information enhancement features.  Youth trained in multitasking transition quickly to new applications.  Older folks aren’t seeing the advantages of letting go of what they experience as a more intimate, personal experience characterized by fewer contacts.

Developments using Twitter in Iran underline the difficulties of the medium when it comes to integrating or synthesizing information.  The wisdom of the crowds is marginalized when the crowd is looking for high quality information, and all it has is agreement.  Twitter and social networking media are failing to offer insight.  The reason for this is that the applications are not tracing the movement of information in real time, tracking the lineage of ideas as they move across the medium.  The applications are not noting when ideas evolve nor are they paying attention to the identity of the individuals who are present when a new idea emerges.  Furthermore, they are not indicating the individuals who are instrumental to an idea’s propagation.

This is not science fiction.  Now that memes or words representing specific thoughts or concepts can be traced as they spread across a network of users, those memes can be followed in just the way that in biological evolution we can track the evolution of species over time.  With Twitter or a Twitter-like application, we can not only trace the evolution of ideas, we can put into the hands of users an ability to conduct searches for these ideas and their particular evolution trajectories.  In other words, users can request reports like we now conduct a Google search, reports that track the speed, span, depth and breadth of ideas as they move across the web.

For example, in Iran let’s say the conversations that citizens are having regarding the exact kind of administration they would like to see are integrated with where in the country people are congregating with those opinions, who the individuals are that are instrumental in the distribution of those ideas, how fast the ideas are spreading and how many degrees of separation are being generated at what rate.  Imagine anyone being able to issue a report collating that information, using that information to draw conclusions, conclusions fed back into the idea distribution network to be able to be traced for their effect.

The result would not be the kind of chaos observed just after the elections but an automatic, lightning speed, dramatic realignment based upon high-quality, real-time information available to anyone who wants it.  This is the equivalent of nature conducting its usual healing in an area devastated by catastrophe.  With countless species in close communication with one another using the information-sharing channels characteristic of natural systems, unique integrations can emerge as a result of adjustment to new conditions.

For this to work in society, as in nature, there can be no hierarchy.  Every person in the system gets access to the reports that offer insight into the nature of the information.  Whereas now each of us uses “search,” with the direction we are going there will be a second level, a meta level, where each of us uses “report.”  At this level the wisdom of the crowd can become conventional wisdom, investing every individual with enhanced understanding, not just enhanced communication.

There is a not so subtle change that accompanies this shift in perspective, this embracing of the meta level of systems operations.  This change is a change in identity.  As we as individuals begin to understand and embrace a viewpoint characteristic of the way many individuals experience the evolution of information, the identity shift that the young in our communities are experiencing will receive an exponential boost.

Observe that the young are now members of communities, online social networking systems, several orders of magnitude greater than anyone not online.  This is having a profound effect upon how we experience ourselves as individuals.  Our peer groups are now far larger, more unique and often self-selected; they are not inhibited by geography.  Our identities are shifting.  We are voluntarily participating in that process.

Consider this ability to romance the wisdom of the crowds so that this understanding becomes easily accessible with the possibility of being further influenced.  Now consider this effect upon individual identity.  The commons will become common.  We will not be able to think of ourselves without considering others.  We are talking about a feminization of society.

As I was observing Twitter in Iran this June, these two things came to mind.  Social networking does not just have to be only about communication.  Social networking can also be about integration.

Where there is integration, there is a shift in identity.  Social networking can change who we think we are.

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 disassociation in space or being a different person. Empathy, envy and the other theory of mind emotions are evident in our great ape cousins. Yet, with the emergence of language and time, a depth was added to our ability to identify with the other that has a lot to do with our relationship with the future, our survival as a species and an exploration of what it means to have identity.

We started out with little language, no sense of time, no identity. We grew to become adept at speech, with a powerful sense of time, with identity. Nevertheless, without making the choice to at least on occasion not have identity, or shift identity to experience consciousness on an expanded scale, our powerful sense of time is hobbled by difficulties viewing the future as a commons, a group holding, a possession of something-larger-than-the-self.

Consider time as a territory with the future as the commons. To survive, it is necessary that we pay close attention to where our resources are stored. Paradoxically, they are stored in the future. That is where our descendants live.

This alternative path toward understanding time suggests an emerging new, third way of experiencing self. The commons is sacred space. The future is our commons. To know this we need an expanded sense of self, a shift in identity.

Whereas we started with little or no sense of self before language, with language and culture we’ve acquired a clear sense of self, of time and of that which is within our personal control. The third place, the synthesis of the first two in a sense, involves an expanded sense of self, which is very different from the no sense of self, yet they are related. We’re going from no time, to time, to yes time. We’re evolving to a place where the future can feel familiar as we intuit our connection with people and an earth that does not yet exist.

This is more than an exercise of imagination.

The opportunity we are creating to make that transition has an enormous amount to do with the new online and cell phone communications technologies. We are shifting identity. We are tying together narcissism and mass cooperation, two distinctly different identity levels, expanding our personal boundaries to include the information received from countless others.

Our defined self is being redefined to include self and others.

The next step is to cross the boundary of time.

When tens of millions of people buy SUVs because they see friends buying SUVs and they see SUV commercials telling them to do so, they are responding to one-to-many communications media commands within a consumer economy that congregates profits in the hands of those that control the communications. We are encouraged to be selfish and not think of the future. Exercising a sense of time only insofar as it offers immediate or delayed results to be experienced by the self gets us only part way to where we have to go.

New communications technologies are expanding our sense of self. Along with that our sense of time is changing. The future is ceasing to be a place that we steal from to satisfy a limited self. The future is becoming our vastest commons, offering literally infinite resources to integrate into our expanded sense of self.

While doing so we are redefining mysticism. Spirituality is acquiring another name. Spirituality now has nothing to do with mythology. Shifting identity is the name of what is now a social game.

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.  Leo had a gift for finding and repping beautiful greeting card lines.  I pretty much represented anything that would sell, but I did carry some beautiful things.  We both represented a particular repping paradigm.  There were enough unique stores in the Chicago area that neither of us felt compelled to sell anything to any shop.  In addition, we didn’t believe in selling products to a store that we didn’t think would succeed.  We were sales reps with a conscience.  This was possible because we sold unique products in a thriving commercial community, one with few geographic limitations.

The other paradigm was characterized by reps seeking to make the most money that they could from the territory that they represented, often a geographically limited territory, which forced them to make profits from a relatively small area.

Whereas Leo and I would evaluate quickly whether the store we were visiting could profit from our wares, leaving if we estimated it could not, reps with small, limited territories might stay and pursue a possible sale, working the hard and soft sell paradigms to get that sale, spending the time it took to close.  The behemoth of Leo and my industry was Recycled Paper Products.  Over time, RPP made smaller and smaller territories for their reps, forcing them to place their greeting cards in more and more locations.  Recycled’s take-no-prisoners placement practices were loathed by many in the industry.  If reps did not quickly perform, they were fired.

Recycled was a large, hierarchical company with many reps with tiny territories with rep incentives to sell to every store they could.  Leo and I represented many companies and had large territories with incentives to sell only to those stores that could profit handsomely over time.

The two salesmen paradigms have relevance in an area perhaps not obvious until examined from an alternative point of view.  The web has the potential to become a vast, horizontal economic engine distributing wealth to huge numbers, an alternative to free markets that create stratification and the congregation of wealth with a relative few.  The difference in the two paradigms can be examined in the context of the two kinds of salesmen.

With the web, anyone on the planet with a computer, or now a cell phone, can easily find another person with similar interests and can email an invitation to collaborate.  With unlimited access, sharing becomes the default.  With the web, resources naturally seek wide audiences with barriers having disappeared.  This is in direct contrast to resources congregating in the hands of the few at the top of hierarchies.  This is all about geography.  A rep in a small territory is forced to behave in only his or her best interest when resources are limited in a confined space.  A rep in a large territory loses the incentive to spend time convincing a marginal potential customer to behave in a way that may not be in the potential customer’s best interest.

With an unlimited territory and access to information on who is in that territory there is no incentive to behave in any other way than in each party’s best interests.  Taking time to form relationships that can potentially end sooner than later is a waste of time.

The astonishing transformation we are in the middle of now hasn’t really started to take effect.  We are in a transitional phase where limping, large firms are selling consumer products to wounded consumers.  It can soon be time for very small firms or individuals to be selling unique content to users across the planet.

Back when Leo and I were reps, I worked for Andrews & McMeel, syndicator and publisher of The Far Side and Calvin & Hobbes products.  I was also a comic artist, published a local comic monthly and attended comic strip and panel conferences.  At one of those conferences I talked with Scott McCloud, wunderkind of the comic industry, a philosopher and engineer of the context and mechanics of the comic arts.

One of the things we talked about was how the emerging web (this was in the 1990s) could create the opportunity for a tidal wave of creativity by rewarding artist sites with micropayments for traffic to those sites.  The comic industry could support thousands instead of maybe 50 comic artists in the U.S. if all the comic artists producing work would have access to their audience in a way that the users could without effort reimburse the creator with a penny for every minute on the site.

This is the Leo model of repping, with an unlimited territory encouraging a large, loyal audience dispersed over a vast plane.  The environment would be characterized by sharing and mutual respect.  No conditions accompany the exchange of assets, other than the presence of the user.  There is no hierarchy, no classic consumer, just the user and content producer sharing space and time.

Consider this model applied to aesthetic productions across the web:  educational pieces, journalistic stories, music, music video, comic art and lectures.

Who would disperse these pennies to get the system started, to prime the pump of the Aesthetic Economy?  What would it take to connect creators and users across the planet in a way that our economy could remarkably transform and people would be employed, manifesting the productions of their imagination?

Begin with government funding.  Get the system up and running.  Perhaps tax nonsustainable goods and services to reimburse the emerging global, integrative, horizontal Aesthetic Economy.

Consider the emergence of an unlimited online geography characterized by universal micropayment commercial access.

When geography disappears, equality becomes not just possible, but ubiquitous.

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, it is all a rather entertaining kind of organized chaos, with an emphasis on the organization.

The time has come for the government to step in and enhance the rewards provided to website content creators who succeed in achieving long-term social goals.  The potential benefits are enormous.

There are three areas that can grow at exponential speeds, and they are serving both industries in crisis and citizen users of the web:  media, education and art.

Government funds can pay for news stories, lectures and art appearing in the form of videos and text on the web.  The more visitors and the more time they spend watching and reading a piece, the more funds the creators receive.  At a certain level, the amount of money dispersed to production operations decreases as it becomes clear that they have enough traffic to raise funds through traditional advertising.

The government can be seeding the amateur and professional production of news.  Print is disappearing.  Traditional media are withdrawing from the collection of high quality information.  By encouraging the collection and creation of quality content, the government would be creating a new set of institutions and making their productions available to all for free.  By receiving a penny for a visitor that stays a minute or more, a creator of a news piece has the incentive to go out and find news, make news or share news happened upon by chance.  The government, by funding a new news business, creates jobs, begins a new institution and offers high quality information to a population starved for high quality content.

Reward great teaching by making the work of teachers universally available.  Reward teachers by using a formula that takes into consideration the number of viewers, the relative popularity of their discipline and how well their viewers perform on tests.

Most classes will continue to be in person, but the government can fund the creation of videos of those educator-performers most adept at connecting with their students while successfully communicating the information.  Again, micro payments would be distributed as rewards.  Professors might work in concert with performers.  For example, trained actors could conduct scripts written by academics.  Interesting synergies might emerge.  A result would be a massive surge in high quality educational videos.  Students would arrive at testing facilities to take tests and receive credit for what they’ve been watching on the web.

With the government funding new institutions in media and education, American net users become the new consumer and decider of what they see.  The government rewards content creators based on web visitor behavior.  There are no government contracts, no lobbyists and no decisions on how to disperse assets.  This paradigm can be applied to the third area, art, where government funds could encourage a blossoming of content in several creative arts where work can be reproduced in digital format.

Consider that a dance troupe could produce a video that is viewed by a certain number of visitors, resulting in micro payments for the artists.  Amateur or professional musicians whose work is visited and revisited would find they receive payments for their productions.  Musicians and dancers working together would not seek a grant but would seek video production capabilities.  The government would have to choose which arts they would be paying.  The line between art and entertainment is not always clear.  But it would not be the government deciding who gets funded.  Traffic would mediate taxpayer assets.

Watercolor painting would not translate, but the comic arts, for example, could experience a dramatic rise.  The comic artists, tethered to disappearing print, could receive micro payments and experience an explosion.  At this time, fewer than 100 American comic strip and panel artists make a living.

Let the “wisdom of the crowds” spend taxed and borrowed money by rewarding individuals and teams producing high quality content in the areas of media, education and the arts.  We’d be spending our own money on quality productions, with no intermediaries between the consumer and producer.  The potential is vast.  Creativity could exponentially increase in areas languishing for lack of funding and attention.  The possibility for synergy is unlimited as educators, journalists and artists work together to produce pieces that have qualities of each.

Consider that we don’t actually categorize productions so that they have to be any one of the three.  It would only be necessary that a piece qualify for one of them.  Imagine news stories about artists, artists producing educational pieces and educators lecturing on the media.

Imagine a world characterized by what we have in common.

Let’s build new institutions by having government fund the web.

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 creation and appreciation is becoming blurred in a way not unlike a particularly satisfying meditation.  I’m observing young people creating/assembling music and video content while absorbing the productions of their peers.  The transition between perception and production seems to be growing smaller, the difference more difficult to define.  There is the old paradox where the act of giving provides more satisfaction to the giver than to the recipient, and this paradox is somehow manifesting in society’s new sharing, aesthetic economy.  The boundary between producer and consumer is disappearing.

In the consumer economy, ostensibly the consumer was being provided great gifts.  These bonuses were accompanied by a destruction of natural resources, the encouragement of a highly stratified society and a denial of the basic right to be free of want.  We’ve been living in a parody of the creator/appreciator paradigm as the creator is encouraged to victimize the receiver.  Some of the most creative people on the planet have been creating advertisements to tell a powerful story to compel a person to spend money with the creative person’s boss’s client.

We are shifting from a consumer economy to an aesthetic economy.  It may seem like this is happening very quickly, but the consumer economy itself has been a transitional phase that provided a bridge from the preceding economy, which was characterized by a basic exchange of goods and services.  That basic economy itself grew from an ancient, aesthetic economy characterized by craft.

In a sense, we’ve come full circle.  We’re returning to an appreciation for our own productions with an enhanced ability to produce and deliver whatever we might devise.  Accompanying this freedom to create/appreciate is a potential to again become familiar with our unique creator/appreciator human sensibility.  Society, the society of the web, is manifesting a spiritual frame of reference, one where reverence for creation is integrated into its operations.  This is a deeply secular orientation.  A religion or mythology is unnecessary.  The process itself manifests that which god is, creator and appreciator, pitcher and catcher, musician and dancer to the music.

Back when we were first painting bodies, weaving, carving and chipping tools, spirit was integrally tied to the productions of society.  There was no difference between the two.

Consider that with the Internet, god the creator and god the appreciator has returned.  Strip religion of everything but process, dump the mythology and words and what’s left is nothing but net.

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. The testosterone surges of puberty cut off brain growth.

Neoteny is central to biological evolution and integral to understanding human beings. Necessary to understanding the repercussions of this process is realizing that the moment when an individual’s maturation rate is determined, during a day six weeks before birth and based upon the mother’s testosterone level, is also the moment that decides that individual’s position in the way that society is structured based upon matrifocal or patrifocal social structures. High testosterone males mate with low testosterone females, and high testosterone females mate with low testosterone males. Understanding evolution without understanding social structure and its relationship to hormone levels and how hormone levels are determined is like trying to understand the joy of night driving with the top down by sitting in a parking lot eating cheeseburgers.

Biological evolution unfolds by working its way through that moment six weeks before birth, pushing and pulling individuals back and forth between hormonal extremes over generations, back and forth through social structures, back and forth through robust and gracile physical manifestations of maturational delay and acceleration patterns. In the same way, the evolutionary principle of neoteny also influences societal transformations, compelling society to evolve through a succession of stages propelled by the prolongation of earlier stages of societal ontogeny into older stages over time.

There is evidence to suggest we were highly matrifocal up to and past our leaving Africa. The diminution of brain size around 25,000 years ago suggests that a transition to a patrifocal orientation was underway. Patriarchy galloped out of Southern Russia 6,500 years ago and quickly converted old Europe, India and China. Right now, we are in the midst of a synthesis of matrifocal and patrifocal paradigms. From this position, we can observe surges of neoteny moving up through cultures as the neotenous characteristics of earlier stages of our societal ontogeny stream into and through contemporary society.

There are the physical features of our chimpanzee-like progenitors that have prolonged into the adult human of today, such as large brain, small jaw, big eyes, walking on hind legs, location of foramen magnum, etc., and there are the nonphysical features, such as propensity to play, creativity, alertness to that which is different, curiosity, etc. Note the most ancient cultures existing today, the young people in society, the poorest in society, the least empowered, the ethnic minorities, the political Left (representing the disempowered) and the artists. Features of these groups have been slowly, over thousands of years, been prolonging their way into societies controlled by ruling elites. This slow process over the last three hundred years has accelerated to the point that right now it’s become a convertible ambulance tearing through traffic, driven by ancient healers, carrying herbs and antibiotics in the trunk.

Aboriginals bring land-based spiritual integrity and an intuitive familiarity with the natural balance between independence and interdependence. Neoteny is characterized by close proximity to creative sources. Aboriginal cultures offer an understanding of this frame.

The young bring a form of deep curiosity and confidence that what they imagine can become true. The young are fearless. The young crave fun. Curiosity is a prime feature of neoteny, and imagination is most powerful when acculturation has not been fully engaged.

The poor and the most disempowered bring a dependency on the culture at large, and although at first glimpse this dependency seems like a deficit, from neoteny’s perspective, dependence provides a compulsion to be connected. This compulsion is mingled with intense creativity as the powerless generate art to express their relationship with the connection/disconnection polarity. As a result, they generate music, song, dance, fashion and unique athletic productions that speak for society as a whole.

Ethnic minorities often draw sustenance and inspiration from their former and present experience of poverty and a relatively close proximity to aboriginal or tribal institutions. These wellsprings of inspiration are characteristic of the sources of neoteny: creativity, sense-based spiritual revelation, deep respect for the physical and reverence for rhythm.

The political Left articulates the frustrations and the goals of neoteny’s children, helping to make it possible that the present-time orientation of the aboriginal, the young, the poor and the ethnic minorities be charted into a future that integrates their orientations, strengths and needs.

The artist or creator, along with the child, is neoteny’s mascot. To empower the creative is to bridge the essence of the child into society. Political empowerment is creative empowerment. Political repression is creative repression. To create is a political statement.

The nascent creativity characteristic of all these groups is now bursting into visibility, supercharged by the appearance of the web.

Observing it, encouraging it, we are part of it. We have a ways to go. First, let’s get the gasoline out of that convertible and find a way to fly through the night, leaving no carbon trail behind. All this creativity is converging just in time to solve the problem of how society will evolve fast and far enough to see the dawn.

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 will surge in the direction of the young, marginalizing the advantages of age. Those adept at social networking will have access to allies and resources formerly reserved for those with decades of experience.

Social networking takes time. Traditional media will suffer. You can’t easily advertise to people not paying attention. Social networking will help take down traditional media.

We are beginning to see how social networking has contributed to the Obama campaign. Next is social networking that creates its own candidate. Once political action tools become integrated into social networking applications, we will see the spontaneous emergence of specialty candidates serving niche issues and social networking-created issue advocates consulting with social networking-created elected officials.

So far, Obama has harnessed social networking to raise funds and drive people to events. Soon, social networking will raise funds that drive elected officials to respond to particular issues without the cooperation of elected officials. Politics is about to change.

Political parties are founded on hierarchy. Social networking operates horizontally, with transparency, breaking down the barriers that prevent diversity. Political party and social networking are not compatible. The processes are diametrically opposed. The young are discovering that en masse, they can make a difference. Watch for the flexing of young muscle when it is discovered that anyone, anywhere can start a part of a movement, provided the action is specific enough to make it easy to jump aboard.

When it is discovered that masses of people can agree on a specific action to achieve change around a specific issue, political parties will begin to fall apart. The skills that come with a lifetime of negotiating nuances to be able to package change in the career of a single person will disappear. Instead, masses will jump aboard social networking-driven particulars that are created by a social networking user that fits the bill of the masses in that moment. Youtube politics.

Soon we will have a universal, world-wide social networking matrix allowing individual users the ability to track their exact indirect influence on the interconnected world around them. If a person has an idea, he or she will be able to observe the trail of that idea as it moves out of her circle of friends to multiple degrees of separation. We will be able to view the source of the ideas, their distribution patterns and the human hubs through which information circulates. We will be able to compare ideas over time, their relative speed of propagation, depth of influence and geographic spread. Patterns will emerge over time that will provide users astonishing perspectives on the dynamics of meme (idea) production and evolution.

Consciousness becomes transparent when ideas, their origins and their evolutions become available for all to view. Walls come down when people feel empowered, not the other way around. When influence moves to those with time, the advantages of hierarchy disappear. Control becomes less about relationships of influence formed from creating allies while climbing up. Mastery becomes about how to move or influence the influential people that you are connected to around a very particular idea, file, event, issue or date.

The technology exists now. The feathers have formed. Flight is days away.

First we sang, and then we spoke. Now we learn to communicate.

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.

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.