In late November and early December, my colleagues and I were working at collecting information from the 1,500 organizations that comprise the Peace, Justice & Environment Project (PJEP).  We work with organizers that are the contact person for their organization, mostly through email, occasionally by phone.  For me, it averages out to my talking to each person that I work with maybe once or twice a year.  There are several hundred people that I work with.

Those mostly fairly tenuous relationships resulted in our being able to accumulate 100 actions protesting the Obama escalation of Afghanistan, while keeping the 1,500 organizations apprised of the growing number of actions.  Just after the December 1 and 2 actions, I got a call from a North Carolina organizer wanting to know how we were different from United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ), which had limited resources and was not able to organize around the escalation protests, other than sending out emails.  I responded that PJEP is sort of like a national organization’s outreach, communications and technology departments.  PJEP involves itself in no content creation or leadership articulation of the issues.  PJEP is mostly just process, process seeking to empower the actions and projects created by small, local organizations.  PJEP does not initiate or articulate.  We empower and encourage.

Empowering and encouraging involves access to and distribution of high quality information.  The closer to consensus reality we are, the better we’re able to perform our job of mapping out the landscape to achieve goals.  PJEP, by simply being in contact with 1,500 organizations, able to retrieve from them information on what exactly they are doing, allows us to share that information, empowering activists with knowledge of their place in the larger whole.  For example, speakers at local events could state with confidence that over 100 cities around the country were protesting a government decision.  Groups are not acting in isolation.

Just before the protests, one of the places I searched for high quality information was Twitter.  Conducting a number of different searches, such as “Afghanistan protest” or “escalation protest” or just “#protest” or “#Afghanistan,” I was shocked to discover there was very little activity around the 100 emerging protests across the country.  One activist posted his frustration with finding any information regarding the protests on Twitter.  That got more retweets than any protest posting.

Concluding that the protests were not generating heated conversations among youth, it was easy to predict, early December 1, that attendance across the country would be low, with mostly the usual older folks.  Indeed, that was the case.  The largest of the 100 demonstrations was in Chicago, with about 450 in attendance.  The folks in Chicago all considered this a healthy turnout.  I received many emails from organizers in other states that were disappointed by the low attendance.

Chicago was the very first city in the country to post that an action would occur at 5:00 p.m. the evening after the announcement.  Organizers worked hard to create the event, led by Andy Thayer, whose leadership has become integral to almost all Chicago Left mass demonstrations.  Chicago also has almost every Left organization on a single organizational listserve.  This dramatically speeds up the time it takes to put a spontaneous project together.  Most cities don’t display as much cooperation among organizations as Chicago does.  Then again, most cities don’t have activists like Andy Thayer.  Andy doesn’t only take responsibility for doing what other activists don’t step up to do, but he executes those things with efficiency, professionalism and a creative flare.

How could other cities have encouraged larger numbers to attend their 100 demonstrations?  Chicago was a unique situation.  Though Twitter was not engaged, Andy relied upon Facebook extensively, even posting links to the other demonstrations around the country from his Facebook page.  A heavier reliance upon social media like Facebook by other city demonstrations might have had a positive effect.

Still, I don’t think the low numbers around the country were about what organizers could have done differently.  Activists that worked hard for Obama mostly did not show.  This included many faith-based, union and African-American activists.  Clearly, youth mostly were not engaged.  That leaves me wondering what youth in the United States would be inclined to twitter about as regards political change.  Furious Twitter activity around the Iran elections engaged a massive number of Americans.  The Afghanistan escalation jolted few.

What in America would compel a powerful Twitter response?

At the end of last November and the beginning of December, Peace, Justice & Environment Project (PJEP) volunteers worked hard to keep the 41 websites serving 50 states current with actions appearing across the country, which were protests of the Obama Afghanistan escalation. There were 99 events posted, by far the most comprehensive list available on the web.  Nevertheless, though attendance was often excellent at these events, it was usually older activists.

Though some activists posted the wider list to Facebook, Facebook events were mostly not linking to other Facebook actions in other locations.  Twitter, profoundly effective at encouraging worldwide attention on events in Iran, was strangely absent from the almost 100 events occurring across the U.S.

This obviously points to young people not being as motivated to fight the Obama escalation as their older activist associates.  If young people were not Twittering their friends to attend events, then it is likely young people were not consumed by the particular issue.  There is another thing suggested.  Not only were young people not feeling compelled to congregate, young people were possibly not feeling empowered to make their feelings known.  There is the possibility that former young…

It happens that while I am deep into composing text describing evolutionary theory, I’ll get an idea having to do with creating or adjusting online website programming designed to enhance communications among social change organizations.

There is the actual idea and there is my awareness of the context of the idea generation.  Then, there is my awareness of the context’s context.  One of the interesting repercussions of theorizing about the origins of consciousness is a frequent shift of position to being aware of how I am aware.

Back to the idea.  It struck me that our PJEP network of almost 1,500 organizations spread across 50 states has little ability to effortlessly proliferate a local action, petition, boycott, eletter or fundraiser campaign across state lines without someone having to cajole, encourage or harangue an ally or potential ally, who could then take that action or campaign and post it in a different state network.  Negotiation accompanies almost every attempt to forge an alliance if there is text involved.  Most organizations have few contacts outside their immediate town or region and so don’t even start the process.

The idea was to simply allow the banding together of different local organizations, or chapters…

An article in the November 9 NY Times, “Refining the Twitter Explosion“, described changes that Twitter programmers are making to Twitter, changes that are taking steps toward a dramatic realignment of our society.

The article noted that in January 2009, daily traffic was 2.4 million transmissions, but it grew to 26 million tweets by October.  Then, the writer Noam Cohen noted the importance of geographic location to high quality information: “Improvements like geolocation have the potential to make the Internet suddenly relevant to society as it is lived, not just relevant to what happens online.”

Twitter at present offers uncannily high quality information, if presented in 140 characters, in real time.  A major issue is access to information, which is stymied by Twitter’s present inability to control other variables.  That is changing.  The NY Times article suggests that Twitter is considering initiating a management tool that allows searchers for content to focus on both time (as long as the time is recent) and place.  The article describes the ability to then monitor individuals’ responses to, for example, the Ft. Hood horror, while it’s happening.

I’ve been writing about the growth of these communication tools for two years…

Exploring human origins and social change paradigms is far more than the specialty of evolutionary biologists and anthropologists.  To understand our origins, it is necessary to understand human consciousness, human consciousness as it relates to prehuman consciousness, and whatever alternative consciousness is necessary to put the other two in context.  In other words, to understand ourselves and our society’s changes, let’s consider an alternative intervention.  Let’s try less dry explorations.  Let’s get wet.

What began as a creative exercise several years ago has evolved into an unconscious routine.  I used to make believe, or run an “as if” frame, that said that if society is changing according to a hidden yet overarching dynamic, the future could be intuited or predicted by patterns or trends observable in the present.  I’d place myself in a meditative space and listen.

The deepest, most impact-filled presupposition that I live with is Descartes’ conclusion that because I am aware, I’ll accept that I exist.  Next in importance is this presupposition:  Because I experience feeling part of something larger than myself, I will accept the experience as valid, even though I began meditating almost 40 years ago with that experience as a goal.  In other words,…

I’m in the process of refining a nearly 100-page introduction to what I’m now calling “The Orchestral Theory of Evolution” or maybe “Neoteny, Evolution and Autism”. I haven’t decided yet.  The 13-page introduction to “The Theory of Waves,” posted last February, has been made less condensed and more accessible, with societal applications included.  The name has been changed with the integration of estrogen as the hypothesized agent controlling the timing of maturation.  I see estrogen as the conductor of the symphony of evolution.

Whereas most not-particularly-grounded amateur theorists with big ideas usually find themselves thinking of Einstein, I wonder about Darwin.  A couple things come to mind right now.

I often write about the nature of the Internet and its future.  It’s not just my profession, but it feels to me to be a particularly evocative part of the contemporary manifestations of neoteny-driven social structure transformations.  A half dozen blogs pick up my pieces regarding the Internet, some with respectable circulations, such as Counterpunch, The Public Record, BuzzFlash and The People’s Voice.  In the world I see forming, the amateur is gaining influence insofar as a person with few or no credentials now has an ability to acquire a relatively…

Google is nothing like a seamless citation system though it has lately improved its ability to find academic papers when certain searches are conducted.  I’m wondering what the effect upon academia would be of a search engine that intuitively displayed the sources of concepts cited in academic and nonacademic works.

No doubt Chomsky would reveal his influence in even more papers than he does now, Chomsky being the most oft-cited of living academics.  What I’m trying to get a feel for is how academia would change if the lineage of influence evident in the citations that accompany a paper were generated by an algorithm instead of the author.  What would emerge would be similar to what we observe now on the web, with a proliferation of very specific, nonrandom links connoting respect and influence.

I look at things evolutionarily.  I seek connections over time that suggest influence directions, and I seek to find out how interconnection propels the behavior of individuals.  An academic, when creating citations in a work and seeking respect among peers, is creating a lineage tree, or evolution history, by describing the precursors to his or her idea.

There is that delightful diagram of the relationship of…

Perhaps 150 academics have contacted me over the last 11 years after coming across one of my websites or this blog.  Some were directed to my work by my having contacted them.  Others happened across it on a search.  Others by referral.  Almost universally, they leave no comments online.  They email me directly with comments or questions.  I receive maybe one email for every three posts by nonacademics.  With academics, I receive maybe 200 emails for every one comment post.

I don’t think the issue is that they feel like they are performing or speaking to a group when commenting online where other visitors can observe a conversation.  What I believe is happening here is partly a hesitation to become associated with concepts they themselves have not signaled that they support.  Perhaps they are concerned about association with an individual that will tout the visitor’s support when it was not provided.

The horizontal, transparent, diverse world of the Internet does not exactly occupy the same behavioral space as academia.  Academics are carving out territories where their names are associated with various disciplines.  They are building walls around a place where their expertise has been established.  This is so they can…

I’ve been noticing that Stumbleupon, the web service that directs participants to interesting sites, has been directing more and more visitors to this site, sometimes more than 100 a day.  For several years, Stumbleupon has been directing some days several hundred visitors to my original evolutionary theory site, serpentfd.org.  I’ve never been able to quite figure out what Stumbleupon is, and yesterday I drilled down a bit after finally joining the group, telling the application my interests and starting to follow where the site directed me to go.

I soon discovered that the reason my original evolution site, posted in 1998, gets so much Stumbleupon traffic is that it has been both a featured site in the evolution section and a site that receives five stars.  The review section of the site gathered almost 30 comments in almost six years; some of those who commented were confused, but many seemed impressed.  I was astonished that my site received respect.  I’m just so used to feeling invisible.

A recent email from an author whose work I deeply respect, his books having introduced me in the 1970s and 1980s to such concepts as sociobiology and matrifocal society, noted the near impossibility of…

I’m a search engine optimization (SEO) specialist by profession, in addition to running a web development firm.  This is in no small part due to the fact that SEO requires little technical expertise.  I’m one of those people that never did figure out a VCR, has trouble with cell phones and is easily stymied by unfamiliar technology.  My running a successful web development firm is based on my having a superb staff and a solid business model based upon serving very small businesses.

In 2002, I figured out Google’s algorithm, long before the competition, pretty much by chance.  I was immersed in creating web directories.  My firm’s website achieved position #1 for “web site design” and maintained that position for over a year.  I was getting top ten spots for items such as “lingerie,” “mortgage” and “airplane tickets.”  By achieving such high positions, the firm was bringing in many clients.  At the time, I had a two-person firm, minuscule compared to my competition.  On November 15, 2004, Google made a dramatic adjustment in its algorithm, penalizing what it had been formerly encouraging.  My expertise dramatically diminished.  To reproduce what I had accomplished would take resources a two-person firm did not…

It struck me this evening that there are no Leftist specialists on the Internet and the Internet’s influence on Left politics.  There are journalists that write stories about the Internet and politics.  There are Left and left-of-center blogs that discuss the influence of the Internet on politics.  There are books, such as Viral Spiral and Here Comes Everybody, that are partly devoted to Internet activism and how the Left is impacted by the web, but I’m having trouble finding examples of those concentrating pretty much exclusively on Left politics and the net.

There is Richard Stallman’s late 20th-century crusade to carve out a commons on the web.  His influence has been astonishing.  In the Left community that I am part of, I am in contact with hundreds of activists.  His name has never been mentioned.

The word “hacker” has evolved over the last 20 years.  It rarely appears in Leftists’ conversations.  Nevertheless, its emerging meaning has more to do with an egalitarian revolution than with one that violates private cyber space.  The folks I am in contact with are little aware of the young programmers’ community fighting for free code and shared universal software.  There are few bringing the young,…

There are about a dozen of us volunteers working with nearly 1500 local peace, justice and environmental organizations in 50 states. The Peace, Justice and Environment Project (PJEP), located at pjep.org, places in the hands of local activists, at no cost, the kinds of tools that larger organizations have access to. This includes such features as online fundraising, eletters, online petitions and boycott tools. In addition, we make available almost 1000 resource documents congregating in 44 issue clusters, offer inter-organizational communications tools, and connect activists with like minded grassroots organizers in other states.

Spontaneous protests have been emerging across the country this last week with activists demonstrating against Obama’s anticipated escalation of the Afghanistan war. Currently United for Peace & Justice (UFPJ) is in flux. They are in debt functioning with all volunteer staff as the steering committee reaches out to member groups to help define the future of UFPJ. As a result, A.N.S.W.E.R., National Assembly, Codepink and World Can’t Wait (WCW) have been, by and large, offering attention to this issue as national organizations. Nevertheless, none of those organizations have an inclusive national presence with chapters or affiliates in every state. Only WCW has put any…

Clive Thompson’s September Wired article, “The New Literacy,” had me thinking several things.

The article describes an academic’s conclusion that there is a writing renaissance going on with astonishing increases in writing by students as they use communications technologies.  It has been believed by many that texting and social media are deprecating communication.  Professor Andrea Lunsford concluded the opposite.  New technologies are encouraging the young to share experiences by writing.

Several things come to mind.

First, texting is acquiring a number of unique conventions that are beginning to approach a different language.  I don’t speak text.  This is a function of my peer group, my age and the fact that I’m at my computer three-fourths of my waking hours.  Perhaps text is approaching another language as its conventions proliferate.  If that is the case, then maybe this is a good thing as regards the inculcation of flexibility of mind.  As youth text, they encourage an ability to experience the world through an alternative perspective.

Second, the day will come when voice translators advance to offer an effortless ability to take our spoken words and transform them into written text.  Gifted youth will find they can profoundly proliferate their productions by…

In the United States, there have been three powerful democratization surges in the last 100 years.  Each featured an experience by participants of feeling part of something larger than themselves.  It continues to astonish me how the one we are experiencing now is almost invisible to folks I know.

In the 1930s, working people were provided a voice and power to affect their lives in positive ways.  The commons emerged as a political power as people were able to realize that the process of focusing on shared resources provided a new way of viewing influence.  Democratization was viewed as a feature of the commons.

In the 1960s, democratization acquired an almost spiritual dimension as peace and new interpersonal-communication protocols became integral to understanding how the commons operated.  Integration and feminization transformed the idea of how working together worked.  I felt part of something larger than myself.

Over the last 20 years, there has been growing a third wave of commitment to the commons.  Far more subtle than the other two waves, its influence has been exponentially more powerful.  Perhaps it makes no sense to separate them; they are all part of the same process.  The process features a horizontalization of…

As we are transitioning out of magazine presentations of Left or Progressive news, news analysis and societal observation and into Internet exhibition of similar content, it looks and feels like we have been presented with several paradoxes.  Paradoxes can seem to disappear once a transition is complete.  The old world view just seems quaint.  Nevertheless, at this point in the process, many print vehicles are experiencing struggle.

Old Model
• Print
• Insight and Erudition
• Professional
• Older Demographic
• Well-researched, articulate, unique content
• Visionary individual
• Community is defined by those that share common values (alliances are with those you respect)
• Hierarchical, segregated, secretive (content is hoarded and shared for money)
• Measured delivery expecting respect for a calm and reasonable presentation
• Unique content

New Model
• Web
• Insight, Erudition, Commentary, Editorializing, Entertaining, Linking, Aggregating
• Amateur
• Young Demographic
• Aggregated, articulate, shared content
• “Wisdom of the crowds”
• Community is defined by those that share common anything (all alliances are ad hoc)
• Horizontal, diverse, transparent (content is distributed to all for free)

In the 1960s, there was the “Generation Gap.”  Youth were perceived by themselves, their parents and society at large as feeling alienated from their parents and society.  Several new forces had emerged that were embraced by youth, forces that felt foreign to older folks.  Nonmonogamous premarriage behavior was reveled in.  Promiscuity was respected.  The Pill and an emerging woman’s movement made this possible.  Drugs were embraced as techniques to acquire insight about the self.  Music grew to become an opportunity to realize and reveal far more about the self than a desire for a mate.  The draft was vilified.  Both “small is beautiful” and a new holism emerged that embraced both immediate community and global community as necessary to a balanced whole.

Still, most of the population was not above a good story.  Reagan was elected on the premise that lower taxes meant more government services.  Reagan proclaimed that empowering the wealthy would result in increasing the resources of those with no money.  The Generation Gap seemed to decrease as Americans almost universally focused on the more and more difficult task of maintaining an established lifestyle as resources congregated with fewer and fewer people.

In the 1960s, there was a…

In the work of scientists, and specifically evolutionary psychologists, there are two unstated presuppositions that make their often elegant, jewel-like conclusions less valuable or useful.

The first presupposition is the usually unstated position that regarding consciousness, a larger consciousness can be assumed to be not present.  This potentially influences theorizing outcomes.  There is a heavy negative emotional valence assigned to theories that presuppose a grounding consciousness.  Some of these theories, for example creationism or intelligent design, are associated with irrational, nonscientific, mythological, constituency-based belief systems.  It is assumed that choosing a nonconsciousness position enhances theorizing capabilities and that a consciousness position is associated with mythology and a respect for non-sense-based conclusions.  Dawkins’ evangelical atheism is an example of evolutionary psychology’s tendency to lump together mythology-based faiths or beliefs with nonmythology, trans-consciousness hypotheses.

The second presupposition revolves around evolutionary psychology’s unstated presupposition that patrifocal social structure is the default social frame of human evolution.  Matrifocal social structure is rarely rejected; it is just ignored.  David Buss has done sterling work exploring mating conventions among people living in patrifocal social structure.  Studies cited in many works by evolutionary psychologists ignore matrilineal or matrifocal examples.  If it can be assumed that matrifocal social…

Thomas S.  Kuhn in his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions describes the way that science textbooks are written that results in the destruction of student abilities to understand how science evolves.  Textbooks are written from the perspective of the current paradigm.  The history of a discipline is told as if all discoveries unfolded along a path leading to contemporary insights.  Left out of textbooks are the unique world views retained by the succession of paradigms.  Past unresolved, nonintegrated anomalies get discarded as the story of the current paradigm is told.  Anomalies are the doorways to revolutions.  With old, unintegrated anomalies ignored, science students are inducted into a society with secrets.  Disciplines become amnesiac.  Individuals within a discipline don’t know what they don’t know.

A very peculiar thing is happening to time and space.  We are experiencing an elimination of time and space in societal relations.  As individuals, we are experiencing a shift in identity.

Several hundred years ago, we had no watches.  In Western society, a vague sense of linear time accompanied those with access to resources.  They could tell the time.  For the rest, church bells bonged out the hour.

Fifty years ago, we all had analog watches that…

It’s interesting how influential barriers and speed of communication are upon systems and their abilities to achieve goals.

With a brain, I observe dramatically different forms of consciousness exhibited depending upon varying degrees of communication between cerebral hemispheres.  Seamless communication suggests primary process, animal, autistic, nonreflective consciousness.  Inhibited communication compels self-conscious, self-aware, often confused, alienated and modern, reflexive frames of reference.  A single society may profit from both paradigms.  We need our artists, mystics, businesspeople and politicians.

In our society, I also observe dramatically different forms of consciousness exhibited.  Different individuals within a society may produce a balance, thus offering a society a multiplicity of forms.  Still, a society may produce tendencies describable by how influential barriers and speed of communication are upon societal systems and their abilities to achieve societal goals.

In an individual, seamless cerebral communication may prevent the emergence of individual-driven creativity with no relative experience of different times, different places or what a thing may be if a thing is not.  In a society characterized by massive barriers and poor communications, a disappearing of those barriers may have an opposite effect.  Instead of a diminution of self awareness, a society without barriers that follows a society…

Once we finally began to move away from kings and queens that were gods and goddesses, monarchs or emperors that were also deities, cults of individuality began to flourish.  It is no mistake that a cult of individuality thrives where there is hierarchy.  To deify an individual there has to be a social climb.

The U.S. exhibits one extreme form of an individuality cult; some would say it is a particularly virulent form.  We have worshiped an ability of individuals to transcend circumstance and achieve reverence and respect.  There have been positive and negative aspects of this social frame.  We have not had a thriving model of the commons or a belief that it is good for all if each citizen begins adulthood warm, fed, healthy and educated.  It has been relatively easy for status-quo Americans to choose selfishness while we’ve experienced the rich gains that come from offering attention and adulation to the individual.  It definitely makes for great stories.

It is not obvious yet, but the American cult of individuality is in decline.

Seamless communication destroys barriers.  Barriers enhance focus on those that control information or resources.  A cult of individuality extolling the successes of individuals requires stratification…

There is a process that we engage in that is characterized by our observing changes in information over time, noting trends and estimating where we will be in the future.  Our lives are filled with charts that provide an image of where we may end up at some particular point.  Usually what is implied is something scary.  Gore’s pictorial representations of greenhouse gases are an example.

I engage in a similar process, focusing on patterns that reflect both personal experience and my social environment.  What interests me are evolution, transformation, consciousness and interconnection.  The news might suggest some specific thing is bound to get worse because there is an evident pattern to support the conclusion, and then it focuses on that thing because it drives viewers to return.  I also have a criterion for what I focus on.  My criterion is that what I follow has to be interesting.

So, reality has little to do with what the media choose to share.  Reality has little to do with what I choose to focus on and write about.  Still, whether a song describes reality isn’t as important as whether the song succinctly expresses feelings and a point of view.  That is…

The Peace, Justice & Environment Project now covers 50 states serving over 1,400 organizations.  Our first fundraiser on July 4th was a success.  Where do we go from here?

I began working on this project over three-and-a-half years ago.  It started with my seeking a way to flip Moveon’s model by supplying local activists an ability to create actions and develop powerful lists with the potential to propagate those actions across wide areas from the bottom up.  Marcia and I experimented with Moveon techniques locally.  We were effective, quickly building an 1,800-person activist list, driving people to events, getting media coverage.  Would it be possible to develop a system where the lists were shared by all participating organizations in a state?

Programmer Rod Homor and I worked out a web application that we were able to test statewide in Illinois with the new Illinois Coalition for Peace & Justice.  It was well received.  It was an online commons offering participating organizations an ability to form ad hoc coalitions with other organizations around the state.  Organizations shared network resources (a central email list) when enough organizations voted support for one another’s projects.

I took the show on the road.  First Minnesota,…

“As emphasized throughout this case study, Zapotec women hold strong roles economically, socially, and in the kinship system.  The father is almost always living in the Zapotec matrifocal household, and relations between husband and wife tend to be highly egalitarian.  It is not only acceptable for women to exercise… authority in their everyday lives, it is currently expected and encouraged.”  (The Isthmus Zapotecs: A Matrifocal Culture of Mexico, Beverly Newbold Chinas, 2002, p. 87)

Comedy can offer insight not easily accessed through other cultural venues.  Growing up, I noticed that the main male characters in The Honeymooners, The Flintstones and in my own home exhibited a decidedly nondominant male exercising a belief in male dominance.  This seemed to be essential to the joke.  Males behaved like they were in control.  They weren’t in control.  This seemed funny.

For several years, I worked with a Feng Shui master.  I drove out to his home in a far southern suburb of Chicago a couple times a month.  We drank tea.  He occasionally made recommendations.  I don’t remember him talking much.  Mostly he offered the perspective or position of not taking seriously something specific that I was at the time taking seriously.  Tom…

“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…

In physics there is the phenomenon where the closer a traveler comes to the speed of light, the more separate one’s “time” becomes from the traveler’s place of origin.  Einstein imagined time while riding a beam of light as if it were a train and concluded that time is relative.

In the physics of biology and social change, identity is a variable that, like time, can change.  What is necessary to be able to trace transformations in identity is a model of biological and social evolution that embraces consciousness or awareness as a default feature of the system.  This is quite different from our present predilection to presuppose that the underlying system does not exhibit consciousness or awareness.  Note the works of contemporary, respected evolutionary psychologists Dawkins, Dennett and Miller.  There is an assumption built upon an allegiance to natural selection being the only necessary process to drive evolution.  That assumption is that because god is not necessary for evolution, god does not need to exist.  All three are atheists.

Identity is changing.  And, like the rider on a light beam, we have a difficult task to evaluate the relativistic nature of our experience without access to an alternative landscape. …