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 supporters of Obama are responding to these developments by returning to a state of noninvolvement.

In other words, assuming that young people were often against the escalation and that young people were not demonstrating their objection, then we can predict a dramatic drop in young people showing up to vote in the next election.

In a blog posting of December 2, the second day of demonstrations, Paul Krugman discussed the increasing likelihood of a double-dip Great Recession.  Krugman described the repercussions of the Obama economic intervention resulting in a drift back into severe recession.  Though the piece did not discuss a combination of recession, war in Afghanistan and a resurgence in the number of Republicans elected congressmen and senators, the absence of youth in our streets suggests this scenario.

There now emerges the strong possibility that deep systemic change will only occur at state levels.  The federal government’s ability to initiate change is disappearing before our eyes.  The Senate will not approve executive support of international treaties.  Environmental legislation is deeply compromised.  The federal government behaves as if incapable of legislating additional large-scale job programs.  Congress will not inhibit presidential right-leaning initiatives.  The president cannot push left-leaning legislation through the Congress.

If the young do not exhibit their passion, the positive energy of our country’s government is destined to disappear.

The Afghanistan protests were a season ago.  The repercussions of these demonstrations will be with us for a while.

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 of nationwide organizations, in organizational alliances that would authorize a member of an organization to post an action or campaign for all participating organizations, at one time, across all participating states.  Once an action or campaign were posted, the members of any local organization could adjust the language of the action or campaign to their local liking or choose to remove themselves from that particular project.

I’m seeking to enhance a seamless proliferation of social change interventions across the country, encouraging relationships, empowering individuals, providing an opportunity for an idea emerging anywhere to have access to the resources to make its fulfillment possible.

Studying how quickly evolution operates through the extraordinary ability of natural systems to respond to information by adjusting the structure of individuals and societies, I’m seeking to program into our social change online applications an ability for small local organizations to easily share information and impact allies, thus creating opportunities for large shifts quickly.

Pieces of this particular idea have bounced around my head and been discussed by Dave, Laurel, Marcia and I for over a year, but it has never felt particularly compelling.  Then, twice this week, Marcia and I were in discussion with national or international organizations working for peace that were having trouble integrating existing chapters.  In one case, a large national organization was disintegrating, for several reasons, and not the least of all was the ineffectiveness of their communications infrastructure, based mostly on one-to-many communications.

So, it’s feeling like it is time to integrate this new programming protocol.

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 in the context of evolutionary theory and the tracking of lineage across time and space in a political action context.  My focus has been on exploring the birth and distribution of ideas in the way that individuals and species evolve in the context of the environment exerting constant influence.  This began with programmer Dave Larson and me.  We instituted social networking software that allowed the tracking of multiple degrees of separation in a fashion that permitted a tracing of speed, geographic span and number of participants in the context of political action.  That software is up and operating at PJEP.org.  I realized that the power of this model and its ability to track transmissions over time, over space, number of users and depth of degree of separation, offered a unique ability to monitor idea gestation, birth, growth and reproduction through communications technologies.  Dave suggested cell phone technology made more sense than use through a laptop.  Then, I realized that Twitter is already evolving in this direction.

With the news that Twitter is adding on a geographic element to its platform, it is clear that Twitter is exhibiting the kind of flexibility necessary to cooperate with the wisdom of the crowd.  What Twitter users are requesting is high quality information.  The kind of information becoming available with these tools is only beginning to be understood.  An individual is now less than a generation away from access to the evolution of ideas in real time, over time, with an ability to make comparisons over time of varying ideas.  At this point, Twitter does not offer much in the way of archived information that can be searched for patterns over time.  It is inevitable that the crowd will be seeking to understand information not only in the now, but over time.  When time, space, degrees of separation and the numbers of individuals associated with particular ideas are all searchable and then available through reports that offer unique, high quality, interpreted and interpretable information, an unfathomable new zeitgeist emerges.

For example, a poor child in India asks, on her cell phone, the following question:  How much faster would the local economy grow if 100,000 cell phones were made available to the poorest people at $1 a month, and how specifically could those phones be used to achieve that goal?  The child’s friends start coming up with ideas.  The technology would track the evolution of those ideas, including information about which individuals are coming up with the ideas most attended to and which individuals are most involved in the distribution of those ideas.  The application would track the speed, geographic span, degrees of separation and number of participants in the discussion.  Those results of the discussion evoking the most powerful response would be available to all interested in those results.

A transformation of society featuring the horizontalization of institutions, transparency, diversity and the use of microblogging to trace the evolution of ideas offers a profound shift in the way that individuals relate to their environment.  If the kind of access described here is accompanied by the ability of any individual to create a report that offers insight into the patterns now observable by the application, a major shift occurs, with the ability for any person with a cell phone to ask a question that can be answered.  Moreover, it is a question that was unanswerable in the past.  In other words, the kind of information that the environment can offer shifts to reveal depth of pattern or structure not even conceivable in human history.  Regarding ideas, idea origins, distribution, synthesis and reemergence–the stuff that our minds are made of–anyone with a cell phone can go exploring.

I recently attended a conference of local Chicago-area radical and liberal alternative-media specialists, about 75 people, who were seeking a better understanding of how to initiate social change by using new media tools.  More than one speaker got up to describe frustration with recent Right Wing successes at marshalling together large numbers of people to behave in specific ways at particular times and places.  Clearly, large chunks of the Left do not understand the milieu that we are entering.  The forces of change are not taking top-down orders from a single, well financed leader.  The evolutionary current is horizontal.  Individuals are seeking information, not orders.

This change in technology is reflected in a dramatically changing society.  The Left is often unaware of the relationship between a technology that offers high quality information instantaneously and a population that feels empowered to achieve goals.  The more features that Twitter acquires and the deeper an individual can dig to discover underlying patterns, the freer a society becomes.  A result of that freedom will be a complete redefinition or reevaluation of what freedom and individuality really are.  If every individual has access to the same high quality information, then individuality becomes less characterized by how each of us is different than by how each of us uniquely manifests what is the same.  Society informed by stratification gives way to an aesthetic society concerned with an appreciation of nuance, not denial.

The direction that Twitter is headed is good.  The crowd wisdom informing Twitter’s adjustments is a deep wisdom.  It is a wisdom that presupposes we are all connected.  Little is hidden.  And, each is entitled to understand.

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 accept spiritual experience on a relative basis, based upon the fact that by seeking spiritual experience I assume that it exists.  As a student of Ericksonian hypnotherapy and as a follower of the work of the psychoanalyst/dolphin researcher/altered-state specialist John C. Lilly, I can relate to Lilly’s basic premise, “What I believe to be true is true or becomes true, within the limits to be found experientially or experimentally.”

Although there is a suggestion here that truth is relative, there is also a suggestion that our mind/self is so powerful a creative force that truth can be designed.

Listening for patterns, I sit in a deeply relativistic place, aware that my unconscious presuppositions deeply inform the patterns I can be aware of, and I am aware that my choice to believe that there is overarching pattern impacts what I perceive.

I theorize that there is primary process consciousness (the one time, one place, no opposites consciousness displayed by protohumans, small children, animals, the unconscious, dreams and the autistic), split consciousness (normal waking consciousness) and a third consciousness that features aspects of the other two.

So, when I engage in the exercise of seeking understanding, I use “as if.”  Placing myself in “as if,” also called “don’t know mind,” I encourage the emergence of patterns.  I get wet.  I’m playing with the notion that this kind of getting wet is becoming common.  I’m playing with the idea that grasping human origins and social change is best conducted outside an academic environment and inside the Internet, where the process of communication is showing signs of primary process, split consciousness and the unnamed transcendent third position all at once.

One of the current default beliefs among academics is that art was a contingent, accidental, emergent feature that resulted from the evolution of our unique large brains, language and self awareness.  Geoffrey Miller has suggested that perhaps we’ve got that direction reversed.  Miller writes that art drove our evolution.  I agree, and I would go a step further.  That which we experience as art is a direct reflection or manifestation of very early ontogenetic embryonic epigenetic process.  Art was encouraged to emerge in the adult of our species via neotenic runaway sexual selection, which emphasized song and dance.  Human adult consciousness in no small way reflects the actual creative process of life on earth.  Art is a direct reflection of that process.  We think like life creates.

Right now we are creating the Internet.

I’m thinking that the best way to understand ourselves is to share.  Giving our conjectures to the Internet, an automatic citation system embedding idea lineage into its very fabrication, we can relieve ourselves of the academic compulsion to father or mother every idea into a peer-reviewed journal, with every parent knowing exactly where every child is.  Yes, there is anonymity and loss of identity when words or works of art emerge and proliferate without it being obvious who might have been an “owner.”  This is the wet world of the Internet.  Boundaries are far less distinct.  Ownership is less important.  Control is not possible.

If we are going to understand human origins and societal evolution, we have to give up control.  The third consciousness that provides an understanding of the other two is one that presupposes that former boundaries can disappear.

For many, the question is:  How can we understand something if we don’t draw lines?

It’s OK to draw lines.  We just draw them with our temporary minds.  And, observe.

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 large audience.  New communications technologies are integrating with our primate compulsions to socialize to form massive hub-and-spoke relationship structures built on a horizontal rather than a pyramid premise.  With a bachelor’s degree, emphasis in art, I get to discuss biological and social evolution with a bunch of folks.

Weird effects emerge.  About four months ago, a blog picked up a piece I had written on the Internet, social evolution and the future.  About 30 Twitterers that specialized in social media picked it up, many with over 5,000 followers.  Over the course of maybe 24 hours, close to 100,000 Twitterers were transmitted a link to my piece.  Twitter has a low read rate for transmissions, so fewer than 1,000 people of the 100,000 read the essay.  I received three emails asking questions.  This blog receives a comment or email for about every 300 views.

What I’m trying to get a feel for is how exactly are new ideas on evolution emerging and being distributed outside the conventional context of publishing in a peer-reviewed journal?  Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and blogs seem integral to this new world.  Stumbleupon, Digg and other vehicles seem to be having an effect.  Right now I am observing mostly the distribution of various aesthetics, such as music, across the Internet landscape.  I am curious how unique theory, the realm of academia, might proliferate in a nonacademic context.

It’s relatively easy for me to write and distribute a piece about the Internet on the Internet.  It’s more a challenge when it comes to evolutionary theory.  The Internet and evolutionary theory are the same to me.  Communicating the experience of it being the same is a challenge.

Back to Darwin.  One of the strangely similar things between many theorists writing in the early to mid-1800s and bloggers keyboarding today is that they were/are both amateurs.  Those earlier amateurs were almost always wealthy and were accorded excellent educations.  Their elevated station, their higher position on the social hierarchy, made it possible to influence the status quo.  Amateurs today are instead sharing ideas in an environment where hierarchies are coming down, enhancing the ability for former outsiders to have access to communities of other former outsiders.  The status quo is becoming less controlled by those with wealth and the conventional credentials.

What we are observing now is the beginning of a process of credential or barrier destruction.  Not surprisingly, it seems to be driven by the young, those with the least invested in traditional enclaves of influence and control.  Young people are creating and distributing their own aesthetics in the form of music, an area formerly controlled by corporations.  They are creating and distributing their own opinions on current events, an area formerly controlled by mainstream media.  Young people are populating one another’s world with image, video and written content; they are not satisfied with being consumers of corporate content anymore.

How exactly this will impact academia is not clear to me.  I find myself in an amateur’s position, in a small way like Darwin 170 years ago, except Darwin was at the top of a hierarchy where amateurs were respected, whereas I am watching hierarchies fall, and perhaps the last to fall will be academia.

Ironically, academia has been instrumental to the present seismic changes.  Lawrence Lessig and his colleagues have encouraged the destruction of the segregation of information with the Creative Commons movement, which encourages individuals to give up the traditional covetous attitude toward what they have created.  Where it was the working class that drove the 1930s changes, the middle class the 1960s, it seems to be a combination of youth and savvy academics that are propelling changes currently underway.  Nevertheless, not surprisingly, academia itself is proving difficult to introduce to a noncredentialed status quo.

Darwin felt loath to experience the ramifications of an introduction of his theory of natural selection to a society perhaps too willing to embrace it.  Only Wallace’s letter managed to push Darwin to publish.  Even then, Darwin put off for another 13 years publishing his theories regarding how specifically humans evolved.  Darwin was a man who was confident his ideas would be accorded both respect and controversy.

My theory of biological and social evolution emerges in an environment where again the amateur is respected, though strategies for being accorded respect are far less clear.  Darwin was a scientist who was wealthy, brilliant, creative and articulate.  I’m an artist with an active unconscious.  I ask myself if there is anything in Darwin’s amateur status that I could learn from as I seek an audience with my peers.

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 many rock ‘n’ roll artists that appears in the movie School of Rock.  It is an evolutionary chart, like Darwin’s branching tree, that reveals the chain of influence leading to the present day.

What if a search engine could automatically generate such a diagram for an academic for the various concepts explored within a paper?

Several things are coming to my mind.  First, those potentially useful former models and current subdisciplines that get made invisible by new paradigms might find their way back into contemporary theorizing if such an algorithm kept noting how they are connected.

Second, because whom one cites is important in establishing and maintaining relationships to get ideas accepted, what if those citations were not solely within the author’s control?  Perhaps the authors could be more daring or creative in what they write.  Maybe writers would take more chances if they were not haunted by the need to behave respectfully.

Third, academics now have little incentive to cite theorists and researchers outside their discipline who are exploring similar or the same processes or patterns.  They do not normally cross boundaries into one another’s journals, conferences or department management issues.  If unique algorithms could be designed that specialize in bridge concepts among disciplines, the citation lineage could be observed to break down discipline barriers, opening ideas to the light of new discipline audiences.

Consider the act of writing a paper just to observe the lineage trees generated by the algorithm.  For those fascinated by unique patterns, concepts could be strewn together just to watch them propagate their origins.  I can see paradigm-busting concepts emerging from observing the particular ways that ideas are observed to be related, particularly if discipline lines are crossed and old paradigms are shown to be still relevant.

Google and the other search engines specialize in revealing the results of connection by displaying those words and phrases that receive the most attention from other websites relevant to the word or phrase.  There is a lineage tree, with no sense of time.  It’s a snapshot of an evolutionary process, with no past.  The resources now exist to trace not just connection, but evolution, providing the opportunity to understand how ideas are born, influenced and transform over time.

Evolution is a process that happens over time and in the present.  Perhaps an algorithm that enhances our ability to view connection over time will at the same time impact our understanding of evolution.  Soon our best metaphor for evolution will not be a computer program describing genetic heritage, but the Internet itself.  What it may take to arrive at that more useful metaphor is an ability for users to view connection, not just in the present, but over time.

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 at least partly possess the respect that accompanies association.  On the web, we mostly concentrate on taking down walls while seeking respect by sharing ideas to watch them spread beyond our awareness and control.  This difference between professional and amateur doesn’t seem that extreme.  Still, control does seem an issue.

The professional, the academic, when offered respect, achieves units of currency called citations.  The amateur, the blogger and net surfer are also offered respect in the form of citations represented by links and comments.  In this way, the academic and the blogger/user are much alike.

The academic mostly shares his or her work and receives little or no money, as does the Internet sharer of ideas.  Of course, the more often academics publish, the more likely they will achieve tenure, but once tenure is achieved, papers published still bring little money.

The academics base their seeking of community respect upon the words they compose, papers written with much attention to detail, citing allies whose work they respect or whose support they seek.

The net idea maker usually places far less attention on the words composed.  Citations are far more casual, often neglected altogether.

A major difference, of course, is that source material in academia is often difficult to retrieve.  Barriers among disciplines–different journals, different academic languages, different conferences–inhibit communication.  Until the last 150 years, academics were almost exclusively the wealthy and elites.  Then, to pursue an academic career and have access to peer-reviewed journals, proof of entry was required–a degree.  Once academics have achieved a degree, the coveted information frame of reference continues to be the most effective way to establish territory among elites.

There seems to be more similarities between academia and Internet relations than differences, though the differences are stark.  Still, wrestling with why so few academics leave comments on the over 600 posted pieces, I’d conclude that because words are the most important possession of a university professional, they are loath to share them publicly without the compensation of a potential citation from someone that shares their elevated or segregated station, or at least they want assurance that the other party won’t embarrass them among their peers.

Is there a hierarchy here that should be flattened, an elite that should be taxed?  The product of the current academic system is astonishing erudition.  Might useful results be achieved if some barriers were removed?  Clearly, the current system inhibits seamless sharing of high quality information.

Sharing is what the Internet is all about, behaving as an example and metaphor for the direction that society is taking.  Academia, with roots in nineteenth century elitism, has trouble with the concept of sharing.  Livings are made and reputations are established by embracing a covetous attitude toward knowledge.

Academics possess knowledge.  Net users share it.  When academics start leaving comments, I’ll know that some walls are finally coming down.

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 my being accorded respect or notoriety in academia.  He emphasized that if work does not appear in peer-reviewed journals, it is invisible.  Though he expressed enthusiasm and respect for what I am doing and recommended publishers to approach, he made it clear that if I expected anything but rejection, I’d be fooling myself.

My experience agrees with his advice that to believe or behave as if an amateur could significantly impact academia is a delusional proposition.  Nevertheless, there is a world outside academia, though unique theorizing on biological, human and social evolution occurs almost exclusively on journal pages.

This is a little like dreaming of becoming a commercial airline pilot and flying tens of thousands of people across the planet in the course of a single year.  Academics are able to carry ideas to thousands of colleagues in many countries, pilots of commercial airliners, so to speak.  Airline pilots are required to speak English to fly a plane.  It’s as if I can’t speak that language and so can only fly small, noncommercial aircraft.  I get to take friends and friends of friends to interesting places across the world.  My experience is not curtailed.  But my ability to share the experience is limited to those, like me, that fly planes for free.  This world of the amateur is rich in experience.  But it is a different world from the one traveled by the professionals.  I can go to as many places.  The folks I travel with share my passions.  But we are not pilots by vocation.  Our ability to help others move from place to place is limited.

I am in a somewhat unique position as an evolutionary theorist operating outside academia, often theorizing on the connection between social and biological evolution, while actually engaged in the profession of enhancing the ability of clients and colleagues to achieve communication goals in this new horizontal, barrier-destroying, diverse and transparent world.  I am not a professional evolutionary theorist.  I am a professional web developer, a social media application developer seeking ways for enhanced information access and digitally encouraged relationships to effortlessly transform the social landscape.  In a very strange and interesting way, my life is becoming about the ability of the potentially transformative ideas that I describe to compel transformation through the actual medium that the ideas seek to explain.

I am an evolutionary theorist who describes modern technological communications/social structure transformations as outcomes of very specific biological processes.  It seems congruent with my creative process, my nonacademic station and my reverence for the explosion of the commons that what I create be offered for free, with no copyright and no citation encumbrances creating barriers to the distribution of the ideas.  In other words, I am feeling an attraction to taking the nonidentity paradigm described by my theory, a process that I hypothesize is necessary to an ability to theorize, and giving myself up totally to the web.

If academia is about forming an identity around the respect accorded for work produced, the web is about allying with nonidentity as the individual forms idea alliances with other individuals.  Academia is about the individual.  The web is about the community.  My evolutionary theory is about the power of environment and community to inform evolution.

Two things have propelled my thought in this direction.  One is the respect accorded my work on Stumbleupon, compliments from strangers, nonacademics.  The other thing was respect offered me by an academic whose work I respect, respect that was accompanied by advice to not knock on an academic’s door.

I embrace that advice.  My life’s work is to share, not to educate.

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 have.

At the height of my ability to quickly achieve high rankings for client sites, I conducted a Google search for a paragraph of text on the home page of my firm’s web design site to see how many other design firms had decided to steal wholesale my text so that their site could hypothetically achieve high Google positions.  Over 200 design firms had taken my home page text with no adjustments.

They were not aware that the text was of relatively no importance.  It was all about the websites linking to the page that they were stealing the text from.  This is common knowledge now, but it wasn’t in 2002.

This comes to mind because in this website, neoteny.org, there are concepts, ideas, principles, theories and paradigms that I would like to have stolen or permanently borrowed.  Having had the experience of having my productions hauled away willy-nilly, I’m wondering what the best way is to reproduce that experience as regards my thoughts and theories.  Posting a Creative Commons license allowing visitors to use posted text in whatever way they choose may have some effect.  What is at issue here is the best way to distribute unique content, information more commonly disseminated in an academic context than in an amateur’s horizontal, web-based world.

I have felt deeply gratified by the many people that have posted comments and emailed me from off this blog.  Receiving those responses has been a deeply rewarding experience.  How best do I encourage this?

In my life, I have chosen not to join an academic discipline and get a Ph.D.  Nevertheless, I seek ways to share what I feel passion for.  What does not appear on journal pages has difficulty being taken seriously.  Academic attention will not come.  But, I do seek opportunities to engage in discussion regarding what I find fulfilling to explore, and I seek alliances that encourage the possibility that those portions of my work that may offer usefulness have an opportunity to prove that this is so.

I’m a web marketing expert, so my theory websites get respectable traffic, several hundred unique visitors a day.  Over one million unique visitors in 11 years have visited my sites.  Still, I’m looking for more interaction, more discussion, more opportunity to share experiences.

In academia, one struggles to achieve a position that makes sharing possible.  In business, one struggles to keep from being ripped off.  In this new horizontal paradigm, one struggles to be relieved of what’s been created.

Relieve me.