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By Root 870 0

democracy. This revolution won’t start at the top, in governments and institutions. As with everything Google touches, it will grow from the bottom, in communities of all sizes and descriptions, as more involvement leads to new ways to organize, manage, and govern. That is what we mean when we talk about power shifting to the edge, no longer centralized. Political movements need not start in Washington but can start in a thousand places linked online. When millions of people give $10 each to a campaign—instead of 10 people giving $1 million each—the power in a party shifts to the edge, some hope. That is what political strategist Joe Trippi argues in his book, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. Generation G will have a different sense of membership, loyalty, patriotism, and power. They will belong to new nations: a nation of geeks, a nation of diabetics, a nation of artists. They may feel greater allegiances to these nations and less to their town or country.

Hear the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace by John Perry Barlow, former Grateful Dead lyricist and a founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, from 1999: “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.” Barlow warned that the old world’s laws of property, identity, and movement “are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.” He said the only law that all online cultures recognize is the golden rule. “We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.”

My generation, the children of the sixties, prided itself on nonconformity, but our nonconformity became conformist. I fear it was a fashion. Some worry that Generation G’s nonconformity and individualism will be entitled rather than empowered, alone more than social, entertained more than educated. Any of that and worse could be true. But I have faith in this generation because, far earlier than their elders—my peers—today’s young people have taken leadership, contributed to society and the economy, and created greatness: great technology, great companies, great thinking.

That is where we return at the end: creation. Looking at the internet, one must be struck by the will of the people to create. One survey I quoted earlier reported that most of us say we have a book in us. Another said, coincidentally, that most of young people think they have a business in them. We have surveyed our creation: We make tens of millions of blogs. We take hundreds of millions of Flickr photos. A few hundred thousand people write applications for Facebook. Every minute, 10 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube. People create T-shirt designs on Threadless, sneaker designs on Ryz, and things of all descriptions on Etsy. Kids make companies. And on and on.

The internet doesn’t make us more creative. Instead, it enables what we create to be seen, heard, and used. It enables every creator to find a public, the public he or she merits. That takes creation out of the proprietary hands of the supposed creative class. Internet curmudgeons argue that Google and the internet bring society to ruin because they rob the creative class of its financial support and exclusivity: its pedestal. But internet triumphalists, including me, argue that the internet opens up creativity past one-size-fits-all, mass measurements and priestly definitions of quality and lets us not only find what we like but also find people who like what we do. The internet kills the mass, once and for all. With that comes the death of mass economics and mass media. I don’t lament their passing.

There will still be a creative class, but it’s role and relationship with the public may change, acting not just as creators but also as examples, educators, and inspirations for others—the flint of creativity. That is what Paulo Coelho became when