In this keynote talk at Personal Democracy Forum 2008, Pesce situates the current moment of transformation in the context of 60,000 years of human civilization; argues that our innate tendencies to connect with each other, copy behaviors and share ideas are now on hyperdrive; and projects a near-future where "hyperempowered" individuals and networks transform politics. As he concludes: "Representative democracies are a poor fit to the challenges ahead, and ‘rebooting’ them is not enough. The future looks nothing like democracy, because democracy, which sought to empower the individual, is being obsolesced by a social order which hyperempowers him."

The speaker created VRML. Memestreams readers will be familiar with the theme of liberal democracy and high technology being a product of the printing press, and the development of computer mediated communications being a similarly important development which will create similarly important changes.

Ultimately, a nice segway into Virgil's recent work on Wikipedia.

A more detailed discussion is here.

PdF2008 Talks: Mark Pesce on 'Hyperpolitics (American Style)'