What you need for a participatory system to work: "a plausible promise, an effective tool, and an acceptable bargain."

The historic role of the consumer has been nothing more than a giant maw at the end of the mass media's long conveyer belt, the all-absorbing Yin to the mass media's all-producing Yang....In the age of the internet, no one is a passive consumer anymore because everyone is a media outlet.

The tools that a society uses to create and maintain itself are as central to human life as a hive is to bee life. Though the hive is not part of any individual bee, it is part of the colony, both shaped by and shaping the lives of its inhabitants.

The loss of control you fear is already in the past.

The transfer of [...] capabilities from various professional classes to the general public is epochal.

Egalitarianism is possible only in small social systems. Once a medium gets past a certain size fame is a forced move.

Prior to the internet, the last technology that had any real effect on the way people sat down and talked together was the table