Of course, with agriculture came the first big civilizations, the first cities built of mud and brick, the first empires. And it was the administers of these empires who began hiring people to keep track of the wheat and sheep and wine that was owed and the taxes that was owed on them by making marks; marks on clay in that time.

There may be a jump on electronic LSD with virtual reality, and the problem just with saying LSD, enough time has gone by that there is no distinction between psychedelics and other drugs.

I'm somebody who seems to stumble into things 10 or 20 years before the rest of the world does.

The AP has only so many reporters, and CNN only has so many cameras, but we've got a world full of people with digital cameras and Internet access.

Communication media enabled collective action on new scales, at new rates, among new groups of people, multiplied the power available to civilizations and enabled new forms of social interaction. The alphabet enabled empire and monotheism, the printing press enabled science and revolution, the telephone enabled bureaucracy and globalization, the internet enabled virtual communities and electronic markets, the mobile telephone enabled smart mobs and tribes of info-nomads.

Active people to revitalize what is really the root of democracy: citizens communicating with each other. Democracy is not just about voting, it's about citizens talking with each other about the issues which concern them. We've lost a great deal of that in the age of the mass media.

The world is restructuring, and all of the enemies that used to exist are kind of gone, so now they are looking out for new enemies.