Most new movements start this way: hundreds or thousands of individuals and groups, working in different fields and different locations, start thinking about change using a common language, without necessarily recognizing those shared values. You just start following your own vector, propelled along by people in your immediate vicinity. And then one day, you look up and realize that all those individual trajectories have turned into a wave.

Some great minds become great by turning the rubble of an exploded paradigm into something consistent and meaningful. Others become great by laying the gunpowder, grain by grain. Every important revolution needs both kinds of minds to complete itself.

If you look at where innovation - defined as ideas, not as commercial product - tends to live, the university system is remarkably innovative.

Nothing really says ... interactivity - which was so exciting and captures the real, the Web Zeitgeist of 1995 - than 'Click here for a picture of my dog.'

The problem is, there are definitely some genuinely lame things on television, and there's more at the bottom of the barrel, because the barrel in a sense has gotten bigger.

Organizations that empower folks further down the chain or try to get rid of the big hierarchal chains and allow decision making to happen on a more local level end up being more adaptive and resilient because there are more minds involved in the problem.

I suspect millions of people from my generation probably have comparable stories to tell: if not of sports simulations then of Dungeons & Dragons, or the geopolitical strategy of games like Diplomacy, a kind of chess superimposed onto actual history.