Back in 1995, while working at Easynet, I spent most of my lunch breaks hunting for or reading the few books about the Internet that had so far been written. One of them was Cyberia by NYT journalist, Douglas Rushkoff. Since then I hadn’t engaged with any of his output until I saw him speak during this week at a public talk at NYU, where he expanded on the ideas contained in his essay called Open Source Democracy. While the first two thirds of the essay contains a not uncommon narrative of the societal impact of new technology, the prescriptive nature of the last third are well worth a read. It is always satisfying when a mainstream journalists documents ideas which resonate so succinctly with one’s own but expresses them in a more lucid manner. The sensation of knowing you are right about an idea, is unfortunately probably most analogous to a religious experience, though at least I retain the willingness to be proven wrong.