There's conversation in the blog interior, where you find ideas being batted around by smart people, on a topic of interest to me. It concerns a force that the Net could give rise to. James Moore, from Harvard, wrote about this emergent force in a paper, The Second Superpower Rears its Beautiful Head . (I posted something about using Kucinich as a rallying point, in a conversation on Moore's site about the Second Superpower electing a president.) Quotes from The Second Superpower Rears its Beautiful Head “There is an emerging second superpower, but it is not a nation. Instead, it is a new form of international player, constituted by the 'will of the people' in a global social movement. The beautiful but deeply agitated face of this second superpower is the worldwide peace campaign, but the body of the movement is made up of millions of people concerned with a broad agenda that includes social development, environmentalism, health, and human rights…What makes these numbers important is the new cyberspace-enabled interconnection among the members. This body has a beautiful mind. Web connections enable a kind of near-instantaneous, mass improvisation of activist initiatives.” “Thus the new superpower demonstrates a new form of 'emergent democracy' that differs from the participative democracy of the US government…the emergent democracy of the second superpower is alive with touching and being touched by each other, as the community works to create wisdom and to take action.” James Moore says, “The point of the paper is that 'the movement' is now approaching the status of 'the second superpower,' after the United States. This is due to (1) critical mass of people who identify with the world rather than the nation, with each other rather than just themselves, (2) the web and interactive media 'neurology' of the movement—including texting, email lists, and blogging—which is giving it a kind of collective mind and ability to act, and (3) the advance of international institutions and international law, which provides a venue or a forum in which the second superpower can work with sympathetic nations to press its cause. The Bush administration is attacking the fabric of the international system, but it is unlikely to prevail. Now, I know that the suggestion that the movement is powerful enough to be called a second superpower will be met with skepticism, given that the bombs of the first superpower are falling on Baghdad. This is either the worst or the best time to be pressing this idea! But even in regard to the war on Iraq, web and media-enabled public opinion is clearly the major actor to which the US government is attuned—before any given nation. And this other actor is uncontrollable by the US, despite its huge current effort to dominate the news.” While you are cogitating about this, as Moore is ongoingly, wondering how the power of this new force can be harnessed, here are two TREATS that I picked up from James Moore's blog. He called the first, “The best video I've seen for awhile,” and the second, “My new favorite weblog.” As Moore says, and I echo, “Check this out, I think you will enjoy it!” From: Linda Genutis [LGenutis@aol.com] Suzanne, I got goosebumps reading “The Second Superpower Rears Its Beautiful Head” — especially the last paragraph: “And finally, we must work on ourselves and our community. We will dialogue with our neighbors, knowing that the collective wisdom of the second superpower is grounded in the individual wisdom within each of us. We must remind ourselves that daily we make personal choices about the world we create for ourselves and our descendants. We do not have to create a world where differences are resolved by war. It is not our destiny to live in a world of destruction, tedium, and tragedy. We will create a world of peace.” I'm on the verge of crying buckets when reading stuff like this because it's so close to how I envision a close to perfect world. I logged onto Media Lens at 4:00 am this morning and sent off I Stand for Peace and Justice essays to several addresses from my email address book. I looked at the list of those who have already pledged their allegiance to the message of this essay and for the first time I felt so totally in tune and so much a part of a much larger reality outside of my own little world — a larger community where there are no national boundaries — in short, for the first time in my life, I felt like a citizen of the world. This revelation was quite an emotional experience for me. If it weren't for the Internet, nothing like this could ever happen! We stand on the edge of a whole new era — a new frontier, a mission to explore ways for everlasting peace, to seek out new international alliances, and new ways to mitigate conflict and obliterate war, to boldly go where no person has gone before…. Awesome.
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