Melançon Enterprises • a multidivision multinational since 1980

Douglas Rushkoff at the Personal Democracy Forum: Second day invocation speech video.

Some notes. Paraphrasings, not exact quotations, so I'm just putting the whole thing in brackets.

[
Personal democracy is an oxymoron.

I'm on the here comes everybody side of this discussion. But it's the everybody that matters.

It's not the network.

It's the people.

The network is just a tool for people to be people again.

The problem with branding, the problem for top-down communication, all these Renaissance era ideas

You are not going to buy the blue jeans if you are already having sex with your beautiful girlfriend
The brand doesn't want us to be engaged with one another, the brand wants us to be engaged with it.

still hopeless idealism and self-interest in every conversation we have

there's a place for you in the world, there's a place for you where you are

the next renassaince, if we get to have them

the collective, the group, will be reborn

the value in this renassaince will not come from the center, like centralized currency

it will come from the periphery
decentralized
tiny, small, real things

We have missed every great media opportunity

* text - released us from hieroglyphic, priests-only view. Moses and his brother-in-law sit around and write law. Instead of people learning how to read and write, they learned how to hear-- still coming from the priest. Real people stayed one step behind their renaissance. God said you will be a nation of priests-- people who can read. Instead we got a nation of hear-ers.
* printing press - 14th century. We got a nation of readers and an elite of writers.
* now we get the computer - we finally gain the ability to write. Writing is not the tool being offered to us, we're getting a programming medium. If we accept writing as this renaissance's promise -- we have to take that, but we also have to take the next one, which is programming.

Writing is like voting. It's fun, you can do it from home. The great mac air touch whatever.

In a true participatory democracy the opportunity here
is not just to be great citizen journalists, it's to be actually participating citizens, to be active in the reprogramming of our culture

our world as an open source proposition that can be changed
a social construction of people just like us
[a social construction that can be changed]

embrace the possibility that democracy is a participatory event, that people are put in office not to do things for us but to help finally create the conditions where we can do things for each other
]