ubble, followed by the revelation of corporate malfeasance and
insider trading, exposed corporate capitalism's dependence on myths;
stories used to captivate and distract the public while the
storytellers ran off with the funds. The spokespeople for globalism
began to be perceived as if they were the 15th century Catholic
missionaries that preceded the Conquistadors, preparing indigenous
populations for eventual colonisation. The free market came to be
understood as just another kind of marketing. Globalism was reduced,
in the minds of most laypeople, to one more opaque mythology used to
exploit the uninitiated majority.

Networked democracy: learning from natural interconnectivity

The current renaissance offers new understandings of what it might
mean to forge a global society that transcends the possibilities
described by the language of financial markets. It might not be too
late to promote a globalism modelled on cooperation instead of
competition, and on organic interchange instead of financial
transaction.

Again, our renaissance insights and inventions aid us in our quest for
a more dimensionalised perspective on our relationship to one another.
Rather famously the first renaissance elevated the Catholic mass into
a congregation of Protestant readers. Thanks to the printing press and
the literacy movement that followed, each person could enjoy his or
her own personal relationship to texts and the mythologies they
described. Our own renaissance offers us the opportunity to enhance
the dimensionality of these relationships even further, as we
transform from readers into writers.

It's no coincidence that early internet users became obsessed with the
fractal images they were capable of producing. The reassuring
self-similarity of these seemingly random graphs of non-linear
equations, evoked the shapes of nature. One simple set of fractal
equations, iterated through a computer, could produce a
three-dimensional image of a fern, a coastline or a cloud. Zooming in
on one small section revealed details and textures reflective of those
on other levels of magnification. Indeed, each tiny part appeared to
reflect the whole.

For early internet users, sitting alone in their homes or offices,
connected to one another only by twisted pairs of copper phone lines,
the notion of being connected, somehow, in the manner of a fractal was
quite inspiring. They began to study new models of interconnectivity
and group mind,