phere capable of transmitting a single
image globally in a matter of minutes. A black man being beaten by
white cops in Los Angeles is captured on a home video camera and
appears on television sets around the globe overnight. Eventually,
this 30-second segment of police brutality leads to full-scale urban
rioting in a dozen American cities.

These models for interactivity and coordinated behavior may have been
launched in the laboratory, but they were first embraced by
countercultures. Psychedelics enthusiasts (people who either ingested
substances such as LSD or found themselves inspired by the art,
writing and expression of the culture associated with these drugs)
found themselves drawn to technologies that were capable of
reproducing both the visual effects of their hallucinations as well as
the sense of newfound connection with others.

Similarly, the computer and Internet galvanized certain strains of
both the pagan and the grassroots 'do-it-yourself' countercultures as
the 'cyberpunk' movement, which was dedicated to altering reality
through technology, together. Only now are the social effects of these
technologies being considered by political scientists for what they
may teach us about public opinion and civic engagement.

The underlying order of apparently chaotic systems in mathematics and
in nature suggest that systems can behave in a fashion mutually
beneficial to all members, even without a command hierarchy. The term
scientists use to describe the natural self-organisation of a
community is 'emergence'.

As we have seen, until rather recently, most observers thought of a
colony of beings, say ants, as receiving their commands from the top:
the queen. It turns out that this is not the way individuals in the
complex insect society know what to do. It is not a hierarchical
system, they don't receive orders the way soldiers do in an army. The
amazing organisation of an anthill 'emerges' from the bottom up, in a
collective demonstration of each ant's evolved instincts. In a sense,
it is not organised at all since there is no central bureaucracy. The
collective behaviour of the colony is an emergent phenomenon.

Likewise, the slime mould growing in damp fields and forests all
around us can exhibit remarkably coordinated behaviour. Most of the
time, the sludge-like collection of microorganisms go about their
business quite independently of one another, each one foraging for
food and moving about on its own