. But when conditions worsen, food
becomes scarce or the forest floor becomes dry, the formerly distinct
creatures coalesce into a single being. The large mass of slime moves
about, amassing the moisture of the collective, until it finds a more
hospitable region of forest, and then breaks up again into individual
creatures. The collective behaviour is an emergent trait, learned
through millennia of evolution. But it is only activated when the
group is under threat. The processes allowing for these alternative
strategies are still being scrutinised by scientists, who are only
beginning to come to grips with the implications of these findings in
understanding other emergent systems from cities to civilisations.

At first glance, the proposition that human civilisation imitates the
behaviour of slime mould is preposterous, an evolutionary leap
backwards. An individual human consciousness is infinitely more
advanced than that of a single slime mould micro-organism. But
coordinated human metaorganism is not to be confused with the highly
structured visions of a 'super organism' imagined in the philosophical
precursors to fascism in the 19th and 20th centuries. Rather, thanks
to the feedback and iteration offered by our new interactive networks,
we aspire instead towards a highly articulated and dynamic body
politic: a genuinely networked democracy, capable of accepting and
maintaining a multiplicity of points of view, instead of seeking
premature resolution and the oversimplification that comes with it.

This is why it appeared that the decision to grant the public open
access to the internet in the early 1990s would herald a new era of
teledemocracy, political activism and a reinstatement of the
collective will into public affairs. The emergence of a networked
culture, accompanied by an ethic of media literacy, open discussion
and direct action held the promise of a more responsive political
system wherever it spread.

But most efforts at such teledemocracy so far, such as former Clinton
pollster Dick Morris's web site www.vote.com, or even the somewhat
effective political action site www.moveon.org, are simply new
versions of the public opinion poll. Billing themselves as the next
phase in a truly populist and articulated body politic, the sites
amount to little more than an opportunity for politicians to glean the
gist of a few more uninformed, knee-jerk reactions to the issue of the
day. Vote.com, as the name suggests