“[...]Self-organizing protests do occur, even in nations which have adequate and well-tested mechanisms for the redress of grievances; all it takes is a minority sufficiently energized and empowered – with wireless technologies – to spread the word … While the vast majority of Australians might be horrified at the results of such a spontaneous act of self-organization, the power to do so is always latent, wherever pervasive wireless networking has become part of the incorporated environment. Call it democracy, call it fascism, call it freedom, call it terrorism. The labels matter not at all. We don’t have a good name yet for just what this is; it isn’t mass action – not in the sense that we knew it in the 20th century. These are not peasants storming the barricades, nor unionists fighting private security forces at the gates of the factory. These are arisings, not uprisings. They are the unpredictable moments of emergence, sudden stirrings of self-organization. As each one occurs, we learn a little bit more about how they work. But they can not be predicted, nor can they be controlled. And that means the 21st-century – now that half of us are effectively wired into a whole – is going to be very unpredictable indeed …

Back in 1995, LambdaMOO creator Pavel Curtis informed us that, “People are the killer app.” But somehow we still don’t believe him. We stubbornly believe that there is some magic inside the network itself, a quintessence within the wiring, the routers, the transponders and repeaters, that make the network something more than the sum of its parts. But this has never been true, nor will it ever be true. The value of the network is entirely in its ability to connect us together. Only insofar as a service makes it easier to connect people together – a service, like, say, SMS – will that service be adopted by the users of the network. Digital social networks such as MySpace and Facebook hold out a tantalizing promise of greater connectivity, but so far that promise has gone entirely unrealized. We don’t need them, and we never have. All we need is the means to connect. We’re perfectly able to handle all the rest …

A company can set its own tariff rates, or build out a high-speed infrastructure, but that is not the network. The network is us mob, a mass of individuals connected together in ever-evolving configurations of purpose, with ever-expanding capabilities….” From Mob Rules by Mark Pesce, Hyperpeople.