2004
I.

The day after a mellowed, decaffeinated Thanksgiving Day, I fueled up good and plenty at my maternal grandmother's birthday bash, drinking cup after cup of delicious, world-disclosing "coffeine." While my aunts chortled and kvelled, my mind was speedracing, my eyes were darting, and my underwear elastic was limp with backsweat. I think the first philosophical tremor came during some mile-a-minute spiel about the internet. The same conversation everyone has had about the internet:

"Really, I think that the internet, provided it stays on course and doesn't get dammed and tangled and everything, will become the democratic tool par excellence. I mean, the Gutenburg printing press helped spur the Renaissance, and, if you believe Marshall McLuhan, forever transformed the shape of human consciousness. And, man, I think the internet has ten times the power of the Gutenburg press. It's not just the same shit in an expedient, pixellated form. You can tell the difference just from first person experience. Microsoft and Netscape rather than yellow manuscripts and legal pads. I write differently, think differently. It's a shift in metaphors: the instantaneity, simultaneity, infinite revisibility, the shrunken space, the algorithms, the branching structures, and first and foremost, the interactivity. I see ten-year-old ghetto kids in our library reading and formulating their thoughts in HTML, becoming literateÑ becoming literary— being seduced into new forms of thought by the flash and dash and RGB eye-candy. I can smell the human conversation burning the midnight oil. Total strangers complimenting me on the "crazy shit" in my HTML-transcriptions. Makes one think: Maybe, just maybe, a Twenty-First Century Renaissance is around the bend, my friends."

Well, I'm paraphrasing of course; I didn't refer to Mom and Aunt Majorie as "my friends." But honestly, I think all of our commonplace conceptions, from Father Time to the Almighty Dollar, will implode with the onslaught of, as they say in geekspeak, "the cybernetic revolution." But there is a critical difference between me and other zealots of the Information Age. For me, this is not purely a technocratic innovation, the perks and betterments of civilization's latest toy, but the latest manifestation of an ancient genius: the genius of DemocracyÉ In the deepest sense of the word.

Mumbling through the internet spiel, pieces were moving inside, adjusting themselves, making room for a new clearing. Once I started blabbering on about the Internet with my extended family, strange dreams started to bubble through my subconscious. Little notions kept accreting to form bigger notions. I would spring from Lenny Bruce to Spinoza and back again. Until, driving back home from Keysville, Virginia, lost on the serpentine deer-strewn backroads of Old Virginie, listening to Iggy Pop, I had a moment of clarity, in which the meaning of "Democracy" was revealed to me in one blinding newsflash.

I spent the remainder of the ride enunciating the details, before I could lose them on the roadside. In this turgid, hallucinatory state, democracy was not distilled down into a simple, final formula. It was more like a brief glimpse of a winding, complex engine with a fuckload of buttons, levers, gears, and interlinking parts and drivetrains. Crap this way and that, dynamic and sweepingly dialectical. I saw the process that sustained the faith and self-assurance of Whitman, Jefferson, Franklin, Dewey, Rorty; the reason they were so sure of the democratic impulse. I understood why "tyranny leaps to the wrong conclusion as democracy stumbles to the right one" and why democracy must be understood in the context of Time rather than in the cross-section.

Everything seemed to tie in, from Darwin and Hegel to Digital Piracy and the Human Genome Project, but something must have lit the fuse, some piece or passage from the mouths of the Wise and Wonderful. And with some quick mental detective work, I followed the trail back to a Dewey quotation in Rorty's Philosophy and Social Hope:

"Democracy is not a form of government or social expediency, but a metaphysic of the relation of man and his experience in nature..."

Democracy, in the widest possible sense, replacing Metaphysics, in the widest possible sense. And this sense only made sense to those who understood democracy as something much, much larger than politics, as an organizing principle within the best strands of human progress. Even before that night, I had understood pragmatism as the democratization of philosophy, or at the very least, the expurgation of metaphysics. I had previously said that: "A non-metaphysical philosophy tries to co-ordinate all of its beliefs, perceptions, fellows, desires, and other possibilities, without appealing to some trumpcard in the great Beyond, beyond the particulars of daily life."

This trumpcard I imagined as some sort of authoritative center, the end-all-be-all of metaphysical descriptions, a despot of human communication. And I saw pragmatism as overthrowing this mad king and priestly caste, permitting the Òco-ordination of all beliefs, perceptions, fellows, desires, and other possibilitiesÓ to follow through in a truly democratic form, much like a democratic town meeting in which everyone gets to speak and compare notes with out the hindrance of a bully pulpit. Pragmatism tells a democratic story about truth, in which we "trust rather to the multitude and variety of its arguments than to the conclusiveness of any one," in the words of Charles Pierce. So I was familiar with the organizing principles of the "democratic form;" the necessity of experiment, error, autonomy, and communication; the antagonism to lopsided plutocracy, distorted communication, and disempowerment, but after that night, I knew it in my blood and bone marrow. I became bristlingly hypersensitive to every jab and manifestation of the antidemocratic, the authoritarian and the aristocratic... I became a true democrat...