Doug Rushkoff kicked off day two of the Personal Democracy Forum with a nice counterblast to excessive individualism. Here's the video.

He fears we pay too much attention to web 2.0 as allowing us write stuff, as if just being able to write back our feedback to the powers-that-be is somehow revolutionary. Basically, we should have grasped that opportunity in the first renaissance. He's great on mocking brands for pretending to be intersted in our conversations but really only being concerned with getting us talking about them.

He argues for a second renaissance, of "open source democracy", where we think of ourselves not as writers/commentators/citizen journalist but as programmers/participators.

Hat tip: Dave Pollard