There’s a great new article in Wired by Kevin Kelly that describes the revolution that is moving us from the dot-commerce mentality to the potential and power of mass collaboration. It also does well in projecting what Internet culture may look like ten years from now … and even further, Kelly predicts how historians may someday view our particular point of time.

Three thousand years from now, when keen minds review the past, I believe that our ancient time, here at the cusp of the third millennium, will be seen as another such era. In the years roughly coincidental with the Netscape IPO, humans began animating inert objects with tiny slivers of intelligence, connecting them into a global field, and linking their own minds into a single thing. This will be recognized as the largest, most complex, and most surprising event on the planet. Weaving nerves out of glass and radio waves, our species began wiring up all regions, all processes, all facts and notions into a grand network. From this embryonic neural net was born a collaborative interface for our civilization, a sensing, cognitive device with power that exceeded any previous invention. The Machine provided a new way of thinking (perfect search, total recall) and a new mind for an old species. It was the Beginning.

“Right here, right now, there is no place that I want to be …“