I am working on a paper about Hannah Arendt and it reminded me that I was going to blog a brief realization....
First we have Arendt's point that the political emerges whenever people come together to begin something new in the world.
Second, we have Reed's Law which says the value of group-forming-networks scales NOT as n^2, i.e. as each new member enters the network, but rather as 2^n because we are interested in the number of new groups made possible by the new member's presence.
Third, we have the obvious fact of global technological connectivity in general, i.e. what Howard Rheingold calls "technologies of cooperation." For example, there is the recently announced fact that the cell-phone is the fastest spreading technology in the history of the world, because it basically does the one thing humanity is based on, which is make possible human coming together.
Fourth, complex systems shows us that highly interconnected systems cross transformational thresholds, called phase shifts, where they suddenly reconfigure into some new form.
If we accept Arendt, and we apply Reed's Law to the world around us, then we can only conclude that we are in the midst of an explosion in the realm of political activity (and social/economic, if you feel a need to separate those out).
Then the key question now is: is there any way we can tell what the threshold is? And what would we do if we knew it?