I've never liked revolutions. They just go in circles, after all. The downside of getting to "win" is that someone else loses, and invariably the cycle begins again. That's why I've begun to think about our current shift less as a revolution than a renaissance. It's not a whole new order coming into power, but rather, as the word "renaissance" implies, the rebirth of old ideas in a new context. Renaissances are not events we work towards, but processes occurring in the present. Revolutions require faith, because movements generally involve killing and other nastiness that people won't generally commit without some spirited motivation. Revolutions happen in the future; Renaissances happen now.

The more I study the original Renaissance, the more I see our own era as having at least as much renaissance character and potential. Where the Renaissance brought us perspective painting, the current one brings virtual reality and holography. The Renaissance saw humanity circumnavigating the globe; in our own era we've learned to orbit it from space. Calculus emerged in the 15th Century, while systems theory and chaos math emerged in the 20th. Our analog to the printing press is the Internet, our equivalent of the sonnet and extended metaphor is hypertext.

¶ 8:50 p.m.