person of the year

All over the world, the protesters of 2011 share a belief that their countries' political systems and economies have grown dysfunctional and corrupt — sham democracies rigged to favor the rich and powerful and prevent significant change. They are fervent small-d democrats. Two decades after the final failure and abandonment of communism, they believe they're experiencing the failure of hell-bent megascaled crony hypercapitalism and pine for some third way, a new social contract.

- TIME

I've been leading an arduous little revolution of my own against entrenched irrationality, bigotry, injustice, and ignorance. I'm definitely feeling vindicated. I sense that perhaps the Mayans were right on target about 2012. It will be a year in which we'll witness profound changes in key paradigms and a transformation of world reality as we know it.

I'm all for a New Age, or, as I also call it, Humanity 2.0. A quick survey of recent world events makes our "current age" seem astonishingly primitive, shockingly irrational, and -- frankly - "below" the potential of an evolved 2011 human being. It's way past time for a software upgrade on human consciousness. The crap currently installed is buggy, outdated, and crashes way too often.

Fascinatingly, just as it allows us to upgrade our iTunes software, the Internet -- being the information superhighway that it is -- is the technology phenomenon that underlies and is driving the already-in-motion transformation of our collective consciousness. As a species we'll be eternally in debt to Mr. Gore for inventing it.

The Internet isn't just networking our computers, it's networking our minds. Think about that.