Dr. Leary and Rheingold are examples of thinkers who can recognize paradigm change on a large scale while it is just beginning to occur. Such changes are invisible to most people, but highly profitable to those who listen. Both men were explorers of the mind and considered to be quite out of the box by many established professionals in their fields. Leary was not the cause of the 60s social revolutions, but he was an important catalyst who opened a door proving the true nature of interpersonal relationship between the observer and the observed. Rheingold, who enters the scene a generation later, understood the evolution of communication through the powers of the human mind, too, but his brain-based models of society was explored through the early internet instead of LSD. Both men see the evolution of the internet-mind as an extension of earlier histories - from written language through the printing press, as well as the evolution of political laws, math, science and philosophy.

Predictions of tomorrow's economy, the weather, genetic code growth outcomes, or the true mechanism of thought in our brains/bodies is still far beyond our current computational power because of the massive interrelationships between trillions of infinitesimal butterfly effects. Yet, Leary and Rheingold's 20 year old predictions are coming true to the extent that the internet has begun to change our world and our everyday experiences. I think their insight stems from their experiencing the seismic shifts of psychedelic drugs in themselves and the communities around them: the experiences of taking part in both intrapersonal and interpersonal transformations. Both recognized an inverse proportion between the rise to hegemony of competition based authority structures (feudal systems. governments, businesses) and the proliferation of internet communities based on cooperation. Both see this as evolution. The Prisoner's Dilemma model is as anethmic to the essence of cooperation between neurons in the brain as it is to the evolution of new freedoms of socialization on the Internet. I do believe that Leary was correct about the 'amplified' mind insofar as it reflects the mind of a community made up of millions of 'neurons' (us) who are not only responding to information coming from other computers, but can create a whole new set of data to send back into the system (web 2.0). This is much like a brain.

One aspect Leary missed, but Rheingold touches upon was the problem of the mob aspect on the net. Sometimes people get quite battered by manipulated opinion. By others employing emotional reaction 'buttons', people can be manipulated by disinformation as much as good information.