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    Some commentators depict this possibility with horror—public issues reduced to shallow sound bites and "deliberated" with the maturity of a mob. Yet, similar dire predictions were made a century ago, when citizens established the initiative process in California and other western states. Today voters get thick booklets filled with pro and con arguments. They hear debates on public radio. All told, the effects aren't as awful as opponents forecast around 1900.

    Elitist gloom is a cliché that crops up whenever common folk are about to be enfranchised or empowered with new prerogatives. Remember how the credit-reporting industry foretold disaster, if consumers were allowed to look over their own credit records? While it can feel satisfying, this habitual disdain for the common man and woman seems tiresome in light of how much better-educated, less bigoted, and more savvy people are today than their ancestors ever imagined.

    Is it so hard to envisage that tomorrow's citizens—our children—may rise to fresh challenges, as we have done?

    We had better hope they do, because some form of demarchy is unavoidable. Public opinion polls already play a crucial role in the two-way exchange of sovereignty between officials and the electorate. Future high-tech surveys will sample a wired, sophisticated populace in real time. Whether this turns into a nightmare, or a dazzling extension of rambunctious citizenship, may depend on how completely people are informed, and how seriously they take their responsibilities.

    Do you see your neighbors as helpless victims of modern times—clueless consumers and couch-potatoes—devouring fast food and passive entertainment? What about the millions who seem engaged in a myriad spirited activities from gardening to choreographed group-skydiving? Radio societies refine their own spacecraft designs. Exotic seed clubs maintain winnowed gene pools. Aficionados revive dead languages and while others frenetically invent new kinds of sports, to achieve 15 minutes of fame on TV. Hobbies drive the economy, even more than our passion for predictions. Might this trend turn out to be important?

    Why not? It happened once before, in Victorian times, when proficient amateurs became a major force in human innovation. As both skill and free time multiply in the next century, the same thing may happen again, multiplied ten thousand-fold.

    Such a trend forms the basis for my story—"Aficionado"—that begins this volume.

    Are we entering a Century of Amateurs? Society may be increasingly influenced by new kinds of know-how, developed outside older centers of expertise like universities, corporations or government bureaus. This new trend is illustrated by the rise of Linux and the "open-source movement," unleashing legions of passionate amateurs into a realm formerly dominated by the cubicled minions of major corporations. Might even more out-of-control creativity emerge when cheap chemical synthesis-in-a-box arrives on every desktop, letting private citizens concoct new organic compounds at will?

    There will be a dark side to such inventiveness. Hateful types will misuse new technologies to wreak harm. In the long run, we may survive this kind of "progress" only if decent people are vastly more numerous and competent than vicious types.

    In other words, we'll be all right, if humanity as-a-whole grows more sane.

    " Sane ?" Did I really say that?

    Well, yes. In the long run, our grandchildren may need far better understanding of that word than we have today.

    The 20th Century dawned amid enthusiastic hopes for a useful paradigm of human nature and psychology. Simplistic models were promulgated by followers of vaunted sages, from Marx to Freud, but these naïve hopes all dashed against reefs of human complexity. Our chief accomplishment in later generations was to demolish countless hoary fables about humanity: myths based on self-deception and over-reliance on cultural norms. For