Lead from
http://www.bopnews.com/archives/000399.html#000399
and different thoughts in the text.
And what crystalized it was when Dave Weinberger, of the "Clue Train Manifesto", entered the station with his cry: "We are more interesting than you are. I am not to be messaged, that is advertising. I don't seek advertising, I flee from it." His coverage of being there is, of course on his blog.
It was worth the price of admission.
The view from here is that it isn't about "bottom up" versus "top down" but the difference between top down - and a model which circulates life and energy - where the center pulls in as much as it pushes out. And sees itself, not as the top, blasting out orders, but as the center, making coherent the activity which is already present, and raising the level of it by providing a focal point for attention.
In private the practioners of control are less polite. They call non-hierachical control "an academic fantasy", they call it "insane" - the are in panic over the idea that they won't be able to crack the whip. It's what they live for.
In private, the practioners of changing politics are more aggressive - they see a different society based, not on "broad cast" but on interconnection. This was the idea behind a visionary show that Christopher Lydon wanted to do. But the internet wasn't ready, nor, really were most people, for what it takes to have a social structure that is based on spheres of activity, with channels of information flowing through them.
It was Emerson who pointed out the deep requirement - that Democracy of this sort requires that each person mix their creative, as opposed to merely physical, presence with the act of politics.
And how to do that, is the work of the internet in politics at this particular moment.