I'm reminded of a series by Greg Bear, "Darwin's Radio" and "Darwin's Children", where the central premise is that there's a sudden and major evolutionary chang

I'm reminded of a series by Greg Bear, "Darwin's Radio" and "Darwin's Children", where the central premise is that there's a sudden and major evolutionary change in newborn humans. One of the traits of the newly-evolved humans is that they have a pervasive and tight-knit social structure. The books try to describe what might happen as the young people grow up and there's a power struggle between the "old" humanity and the "new" humanity. Comments like rayiner's in this thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8943501 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8943501) are a perfect example. What he finds "scatterbrained" is something that works just fine for a lot of young people. They've grown up in a media-rich, active world, and they're making it their own. Their brains probably work a little bit differently from older brains. I think the article was really well-written and made a cogent argument. I think that the facts of political engagement from youth support its argument. Whether and to what extent old politics is able to co-opt young media remains to be seen -- Obama's campaign certainly did it pretty successfully only to further disenchant a lot of young people with the political process. But eventually their generation will become the dominant political force in this country, and if old media continues to approach politics the way it does now, it's going to die when that happens.