The funny thing about this new movement was that it didn’t readily fit the categories of either political party in the US. Because it favored decentralized, bottom-up solutions, it broke with the statist, Big Government solutions of the Left, and yet it looked nothing like the free market religion of the libertarian Right. And it wasn’t the moderate’s safe middle ground between those two poles. It was something altogether new. And more that that, it was a political worldview with a real track record of practical success. In an age of great disillusionment with current institutions, I thought, here were individuals and groups that could inspire us, in part because they had attached themselves to a new kind of institution, more network than hierarchy--more like the Internet itself than the older models of Big Capital or Big Government.