ABSTRACT
The collective intelligence, the ubiquitous eyes, ears and communications constituting the will of the public conceived in the discourses of the eighteenth-century revolutionaries can be manifested through the web. Even more generally, the techniques can be taken out of the world of political campaigning and into the worlds of public relations or indeed, research and education and the more intimate worlds of building friendships to engage in projects of mutual interest. The idea of the family as a prefigurative model for the public expands the prefigurative theatres for democratic publics into previously closed domains where structures of dominance prevail: the church, the school, the private sector of business organisation, the military, and the government. Each unique path of individuals is always shaped by encounters and associations formed with others. Those paths can become very predictable whether comfortable, disturbing, friendly or hostile.
