We must admit we were warned: we were told that everything had to change. So sure enough, change started kicking in. McLaren vamoosed. Pagitt is off pretending to be an economist. Tony Jones (who with no evidence at all regards himself an over-educated white man) magnanimously stepped down as National Coordinator of the Emergent Village. Then we saw a bunch of wannabes posting announcements on YouTube of their intentions to step up and fill the vacancy.

This was a "decentralization of power".

Now come the complaints, the whinging, and the back-stabbing. It's like an FBFI annual "fellowship" after they pass out the namecards and knives. Villagers are disillusioned, energy is down, spirits are low. You can examine the debris field thither and yon.

Two extremely intelligent and very articulate Villagers published a real thoughtfest on the web. It began with Zach Lind, a drummer, saying to Nick, his good friend:

Basically I was like, you know, I read what you said, and I had like, cuz see, I kinda come at it from a different perspective, like I totally don't begrudge frustration or anything like that, but I'm kind of wondering like, I guess for me it was sort of like, I understand it, but like, what is, what was your expectation, you know, like I guess, that's me, it seems like the hardest part to swallow about what you're saying is you sort of said that you and your friends expected everything to kind of change and it's not really changing you know. Do you think it's not changing at all, or do you think it's just not changing as quickly as you would like it to?

Emergence is a "conversation", ironically.

Then we read this from a hopeful skeptic:

Emergent is de-centralizing, loosing leadership, and ten odd years into it, it still hasn't been able to define itself completely. As it struggles to define itself, some of us loose faith in it.

So what am I saying, that I don't like Emergent? No. Just that I guess some of us where hoping that everything would change, and it seems that the only thing that has changed is we have seen the group get dispersed and less potent.

Maybe it's our fault for not putting in our two cents early on. Maybe it's the fact that the leadership of Emergent was too accommodating to really define themselves in a way to produce a movement. Maybe I was stuck on the idea of revolution and movement, and it was only a conversation.

They where [sic] hoping everything would change, but that didn't happen. So we still have a bunch of friends with a website and a 501(c)3 tax-exempt classification, but we now also have a map.

And good luck with that map thingy! That looks like something that could really help you retain leadership and define the conversation/movement/ethos/whatever.

Let us all fervently hope the Villagers can sort through this loss of faith so they can focus their mighty intellects on ending poverty, war, and environmental destruction.