Can a Tech Meetup Change the World?

Interview with @Mashable

New York Tech Meetup was founded in 2004. Each month, 10 companies get the floor for up to five minutes to demo something cool to 22,000 members of New York’s tech community — geeks, investors, entrepreneurs, developers and hackers included. In short, they’re interested in game-changing technology that will level the playing field.

“The Internet is much more mature than it was ten years ago,” says Andrew Rasiej, chairman of New York Tech Meetup. “The systems that were designed in the 20th century are now being challenged by networks, and those networks don’t really care for top-down hierarchy, they don’t really care about nation-state borders, they don’t really care about diplomatic channels — they care about connectivity, they care about openness, they care about trust.”

The maturing Internet has birthed a new entity, what Rasiej dubs the “Internet Public” — and you’ve heard its voice during the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street and Tea Party movements. These social movements invested in social media to organize themselves, gather their voices and challenge authority. While SOPA and PIPA bills were before Congress, 2,000 people showed up for an “emergency meetup” to protest outside the offices of Senators Schumer and Gillibrand. “The next day, Congress pulled those bills from consideration,” says Rasiej. “The authorities now are realizing that these forces have been unleashed, and they’re trying to put the genie back in the bottle,” say Rasiej.

The emergence of this collective voice has essentially created a “battle between the 20th century and the 21st century,” says Rasiej. But he’s optimistic about who will win, and he envisions a connected future. Watch the video above to hear Rasiej in his own words.