Speaking on NPR’s Talk of the Nation, Ray Kurzweil recommended two books for NPR’s “library of democracy”: Smart Mobs, The Next Social Revolution, Transforming Cultures and Communities in the Age of Instant Access by Howard Rheingold; and The Future of Ideas, The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World by Lawrence Lessig.

The show invited leaders from various fields to suggest books that embody the ideas of democracy.

“Communication technologies are creating new communities based on shared interests and value, as well as transforming discourse within existing ones,” says Kurzweil. Both books show how “communication technologies such as the Internet are creating new communities based on shared interests and value, as well as transforming discourse within existing ones.”

Rheingold’s book “provides entertaining and insightful descriptions of new communities created by the new networks,” ranging from cell phones to the Internet, while Lessig makes similar points about the cultural and social impact of instant communication across traditional boundaries of geography and social strata.

“We can trace the movement towards political democracy in much of the world through the 1990s to the advent of unfettered communication through the Internet,” says Kurzweil, whose own first book, The Age of Intelligent Machines, published in 1990, predicted that the emerging decentralized technologies posed a threat to the Soviet Union and its centralized, totalitarian control of information, and would do them in.