Resnick (media laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology) explores the counterintuitive world of decentralized systems and self- organizing phenomena. Drawing on ideas from computer science, education, psychology, and systems theory, he examines why many people resist decentralized ideas, and describes an innovative computer language, StarLogo, that he designed to help students from grade school and up simulate self-organizing behavior in systems. Resnick analyzes the educational ideas, such as constructionism, and computational ideas, including massive parallelism, underlying StarLogo.