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Rap inflects global popular culture from music to fashion. Linux poses a real threat to Microsoft. The Sims is among the most popular computer games ever.

These far-flung developments have all been driven by Pro-Ams -- committed, networked amateurs working to professional standards. Pro-Am workers, their networks and movements, will help reshape society in the next two decades.

The 20th century was marked by the rise of professionals in medicine, science, education, and politics. In one field after another, amateurs and their ramshackle organizations were driven out by people who knew what they were doing and had certificates to prove it. Now that historic shift seems to be reversing. Even as large corporations extend their reach, we're witnessing the flowering of Pro-Am, bottom-up self-organization.

Rap, for one, started as do-it-yourself music among lower-income black men from distressed urban neighborhoods, recorded by artists on inexpensive equipment and distributed on handmade tapes by local labels. Yet within two decades, rap has become the dominant popular music across the world. In league with Pro-Am music distribution made possible by Napster and Kazaa, it has turned the entire record industry on its head.

Linux is the product of mass participatory innovation among thousands of Pro-Am technologists. Many of them program commercial software for a living but work on Linux in their spare time because the spirit of collaborative problem solving appeals so powerfully. Likewise, according to one estimate, 90% of the content in The Sims is created by a Pro-Am sector of The Sims' playing community, a distributed, self-organizing group whose players are constantly training one another and innovating.

Passionate amateurs, empowered by technology and linked to one another, are reshaping business, politics, science, and culture.

In the developing world, Pro-Ams are solving a historical scarcity of professional resources. The Grameen Bank, founded by Muhammad Yunus, a Bangladeshi economics professor, trains barefoot bankers to deliver loans to people earning less than a dollar a day. This Pro-Am workforce makes it possible to cost-effectively administer 2.8 million loans worth more than $4 billion. Had Grameen relied on professionals, it would have reached a tiny proportion of the population.

The transformation of astronomy captures the dynamics that will change other fields. Amateurs laid the foundations for modern astronomy; Copernicus, who moved the sun to the center of the universe, was only a sometime astronomer. By the 20th century, though, the pendulum had swung decisively in favor of professionals for one simple reason: They had access to much bigger telescopes.

But in the past two decades, as science writer Timothy Ferris points out, three linked innovations have turned astronomy into an open-source, Pro-Am activity. First, there was the disruptive innovation. John Dobson, a onetime monk and full-time stargazer, built a crude but powerful telescope using inexpensive materials. Observers armed with their own Dobsonians can now invade deep space, previously the preserve of the professionals.