The intelligent crowd emerges when communication technologies expand human talents of cooperation. Perhaps their most popular recent expression is social media, but the internet, the network of networks, must be counted among them, not even to mention that there are even space programs that benefit from the participation of hundreds of volunteer collaborators. The impacts of the technology that defines the intelligent multitude can be both beneficial and destructive: with their help, governments have already fallen, subcultures of young people have spread from Asia to Scandinavia, new industries have been born, and the old ones have launched furious counterattacks. People who are part of the intelligent crowd cooperate in ways that have never been possible before because they carry devices that have at the same time communication and computing properties. Media cartels and government agencies try to re-impose the regime of the one-way radio age, depriving users of technology of the power to create and leaving them only the power to consume. This struggle for power is at the back of battles for file-sharing, copy protection, radio spectrum regulation. In these pages, the author describes the keys to this novel concept that he has cradled, but also gives a glimpse into the effect of intelligent crowds on the future of human society: "What is the new literacy of cooperation like? The technologies and methodologies of cooperation are now in the embryonic phase, and the emergence of new democratic, cordial and intelligent social forms will depend on how society adopts, transforms and reshapes new media when they cease to be in the hands of engineers, as always happens."