What are those dependencies? Here are some samples for our current activity:
- The power grid
- The long-distance phone network
- The local phone network
- Your Internet server
- Your computer
- The vast industries that build the components for all the above
- The internal integrity of the software that runs the system, from my word processor to the telephone companies' switches to your Web browser
- The conventions that bind the system together
- The economy that underwrites the system and our ability to participate in it
- The laws that govern it all
- etc.
The fact that traces of anarchy and evidence of individual creative effort persist on the Internet only reflects the amazing capacity of our society to harness that which it is in the process of denaturing, if not eradicating.
And of course we don't just have to think about the Internet. The same sorts of dependencies apply to CD audio, the modern automobile, office buildings, hospitals, and on and on.
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