Any sensible person can't help but be deeply suspicious, not only of the techno-world's fragility, but also for the way it binds us ever more tightly to an economic and technological order whose fundamental tendencies are centralizing and despotic.

Those proclivities are not necessarily in the consciousness of the system's mavens and power brokers (who in some cases may be us), but they are evident in the way progress plays itself out. Our privacy, political liberty, autonomy erode. Well-being is reduced to commodity. Politics shrivel, civil society languishes and civility perishes as scientistic, market-driven rationalization overtakes what moral and cultural depth we have left. (This is not just a function of the computer age; read Max Weber, circa 1900.)

The survivalists and fundamentalists and militia folk often miss the point in their analysis of who is to blame and how it's done. Their notion that the modern world system is under the control of some clear-cut, identifiable evil-doer is pure fantasy.

But they are dead right to be terrified. We indeed face a system that is relentless in its operation and that is making our individuality, our very lives, more and more frail by its very promise to make us more comfortable, more connected and, not coincidentally, more corporate.

Yet to opt out, to flee technology and the fierceness of progress in favor of the Simple Life, requires a leap of faith greater than most of us are capable of. To break the threads that bind takes spiritual resources that most of us -- well, that I -- don't possess.

Instead, we fancy ourselves surfing the waves rather than being engulfed by them. We find equivalence in entertainment and edification. We seek to build a defensible niche in the wall going up around us, dreaming of the little spaces where we hope to still do right (however pathetically) and fantasizing that the mere act of creation (however meaningless beyond the act itself) will give some point to our surrendering lives.

So thus this home page.