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By Carl M. Cannon, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Friday, June 29, 2007

"Information is like a drug: The more you have, the more you want." -- San Francisco private eye Sam Brown

It's not every day that Brian Lamb uses the expression "dickhead" on the air, or tells himself, "You suck." But earlier this month, the unflappable C-SPAN anchorman and CEO found himself reading e-mails from ill-tempered citizens. The epithets, which were directed at him, were instigated by talk-radio host Michael Savage, who in his approach to public discourse is as immoderate as Lamb is restrained. It seems that Savage won a talk-radio award and sent a DVD of his remarks to the award ceremony in New York City, along with a request that C-SPAN air them. The network covers live, not canned, speeches, so it declined -- only to find itself "Savaged" for its troubles.

There was a certain irony in this. Part of Lamb's founding vision for C-SPAN was a commitment to citizen participation through call-in shows and the frequent reading of viewers' letters and e-mails. The problem, to parse the observation of Sam Brown, who has trained more than 200 private detectives in Northern California, is that people are abusing the information drug -- and sometimes they're getting bad drugs. "Misinformation is quite powerful," Brown says. C-SPAN could attest to that.

Angry e-mailers vented their "outrage" that their tax dollars were paying for censorship (frequently misspelled) and vowed to pressure Congress to cancel the network's funding. C-SPAN, of course, receives no tax dollars -- and no advertising revenue, either. It is a nonprofit network that the cable television industry sponsors as a public service.

The same computer chips that make it possible for the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on the American people have made it easy for people to do everything from slur public personages to spy on their own lovers -- all before taking time to think. The context of Brown's observation was the inquisitiveness that leads suspicious spouses to seek an investigation of their possibly wayward husbands or wives. But his truism has broader applications.

Creative curiosity, the trait that spurred human beings to unravel the power of the atom and to store knowledge on silicon chips, is not easily tamed. The sex habits and private lives of our neighbors have been an irresistible subject of interest since civilization began. Today, we possess the technology to scratch that itch, and to comment on what we've learned -- or think we've learned -- about celebrities, politicians, perfect strangers, and every public issue under the sun. And comment we do, without paying over-much deference to either proof or protocol.

To be sure, some people still want knowledge, but it turns out that what the citizenry really craves is an open microphone. The Internet has provided that opportunity. Every day is "open-mike" night in America. The premium isn't on facts, but on attitude. In the early years of the 21st century, the Information Age has morphed into the Age of Opinion. We are all pundits now, and it's not a pretty picture.

It's one thing when fans of The Sopranos get so miffed at creator and executive producer David Chase's offbeat ending that they overload HBO's computer server with complaints. It's quite another when Paris Hilton-haters advocate on various websites for the torture and murder of a young woman they've never met. Hilton was still in the squad car carrying her back to jail for drunk driving when the blogging began. In Southern California, where she lives, 140 postings appeared within seven hours on Craigslist, under a section called "rants and raves."

They were rants, for sure.

One posting expressed the hope that Hilton would be locked up in a men's prison so that she could be "gang-raped by a few hundred hard-timers." Another showed a doctored photo of a woman with bruises all over her body, along with the wish that "lesbiens" would attack her. Race and class also seemed to incite many of the posters. "LOCK HER UP and give her more time just because she is white trash," typed one correspondent. In response, someone wrote, "If she was black, she would have gotten off without any time served. O.J. committed murder and never did a day." The invective extended to the 26-year-old heiress's family. "Notice how Paris keeps calling out for her skank slut mom," one person wrote.

A German word, "schadenfreude," means pleasure taken at another's pain. The anti-Paris postings went way beyond that. Sadism was more like it. "I HOPE THEY GUT YOU LIKE A FISH," one poster ranted. "Among all that paparazzi shooting footage, you would think there would be at least ONE sniper!" complained another. "It doesn't get any better than this!" one person chortled. "And I don't even have to pay for it. What a wonderful country!!"

What a country, indeed. And what a medium the Internet is turning out to be.

"This makes me so happy," said one Craigslistee on the Washington, D.C., site, where the postings took a predictable, and ugly, turn toward politics. There, the Hilton-bashing veered, with no discernible connection, toward President Bush, his aides, his party, and his religious faith. "What I can't understand is, Paris Hilton gets 45 days in jail for a traffic violation yet Bush, Rumsfeld, Scooter Libby, Cheney, Rice are still free," one person complained. "They're all immoral christians."

"Libby won't spend one day in jail nor will he pay a quarter-million-dollar fine," another added. "Fuhrer Bush most likely will pardon him."

President Clinton, for all of his diverse talents, wasn't computer literate when he was in the Oval Office, so historians will identify, perhaps ironically, George W. Bush as the first wired president. The paradox, at least to Bush's critics, is that the man who ran against Bush in 2000 was an evangelist for the Internet years before it even had a name. In the mid-1980s, Al Gore would tell anybody who would listen about the Next Great Thing: "the information superhighway." Gore didn't invent the phrase, but he helped popularize it. And by 1989, as a senator, he chaired hearings on that superhighway of the future, and promoted legislation to provide federal funding for a medium that he conceived as mainly linking universities.

The 2000 Florida vote recount ensured that Bush, not Gore, became the first president who had used the Internet in his private life. In Austin, Bush regularly e-mailed his children, his brothers, and other members of the clan. The claims of Howard Dean partisans to the contrary, Bush was also the first presidential candidate to make a digital-savvy appeal to voters. In 2000, the Bush-Cheney campaign website urged Americans to type in their annual income and estimated deductions to see how much Bush's proposed tax cut would save them. Those already seem like quaint days, considering how Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton keep cleverly one-upping each other this year on their respective campaign websites.

But in 1999, Google was a one-year-old Silicon Valley company (not yet a verb), Wikipedia didn't exist, and Markos Moulitsas was three years away from launching Daily Kos. Conservative Matt Drudge had already demonstrated that the new medium put a premium on speed and edginess instead of verification and objectivity. He'd also shown that anyone could hang out a shingle as a scribe. "We are all newsmen now," said Drudge, who disdained the term "blogger." Liberals didn't much care for that opinion, but with a Democrat in the White House, the Left wasn't "angry" just yet (and thus, no Angryleft.org clearinghouse website existed). When a Republican took office, it was another story. Comparisons of George W. Bush to Hitler -- or Satan -- became commonplace. The reason wasn't the computer, exactly, or even the Internet. What happened was that this technology helped to unleash the inimitable power of human networks.

Learning To Hit The Curve
Henry David Thoreau, contemplating the existential meaning of life from Walden Pond at the dawn of the Industrial Age, noted none-too-approvingly, "Men have become the tools of their tools." Thoreau hadn't seen anything yet. Humankind, with the United States at the forefront, was about to reap the benefits -- and moral dilemmas -- of what technophiles call simply The Curve. The curve of accelerated learning, or accelerated production (or, to put it in everyday terms, compound interest on a savings account), is a simple but wondrous concept that can be reduced to a simple dictum: The more you have, the more you make. This is science, not art.

In 1969, British historian Kenneth Clark brought his series Civilisation to the BBC (and to PBS the following year). The films highlighted the contributions to society of great men, which Clark brought to life through an examination of great art. This approach didn't sit quite right with Jacob Bronowski, a fellow intellectual and polymath trained in mathematics and science, and also an artist of sorts. His art form was storytelling, and the version of history he imparted in his 1973 series, The Ascent of Man, is that technological change -- no matter what the innovators' inventions -- precedes, and causes, great social and cultural upheavals.

The locomotive steam engine was invented by men determined to haul coal farther, faster, and it succeeded. But railroads could haul people, too, and in the mid-19th century, they transformed not just industry, but families, farms, communities, people's notions of distance -- everything. The railroad was what Clayton Christensen, a professor at Harvard Business School, would dub a "disruptive technology," a term he later amended to "disruptive innovations."

Inevitably these innovations change the societies that produce them, and they change them at a rate of increasing speed, and that acceleration constitutes The Curve. The patent for a steam engine was granted in 1815, a year after a British engineer named George Stephenson succeeded in building a steam locomotive that hauled eight railroad cars weighing 30 tons up a grade at 4 miles per hour. But no infrastructure to support the invention existed on either side of the Atlantic, so 15 years later the United States still had only 23 miles of railroad tracks. Then The Curve kicked in.

In a couple of years, America had 46 miles of track, and a couple of years after that, 92 miles -- and so on. In one decade the miles of rail lines doubled nearly seven times, so that by 1840 the country boasted 2,800 miles of track. The speed of change ultimately slowed, as it was bound to, because railroads require finite resources such as massive amounts of coal, land, and steel. But by 1880, the United States had 100,000 miles of track; by the time America entered World War I, 250,000 miles of rail lines crossed the country.

In the process, the United States had utterly transformed itself. A huge Europe-bound army could travel on those tracks, and so could a deadly influenza virus. "The railroads changed whatever they touched," Joel Garreau wrote in Radical Evolution, his 2005 book about the future of humankind and our new machines. "A struggling, backward, rural civilization mostly hugging the East Coast was converted into a continent-spanning, world-challenging, urban behemoth."

Eventually, the doublings of the rails stopped, as automobiles, semitrailers, and airplanes began to take over. The principle of The Curve remained intact, merely jumping to new technologies. It is something you can chart on a graph.

Moore's Law
In the 1880s, a German psychologist named Herman Ebbinghaus used himself as the subject of experiments showing that human memory increases with repetition. This is common sense, but Ebbinghaus was able to document this improvement on a graph -- the world's first "learning curve." In a 1936 issue of the Journal of the Aeronautical Sciences, this principle was applied to manufacturing airplanes -- the more planes you make, the faster you can make them. The U.S. aeronautics industry's grasp of this concept helped to win World War II and is still applied today in manufacturing the space shuttle -- but we're getting ahead of our story.

In the winter of 1958-59, two Midwestern-born scientists working in different parts of the country figured out, more or less simultaneously, how to build an integrated circuit. Jack Kilby, an electrical engineer at Texas Instruments, and Robert Noyce, an MIT-trained physicist at Fairchild Semiconductor, a firm he founded in Santa Clara County, Calif., were tackling the same problem: how to put transistors, resistors, and capacitors on a single "chip" of semi-conductor material so that they could work in rapid sequence. Kilby used the element germanium; Noyce used silicon, which would prove easier to mass-produce. Litigation ensued between TI and Fairchild, but the microchip had been invented. It would revolutionize everything it touched.

The speed of this revolution soon became a source of fascination for the new industry's engineers. In 1965, Gordon E. Moore, the director of research and development at Fairchild who had come from the California Institute of Technology, broached the near-infinite possibilities of this new device in an article for Electronics magazine. Six years after the invention of the microchip, Moore noted, the capacity of chips had been doubling every year, a trend he predicted would continue for 10 years. (Ten years later, with his theory showing no signs of abating, Moore revised his prediction to a doubling every two years. If you average his two predictions, you have the correct answer. The amount of information a computer chip can hold doubles about every 18 months.)

It is almost impossible to overestimate the implications of this phenomenon. Carver Mead, a Caltech professor, dubbed this 18-month doubling cycle Moore's Law. Strictly speaking, it's not a law of science, but it may be even more profound. Think of Moore's Law not just as a rule of thumb to help chip manufacturers predict their future market, but as a mind-set that information -- human knowledge -- potentially doubles every year and a half.

Future Shock, the book in which Alvin Toffler coined the phrase "information overload," was published in 1970, halfway into Moore's first prediction. That was before the Internet, before the microchip made mass, real-time, global human networking a reality. Gloria Mark, a professor of interactive and collaborative technologies at the University of California (Irvine), coined a similar concept, "cognitive overload." This is what happens when people get hit with interruptions requiring them to change mental topics -- something that occurs about every two or three minutes in a typical office setting, Mark discovered. "It's a myth you can do two things at once," she said an interview. "What you can do is switch from one task to another very rapidly. What causes cognitive overload is switching contexts. This shift is what creates stress."

The information revolution stresses individuals, and even institutions, but it also creates opportunities for great paradigm shifts. In contemporary political terms, here's the kind of creative change that human networks, aided by computers, can effectuate: In 1980, the presidential candidates raised a total of $162 million. Eight years later, that amount doubled. The next doubling took a little longer, but in 2004, candidates raised $881 million. The 2008 race will be the first $1 billion national election in American history. Eight years ago, a serious Democratic presidential candidate was expected to raise $27 million (Bill Bradley) or $28 million (Gore) in the entire year before the election -- not in the first quarter of that year, as Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama very nearly did this year. That's the power of The Curve.

Is This Heaven -- Or Hell?
In Radical Evolution, Garreau explores the possibilities implied by a future in which the availability of information continues to double every couple of years. He comes up with three vastly differing scenarios that he provocatively calls "heaven," "hell," and "prevail." In Garreau's telling, heaven's apostle is Ray Kurzweil, a habituate of his lab in Massachusetts' famed high-tech corridor along Route 128. Kurzweil espouses a spellbinding future in which machines will soon do much of the thinking for humans, and humans and machines will assimilate and evolve into hybrid creatures who live a very long time. Kurzweil hopes to be one of them.

It's easy to scoff, but first consider that dude you saw on the subway recently who had a thingy hooked onto his ear, and a little wire going into a pocket, and who was carrying on an animated conversation with someone -- in Singapore, perhaps? Why can't the tiny chips in those earbuds be planted in the guy's earlobes, or his brain? We do that for pets already, which is why a basset hound that had roamed 400 miles into Arizona was returned to his California home earlier this month. How long is it before microchips are implanted under our skins, to help us -- well, think?

In 1987, Chris Langton, a researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratories and at the Santa Fe Institute for the Sciences of Complexity, came up with the term "Artificial Life" to refer to this next-generation application of Artificial Intelligence. AI, by the way, is not a future concept. It's here now, and its ability to challenge human primacy has not been in dispute since 1997, the year that an IBM computer defeated the greatest chess player in the world. The machine, said then-reigning (human) chess champion Garry Kasparov, "played like a god."

Hell, however, is the more-familiar science-fiction scenario. In the midst of World War II, Isaac Asimov wrote his three rules of robotics, the gist being that a robot may not harm a human being. But science-fiction writers from Asimov to Arthur C. Clarke couldn't help but noodle around with the inherent paradox: Humankind often hurts its own, so robots, quite naturally, wind up in the middle, or turn against humans in disgust. This theme has spawned a spate of books and movies, from the frightening 1970 sci-fi thriller Colossus to the 1983 anti-war pic WarGames -- a movie that was used as an argument both for and against President Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative.

As early as 1917, when splitting the atom was no more than a gleam in the brains of Otto Hahn, Fritz Strassmann, and Lise Meitner, Albert Einstein wrote to a friend, "Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal." Today, the Cassandra trying to warn us of the apocalyptic danger of information overload is the inaptly named Bill Joy. He has been called the Thomas Edison of the Internet, and once upon a time, Joy was a Silicon Valley-dwelling braniac working on cutting-edge innovations that would enhance the quality of American life.

While still a grad student at the University of California (Berkeley), Joy was the chief programmer for a project of the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency that envisioned -- as Gore had done -- a network to link universities. The project would, of course, become the Internet, and Joy would go on to become the chief scientist at Sun Microsystems. There he helped to develop a new generation of processors that made Sun wealthy and Joy a legend. But his true genius was in seeing the ramifications of what he was doing, a realization summed up by Sun's prescient slogan: "The network is the computer."

So it came to be. But like Butch Cassidy ("You keep thinkin', Butch," the Sundance Kid told him, "that's what you're good at"), Joy kept thinking about the future of the new machines, and it led him to a place as far off the grid as Hole in the Wall. In a startling 2000 article in Wired, Joy wrote -- this was before 9/11 -- that "we are on the cusp of the further perfection of extreme evil." It was an evil, he said, that entailed not just bequeathing weapons of mass destruction to rogue nations but also to "extreme individuals." Then he relocated to the mountains of Colorado, leaving behind a haunting question: "If our own extinction is a likely, or even possible, outcome of our technological development, shouldn't we proceed with great caution?"

The destruction of the human race is depressing stuff. But the dark potential of computer networks has already shown itself. Identity theft has practically replaced bank robbery; child pornographers peddle their perversions on the Web; and grifts are so ubiquitous that it was probably inevitable that the first so-called "Internet murder" (a mail bomb was actually the weapon of choice) was a fatal interaction between two men trying to scam each other.

From his caves in the middle of nowhere, Osama bin Laden communicates with his followers, sends taunting messages around the globe, and recruits future mass murderers with Silicon Valley technology. The would-be jihadists who made the news in early June planned to cripple America's economy, kill more people than the 9/11 terrorists did, and destroy John F. Kennedy Airport. They reportedly chose their targets using Google Earth.

In the aftermath of the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the United States invaded a sovereign nation with the announced purpose of preventing that nation from giving weapons of mass murder to terrorists. No such weapons were found, and partly for that reason, and partly because the Internet has made incivility so transmissible, Americans have turned on one another over the Iraq war, employing nasty rhetoric along purely partisan lines unmatched since the Civil War.

A Google search done on June 21 for postings containing the terms "George W. Bush" and "Hitler" produced 1.45 million hits. Bush and Stalin got 748,000 hits; Bush and Mussolini, 335,000. The headlines that pop up on the screen -- or even the names of the websites -- tell you all you need to know, especially the ones like whywehatebush.com.

"People say bad things online," said blogger and science-fiction writer Cory Doctorow. "They write vile lies about blameless worthies. They pen disgusting racist jeremiads, post gut-churning photos of sex acts committed against children, and more sexist and homophobic tripe than you could read -- or stomach -- in a lifetime. They post fraudulent offers, alarmist conspiracy theories, and dangerous Web pages containing malicious, computer-hijacking code."

And he was arguing in defense of free expression in cyberspace.

Prevailing Winds
The first president to install a telephone in the White House was Rutherford B. Hayes, another candidate who lost the popular vote but won the Oval Office. The year was 1878, and Hayes's first phone call was to Alexander Graham Bell, who had invented the contraption. The president's opening words were, "Please speak more slowly."

An understandable instinct, but slowing things down is not what new technologies do. Some people once hoped that the Internet would break down historic differences in class, gender, race, and the like. Indeed, the original idea for this article was an examination of whether the United States is close to achieving a "post-racist" nation. Perusing the casual racism expressed anonymously in online discussions disabused National Journal of that idea. Sexism is even more widespread.

If anything, networks increase the speed and power of prejudices, no matter how esoteric. The Internet turns out to be an enabler of some of humans' worst instincts. Intolerance, for one. At the dawn of the Internet age, technology guru Mitchell Kapor was teaching a course at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on "Democracy and the Internet"; he learned that some of his students quickly dismissed America Online users as clueless. This, he thought, encapsulated the first truth of cyberspace: "We bring our baggage with us."

While Garreau uses the word "prevail," Kapor, the founder of software development firm Lotus, uses the phrase "muddle through." He thinks we will, but it will never be easy. Earlier this year, a California computer programmer named Kathy Sierra, who runs a blog for other programmers, discovered just how heavy the baggage can be. Some minor difference in philosophy prompted someone to launch an Internet "flame war" of hate speech and threats against her. Sierra canceled an appearance in San Diego after viewing sexually graphic and intimidating posts that made her afraid to leave her property. "I will never feel the same," she wrote. "I will never be the same."

This incident sparked a conversation in cyberspace about the need for a bloggers' code of conduct. "It's this culture of attacking women that has especially got to stop," wrote Robert Scoble, a rival technology blogger.

Conversations such as these are aimed at taming technology's excesses. Sara Kiesler, a professor of computer science and "human-computer interaction" at Carnegie Mellon University, has identified five factors that encourage bad behavior online: 1) the likelihood that people in an online community simply reinforce one another's views, in ever-escalating rhetoric; 2) conversely, the easy access -- a single click of the mouse -- for people from an outside group who abhor the dominant ethic of the first group; 3) the kind of anonymity that prompts people in cars to flip the bird to sometime who cuts them off in traffic; 4) fewer social cues -- after all, you're at a computer screen -- to remind people of the norms of behavior; and 5) a low risk of sanctions for those who violate those norms.

Having said that, Kiesler believes that new codes of behavior -- "netiquette" is the term of art -- are evolving. "I think there are technologies, such as rating and reputation systems, that are working within communities to keep people from violating norms," she said in an online interview. "Some online communities have policies and rules, and they kick you out if you don't behave yourself. I think technologies for encouraging good behavior and discouraging bad behavior are going to improve with the ability to track people's social networks across the Internet. It's going to be possible to use people's connections to make them less invisible and less anonymous online."

The conundrum, however, is that the essence of the latest technology -- networks -- is the ability to unleash human excess. Eleven years ago, a rebellious wizard named John Perry Barlow penned a defiant screed, A Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace, that called for government to keep its mitts off the Web. The manifesto made him a legend of the "Netsphere." These days, Barlow is not so sure. "On the Internet today we are beset with spam, viruses, international fraud, identity theft, unregulated surveillance, and an ascending spew of increasingly bizarre pornography, and no power of the physical world seems able to stop it," he wrote on the 10th anniversary of his declaration. "My belief in the virtues of giving all humanity a voice did not take into account what would happen if you gave every one of a billion people his own virtual soapbox and street corner. Everybody's talking, and nobody's listening."

If the answer to incivility is for humans to formulate new cultural "net norms" to prevent Web-facilitated crimes ranging from con artistry to mass murder, one of the "muddle-through" solutions is -- more technology. Spam filters, data mining, cyberwar techniques, these kinds of inventions are meant to protect us.

Reinventing Ourselves
All technological innovations require a shakeout period, says Paul Saffo, a technology forecaster who teaches at Stanford University. That's where we are today. Saffo notes that after the telephone was invented, it took people a decade to learn that they shouldn't call their neighbors at 7 p.m. when they were sitting down for dinner. "First we invent technologies, then we turn around and use our technologies to reinvent ourselves." One of his concerns is that technical solutions to technological problems tend to erode privacy. "Technology is not a friend of privacy," Saffo said. "It may be the friend of security; I'm not sure. In the 1980s, we developed the personal computer. In the 1990s, we invented networks. In this decade, we are putting eyes, ears, and sensory devices on our computers -- letting cyberspace watch us all."

Other worries abound. Displacement is one. Craigslist does more than allow people to rant and rave about Paris Hilton and George Bush. It helps them find apartments, jobs, cars, furniture, baseball tickets, and girlfriends -- all free of charge. In the process, local newspapers coast to coast have lost the valuable wants ads that kept them profitable, and thousands of journalists have lost their jobs. The new technology has also threatened traditional journalist ethics.

If a Hollywood screenwriter were pitching a movie treatment of the life of journalistic legend and civil-rights champion John Siegenthaler, he might cast it as Lincoln Steffens meets Forrest Gump. In Tennessee, Siegenthaler was an investigative reporter who exposed corrupt judges and politicians, crusaded for civil rights, and once saved the life of a man who was trying to commit suicide. Attorney General Robert Kennedy brought Siegenthaler to the Justice Department, and Siegenthaler later was a pallbearer at RFK's funeral. After returning to journalism, he helped to launch USA Today -- and alerted a young reporter named Al Gore about an open congressional seat. Yet, one morning in 2005 his reputation nearly became roadkill on the information superhighway.

For reasons that remain unclear, a man whom Siegenthaler had never met inserted two sentences in Siegenthaler's Wikipedia biography: "For a brief time, he was thought to have been directly involved in the Kennedy assassinations of both John, and his brother, Bobby. Nothing was ever proven." The man who posted this eventually apologized to Siegenthaler, and the bizarre charge was deleted from Wikipedia. But for the "encyclopedia" written (anonymously) by anyone and everyone, inaccuracy, malice, and bias is a common problem -- even as Wikipedia entries dominate Google search results.

Who can stop all of this? Probably no one, at least until something better comes along. (Internet2 is already on the drawing boards.) But remember the beauty of Moore's Law -- something will come along. That has been the American way: Keep innovating until we succeed. It might be human nature. After he witnessed the nuclear explosion in Alamogordo, N.M., on July 16, 1945, Robert Oppenheimer wrote that his thoughts turned later to words from the Bhagavad-Gita: "I am become death, the destroyer of worlds."

Perhaps, but at the time of the explosion, Oppenheimer's immediate reaction was the same as for inventors everywhere. "It worked," he told his brother.

One American politician in particular can relate to this impulse. During President Reagan's first year in office, an abrasive Wall Street trader was shown the door at Salomon Brothers, leaving with $10 million in severance and a big idea. The idea was that by using computers to scour government records, he could give investors better advice -- and that people would pay a lot for it. Until that time, valuing one stock or bond over another was mostly guesswork.

"Something that could show instantly whether government bonds were appreciating faster than corporate ones would make smart investors out of mediocre ones," the innovator wrote. Soon, he began filling the country with his expensive terminals that helped investors track the bond and stock markets. Then he ran for mayor of New York City.

In some ways, Michael Bloomberg is the perfect man for the times. He named his product the "Bloomberg," made $5.5 billion in the process, and has taken up three political labels (Democratic, Republican, independent) in five years. Now he's thinking about running for president.

The Internet has helped presidential candidates, even those with no real chance to win, raise improbably huge sums of money. Yet the same power of the network might be harnessed to threaten the dominance of America's two great political parties. Perhaps that little integrated circuit, doubling in power every 18 months, really is "the destroyer of worlds."

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