inding people like you is
like gravity. Lots of things work against gravity, but gravity always wins in
the end -- in the end, everything collapses. In the end, everyone ends up with
the people that are most like them that they can find."

I was warming to my subject now, in that flow state that great athletes get into
when they just know where to swing their bat, where to plant their foot. I knew
that I was working up a great rant.

"Fast-forward to the age of email. Slowly but surely, we begin to mediate almost
all of our communication over networks. Why walk down the hallway to ask a
coworker a question, when you can just send email? You don't need to interrupt
them, and you can keep going on your own projects, and if you forget the answer,
you can just open the message again and look at the response. There're all kinds
of ways to interact with our friends over the network: we can play
hallucinogenic games, chat, send pictures, code, music, funny articles, metric
fuckloads of porn... The interaction is high-quality! Sure, you gain three
pounds every year you spend behind the desk instead of walking down the hall to
ask your buddy where he wants to go for lunch, but that's a small price to pay.

"So you're a fish out of water. You live in Arizona, but you're sixteen years
old and all your neighbors are eighty-five, and you get ten billion channels of
media on your desktop. All the good stuff -- everything that tickles you --
comes out of some clique of hyperurban club-kids in South Philly. They're making
cool art, music, clothes. You read their mailing lists and you can tell that
they're exactly the kind of people who'd really appreciate you for who you are.
In the old days, you'd pack your bags and hitchhike across the country and move
to your community. But you're sixteen, and that's a pretty scary step.

"Why move? These kids live online. At lunch, before school, and all night,
they're comming in, talking trash, sending around photos, chatting. Online, you
can be a peer. You can hop into these discussions, play the games, chord with
one hand while chatting up some hottie a couple thousand miles away.

"Only you can't. You can't, because they chat at seven AM while they're getting
ready for school. They chat at five PM, while they're working on their homework.
Their late nights end at three AM. But those are their *local* times, not yours.
If you get up at seven, they're already at school, 'cause it's ten there.