ntire perception of him has
changed in an instant. His speech, which once seemed just bright and
enthusiastic, now seems to have a dangerous tang of mania. "I have to
do this!" he assures me. "Track this guy down.... It's a thing I do
... you know ... to keep myself together!" He smiles, nods, lifts his
trolley by its decaying rubber handgrips.

"Gotta work together, y'know," Stanley booms, his face alight with
cheerfulness, "the police can't do everything!" The gentlemen I met in
my stroll in downtown Phoenix are the only computer illiterates in this
book. To regard them as irrelevant, however, would be a grave mistake.

As computerization spreads across society, the populace at large is
subjected to wave after wave of future shock. But, as a necessary
converse, the "computer community" itself is subjected to wave after
wave of incoming computer illiterates. How will those currently
enjoying America's digital bounty regard, and treat, all this teeming
refuse yearning to breathe free? Will the electronic frontier be
another Land of Opportunity--or an armed and monitored enclave, where
the disenfranchised snuggle on their cardboard at the locked doors of
our houses of justice?

Some people just don't get along with computers. They can't read.
They can't type. They just don't have it in their heads to master
arcane instructions in wirebound manuals. Somewhere, the process of
computerization of the populace will reach a limit. Some people--quite
decent people maybe, who might have thrived in any other
situation--will be left irretrievably outside the bounds. What's to be
done with these people, in the bright new shiny electroworld? How will
they be regarded, by the mouse-whizzing masters of cyberspace? With
contempt? Indifference? Fear?

In retrospect, it astonishes me to realize how quickly poor Stanley
became a perceived threat. Surprise and fear are closely allied
feelings. And the world of computing is full of surprises.

I met one character in the streets of Phoenix whose role in this book
is supremely and directly relevant. That personage was Stanley's giant
thieving scarred phantom. This phantasm is everywhere in this book.
He is the specter haunting cyberspace.

Sometimes he's a maniac vandal ready to smash the phone system for no
sane reason at all. Sometimes he's a fascist fed, coldly programming
his mighty mainframes to destroy our Bill of Rights. Sometimes he's a
telco bureaucrat,