ng to be via high-level interfaces,
not via wires. I mean, ULTIMATELY there are going to be wires--but the
wires are just a commodity. Fiber, wireless. You no longer NEED a
utility."

Water utilities? Gas utilities?

Of course we still need those, he agrees. "But when what you're moving
is information, instead of physical substances, then you can play by a
different set of rules. We're evolving those rules now! Hopefully you
can have a much more decentralized system, and one in which there's
more competition in the marketplace.

"The role of government will be to make sure that nobody cheats. The
proverbial 'level playing field.' A policy that prevents
monopolization. It should result in better service, lower prices, more
choices, and local empowerment." He smiles. "I'm very big on local
empowerment."

Kapor is a man with a vision. It's a very novel vision which he and
his allies are working out in considerable detail and with great
energy. Dark, cynical, morbid cyberpunk that I am, I cannot avoid
considering some of the darker implications of "decentralized,
nonhierarchical, locally empowered" networking.

I remark that some pundits have suggested that electronic
networking--faxes, phones, small-scale photocopiers--played a strong
role in dissolving the power of centralized communism and causing the
collapse of the Warsaw Pact.

Socialism is totally discredited, says Kapor, fresh back from the
Eastern Bloc. The idea that faxes did it, all by themselves, is rather
wishful thinking.

Has it occurred to him that electronic networking might corrode
America's industrial and political infrastructure to the point where
the whole thing becomes untenable, unworkable--and the old order just
collapses headlong, like in Eastern Europe?

"No," Kapor says flatly. "I think that's extraordinarily unlikely. In
part, because ten or fifteen years ago, I had similar hopes about
personal computers--which utterly failed to materialize." He grins
wryly, then his eyes narrow. "I'm VERY opposed to techno-utopias.
Every time I see one, I either run away, or try to kill it."

It dawns on me then that Mitch Kapor is not trying to make the world
safe for democracy. He certainly is not trying to make it safe for
anarchists or utopians--least of all for computer intruders or
electronic rip-off artists. What he really hopes to do is make the
world safe for future Mitch Kapors. This world of decentralized,
small-scale