“These lights represent all the searches that are going on right now,” the engineer said. “Each color is a different language. If you move the toggle this way”—he caused the screen to alter—“you can see the traffic patterns of the entire Internet system.” The image was mesmerizing, more organic than mechanical, as if I were glimpsing the early stages of some accelerating evolutionary process, in which all the boundaries between men—nationality, race, religion, wealth—were rendered invisible and irrelevant, so that the physicist in Cambridge, the bond trader in Tokyo, the student in a remote
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