Neal Stephenson Quote

I deal in information, he says to the smarmy, toadying pseudojournalist whointerviews him. He's sitting in his office in Houston, looking slicker thannormal. All television going out to Consumers throughout the world goesthrough me. Most of the information transmitted to and from the CIC databasepasses through my networks. The Metaverse -- -the entire Street -- exists byvirtue of a network that I own and control.But that means, if you'll just follow my reasoning for a bit, that when I havea programmer working under me who is working with that information, he iswielding enormous power. Information is going into his brain. And it's stayingthere. It travels with him when he goes home at night. It gets all tangled upinto his dreams, for Christ's sake. He talks to his wife about it. And,goddamn it, he doesn't have any right to that information. If I was running acar factory, I wouldn't let workers drive the cars home or borrow tools. Butthat's what I do at five o'clock each day, all over the world, when my hackersgo home from work.When they used to hang rustlers in the old days, the last thing they would dois piss their pants. That was the ultimate sign, you see, that they had lostcontrol over their own bodies, that they were about to die. See, it's the firstfunction of any organization to control its own sphincters. We're not evendoing that. So we're working on refining our management techniques so that wecan control that information no matter where it is -- on our hard disks or eveninside the programmers' heads. Now, I can't say more because I got competitionto worry about. But it is my fervent hope that in five or ten years, this kindof thing won't even be an issue.