Twenty years before my meeting with the vice president, I was a communist. I joined an underground party. I took a nom de guerre. If I had been clever enough to write a bug fatal to world banking, I would have been promoted to party leadership, hailed as a heroine of the revolution. [...]

Now the thought terrifies me. The wave of nausea I felt in the vice president's office, the real fear of being responsible for her system, followed me around for days. And still, try as I might, I can't envision a world where all the credit cards stop working. The life of normal people-buying groceries, paying bills-would unravel into confusion overnight. [...]

[...]

The global network is only the newest form of revolution, I think. Maybe it's only revolution we 're addicted to. Maybe the form never matters- socialism, rock and roll, drugs, market capitalism, electronic commercewho cares, as long as it's the edgy thing that's happening in one's own time. Maybe every generation produces a certain number of people who want change-change in its most drastic form . And socialism, with its quaint decades of guerrilla war, its old-fashioned virtues of steadfastness, its generation-long construction of a "new man"-is all too hopelessly pokey for us now. [...]