Democracy

Somehow, somewhere our democratic institutions will need to be reinvented, if only to lay down the rules and fix the limits within which economic rationality ought to be permitted to function and to run roughshod over our lives. The forces behind the coming virtual city are driven by savage economic imperatives, not delirious new possibilities for freedom; and we will need, at great challenge to the imagination, to find effective new ways of refusing them. We will need to create strong alternative cultures resistant to the sleazy short-term seductions of gadgetry, in the hopes of maintaining any semblance of long-term autonomy over our fates. ( VC 100)