Words&Dirt

“I have often compared the current evolution of cyberspace to the last great age of globalization, the centuries of European discovery. That era, for all its accomplishments, jammed together the good and the bad and the weak and the strong in ways that had never been experienced before. What the Europeans got out it was land, wealth, tobacco, and syphilis. Much of the rest of the world got exploitation of entire populations, global piracy, and the global slave trade. We are in a somewhat analogous condition now except that today’s connectivity isn’t at ten knots with a favoring wind. It’s at 186,000 miles per second.”

––Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror, by Michael V. Hayden, pg. 132