In the United States, we're sexually obsessed, largely because our media have been putting us in a constant priapic condition, and our religion and culture have been telling us that it's not OK to have a hard-on. We're in this terrible double bind.

help them to focus on the long-term view but that's pretty difficult to accomplish in a business where people's heads are always turned by a pile of cash instead of by what the pile of cash can actually do."

If the Net enables me to have higher and higher resolution in my communication with people‹in the sense that I can feel to an increasing degree that they are "right in front of me"‹that's a very interesting business opportunity. They're going to lose a ton of money and lots of them will back off. And when they do, we're going to be left with brand-new infrastructure, and the artists will come along and do something interesting with it. I figure ten years will go by before that happens. All these iterations are absolutely necessary‹failure built upon failure built upon failure. I don't think you can speed up that process.

The fundamental power of network technology is that it blows apart huge existing infrastructures because just about anyone can put a Web site on the Net and publish for an audience of millions, instantly. This distributed environment of networking obviates huge media structures. If they don't pay attention, the technology will blow them apart.