Technology is amoral, and inventions are routinely deployed in ways their creators neither intend nor sanction.

By creating a universal medium, one able not just to display text but to show images and process transactions, the Web transformed the Internet from an intellectual meeting-house into a commercial enterprise.

This intellectual work became as important, and often as arduous, as the physical labor of manufacturing products and delivering services.

In 1999, proclaiming the imminent “end of software” to any reporter who would listen, Benioff left Oracle and, together with a gifted software engineer named Parker Harris, launched Salesforce.com.

It seems clear that as newspapers adapt to the economics of the Web, they are far more likely to continue to fire reporters than hire new ones.

If the Internet levels the battlefield to the benefit of America’s enemies, the only recourse, it seems, may be to destroy the battlefield.

“Unrestricted by physical distance, they collaborate with each other without the direct mediation of money or politics. Unconcerned about copyright, they give and receive information without thought of payment. In the absence of states or markets to mediate social bonds, network communities are instead formed through the mutual obligations created

to understand how computing is not like electricity, for the differences between the two technologies are as revealing as their similarities.

The distinguished Columbia University economist Jagdish Bhagwati argues that computerization is the main cause behind the two-decades-long stagnation of middle-class wages.