ABSTRACT
Attempts to envision the future are notoriously entertaining but rarely accurate (e.g., Corn & Horrigan, 1984/1996; but see Brewer, 1998, for an exception that is, characteristically, entertaining and accurate). Many of the great minds of the past century, Bertrand Russell included, believed that war with the Soviet Union was inevitable and advocated a “preventive” nuclear attack against the Soviets to forestall greater catastrophe (Poundstone, 1992). Thankfully, neither tragedy–the inevitable war nor the preventive attack–occurred. What emerged instead was a protracted cold war with the Soviet Union, and one result of that cold war was the development of a communications technology–packet switching on a distributed network–specifically designed to be less inviting to preemptive attack by the Soviets (Cairncross, 1997). That technology, in turn, became the foundation of another future—of what we now know as the Internet.
