Just happened upon this nice quote from "God's Debris," Scott Adams new novel (which is by turns frustrating and wonderful). It's a Socratic dialogue between a courier and an old man:
"Think about this," [the old man] continued. "As we speak, engineers are building the Internet to link every part of the world in much the same way as a fetus develops a central nervous system. Virtually no one questions the desirability of the Internet. It seems that humans are born with the instinct to create it and embrace it. The instinct of beavers is to build dams; the instinct of humans is to build communication systems."
"I don't think instinct is makis us build the Internet. I think people are trying to make money off it. It's just capitalism," I replied.
"Capitalism is only part of it," he countered. "In the 1990s investors threw money at any Internet company that asked for it. Economics went out the window. Rationality can't explain our obsession with the Intneret. The need to build the Internet comes from something inside us, something programmed, something we can't resist.
