Here's this huge opportunity for the market to streamline itself. By finding out more about people, you can deliver them what they want. You can also manipulate them, but this is the same fear that people in earlier eras had about advertisements, that they were manipulative, until the ads became a joke because people became capable of defending themselves psychologically against these things.

You're bribed to do this. You're bribed to get rid of your privacy. You're bribed by being shown lots of things you want at the best possible price, and people love that.

Say you watched the ordinary amount of television, which is, say, 35 hours a week. You're sitting there and, you have your remote control, but all these things get hurled at you that you have just no interest in.

What if someone said that in addition to having control over your television set, which is fabulous in itself, they're only going to show you things that really interest you. That's very appealing. The response to that isn't naturally for people to march out into the street and protest the violation of their privacy.

They say, "I don't have to look at all these ads for pharmaceutical medicines treating a disease I don't have."

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That's exactly right. I don't have to watch the hemorrhoid commercials anymore. It's true that someone could come and explain to them, theoretically, they should be offended that their privacy is being violated, but practically they're just being given what all Americans want: more stuff at cheaper prices.

But doesn't it even go farther than that? If the current TV advertising model is so inefficient now, then this will make companies more efficient and then presumably prices will go down?

That's right. If you have one culture that embraces this technology, and another culture that rejects it, the culture that embraces it is going to be commercially more successful. And you could argue that the inner lives of the people in that culture will be less rich. And that may be true, but that's a separate issue.

The culture that rejects it will be paying a very steep price for its rich inner life.

So, why then do you think there is this worrying about privacy around these kinds of technologies? Do you think it's just a small group of people that actually care about that and are very vocal, or is there real, widespread anxiety?

People need to be scared about something. It is a smaller group of people who are actually, genuinely enraged by the idea of other people's privacy being violated.

And there's a large kind of amorphous low-level interest in the general public. They're willing to feign outrage on command, until they see the benefits of relinquishing their privacy, and they'll say: "Oh, give me that. I want that. I want to be able to do that with my box. My friend down the street, he's a boat fanatic, and he's got all these great cheap deals for boats coming in through the television set."

That's the way it's going to work. People are not going to worry much about privacy -- unless some really horrible things are done, which I don't think corporations are stupid enough to do.

One of the downsides of all this technological chance is the dislocation of adulthood. As you write, the price of being able to be a genius at 15 or 18 is being washed-up at 40. Do you think that's going to be true of your field? Do you worry about that yourself?

I do. I think about it. I look around and think that I'm in a lucky field in that they're lots of examples of writers surviving past the age of 40. Any field in which there is a lot of change, and a lot of technical change, and that's a lot of fields, is going to be increasingly youth-oriented.

Right now it's true of medicine. Medical technology, especially medical research, is moving so fast, and you see very young people becoming very prominent in medicine.

The technology of routine, white-collar office work, what most Americans do for a living, has been changing rapidly because of computers. I would think the effect there is the same. It's not as dramatic as on Wall Street or in the computer business itself, but that's the general pressure.

What effects do you think that the Internet has had or will have on journalism? Has it undermined the elites in some way?

I think it's had a very healthy effect on journalism, especially American journalism. Because there is this horrible tendency in American journalism to want to be a profession. There are people who aren't their work; they're their position. So, it's because they're a muckety-muck at the Washington Post that they're an important journalist, not because they've actually done any good journalism.

And the Internet is a great celebration of doers and it also enables anybody to do it. So it enables Matt Drudge and anybody else; it just opens up the fields. It lets lots of people do to journalism what Jonathan Lebed did to Wall Street -- make it look foolish, make professionals look foolish.

The Internet is a blow to the idea of the professional journalist, and so for that reason I think it's a very healthy thing. And every time you see a panel at a journalism school about "Whither Internet journalism: Good or Ill?" I think, God almighty, thank God for the Internet.

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