I doubt Jobs' sincerity. I suspect he likes DRM because it creates an anti-competitive lock-in to Apple. I think he's trying to shift blame for the much-criticized DRM to the music industry, whose executives are twirling their mustaches and declaring DRM to be the only way forward for their industry.

The context for this is complex and global.

DRM technology is used to lock music -- and movies, books and video games -- to a specific vendor's products. It's intended to ensure that copyright holders earn royalties from their music or movies, control how they are distributed, and prevent them from being copied without permission.

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Lester came down the drive grinning and bouncing on the balls of his feet. Perry had evidently been expecting him, for he came racing through the shantytown and pelted down the roadway and threw himself at Lester, grabbing him in a crazy, exuberant, whooping hug. Francis gimped out a moment later and gave him a solemn handshake. She hadn't blogged their meeting in Detroit, so if Francis and Perry knew about Lester's transformation, they'd found out without hearing it from her.

She finished recording the homecoming from Mrs Torrence's crow's nest, then paid the grinning old bag and took the stairs two at a time, hurrying to catch up with Lester and his crowd.

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"I was just in Greensboro, Miss," the PhD candidate said. He was in his mid-twenties, young and slick, his only nod to academe a small goatee. "I used to spend summers there with my grandpa." He talked fast, flecks of spittle in the corners of his mouth, eyes wide, fork stabbing blindly at the bits of crab-cake on his plate. "There wasn't anything left there, just a couple gas-stations and a 7-Eleven, shit, they'd even closed the Wal-Mart. But now, but now, it's alive again, it's buzzing and hopping. Every empty storefront is full of people playing and tinkering, just a little bit of money in their pockets from a bank or a company or a fund. They're doing the dumbest things, mind you: tooled-leather laptop cases, switchblade knives with thumb drives in the handles, singing and dancing lawn-Santas that yodel like hillbillies."

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But what does decentralization really mean? On her "blog" this week, former journalist Andrea Fleeks reports that the inmates running the flagship Kodacell asylum in suburban Florida have invited an entire village of homeless squatters to take up residence at their factory premises.

Describing their illegal homesteading as "live-work" condos that Dr Seuss might have designed, Kodacell shill Fleeks goes on to describe how this captive, live-in audience has been converted to a workforce for Kodacell's most profitable unit ("most profitable" is a relative term: to date, this unit has turned a profit of about 1.5 million, per the last quarterly report; by contrast the old Kodak's most profitable unit made twenty times that in its last quarter of operation).

America has a grand tradition of this kind of plantation living: the coal barons' company towns of the 19th century are the original model for this kind of industrial practice in the U.S.A. Substandard housing and only one employer in town -- that's the kind of brave new world that Fleeks's boyfriend Kettlewell has created.

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They arrived to discover a firetruck parked on the side of the freeway nearest the shantytown. The firefighters were standing soberly beside it, watching the fire rage across the canal.

They rushed for the footbridge and a firefighter blocked their way.

"Sorry, it's not safe," he said. He was Latino, good looking, like a movie star, bronze skin flickering with copper highlights from the fire.

"I live there," Francis said. "That's my home."

The firefighter looked away. "It's not safe," he said.

"Why aren't you fighting the fire?" Andrea said.

Francis's head snapped around. "You're not fighting the fire! You're going to let our houses burn!"

A couple more firefighters trickled over. Across the river, the fire had consumed half of the little settlement. Some of the residents were operating a slow and ponderous bucket brigade from the canal, while others ran into the unburned buildings and emerged clutching armloads of belongings, bits of furniture, boxes of photos.

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They walked to the IHOP to have a celebratory lunch. Being back in Florida felt just right to Andrea. Francis, the leader of the paramilitary wing of the AARP, threw them a salute and blew her a kiss, and even Lester's nursing junkie friend seemed to be in a good mood.

When they were done, they brought take-out bags for the junkie and Francis in the shantytown.

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"So, Perry, what have you got for Tjan?"

"I came up with the last one," he said, grinning -- they always ended up grinning when Tjan ran down economics for them. "Let Lester take this one."

Lester looked shy -- he'd never fully recovered from Andrea turning him down and when she was in the room, he always looked like he'd rather be somewhere else. He participated in the message boards on her blog though, the most prolific poster in a field with thousands of very prolific posters. When he posted, others listened: he was witty, charming and always right.

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She did get an eyeful of several anatomically correct anatomic drawings before taking off again. It made her uncomfortably horny and aware of how long it had been since her last date. That got her thinking of poor Lester, buried underneath all that flesh, and that got her thinking about the life she'd chosen for herself, covering the weird world of tech where the ground never stood still long enough for her to get her balance.

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"When it's done, it will make toast."

"Make toast?"

"Yeah, separate a single slice off a loaf, load it into a top-loading slice-toaster, depress the lever, time the toast-cycle, retrieve the toast and butter it. I got the idea from old-time backup-tape loaders. This plus a toaster will function as a loosely coupled single system."

"OK, that's really cool, but I have to ask the boring question, Perry. Why? Why build a toast robot?"

Perry stopped working and dusted his hands off. He was really built, and his shaggy hair made him look younger than his crow's-feet suggested. He turned a seashell with a half-built motor in it over and spun it like a top on the hand-painted WEATHER IS HERE/WISH YOU WERE BEAUTIFUL legend.

"Well, that's the question, isn't it? The simple answer: people buy them. Collectors. So it's a good hobby business, but that's not really it.

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"Yeah, it's 'cause they never finished building the mall, so the address hasn't been included in the USGIS maps. The open GPSes all have these better maps made by geohackers, but the rental car companies have got a real hard-on for official map-data. Morons. Hang on, lemme get my GPS out and I'll get you some decent lat-long."

His voice had a pleasant, youthful, midwestern sound, like a Canadian newscaster: friendly and enthusiastic as a puppy. His name was Perry Gibbons, and if Kettlewell was to be believed, he was the most promising prospect identified by Kodacell's talent scouts.

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Blue blazer today, and she wasn't the only one. There was Morrow from the NYT's Silicon Valley office, and Spetzer from the WSJ, and that despicable rat-toothed jumped-up gossip columnist from one of the U.K. tech-rags, and many others besides. Old home week, blue blazers fresh from the dry-cleaning bags that had guarded them since the last time the NASDAQ broke 4000.

The man of the hour was Landon Kettlewell -- the kind of outlandish prep-school name that always seemed a little made up to her -- the new CEO and front for the majority owners of Kodak/Duracell. The despicable rat-toothed Brit had already started calling them Kodacell. Buying the company was pure Kettlewell: shrewd, weird and ethical in a twisted way.

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But when Anda was 12, she met Liza the Organiza, whose avatar was female, but had sensible tits and sensible armour and a bloody great sword that she was clearly very good with. Liza came to school after PE, when Anda was sitting and massaging her abused podge and hating her entire life from stupid sunrise to rotten sunset. Her PE kit was at the bottom of her school-bag and her face was that stupid red colour that she hated and now it was stinking maths which was hardly better than PE but at least she didn't have to sweat.

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Adrian fought to control his irritation. His mother was always cranky before breakfast, and a full-blown fight could extend that mood through the whole day. No one needed that. "Mom," he said, twisting his body in the narrow, three-person coffin he shared with his folks so that he could look her in the eye, "I'm not asking you to move to India. All I'm doing is explaining my paper."

His mother snorted. "The Last Generation on Earth, really! Adrian, if I were your instructor, I sure wouldn't graduate you on the strength of something like that. I don't really care if that boy in India has convinced the ITT people that his trendy little thesis holds water. The University of Toronto has higher standards than that."

It had been a mistake to even discuss it with his mother. At 180, she was hardly equipped to understand the pressures he and his minuscule generation faced. He should've just written it and stuck it in his advisor's public directory. Only just that he'd had the coolest idea in the night and he'd reflexively bounced it off of her: Once his generation reached maturity, the whole planet would be post-human, and a new, new era would start. The Bitchun Society, Phase II.

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On U.S. soil, he pulled the bus over at a temporary roadhouse and set the handbrake. He eased off the driver's perch, chafing his narrow ass to get the blood flowing, and gave forth a drawn-out "gaaaah" as pins and needles stabbed his sweat-marinated muscles. He heard the multinational rousing itself behind him. First, the major investors in the front row. Then the rest of the board of directors in the row behind them. Then four rows of middle managers and finally the great mass of frontline workers, techs, customer service reps, troubleshooters, antennamen, switchwomen, chicken pluckers and left-handed bottle stretchers.

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Liam's death really screwed things up for Murray. He'd gone into one of those clinical depression spirals that eventually afflicted all the aging bright young coders he'd known during his life in tech. He'd get misty in the morning over his second cup of coffee and by the midafternoon blood-sugar crash, he'd be weeping silently in his cubicle, clattering nonsensically at the keys to disguise the disgusting snuffling noises he made. His wastebasket overflowed with spent tissues and a rumor circulated among the evening cleaning-staff that he was a compulsive masturbator. The impossibility of the rumor was immediately apparent to all the other coders on his floor who, pr0n-hounds that they were, had explored the limits and extent of the censoring proxy that sat at the headwaters of the office network. Nevertheless, it was gleefully repeated in the collegial fratmosphere of his workplace and wags kept dumping their collections of conference-snarfed hotel-sized bottles of hand-lotion on his desk.

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