Any sufficiently radical invention seems ri-diculous to most people when they first encounter it. This is a rule of technological innovation. In 1998, I ate lunch with an entrepreneur at a vegetarian restaurant in San Francisco. The entrepreneur, an ascetic and ayogi with startling blue eyes, spooned a lone bowl of bean soup and told me, "Software is a living tree." He said he had invented a new kind of software called PowWow that "would allow people to run in tribes on the Internet." He boasted that Tribal Voice, his new venture, would be the physical manifestation of what Indian shamans call "the golden thread." I was nonplussed.
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