Even the third world has a fair amount of Internet access, though, and with the increasing educational piracy, what you get is a hundred street kids in Santa Domingo pilfering a Harvard lecture on classical philosophy from the Internet like they take penny candy from the corner market. You get a professor in Havana downloading the notes of a Stanford physics teacher before a classroom so teeming with students that the cockroaches are outnumbered and flee.

Beneath the egalitarian rhetoric of a global community and all of the other grandiose things that were supposed to accompany the online explosion, a silent riptide rages, tearing at the majority. It is the undercurrent of those to whom education is still a privilege, not a rite of passage. When America's students stopped being hungry, when the West decided that some countries were best suited for assembling tennis shoes, this was the time when these countries started taking back what they deserved.

The multinationals, for all their expansion, are only a part of a giant machine duplicating its parts, building a new skeleton for itself. The machine grows but it does not change. It doesn't know how. And so it doesn't know how to stop the growing masses accumulating against it.

The third world phenomenon of stealing knowledge from the Internet is spreading like wildfire. Well, not wildfire, exactly. You can put out a wildfire. You can attack it with hoses and have helicopters dump great basins of water on it. You can isolate it by cutting down the brush and trees around the fire. You can contain it. You can walk through the woods and find the cause, a cigarette butt, or scars of lightning on a tree. You can stomp out the remaining embers.

But with the Internet, you have the perfect wildfire. There are a thousand possible ways that the fire started. You can stamp and curse at the ground, but you will still be walking on a bed of coals. The Internet, after all, belongs to no one. It is not part of the corporate machine. The machine is part of it, the single spindly arm of an octopus with its tentacles wrapped tightly around the globe, the other seven arms beginning to learn their own strength.
salon.com | Feb. 2, 2000

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