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The 1990s saw an incredible amount of excitement about optical networking technology. Many start-up companies with potentially viable new technology seemed very “hot” to investors, especially venture capital firms and well established technology companies in telecommunications like Lucent, Nortel, and Cisco. There was a mad scramble to either invest in or acquire a number of these new start-up companies including Chromatis, Ignitus, Sycamore, Lightera, etc. Winners ended up paying billions of dollars for companies with commercially unproven technology or technology that could be emulated by others. Over the past two years, the optical networking industry has lost over $500 billion in investor value, and it offers a good example of market factors leading to the winner’s curse.

Whereas the first five chapters talk primarily of companies’ reactions to disruptions, Chapter 6 begins the discussions of more proactive preparations. These preparations include the fundamental steps of creating redundancy and building flexibility. Yet the maturation of risk management has also led companies to prepare other kinds of specialized risk-management assets in the form of business continuity plans, emergency operations centers, and formalized processes for managing disruptions.

Chapter 7 continues to explore the centrality of place to the continuation of Nipmuc culture and identity, and the concept of cultural landscapes, large and small. The important role that Nipmuc women who lived at the Cisco Homestead, such as Sarah Arnold Cisco, Sarah Cisco Sullivan, and Zara Ciscoe Brough, had in the preservation of this place is a focus of the chapter’s history about the homestead andHassanamisco Reservation in Grafton, Mass. The parcel on Brigham Hill Road in Grafton (which became the Hassanamisco Reservation) became the last parcel of tribally-owned land in the region following the sale of the parcel at Hassanamesit Woods. The decision to preserve this land base by women leaders of the tribe, beginning in 1857, became a defining moment in the formation of the modern-day Nipmuc Tribe. Without the preservation of this land and homestead, the tribe would not have continued as a distinct cultural group as it exists today.

“Long live prostitutes” was the title of Wang’s posting. Fifteen years old, living in China, and full of teenage bluster, Wang had collected fifty-four reasons to think Chinese politicians worse than prostitutes. The list included:… • There is no indicator that prostitutes will disappear, but there are many indicators that the government will collapse. • Prostitutes allow others to oppose them, unlike the government which arrests opposition and “re-educates” them through labor. • Prostitutes have no power, unlike those who use their power to suppress others. • Prostitutes do not need you to love them, unlike that group which forces you to love it. • Prostitutes win customers with credibility, unlike those who maintain power with lies. • Prostitutes sell flesh, unlike those who sell soul…. Liu Di was a psychology student at Beijing Normal University who called herself the “Stainless Steel Mouse” and ran an “artist’s club” through her personal website. In 2002, in one of her many stunts, the twenty-two-year-old urged her followers to distribute Marxist literature:… Let’s conduct an experiment of behavioral art: disseminating communism on the street! We can print copies of “The Communist Manifesto.” However, we should take “Communist” out of the title. Then, like sociologists, we ask people on the street to sign their names onto the Manifesto…. Liu Di wrote an essay titled “How a national security apparatus can hurt national security.” Echoing typical criticism of governments everywhere, she called China’s security apparatus “limitless,” or possessed of “a tendency to expand, without limits, its size and functions.” Wang’s message and the writings of Liu Di appeared on obscure Internet sites. Nonetheless, they came to the attention of the Chinese authorities and provoked swift action. Soon after Wang posted his message, it was deleted. He was arrested in Henan and subjected to an unspecified punishment. Wang’s story was printed in the People’s Daily as a warning, with the headline “15-Year-Old Youth Punished For Making Reactionary Argument That the Government is Prostitute” The State Security Protection Bureau arrested Liu Di on her university campus on November 7, 2002.

A visitor to the dell.com web page finds a message prominently displayed in the upper left-hand corner: “Choose a Country/Region.” The cisco.com page likewise asks users to “Select a Location.” Yahoo’s web page has a “Yahoo International” link that connects to a global map with over twenty-five hyperlinks to specialized web pages tied to particular countries (like Denmark, Korea, and Argentina) and regions (like Asia). Everywhere on the web, sites ask viewers to identify their geographical location. Geographical links are puzzling for those who think of the Net as a borderless medium that renders place irrelevant. But the puzzle disappears when we see that, globalization and the supposed death of distance notwithstanding, national borders reflect real and important differences among peoples in different places. As this chapter shows, geographical borders first emerged on the Internet not as a result of fiats by national governments, but rather organically, from below, because Internet users around the globe demanded different Internet experiences that corresponded to geography. Later chapters will show how governments strengthened borders on the Net by employing powerful “top-down” techniques to control unwanted Internet communications from abroad. But in order to understand fully why the Internet is becoming bordered, we must first understand the many ways that private actors are shaping the Internet to accommodate differences among nations and regions, and why the Internet is a more effective and useful communication tool as a result. The most immediate and important difference reflected by borders is language. People in Brazil, Korea, and France don’t want English language versions of Microsoft products. They want a version they can read and understand. Microsoft learned this lesson when it tried to distribute an English version of Windows operating system in tiny Iceland. Redmond executives thought the market of 500,000 worldwide Icelandic speakers did not justify translation costs and figured the English version would suffice because most Icelanders spoke English as a second language. But Icelanders felt that Microsoft’s plan would imperil their language, which has retained basically the same grammar, spelling, and vocabulary for more than a thousand years.

Seldom has the arc of a neologism been so visible. On the afternoon of August 18, 2007, standing at the PodCamp Pittsburgh registration desk, Tommy Vallier, Andy Quale, Ann Turiano, Jesse Hambley, and Val and Jason Head—all participants in the city’s annual social media conference—were having a conversation about Canadian bacon. Vallier informed the group that peameal bacon was an alternate name for the breakfast meat, leading others to comment that peameal sounded like email. This coincidence in turn reminded them of a prior discussion about all the automatic email notifications they received daily, from Google news alerts to Facebook updates, which were becoming almost as distracting as spam. They decided it was a problem, and their banter about peameal and pork suggested a name. Since the notifications were a cut above spam—after all, these updates had been requested—they dubbed this “middle class” of email bacn. The following day the six PodCampers held a spontaneous group session with several dozen of their fellow social media mavens, who were swiftly won over by the jokey name and ironic spelling (a play on sites such as Flickr and Socializr then popular). The web address bacn2.com was acquired—bacn.com was already taken by a bacon distributor and bacn.org belonged to the Bay Area Consciousness Network—and a droll public service announcement explaining the time-wasting dangers of bacn was promptly posted on YouTube. What happened next was best explained by PodCamp’s cofounder Chris Brogan to the Chicago Tribune five days later. “The PodCamp event was about creating personal media,” he said, “so 200-something reporters, so to speak, launched that story as soon as they heard it.” The term was written up on hundreds of personal blogs, bringing it into Technorati’s top fifteen search terms and leading Erik Schark to muse on BoingBoing that the spread of bacn showed “the ridiculous power of the internet.” Schark also listed the mainstream media that had covered it, including CNET, Wired , and the Washington Post, where Rob Pegoraro complained about the name: “Bacon is good,” he opined.

The Chinese government declared 1996 the Year of the Internet. There wasn’t much to it: only one person in ten thousand was connected—at a modem speed of 14.4 kilobits per second—and 86 percent of the population had never encountered a computer. Even in universities email was still a novelty, haltingly introduced in 1994. Yet in one respect China was the most advanced nation on the planet. Using equipment supplied by Sun Microsystems and Cisco, the Chinese Public Security Bureau had corralled the entire country, all 3,705,000 square miles, within a fanghuo qiang, or firewall. The firewall promised to make the internet safe for autocracy. All online communication could be monitored, at least in principle, and access to any website could be denied. On February 1, 1996, Premier Li Peng signed State Council Order 195, officially placing the government “in charge of overall planning, national standardization, graded control, and the development of all areas related to the internet,” and expressly forbidding users “to endanger national security or betray state secrets.” Enforcement was arbitrary. Discipline was imposed by the dread of uncertainty. This was an inevitability, since the Public Security Bureau couldn’t possibly watch all online activity within China, let alone block every objectionable web page worldwide. Interviewed by Wired magazine, the computer engineer overseeing the fanghuo qiang bluntly explained his working policy: “You make a problem for us, and we’ll make a law for you.” In many countries such a firewall might have stifled development, but most Chinese weren’t interested in making problems. They were attracted to the internet’s dazzling potential, as advertised on billboards that encouraged them to “join the internet club, meet today’s successful people, experience the spirit of the age, drink deep of the cup of leisure.” Those who could afford a connection, which cost approximately half the monthly salary of a recent college graduate, casually referred to the fanghuo qiang as the wangguan , calmly evoking the many guan (passes) of the Great Wall as natural features of China’s wan wei wang (ten-thousand-dimensional web).