In the fictional world of "Islands" there exists a book titled "The Lawrence Doctrine and Postindustrial Insurgency" by Colonel Jonathan Gresham. It is banned by Vienna and widely read in the political underground. It draws on the example of T. E. Lawrence, who during the First World War helped the Arabs, who were fighting the Ottoman Turks. Lawrence convinced them, instead, to block the Ottomans' expansion by destroying their communication lines, which at the time were railway tracks and telegraphs. Although the Arabs were successful in fighting the Turks, they became dependent on the British Empire to provide them with industrial products such as explosives and canned food. Gresham calls the First World War “a proto-Net civil war”. In Sterling's 21st century, the Tuaregs' enemy is the Net. But whereas the Arabs were colonized by the British with industrial products such as guns, cotton, dynamite, and canned food, for Sterling's Tuaregs the necessary products of the Networld are solar power, plastique, and single-cell protein.