A villain because, if it didn't impose the blazing pace of change we have constructed for ourselves, it certainly abetted it. It poses a challenge because so much of our memory is located there and nowhere else that it is subject to total loss, owing to the evanescent nature of magnetic data storage. This ensues both from the rapid decay magnetic media and from the unprecedented pace of turnover in the hardware that stores and retrieves their stored data. It is typical of this mellow manifesto that it doesn't urge us to destroy the net and the web, only to integrate them into our long-term existence. Brand aims to be a world-saver, but he's prepared to be patient about it.
Culture changes over millennia, while nature left alone takes millions of years to change.
These are not independent elements of social life. A dazzling pace of change in fashion, for example, can energize the slower-moving areas of culture, while they provide fashion with a substantial and predictable base of reference. No society can function entirely at the pace of any one element, though some, like our own, have tried. C orporations may try to force nature to work at the pace of commerce. An example is clear-cutting, where a forest is razed in the interest of the bottom line, then left to regenerate itself, as though its destruction had not also destroyed the biome that sustained it.