By 2007, the largest control systems are being grown and trained, rather than written. Some academics believe life will ultimately return to a manageable rhythm. The vast majority of consumers believe otherwise. Now the embedded networks spread quickly, creating a kind of Digital Gaia. More and more, the underdeveloped world is characterized not by geography but by education and acceptance of technology.
Civilization is a fractal patchwork of old and new and dangerously new.
In the 20th century, there was the specter of nuclear warfare. In the 21st, nuclear terror is very real, but there is also distributed terror and the consequent government drive to use embedded networks for ubiquitous law enforcement. The new threats and the century's early system disasters drive some groups to ban all embedded computers. The Independent Communities, for example, use only machines that a trained person can understand and repair without computerized tools. The Independents argue that our cleverness is just making future disasters more awful, that the more we interconnect our systems, the more rigid and brittle they become.