The trajectories of biology are forky and unpredictable as lightning. There is a new mathematics to describe them, but what these numbers tell you is only that you can't know where things are headed. The current hurdle of civilization into cyberspace has required, like the bridge, the assembled acts of the existing institutions, but it hardly reaffirms them. For one thing, large collective enterprise loves certainty above all other things, including profit. In the pursuit of certainty, almost any established corporation will follow the Devil It Knows, whether buggy-whips or minicomputers, straight to doom.
Nothing is certain in cyberspace but accelerating change.
Furthermore, there is reason to think many of them will become irrelevant in this new environment, devoted as they are to distributing centralized goods and services. For this reason, it is hardly surprising that many of the corporations that were putting us up at the corner of Dinah Shore Drive and Bob Hope Way resist going into Cyberspace. In some deep, organic recognition of their own, they know there be dragons there. They have a sense of nameless dread. Of course, dread hates to be nameless so, in this instance, it finds its focus in the Nightmare Hacker, bent on lobotomizing corporations for the hell of it.