But Carl Hollywood wondered if it really made a difference. The Drummers 
could only do such things by subsuming themselves into a gestalt society. As 
the case of Hackworth demonstrated, as soon as a Drummer removed himself from 
that gestalt, he lost touch with it completely. All communication between the 
Drummers and normal human society took place unconsciously, through their 
influence upon the Net, in patterns that appeared subliminally in the ractives 
that everyone played with in their homes and saw playing across the walls of 
buildings. The Drummers could break the code, but they couldn't take advantage 
of it in an obvious way, or perhaps they simply did not want to. They could 
make gold, but they were no longer interested in having it.