"The countryside is a good example. It happens to be a digital map of 
France. Where did this map come from? Did the makers of First Class to 
Geneva send out their own team of surveyors to make a new map of France? 
No, of course they didn't. They used existing data—a digital map of the 
world that is available to any maker of ractives who needs it, for a price of 
course. That digital map is a separate object. It resides in the memory of a 
computer somewhere. Where exactly? I don't know. Neither does the ractive 
itself. It doesn't matter. The data might be in California, it might be in 
Paris, it might be down at the corner—or it might be distributed among 
all of those places and many more. It doesn't matter. Because our 
media system no longer works like the old system—dedicated wires passing 
through a central switchboard. It works like that. " Carl pointed to 
the traffic on the street again.