I deal in information," he says to the smarmy, toadying pseudojournalist...

I deal in information," he says to the smarmy, toadying pseudojournalist who
"interviews" him. He's sitting in his office in Houston, looking slicker than
normal. "All television going out to Consumers throughout the world goes
through me. Most of the information transmitted to and from the CIC database
passes through my networks. The Metaverse -- -the entire Street -- exists by
virtue of a network that I own and control.
"But that means, if you'll just follow my reasoning for a bit, that when I have
a programmer working under me who is working with that information, he is
wielding enormous power. Information is going into his brain. And it's staying
there. It travels with him when he goes home at night. It gets all tangled up
into his dreams, for Christ's sake. He talks to his wife about it. And,
goddamn it, he doesn't have any right to that information. If I was running a
car factory, I wouldn't let workers drive the cars home or borrow tools. But
that's what I do at five o'clock each day, all over the world, when my hackers
go home from work.
"When they used to hang rustlers in the old days, the last thing they would do
is piss their pants. That was the ultimate sign, you see, that they had lost
control over their own bodies, that they were about to die. See, it's the first
function of any organization to control its own sphincters. We're not even
doing that. So we're working on refining our management techniques so that we
can control that information no matter where it is -- on our hard disks or even
inside the programmers' heads. Now, I can't say more because I got competition
to worry about. But it is my fervent hope that in five or ten years, this kind
of thing won't even be an issue.