take over more functions. At the same time, the video game
can encourage the user, particularly the younger user, to see work and
life as a video game, and find it more difficult to cope with anything
that doesn't work the same way. On the most sinister level, it may be
no accident that the Gulf War, presented by U.S. television as a video
game, occurred during the period when graphic interfaces were
generating large scale euphoria.

Another interesting parallel to graphic interfaces is the pre-
columbian writing systems of central Mexico. This area was a sort of
bottleneck for the indigenous peoples of the Americas in their patterns
of migration and settlement. Here many distinct groups with different
languages came together, lived in close proximity to each other, and
often produced cultural, linguistic, and physiological hybrids. The
writing systems ofto
manifest itself in a way that older media have not. It's possible that
exposure to alternatives could bring about changes in the attitudes of
people inured to a painfully narrow spectrum. At the same time, it
could help break down some of the insularity of people outside the
sphere of the centrists and lead to cooperation and reorientation of
activists of all sorts. On the other hand, the fear of such possibilities
could lead to paranoia and repression on the part of people in power,
accompanied not only by arrests, deportations, etc. but also attempts to
use the net as a tool for thought control.

"Would that all God's children were prophets" wrote William
Blake two centuries ago. In a sense, the proliferation of web sites
could move toward something like Blake's vision, with everyone who
had something to say