Strange the way we misinterpret. An essay by Morozov in the New York Times (discussed by John Naughton in the Observer, 120212) compares (by the by, as far as this post is concerned) the net to 19th-century Paris: the labyrinthine medieval city was initially populated by flâneurs, who cruised the ancient arcades for curiosities; they were displaced by Baron Haussmann, “who remodelled the urban maze of medieval Paris into a tidy metropolis of wide boulevards that facilitated troop movements and cannon fire”.