"And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?" -- William Butler Yeats

Gibson's vision of cyberspace was seductive: a level playing field where the best code won. Reality gave us something far more complex and depressing: a digital world where power structures from the physical world have been replicated and amplified.

When John William Polidori sat down in 1819 to write The Vampyre, he might have been a humiliated young doctor seeking revenge against a cruel employer, but the character he created — Lord Ruthven — became something vastly larger.

What was once the exclusive domain of nation-states with billion-dollar defense budgets has become democratized through a volatile combination of civilian innovation, commercial technology, and wartime necessity.