If you build it, there's no telling what they will do with it

This is the fiftieth anniversary of the beginning of the US interstate highway system, a constuction endeavor that outstrips in scope the Pyramids and the Great Wall of China combined, and that has transformed the physical, social and commercial landscape of the nation for good and for ill. It's difficult now to recall that what President Eisenhower had most in mind was a means to provide for rapid deployment of military personnel and supplies in times of crisis, and a way to quickly evacuate American cities in case of nuclear attack. Our ongoing love affair with long-distance driving and the sprawling homogenization of suburbia "just happened." Drive-thru donuts beside the on-ramps were not in the plan.

Another cold war invention was ARPANET, a decentralized network of computer nodes that would continue to function even after large areas of its infrastructure were destroyed by nuclear attack. Its direct descendant is the modern Internet. I doubt the bunkered pioneering cyberwonks of the Defense Department foresaw poetry podcasts, UTube, spam, and bangkokvirginsluvuplenty.com. One might well wish to devastate large areas of its infrastructure, but the geeks of yore built too well. And going farther back, Marconi, the wireless pioneer, thought the best use for radio was to keep in touch with ships at sea. He may have been right--increasingly, we are all a little at sea.