‘Daemon’ by Leinad Zeraus (2006).

pp107

No. They don’t. We believe the components are triggered not by each other, but by reading news stories. For example, one component just issued this press release…” he passed a printed page, “…only after the siege story hit the wire services. The release is digitally signed, Sobol wants us to know it was his. We already tracked down the origin of the press release; it was emailed from a poorly secured computer in a St.Louis accounting firm. The program destroyed itself after it ran, but we were able to recover it from a tape backup. It was a simple HTML reader searching hundreds of web sites for headlines about the estate siege.

pp183

Ross raised his eybows at that. “That’s to prevent him from inadvertently triggering a new Daemon event?”

“Precisely. There’s no doubt it’s reading the news. So you’d be advised to stay out of the headlines.”

[wikipedia]
[website]
[WSJ]

Daniel Suarez, aka Leinad Zeraus, in Wall Street Journal March 2009

Over-centralization and excessive interconnectivity in the pursuit of hyper-efficiency increases the fragility of the system.

McLuhan

the wheel
is an extension of the foot
the book
is an extension of the eye
clothing, an extension of the skin,
electric circuitry,
an extension of
the
central
nervous
system

The Medium is The Massage, Marshall McLuhan p 31-40

As youth enters this clan world and all their senses are electrically extended and intensified, there is a corresponding amplification of their sexual sensibilities.

From “The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan�, Playboy Magazine, March 1969. © Playboy

…[I]f a new technology extends one or more of our senses outside us into the social world, then new ratios among all of our senses will occur in that particular culture… And when the sense ratios alter in any culture then what had appeared lucid before may suddenly become opaque, and what had been vague or opaque will become translucent.

Marshall McLuhan, “The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man”, 1962.