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R ' ,,/ Police sketch of the U nabomber, hooded and wearing aviator sung lasses. Courtesy of the Federal B u reau of Investigation. M ichael H e i m - threat explicitly to computers. This killer-critic sees computers as instru­ ments of control to oppress human beings either by putting them out of work or by altering how they work. The manifesto states: It is certain that technology is creati ng for human beings a new physical and social environment radically different from the spectrum of environments to which natural selection has adapted the human race physically and psychologically.

Dialogues between people achieve more than mutual recognition and shared feelings; dialogues also expose conceptual and attitudinal differences as they apply to the issues under consideration. The interplay of differences about issues constitutes the original meaning of dialectic. It is this meaning of dialectic-an ongoing exchange between polar positions-that I wish to emphasize for and in cyberspace. You could say, then, that dialectic is the conceptual exchange that hap­ pens in dialogue. Dialogues can contain banter, jokes, irony, and shared feelings, but any serious, sustained dialogue will sooner or later reveal a dialectic in play.

The Cartesian revolution in philosophy put mathematical physics at the top of the list of priorities while ethics became the incidental victim of skeptical reasoning. The Cartesian faith in progress relied on the reduction of think­ ing to systems of rational logic. So great was the optimism of seventeenth­ century rationalists that they became easy targets for satirists like Voltaire, the French philosopher and writer whose works epitomize the Age of En­ lightenment. In his novel Candide ( 1 7 5 9), Voltaire caricatured Leibniz in the character of Professor Pangloss.