In those days, information (not to be confused with knowledge) crept along slowly.

How much easier it is in these modern times when bits zip around the globe at the speed of light -- or at least the speed of a good fiber optical T3 line.

Within hours of the Oklahoma City bombing, the throbbing, fevered brain of the Internet was hallucinating about a supposed second explosion, which was picked up by seismographs milliseconds before the Ryder truck blast. There it was: proof of a conspiracy so immense that it involved agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, minions of the New World Order, blowing up their own building. Like the second gunman on the grassy knoll, the second explosion entered the folklore of paranoia, with dizzying speed. Oklahoma City was linked to Waco and Ruby Ridge.

Electrified by the Internet, suspicions about the crash of T.W.A. Flight 800 were almost instantly transmuted into convictions that it was the result of friendly fire. Even the journalist Pierre Salinger was taken in. The culprit? Some blamed those evil A.T.F. agents. Or Arkansas state troopers. It was all linked to Whitewater -- unless the missile was meant for a visiting U.F.O.?

As the Internet grows bigger, more dense with synapses, the possibilities it can dream up multiply and then exponentiate. Postmodern literary theorists talk about language taking on a life of its own, speaking through the passive pawns called people. With the Internet you can almost see what they're getting at.

Ideas become E-mail to be duplicated and duplicated again, fanning out along the proliferating branches and twigs of circuitry both electronic and neural. The typists and the bleary-eyed readers are just extensions of their computer terminals -- a way for the ideas to get off the net and spread through the molasses-slow network of conversation, books, newspapers, radio talk shows, only to be picked up again and re-posted.