For decades, future-gazing technologists and visionaries have assumed that technology would bring into being some sort of electronic Library of Alexandria. In this scenario, massive databanks would be centralized information utilities, with access granted by cheap, fast and ubiquitous data feeds. In Star Trek, for instance, crew members used a wireless network to link their tricorders with the starship Enterprise's onboard computer-that storehouse of all things interesting and relevant. And the original Internet was created not to distribute information, but as a massive remote-access system, enabling researchers in one place to tap into computers located somewhere else. Even George Orwell's 1984 envisioned a world in which records of news and current events were stored in relatively few places; that's how Winston Smith was able to edit the past so that Big Brother's pronouncements were never wrong.

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