And as bandwidth grows, more of these narrow interests--recreational, political, cerebral--can be pursued online. In 2025, the League of Women Who Find Gilligan More Attractive Than the Skipper and the Professor can not only form online; it can tele-convene and watch reruns! More and more, obsessions will be online obsessions.

This is the big downside of the future. Obsessions are fine, but every minute you spend online--playing chess, talking politics or just shopping--is a minute you're not spending off-line. And it is off-line, in the real world, where we find a precious social resource, people we have little in common with. The supermarket checkout lady, the librarian, the shoppers at the mall--all are handy reminders of the larger community we're part of--multicultural, socioeconomically diverse yet bound by a common nature.

That's the trouble with cyberspace. It leaves nothing to chance. The Internet, with its antlike order, is in some ways becoming a Web of gated communities. It could deepen cultural and socioeconomic rifts even to the point of straining a nation's social fabric.

On the brighter side, it may bridge rifts between nations. Some interest groups, after all, are transnational. So far these groups have mainly been political--environmental groups, human-rights groups, labor groups. But transnational bonds will get richer, for two reasons. First, automated translation is improving. (Go to babelfish.altavista.com to have any document rendered in several languages--not perfectly but better than was possible 10 years ago.) Second, autotranslation is merging with video to yield "face translation." Unveiled last year by the Consortium for Speech Translation Advanced Research, face translation lets you speak into a camera in English and be seen in Russia speaking Russian. And I mean speaking Russian. Your face is morphed so that you seem to be pronouncing the words of the language you don't really speak.

After demonstrating face translation to reporters, the head of the research consortium admitted that "some of it still looks a little goofy." But 25 years will smooth out not just the visual kinks but the translation itself. True international friendship, now available mainly to business big shots, can in principle become a middle-class indulgence. Stamp collecting, environmental activism, toe fetishes--all kinds of interests can kindle the citizen-to-citizen amity that makes war politically difficult.

This has all been happening for a long, long time. Telephones made distance irrelevant to talking, encouraging us to ignore next-door neighbors in favor of longer links. The invention of writing had parallel effects. Paul's letters to the Corinthians and the Romans nourished faraway contacts while reinforcing distinctions between Christians and nearby nonbelievers. The expansion and crystallization of communities is, in a sense, the story of history. But the story has never moved as fast as it is going to move in the next 25 years.

Robert Wright is an author whose most recent work is Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny

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