I hate being edited, so I'm not going to suggest that Tim Bartlett in any way improved the quality of this book with his care, attention, and comments, even though he did risk near-certain death to do it (edit this!). I would like to thank, though, the many editors at the Guardian, PC Answers, Internet Today, and Personal Computer World, who commissioned much of the work on which this book is based: Jack Schofied, Bill O'Neill, Azeem Azhar, Tom Standage, Ben Rooney, Steve Patience, Richard Baguley, and Ben Tisdall, who also began the whole business by loaning me a modem and some communications software to write a beginner's piece about BBSs. Dan ("hacks the media") O'Brien at the now defunct Wired UK was the person who first spotted that the debates we were watching on alt.religion.scientology were heating up into a story of some significance, and he saw the first version of that story through most of the editing process; more help came from John Browning, who edited the piece for Wired UK, and Martha Baer, who edited the second version for Wired.

The Net is a collaborative medium, and ideas flow so freely that after a while you can't always be sure whose they were; thanks, therefore, for many inspirations to all my unwitting collaborators, as well as the hard core who show up at the annual Computers, Freedom, and Privacy Conference. Thanks also go to Demon Internet and the WELL for facilitating my online presence, and especially to CIX, which bears the brunt of my weird online habits, as well as to the many people, such as Mike Rogers, Ron Newman, Rupert Goodwins, and David Morton, who have taken the time to explain technical details for me. Lucy Kewney deserves to be appreciated for checking URLs and sorting papers.

Thanks also go to my agent, Diana Finch, who seems to like grinding contracts into dust; to Bill Steele and Carol Hemsley for picking out what would have been embarrassing errors; and to my friends Barbara, David, Alison, and Owen Long, who spent their Christmas vacation watching me work and trying to get on their own computer and phone line; and to the byline conference on the WELL for all the help and advice, and for providing the closest thing there is to a productive displacement activity.