As the software that provides system-operating codes for global culture, America powers up the zest century. When McLuhan said that America is the world environment, he is to be taken literally. Tech hardware may provide external prosthetics for the digital addiction, and tech wetware may interface the body and the Net, but software is the distributive intelligence that authors the system. Just ask IBM, whose mainframe hardware monoliths were like digital dinosaurs crashing around wired culture, supposedly impervious to challenge, just before Bill’s cyber-gates opened up, releasing software raptors into the feeding chain. The rest is virtual history.