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Postmodern marketing hasn’t just permeated politics; it has invaded all aspects of life, including military planning and propaganda. In the lead-in to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, we first heard of “shock and awe,” an apparent sales pitch for the paralyzing effects of firepower. Another slick military term followed soon after, “The Voila Moment.” According to author Naomi Klein, VM was “likely the product of the Bush administration’s penchant for hiring advertising executives and flakey management consultants as foreign policy advisors.” She explained The Voila Moment: “That’s when Iraqi soldiers and civilians, with bombs raining down on Baghdad, suddenly scratch their heads and say to themselves, ‘These bombs aren’t really meant to kill me and my family, they are meant to free us from an evil dictator!’ At that point, they thank Uncle Sam, lower their weapons, abandon their posts, and rise up against Saddam Hussein. Voila!” It turned out the Iraqis were less favourably disposed to a Voila Moment than the corporate mythmakers who dreamed it into being. It was all part of a well rehearsed folie à deux on the coalition side – a delusion shared by two or more people. There were also plenty of news consumers along for the ride, people who believed the Iraqis would greet coalition forces as liberators. As we all know now, that turned out to be another unwarranted projection onto a foreign people.

Five years ago, the World Wide Web, global in scale, was already more complex than a human brain and had surpassed the 20-petahertz threshold for potential intelligence, as calculated by inventor Ray Kurzweil.

As of 2005, according to former Wired editor Kevin Kelly, there were 100 billion clicks per day on the Web, and 55 trillion links between all the webpages on a machine that uses five percent of the global electricity, with its processing power doubling every two years.