Early computer systems were machines used as tools to perform given tasks in repeatable and predictable ways. Networking, as such, did not kill that metaphor. A distributed system is one with its components here and there; inputs may come from hither and outputs may go to yon. But the system retained its machinelike functionality, structure, and process.

Cyberspace, though, is harder to liken to a machine. Its components are not only distributed but also often independently controlled, especially when they interact. At first, cyberspace was a medium through which people alone exchanged information, a phone system as it were but one where the content that people traded – text, image, audio, video – was all turned into bits. But people also interacted with the system and its artifacts, such as files or programs. Increasingly, processes (such as shopping bots), nodes, servers, computer-controlled machinery, and so on, entered cyberspace to exchange information with each other.

Cyberspace is thus less of a passive medium and more like a stage that both supports and interacts with billions of entities, humans among them, which themselves pursue billions of purposes in conjunction with one another, with all assertions, comparisons, judgments, challenges, and the presentation of bona fides one expects in conversation.

What does it say about conquest in cyberspace if systems loss their machinelike character and cyberspace is seen as an enormous conversation?