And that’s just for a stick of iron. More complex objects and services are capable of permeating far more systems and networks, thus greatly boosting their own value and the plentiful value of all the systems they touch.

The network economy runs with plentitude. It vastly expands the numbers of things, increases the numbers of intangibles with ease, multiplies the numbers of connections exponentially, and creates new opportunities without number.

Furthermore, the number of new opportunities increases exponentially as existing opportunities are seized. Networks spew fecundity because by connecting everything to everything, they increase the number of potential relationships, and out of relationships come products, services, and intangibles.

A standalone object, no matter how well designed, has limited potential for new weirdness. A connected object, one that is a node in a network that interacts in some way with other nodes, can give birth to a hundred unique relationships that it never could do while unconnected. Out of this tangle of possible links come myriad new niches for innovations and interactions.

Some of the best video games of all time were elegant little programs that ran on early computers such as the Commodore 64. Millions of C-64s were sold during the early 1980s; most of them lie at the bottom of landfills today. Their flealike memories and lack of disk space have been replaced by Powerbooks and Pentiums. The few still working are sold at collector’s prices. But out on the web, filling niches no one could have predicted, are a flock of emulators. You can download a Commodore 64 emulator onto your Powerbook. At the click of a button it will turn your state-of-the-art workstation into a moronic C-64 (or one of 25 other golden oldies) so you can play an ancient version of Moondust, or PacMan. This is equivalent to having a switch on the dashboard of your Ferrari to make it run like a VW Bug.

These refreshing street uses for technology stem from the plentitude of interactions. Artifacts of the industrial economy yield limited potential for such weird, tangential uses. The network economy, on the other hand, is a cornucopia of products and innovations that cry out to be subverted in new ways. Indeed, in a network, new opportunities arise primarily when existing opportunities are seized. A business that successfully occupies a niche immediately creates at least two new niches for other businesses. There is, for example, no end to the number of companies that will find a niche in email; the more wild ideas that are created, the more wild ideas can be created. The arms race between spammers and readers is only in its infancy.

As opportunities proliferate, unintended uses take off. In the late 1970s, the Shah of Iran exiled his rival, the Ayatollah Khomeini, to Paris. Since the Shah controlled his country’s media he assumed Khomeini would not be able to reach the Iranian people from France to stir up trouble. But sympathetic Iranian clergy exploited an unsuspected technological opportunity: the cassette tape. Every week in Paris Khomeini’s friends recorded his inflammatory speeches on cheap recorders and smuggled copies (easily disguised as music tapes) into Iran, to be multiplied on $200 duplication machines and passed out to every mosque. On Fridays, Khomeini’s sermons were played throughout Iran on boomboxes. The clerics turned the common tape deck into a broadcast network. I’m sure that not a single engineer who developed cassette tape technology ever envisioned it being used for broadcasting. Electronic media, because it is animated by electrons, is highly susceptible to being subverted by new uses.

Recently Sprint, the telecommunications company, pioneered flat cellular phone pricing–you could make all the cell phone calls you want for a fixed monthly fee. Within days of the pricing, the startled marketing experts at Sprint heard reports that people were using the cell phones as baby monitors. Parents would go into baby’s bedroom with a cell phone, dial the kitchen, and then leave the line open. Voilà!