Little orange flags have sprouted along the sidewalks in Bethesda, a Maryland suburb just over the line from Washington, D.C. I have seen enough of these flags to know that they fly for the diggers. Someday soon the diggers and their backhoes and their flashing warning lights will arrive to tear up the roads and slow down traffic so they can bury something. But what?

Not far from my home I caught up with Martin J. Droney, who was running a crew of telephone company workers. Martin introduced me to the rewiring of the world. It is a world of cables buried on land and in sea beds, a world of cascading e-mail messages and a burgeoning Internet, doubling in size