OK, the scary part is over now. You can come out. It's safe.

In fact, the news gets better from here on out. And the first bit of news is that this isn't about us and them. It's about us. Them don't exist. Not really. Corporations are legal fictions, willing suspensions of disbelief. Pry the roof off any company and what do you find inside? The Cracker Jack prize is ourselves, just ordinary people. We come in all flavors: funny, cantankerous, neurotic, compassionate, avaricious, generous, scheming, lackadaisical, brilliant, and a million other things. It's true that the higher up the food chain you go, the more likely you are to encounter the arrogant and self-deluded, but even top management types are mostly harmless when you get to know them. Given lots of love, some even make good pets.

Inside companies, outside companies, there are only people. All of us work for organizations of some sort, or we're peddling something. All of us pay the mortgage or the rent. We all buy shoes and books and food and time online, plus the occasional Beanie Baby for the kid. More important, all of us are finding our voices once again. Learning how to talk to one another. Slowly recovering from a near-fatal brush with zombification after watching Night of the Living Sponsor reruns all our lives.

Inside, outside, there's a conversation going on today that wasn't happening at all five years ago and hasn't been very much in evidence since the Industrial Revolution began. Now, spanning the planet via Internet and World Wide Web, this conversation is so vast, so multifaceted, that trying to figure what it's about is futile. It's about a billion years of pent-up hopes and fears and dreams coded in serpentine double helixes, the collective flashback dij` vu of our strange perplexing species. Something ancient, elemental, sacred, something very very funny that's broken loose in the pipes and wires of the twenty-first century.

There are millions of threads in this conversation, but at the beginning and end of each one is a human being. That this world is digital or electronic is not the point. What matters most is that it exists in narrative space. The story has come unbound. The world of commerce became precipitously permeable while it wasn't looking and sprang a leak from a quarter least expected. The dangers of democracy pale before the danger of uncontained life. Life with the wraps off. Life run wild.

Why do companies find this prospect terrifying? How, for instance, does the above description differ from the basic operation of a virgin forest? When he said, "in wildness is the preservation of the world," I bet Thoreau wasn't just thinking about old-growth trees. He also wrote a little ditty called On Civil Disobedience. There is a connection.

But don't look at us. For the defenseless position all you companies now find yourselves in, you can thank the creators of the Internet, the U.S. Department of Defense. What a paradox. What a total hoot!

And you might as well hoot as cry about it. It's not the end of the world. It's the beginning of a new one. What's emerging is our story in the most fundamental sense, the human mythos weaving a vision of whatever it wants to become. There is no known deterrent. Take a deep breath, baby. Roll with it.

While this may sound spooky and mystical and terribly uncorporate, it isn't meant to put you Fortune 500 types off. When you get right down to it, human beings are spooky and mystical and terribly uncorporate, and corporations . if you'd only let yourselves admit it . consist entirely of human beings. Sort of neat how that works out. So the bottom line is: you can play in the Internet headspace as well as anyone.

There are just three conditions: 1) you have to let your people play for you, since there's really nobody else at home; 2) you have to play, not something more serious and goal-oriented; and 3) related to the previous, you have to have at least some tenuous notion of what "headspace" might mean. It's not in the dictionary. But you can ask around. Get the general hang of the thing. If you figure it out, we'll think you're cool and consume mass quantities of all your wonderful products.

See how easy life can be when you loosen up a little?

You laugh, we laugh with you.

Either way, we live.