I'm running toward the local sneaker outlet with cash in my hand and nothing but Air Jordans in my head. It's 1985 and I can hardly believe it's happening. I've spent the entire year begging, arguing and subtly suggesting that my parents spring for the sneakers that I crave. Their colossal social importance, the extent of their style, coolness and athletic support -- I've explained it all to my parents. But they've never seemed to get it.

"They're too expensive," they kept saying. "Forget it, we're not spending nearly $100 on footwear."

Until now. Finally, I've won. After agreeing to split the cost, after working at a flower stand to earn my share -- and especially after finding a store that sold the overhyped kicks for $50 -- I've convinced my parents to let go of their anti-materialistic urges. They've brought me here, to a dingy, musty store housed in the basement of an old brick factory in Worcester, Mass. And they've conceded defeat. My 12-year-old palms are sweating. Through the skewed lens of my memory -- in which all things visual are clear while emotions are remembered as vague but intense -- I think I'm afraid. As I sprint through the aisles looking for my size, I remember thinking: What if they don't have my size? What if my parents suddenly decide to rescind their offer? What if I never get the shoes?

Thankfully, my fears proved unjustified. Perhaps because I actually prayed for the sneakers, God smiled on me and my size was not sold out. Within a matter of minutes, I had pulled down a pair of blue and black high tops, tried them on, paid and strutted out of the store. Later, I regretted my decision to forgo the black and red classics in favor of the blues, but in the midst of that first sweet, short moment of ownership, as I pretended to juke Magic Johnson in the parking lot, I can only remember feeling relieved, excited -- and intensely happy. Never before or since has a single purchase brought such bliss.

Of course, I know now that this feeling was sick and twisted. I've digested the writings of Thomas Frank and Naomi Klein. I know that Nike took advantage of my adolescent vulnerabilities. I know that forging emotional ties to Nike's flagship offering -- quite possibly the single most marketed fashion product of the 20th century -- puts me in the "shallow consumer" category dominated by teenagers on the WB, Imelda Marcos and Annette Bening's character in "American Beauty."

But my desire for Air Jordans arrived before the slick commercials, and my appreciation extends beyond the simple product. Consider, if only for a minute, that the vast majority of the developed world has a view of athletic footwear that couldn't have existed without Nike's black and red high-tops. Gone are the thoughts of pure function, of rubber soles and leather uppers. Because of Air Jordans, sneakers are now a part of the bright, brash, mesmeric and often-flawed Leviathan that is American culture. Those kick-around Simples that you love wearing to bars or barbecues? They exist because of Air Jordans. The idea that casual footwear somehow reflects who you are, what you like -- your vision of the world? It's gotta be da shoes.

Sure, there are serious problems with the sneaker culture that Nike helped create -- among other things, its tendency to breed violence -- but Jordans deserve to be lauded for their powerful cultural impact. No other fashion item in the past 25 years has made such a mark on the world's sense of style. Air Jordans are the Levi's of our era.The Air Jordans story, in my mind at least, starts not with the marketing or with the man but rather with the shoes. Peter Moore designed the original Air Jordans and they looked nothing like their predecessors. Sneakers had almost always been white, crisp like snow when new, beige and brown once they got old. But Moore figured, why not make the shoes match the clothes? If the Bulls' colors are red and black, why shouldn't Michael Jordan's sneakers match?

This idea has since become a form of conventional wisdom, after Converse created its Weapons line -- green and white for the Celtics' Larry Bird; purple and yellow for Magic Johnson. But it was Moore who started the trend. And even now, his design, both in color and arrangement, remains unmatched. The lack of white, the red and black leather overlays around the toe, up the laces and behind the heel, still look fresh and sinister even after a decade. The fact that each pair of shoes came with colored laces only emphasized that these shoes didn't belong on Bob Cousy or anyone else from the earlier black-and-white, dunk-free age.

Look no further than the logo on the original design to see what I mean. On the outside ankle rests a basketball flanked with wings. It's an almost angelic symbol: Sport mixed with divinity. Just as you needed supernatural powers to stop Michael Jordan in his prime, his sneakers evoked something larger than athletics, and perhaps life itself.

Older sports fans couldn't see the genius of Moore's design. Sports Illustrated's Curry Kirkpatrick, in a November 1987 article, called them "extraordinarily ugly red and black clodhoppers." NBA commissioner David Stern went even further, banning the shoes because they didn't match the Chicago Bulls' mostly white uniforms. But the elders' disgust only made the sneakers more beautiful, more magnetic. Air Jordans weren't just one of the few cool, timeless items to come out of the '80s -- hip-hop also belongs in that category -- they were also products of rebellion and generational individuality.

None of these feelings would have been as intense, of course, without Michael Jordan. If not for No. 23's moves, dunks and sheer explosive basketball brilliance, Moore's design would likely have disappeared, like the leather boots with bow ties that also characterized late-'80s footwear. And Jordan brought more than athletic prowess. He was also the perfect pitchman. Good-looking, noncontroversial and graceful on the court and off, he was the epitome of smooth. He made greatness seem easy and attainable. He made us all believe that we could be like him. The shoes were simply part of the process.

Moore, perhaps better than anyone, understood that we bought Jordans because we identified with the 6-foot-6 master of all things hoop. He never lost sight of the fact that he and his company were selling a dream, the dream of Jordan. "True innovation ultimately must strike an emotional chord," he told Fast Company magazine. "Which of us would pay $150 for a pair of Air Jordans? But that product struck a chord with teenagers. Innovation means changing mind-sets. Kids lined up overnight to get those shoes because of the emotional connection to Jordan. And that was the innovation: Taking something as innocuous as a shoe and making it something you aspire to."

Nike, however, didn't just let the relationship between Jordan, his shoes and consumers develop on its own. The Beaverton, Ore., company turbocharged the process with a heavy dose of big-budget marketing -- equal in style and force to both Jordan and his sneakers.

The first trick Nike employed was simple diversification. Each year, Nike came out with a new, completely different version of Air Jordans that we all wanted to have. Version II, for example, was a plain, white high-top with black laces and a black midsole; Air Jordan III's, the first to show a visible air sole, returned to a black color scheme, but this time the shoe was a midcut and contained a gray-and-white print at the toe. Later versions mixed these basics of color and height with flashes of design, from flames to glow-in-the-dark rubber. Only Version 17 -- a blue-and-white model that came out in 2002, to match Jordan's new team, the Washington Wizards -- looks like a complete break from Moore's original design. And even these sold out in many stores as soon as they arrived.

Every Air Jordan since III, which came out during the 1987-88 NBA season, received a major push from Nike advertising. Television commercials became Nike's trademark, starting first with the Mars Blackmon campaign. Directed by and starring Spike Lee, playing an awestruck fan who declares repeatedly, "Yo, money, it's gotta be the shoes," the ads upped the ante of sneaker salesmanship. Sneaker sales had previously relied on print advertisements and word of mouth. But the Blackmon ads offered something new. They were slick, funny, urban, compelling -- the kind of thing discussed at the proverbial water cooler or, as was the case for me, in the junior-high lunchroom."This was one of the great American moments in Madison Avenue advertising," says Robert Thompson, founding director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University. "The idea that people don't get good at something because of practice and the right genes, but rather with the right attitude and the right shoes -- it was brilliant."

Nike also pioneered guerrilla marketing on Air Jordans' behalf. The company relied on its "urban promotion teams" -- "young black guys who would go into ghettoes to see what was happening and to put our shoes on the hot guys," in the words of Brendan Foster, a former Nike marketing V.P. and Olympic runner, who laid out the strategy in a 1990 article in Campaign magazine. "Six months later, the shoes would be hot in L.A."

And this is where the Air Jordans story takes a turn toward tragedy. The ads, the innovative marketing and the high prices all contributed to a major problem: sneaker-related violence. Throughout the late '80s and early '90s, a spate of robberies and a few murders were tied to Nike's high-priced sneakers. Kids who couldn't afford the $125 price tag simply started stealing the shoes they wanted. Gangs reportedly started using sneakers to recruit youngsters, and even accepted nifty new pairs as payment.

Was Nike ultimately responsible for the violence? Thompson suggests that Nike marketing was simply part of a larger trend. "This ability for American commerce and culture to transform celebrity into a product, a commodity -- even something as mundane as a shoe -- is perhaps a thing that Americans do better than anyone else," he says. "Air Jordans are just one of the supreme examples."

But critics contend that in Nike's case, the trend toward branding went too far. Thomas Frank, in "The Conquest of Cool," criticized Nike for co-opting and commercializing the counterculture: "the words of William S. Burroughs and songs by the Beatles, Iggy Pop and Gil Scott-Heron ('the revolution will not be televised')."

Meanwhile, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, despite Nike's stable of African-American spokesmen, condemned Nike for taking advantage of the black community; for promoting what he called an "ethos of mindless materialism" that most low-income blacks couldn't afford. And it wasn't just the buyers who needed to beware. The three-figure prices were especially egregious, Jackson and other critics argued, because the company paid the workers who actually made the shoes -- typically in Indonesia -- less than $3 an hour.

Ultimately, consumers -- "black and white and brown," Jackson said in a 1998 "Frontline" interview -- needed to wake up. They should judge companies and their products not according to style, cost and appearance but rather "by their investment policy," he said. "That's the real challenge for us today."

I agree with Jackson's point; in an ideal world, consumers would always consider the extended effects of their purchases, whether on workers or the environment. I also agree, though to a lesser extent, with Frank. Sometimes the Nike ad campaigns anger me at a visceral level. John Lennon doesn't deserve to have his "instant karma" tied to a product. If he were alive and in charge of his own rights, I'm sure Nike would have had to look elsewhere. (They could probably have bought a song from Donovan.)

The real point, though, is not whether Nike's use of such songs somehow taints the originals (I would argue that it doesn't), or even whether Nike crossed a line from marketing to manipulation. To truly judge greatness, one must only consider impact. Karl Marx's ideals have largely been found impractical, but he's still a towering figure of 20th-century history. Sigmund Freud's theories have been punctured and pricked with doubt, but anyone who argues that he should be dropped from the canon of Western civilization needs therapy.

So it is with Air Jordans. The sneakers, in all their black, red, white and blue brilliance, are a masterpiece. They've given the world a new vision of their feet, a reason to exercise, a new form of cultural expression. A fresh pair of A.J.s won't necessarily make the world a better place, but I for one am willing to let this larger issue go. Even though I'm less willing than I once was to pay the outrageous prices, I'll never regret owning those original Air Jordans. Because, as I told my friends when I hooked up with them at the mall later on that fateful day, Air Jordans are just too wicked cool to pass up.

Damien Cave is a senior writer for Salon. Originally Published on Salon.com. Reprinted with permission.

Patty Estrella drives her Chrysler Sebring convertible down a dirt road, pulls onto a small hill, turns the car around and throws it into park. On the right, small suburban houses litter the landscape; to the left lies the blue expanse of southern Massachusett's Buzzards Bay. And straight ahead sprawls the subject of our tour: the abandondoned Atlas Tack factory, a 24-acre, arsenic-laden site that's dominated by empty brick buildings with broken windows, a smokestack and -- lying a few yards from where Estrella and I sit -- reed-filled marshland that leaches poison into the bay, its mud and its clams.

"You can't see pollution," Estrella says, running a hand through her frosted blond hair. "But you can see the beauty of the ocean and the tragedy of it being ruined."

She points to a downed strip of fence that lies in the marsh, glistening like a silver bridge. "The fence has been down for a while," she says. Later in the day, I see a group of kids playing nearby; Estrella's teenage son tells me that sneaking into the site has become a Fairhaven rite of passage.

It doesn't look as though it would take much to get in. Getting the factories and poisons out, however, is another story -- as Estrella knows. She has been fighting for an immediate cleanup of the area ever since the mid-'80s, when Atlas Tack abandoned the site, and when she and her husband bought the tiny ranch house that abuts what state, federal and independent studies have found to be contaminated property. She's complained at community meetings, formed neighborhood watchdog groups, spied on the company from her attic window. Her closets overflow with Atlas Tack-related documents.

For a while, particularly during the late '90s, it looked as though Estrella's efforts were not in vain. State officials had already cleaned up a contaminated lagoon in the late '80s and in 1999, after the city sued, Atlas Tack demolished one of the site's more dangerous buildings. One year later, the EPA offered an $18 million cleanup plan.

"I thought then that it might actually happen," Estrella says.

But two years after the plan was approved by town and state officials, the site remains nearly as dangerous as it was a decade ago. With its condemned buildings and contaminated ground -- more than 54,000 cubic yards of soil, debris and sediment contain "heavy metals, cyanide, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and pesticides," according to the EPA's most recent report -- the site is a health risk to any human or animal who visits the area or ingests shellfish harvested nearby. But even though the site is tainted enough to find a place on the Superfund list -- a running tally of the nation's most polluted areas, each of them eligible for federal Superfund money for cleanup -- Atlas Tack's poisons won't be removed anytime soon. On June 24, the EPA told Congress that it planned to cut funding for 33 Superfund sites. A handful of those properties received last-minute funding July 22, but Atlas Tack, its cleanup once scheduled to start in April, is currently destined to remain unfunded and untouched.

Estrella and the other 7,200 residents who live within a mile of the site are the most obvious victims of the decision. Unless more money becomes available, their only recourse to living in the toxic shadow of Atlas Tack is to move. Barring that, they have to derive what little comfort they can from EPA studies showing that the site's poisons are leaking into the ocean, not into local neighborhoods, perhaps delaying the seemingly inevitable impact on their health.

But it isn't just the prospect of a future living next to contaminated land that residents of Fairhaven, and other Americans affected by the Superfund cuts, find devastating. It is the fact that the decision to leave them mired in contaminants has huge benefits for the companies that dumped them. Companies like Atlas Tack, and its parent company, Great Northern Industries, are the happy beneficiaries of the Bush administration's new Superfund policy. By refusing to clean up the sites and then collect costs from the responsible parties, Bush and the EPA have essentially given the nation's biggest corporate polluters a multimillion-dollar reprieve -- at a huge personal cost to less influential citizens.

Environmental activists, local residents and politicians who have fought for Superfund cleanup say they are not surprised by the move, crushing as it is to all of them. The Bush administration never liked the Superfund program, says Scott Stoermer, spokesman for the League of Conservation Voters. "They see it as an inefficient government program that puts too much of a burden on corporations."

But EPA officials dispute this conclusion. In a July 18 editorial in the New York Times, EPA administrator Christine Todd Whitman stressed that the agency remains dedicated to the Superfund cause. Designates like Atlas Tack, Whitman argued, could get cleanup funding as early as the end of the year. But the Bush administration has never suggested it would reinstate the corporate taxes that fed the Superfund until 1995, and with the cleanups at Atlas Tack and more than a dozen other sites delayed indefinitely, critics are struggling to take the EPA at its word.

Fairhaven's residents in particular see the cuts as one more punishing corporate perk, an extravagant handout from the nation's CEO-in-chief. And in the case of Atlas Tack, they say, it is nearly impossible to rationalize a regulatory break that so clearly endangers the well-being -- perhaps the lives -- of an entire community. Fairhaven's history has been intimately tied to Atlas Tack for more than a century. Henry Huttleston Rogers, a well-known robber baron who made millions as a vice president of Standard Oil, bought Atlas Tack and brought it to Fairhaven in 1901. Town history celebrates the factory as a gift. Rogers grew up in Fairhaven; he paved Fairhaven's roads and built its schools, the library and the impressive Unitarian church, a Gothic landmark. Atlas Tack, the theory goes, was built to ensure that the members of Rogers' beloved community would always have a place to work.

The owners who took over Atlas Tack after Rogers died in 1909 stayed true to his intentions. Even after Great Northern Industries bought Atlas Tack in the mid-'60s, local residents could usually find work producing shoe eyelets and other metal at the factory. Sometime in the '40s, wastewater laced with chemicals from electroplating, acid-washing, painting and other activities began to be discharged into a lagoon down by the marsh. There was occasional chatter about the greenish-yellow liquid; but throughout the '60s and early '70s, even as public knowledge of toxins began to rise, no one found the courage to ask questions about the sludge.

"The town used to accept it because a lot of people worked there," says Irving Macomber, 74, a Fairhaven resident since birth who remembers playing near the lagoon in the '50s. "They didn't want to say anything because they didn't want to lose their jobs."

State officials, however, had a hard time staying silent. In the '70s, for example, the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Quality Engineering (DEQE) tried to enforce a law mandating that polluted water be treated before being dumped. Great Northern Industries, responsible for the routine discharge at Atlas Tack of wastewater containing cyanide, arsenic, cadmium and other poisonous heavy metals, simply stonewalled the effort.

"They've been very difficult from day one," says Paul Craffey, the agency's (now called the Department of Environmental Protection) chief project manager for Superfund sites in southern Massachusetts. "The national pollution elimination system requires pre-treatment of wastewater before putting it into the town sewer, but they fought that for years. They had been putting untreated water -- throughout the '60s and '70s -- into the lagoon and it took them a long time to comply."

Four calls to Great Northern Industries seeking comment on the company's business practices were not returned. The company's former lawyer, Kevin O'Connor, also refused to comment and two of the company's environmental consultants failed to respond as well.

Craffey, in his roles as a state and EPA official, has been working with and studying Atlas Tack for more than a decade. He says that Great Northern finally started following the pre-treatment rules in the late '70s. But by this time, most of the serious damage had been done. The untreated wastewater had already been discharged from troughs in the buildings, through leaky pipes, out into the unlined lagoon. And according to an Oct. 19, 1982, state report that was sent to Atlas Tack, laboratory analysis of sludge samples in the area "indicate that the contents of the Atlas Tack lagoon ... exhibit a potential harm to the environment resulting from improper storage and disposal." Animals and people -- anyone and anything that comes into contact with the area, state officials argued -- would run an increased risk of health problems, cancer included.

Other documents from the early '80s -- made public through court records -- show that state officials didn't just warn Atlas Tack of the site's dangers; they also demanded that the company clean up the mess. The company, however, did nothing. Atlas Tack failed to respond to a series of notices in 1982 and 1983, including one showing that groundwater was potentially being poisoned by the lagoon.

In 1984, the state decided to sue Atlas Tack for violations of Massachusetts' pollution laws. R.L. Lewis, president of Atlas Tack at the time, initially agreed to clean up the area. But after signing a consent decree, the company quickly "fell behind in its compliance" according to a story in the March 2000 edition of White Collar Crime Reporter. So the state moved in, assuming control of the area in 1985, and selecting a contractor who finished cleaning up the lagoon.

The state billed Atlas Tack for the work, but the company refused to pay. Claiming that the cleanup costs were too high, Atlas Tack instead sued the state, the contractor and even its own insurer, who refused to pay for the cleanup because it had never been notified of the initial settlement. Atlas lost every case; Craffey says the lagoon cleanup cost the state between $500,000 and $1 million. Atlas Tack, at the behest of court officials, eventually paid most of the bill.

But the state's legal costs were never recouped and Atlas Tack has paid far less than it owes. There's still a lot of work that needs to be done. The dilapidated buildings, an identified fire hazard, need to be demolished; the land below and around them remains dangerously poisoned to this day. More than 200 EPA soil samples taken over the past decade show that about half of the marsh area is contaminated with dangerous levels of metals and cyanide, "causing an ecologic risk to the wildlife," according to EPA reports. Everyone who comes into contact with the area -- the kids who visit the site for kicks, scavengers Estrella has seen stealing bricks, visitors who eat shellfish pulled from the area -- is being exposed to toxic chemicals. Atlas Tack, though made aware of these dangers, refuses to offer assistance. On the rare occasions that the company did what it was told -- for instance, when Atlas Tack put up the fence that's now fallen down -- the solutions rarely lasted. Calls to the company's Boston office are greeted with a mysterious "hello" rather than identification of the company, and messages are rarely, if ever, returned. "They want to be as inconspicuous and unknown as possible," says Jeffrey Osuch, executive secretary for the town of Fairhaven, a city employee since 1988. "They want to avoid being held responsible for the site."

Atlas Tack may also want to avoid the possibility of a massive tax bill. Fairhaven records show that the company hasn't paid taxes since 1990. The town is now owed more than $180,000 in back taxes and interest, according to Osuch. (Atlas Tack failed to return calls on this matter as well.)

Atlas Tack gained a new enemy in 1988, when the EPA nominated the company for Superfund status, a designation that meant its factory site was one of the country's most polluted areas. When the nomination was approved two years later, the site was given priority, with 1,200 others, for immediate cleanup, with federal funds available to the polluters to expedite the process.

Estrella's first reaction to the Superfund listing was shock. "I didn't know it was bad enough to be put on the Superfund list," she says. But then she remembered what it was like to live on the street a decade earlier, when she and her parents lived a few doors down the street from where she now lives, which runs parallel to Atlas Tack's property line. There were signs then that pointed to environmental dangers.

"Pets used to go into the site and come back blue from the chemicals," Estrella recalled. "We had one cat down the street that would regularly come back with blue paws. It looked like it was a punk rocker."

Estrella visited the site with a Great Northern representative, Osuch, and a few other town officials in the early '90s. The tour was organized by Great Northern "so we'd see that it wasn't as bad as the EPA claimed," Estrella says. But after touring the main building's plating room, the source of much of the area's waste, Estrella began to feel sick. "I came away with an upset stomach and I had a headache for 3 days," she says. "I thought it was obviously a biohazard."

State and federal officials agreed. After completing initial assessments, they pressured Atlas Tack to remove asbestos from all the buildings and to demolish the main building, which was structurally unsound. Years later, in 1998 and 1999, the company did the work -- sort of. Atlas Tack removed the asbestos in the main building and demolished it, but never hauled off all the debris. Asbestos in the other buildings was left in place, even though pipes with the carcinogenic material could easily be seen through the buildings' windows, Craffey says. The EPA had to step in again.

Even after the building was torn down, the area remained contaminated. According to the EPA Web site description, which summarizes a series of studies on the area, the on-site soil is contaminated with volatile organic compounds (VOCs), heavy metals, including lead, pesticides and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) -- poisonous materials known to cause cancer and other illnesses. Anyone or anything that comes into contact with the area could be in danger.

Atlas Tack has consistently argued that the EPA studies are flawed, that the property never should have been listed as a Superfund site in the first place. In a Feb. 19, 1999, response to the EPA's proposed remedy, the company claimed that tests used to determine that the site was contaminated only focused on the most polluted areas, and never proved that the chemicals had been flowing into the groundwater or the ocean. The proposed remedy -- demolition of the buildings, removal of polluted soil -- is nothing more than, in the words of Atlas Tack's lawyer, "a pointless attempt to stop a contaminant migration process that is not occurring at levels above EPA's cleanup goals." Citing its own experts, Atlas Tack went on to argue that "The EPA cannot proceed to implement such a plan. Doing so would be a waste of time and taxpayers' money."

Craffey disagrees. Studies conducted at the site after Atlas Tack joined the Superfund list confirmed that migration levels posed a threat to the community. Atlas Tack, he argues, is just plain wrong.

"[Atlas Tack and its consultants] did a quick sampling of the plants that found the grasses had no contamination, but look at the dirt," Craffey says. "It's contaminated. The plant is irrelevant because the animals who eat it don't wash it off. Ducks don't have teeth so they put gravel in their mouths to break up their food. They're being affected."But if people like Estrella and Long, who both live only steps from the site, are healthy, isn't the community safe? Isn't the EPA justified, as it claims, in directing funds to more dangerous areas?

Not necessarily. Craffey argues that Atlas Tack shouldn't fall through the cracks simply because other sites might be more contaminated. The site, he argues, poses a present and future danger. The fact that nothing has been done for so long only increases the possibility of harm: Buildings are closer to falling down, and the public is not as cautious as it should be. Some people don't even seem to notice that the area is poisoned. "We saw evidence of people with plates and forks over there by the water [within a hundred yards of the poisoned area]," Craffey says.

Fairhaven kids may be the ones most at risk. They are fascinated by the site -- many go there as a matter of local tradition. Even Brandon Estrella, who had been warned repeatedly by his mother about the site's dangers, felt the need to sneak in. He was 12 or 13 at the time, which is when most kids have the urge, he says. "It's a Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn sort of thing," he says. "Something you look back on and say, 'Wow, that was kind of stupid.'" Stupid, but incredibly easy to accomplish.

Some residents now believe, perhaps justifiably, that the site will only be reconsidered for cleanup if someone dies. The smokestack will eventually come down through the powers of decay, so will the buildings. Macomber, whose 16-year-old granddaughter lives within a few hundred yards of the site, hopes that no one will be trespassing when they do. "It's a real danger for the kids," he says.

And then there are the potential health risks, which might only begin to show after years of exposure to the toxic chemicals. Once people begin to die or become ill or detect birth defects, cleanup might come, but obviously too late -- at least for Fairhaven residents. When one begins to consider future harms, Craffey says, the site begins to look like an onion -- "There are several layers and the more you pull, the more it makes you cry."

The suffering now is mostly related to fear and frustration -- and a sense of betrayal from a company that locals served well for decades. "It makes me mad because the government said they were going to clean it up," Macomber says. "We" -- the nation, government and especially big businesses like Atlas Tack -- "lived high off the hog for years; it should have been cleaned up by now."

Now that the EPA pressure is off, however, it is unlikely that the company will foot the bill for cleanup simply because it is the right thing to do. Great Northern and Atlas Tack have rarely paid for the cleanup or safety measures that weren't court-ordered and first covered by Superfund or state funding. In fact, the company already has a large bill outstanding. Along with the tax bill, there's the costs of cleanup activities already completed that haven't been paid. According to Craffey's estimates, the EPA has spent more than $4 million assessing the site and doing initial cleanup -- not a dime of it has been paid for by Lewis, Atlas Tack or Great Northern.

Some companies take responsibility for their property: AVX, Aerovox, Belleville Industries are just a few of the companies that have agreed, with little argument, says Craffey, to help clean up their polluted Superfund sites. The area that these particular companies are responsible for -- in New Bedford, only a few miles away from Fairhaven -- is still on the Superfund list and may never leave but the companies continue to contribute funding.

Whitman emphasized this point in her New York Times editorial, noting that 70 percent of Superfund cleanup costs are paid for by polluters. But what she failed to mention is that many of these polluters only paid because they had no choice. The Superfund -- as a pool of money that allows the government to complete massive cleanups, regardless of corporate stonewalling -- was the EPA's greatest weapon. It was the proverbial big stick used to beat the worst corporate polluters into submission. Without the guarantee of funding from corporate taxes -- which expired in 1995 -- and without a steady commitment from Congress and the White House, the cuts to Superfund create a vacuum of authority. Not only is there no real penalty for contaminating the environment, there is also an incentive to fight any demands to be clean.

The lesson here is that if a company delays long enough, it will get a break from the government. There is also an implied promise of laxity for future polluters. Why should a company spend money on clean and sustainable production if it is cheap to pollute for a profit?

The message in the Superfund cuts frightens and depresses people like Estrella. She's appalled by the prospect of inaction, the possibility of more families being poisoned and the inability -- now enforced by the government -- of communities to hold a local company responsible. But ultimately, it comes down to what she sees every day. Back in her car, under a summer New England sun, she still thinks about what the site might have looked like if it were already cleaned up.

"It shouldn't be left with all these shitty fences," she says. "This could be bird sanctuary."

Damien Cave is a senior writer for Salon. This article was originally published on Salon.com. Reprinted with permission. Copyright Salon Media Group 2001.

A sense of panic, instead of anticipation, coursed through Brian Cianessi when he bought the "More Fast and Furious" movie soundtrack just before Christmas. He had heard that the CD was one of the first to be copy-protected for sale in the U.S. market. He feared his days of music ripping would soon be over; Universal Studios had allegedly found a way to keep listeners from making MP3s out of the album's nu-metal gems.

Cianessi, a 24-year-old Los Angeles computer programmer, wasn't interested in posting the songs to KaZaa, Gnutella or any of the other file-sharing networks that have sprung up in Napster's wake. He had no desire to be a pirate. But he did want to play songs from the album on his MP3 player. "I was just worried that I wouldn't be able to rip the tracks, and subsequently transfer them to my car stereo, which has no CD player, only hard drives," he says.

At first, his worries proved justified. When he put the CD in his computer and fired up AudioGrabber, a software program that converts CD tracks into MP3s, the CD locked up the program. But after rebooting his computer, he discovered that the protection was easy to thwart. The copy protection worked by introducing a false value for the start time of the CD -- Cianessi used a function of AudioGrabber to reset that start time to zero, and then was able to encode the music without a glitch.

"My original plan was to buy the CD and then cause a fuss at the store and demand they refund my money when I couldn't play it on my car stereo," he says. "But it turned out to be such a trivial workaround I didn't even bother."

Cianessi's trick turns out to be far from the only way to defeat the various forms of copy protection currently debuting on CDs all over the world. (Running a digital output cord from a CD player to a computer, for instance, is also becoming a popular form of circumvention.) But even as crackers continue to prove how easy it is to set information free, the backlash against intellectual property violation is continuing to swell.

Hollywood is on the march. Adding copy protection to CDs is just one tactic in a comprehensive onslaught. Media behemoths like Disney, Sony and AOL Time Warner are seeking full control of all methods of entertainment distribution; if their vision is realized, digital television sets, hard drives, personal video-recorders and wireless devices will all have some form of copy protection. In the most dire incarnation of the digital entertainment future, consumers of music and movies won't be able to make any copies at all without explicit permission; you might not even be able to move, for example, a recorded version of "The Simpsons" from the digital VCR in your den to the one in your bedroom.

Many critics are convinced that copy-protection technologies are doomed to failure. No system is perfectly secure, and anything that works too well is bound to annoy consumers. Veterans of the consumer industry recall the late 1980s, when many software manufacturers abandoned various copy-protection schemes as bad for business. That cycle, they argue, is set to repeat itself.

But there are signs that the digital future will not resemble the past. Not only do the content companies enjoy access to much more sophisticated technology, but they also have a new tool at their disposal: Congress. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 makes it illegal to distribute or even discuss anything that circumvents digital copyright control. And last month, Sen. Ernest "Fritz" Hollings, D-S.C., threatened to launch another bill -- the Security Systems Standards and Certification Act (SSSCA) -- that will mandate the inclusion of copy-protection technology in all digital devices.

Computer-savvy geeks will likely find a way around every technological advance delivered by state-of-the-art copy protection. But what happens when the law of the land is in direct opposition to mainstream consumer behavior and desires? As the content companies accelerate the deployment of every legal, political and technological weapon in their arsenal, that is precisely the showdown that looms.

Consumers of entertainment have long taken advantage of whatever technology is at hand to make copies of their favorite obsessions. Likewise, content creators have long struggled to resist this tendency. Copyright law, originally intended to balance the needs of both consumers and producers, existed in a middle ground between the two sides. But the advent of the Internet, which makes copying anything digital, anywhere, absurdly easy, vastly increased the stakes of the struggle. In response, the content companies have used their lobbying clout to aggressively redefine copyright law in their own interest.

"Over the past 10 years, many have come around to the view that, in a networked digital world, limitations on copyright owners' control of their works are no longer desirable," writes Wayne State law professor Jessica Litman in her book "Digital Copyright." Intellectual property laws, she adds, have taken on a new meaning. No longer a balance between public and corporate rights, "Copyright is now seen as a tool for copyright owners to use to extract all the potential commercial value from works of authorship, even if that means that uses that have been long deemed legal are now brought within the copyright owners' control," she writes.

As a result, if the content companies continue to have their way, the once-freewheeling Net will be reduced to a glorified form of top-down broadcasting: "a digital multiplex and shopping mall," in Litman's words; "cable television on speed," as Lawrence Lessig phrased it in "The Future of Ideas."

Hollings' bill, whether or not it passes, will likely accelerate the pace of change. Some of the world's biggest technology companies are already scrambling to come up with forms of protection that keep content safe. The industry dwarfs Hollywood in size -- domestic spending on technology goods and services totaled $600 billion in 2000, according to government figures, while Hollywood receipts equaled $35 billion -- but companies such as Intel are still wary of letting Congress dictate their hardware designs.

They're developing technology out of "a fear of legislation," says David Touretzky, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University and frequent critic of the DMCA. "Better to negotiate something they can live with than have something imposed on them unilaterally by clueless senators" in Hollywood's thrall.

Other factors are also in play: Broadband providers and consumer electronics companies are worried that without copy protection they won't have access to the kind of entertainment that would drive consumer adoption of new technologies. Software industry titans such as Microsoft stand to benefit both from enhanced protection of their own products, and from the sale of security services.

It appears unquestionable that hard-wired copy protection is on the way. But will any of it work the way its backers want? Touretzky notes that in the 1980s, copy protection "really pissed off customers, who found they couldn't make backups, or recover easily after a disk crash." Will the new push for protection be any different?

Hollywood will get what it wants, says Talal Shamoon, executive vice president of InterTrust, one of the first companies to pioneer copy- protection strategies for digital audio and video. Cable television, he notes, prevents consumers from accessing content they haven't paid for; the future of digital entertainment will be equally secure. Get ready for what is increasingly being called "trusted computing."

Several different approaches are in the works. The "broken media" method discovered by Cianessi on his "More Fast and Furious" CD is one example. Watermarking -- incorporating a kind of digital label in a song or TV show or movie that uniquely identifies the copy -- is another. There's also the idea of "protection bits," a tool currently used in digital audiotapes, which only permits users to make a copy of an original, and not of another copy.

The leading lockdown candidate combines several of these older software fixes with emerging technologies that focus on hardware. The Copy Protection Working Group (CPTWG), a Hollywood high-tech body charged with developing protection for digital television and other forms of video distribution, wants to make it possible for a broadcaster to physically stop users from sending a digital stream of, say, "Star Wars" to a VCR.

"There are two technologies that create secure connection devices," says Shamoon. "One is called 5C," named after the five companies that created it -- Hitachi, Intel, Matsushita, Sony and Toshiba. "Then there's another technology from Thomson Multimedia called "SmartRight."

Both work by embedding a chip that has the power to shut down specific functions in a given entertainment device; such a chip would be able to instruct the device that sending digital output to another device is forbidden.

"Digital rights management" software takes over from there. "There will be something called a broadcast flag, which will be embedded in the digital signal," says Fred von Lohmann, an intellectual property attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation who has attended several CPTWG meetings. "It will identify the content as copy once, copy always, copy never. TV receivers or set-top boxes will read the flag and comply. So if it says 'copy never' it will turn off our digital outputs."

Media players in a personal computer could also be set to read similar "flags," both for audio and video. And, says Touretzky, everything will likely be encrypted. "For example, instead of sending analog signals to your speakers, you send an encrypted stream of digital data, and the decryption is done in a sealed module built right into the speaker," he says. "Video is done the same way: Encryption is done in a sealed module built right into the monitor, so you can't bypass the encryption by tapping into the monitor cables. Disk drive encryption is built into the drive itself, etc., etc."

There are advantages for both consumers and owners with this scheme, says Shamoon. "It supports the copy/no copy commands but it also lets you buy the movie you just watched at the end, or send it to 10 friends," he says.

The new techniques, promises Shamoon, will be both secure and painless. "Having been around the block a few times, we've learned a lot," says Shamoon, who once worked for the Secure Digital Music Initiative, creators of a vaunted protection scheme that was defeated in October 2000. "Our new products are as easy as buying something on Amazon, except you don't have to wait for UPS to show up."

But just as Shamoon overestimated the strength of SDMI, some experts argue, Hollywood and the digital rights management industry have failed to realize that the search for secure content is a Sisyphean exercise.

Today's copy-protection technologies are less frustrating than those of the past, but they still threaten to enrage and alienate consumers. Take the case of Microsoft Office XP. The copy-protected software is full of problems, says Tom Cramer, 21, a server technician for Compaq in Colorado Springs, Colo.

"I have a licensed copy and I've had to call Microsoft to reactivate it several times," he says. "When I reformatted my laptop, it didn't pick up that it was the same machine. I've since changed laptops; and the license says that I can have it on one laptop and one desktop but when I bought a new laptop, I had to call again."

"If this is the kind of protection that gets into a digital device, I'm going to be upset," he adds. "If I have to call a record label to say, hey, my MP3 player broke, give me another license, I'm not going to buy the device."

Even the tightest and smoothest forms of protection promise to be not just annoying, but also beatable, say experts. History is on the hackers' and crackers' side. Every attempt to handcuff content -- even cable and satellite TV -- has failed. And the reason is simple: If you can see or hear the content once, you can find a way to copy it. Episodes of "South Park" may originally only be legally available to cable television subscribers, but they're also easily available via the Net. One digitized, uploaded copy opens Pandora's box.

If users can't decrypt the stream, reset the index of the CD or recode the television to allow for digital output, they'll simply record another way, notes Touretzky. "People don't care all that much about the superior quality of digital content, compared to price and convenience issues," he says, pointing out that MP3s became popular even though they sound worse than CDs. "So, if people can't grab the digital data stream, they'll just set up a microphone next to their speakers and take the one-time analog quality hit in order to rerecord the data in an unprotected format. Granted, this is a lot less convenient than ripping CDs is now, but they'll do whatever it takes."

Ultimately, Touretzky and others argue, copy protection and the Net are technologically at odds, magnets repelling each other in opposite directions. "It's the nature of the Net to pass information from anywhere to anywhere," says Princeton computer science professor Edward Felten, who was threatened with legal action by the Recording Industry Association of America for planning to give a paper on how to reverse- engineer SDMI. "It's the same with PCs: They can handle and process information in any way that you like. Copyright protection is the opposite."

Society must either give up on copy protection or the general-purpose PC and the Net, says Felten. And no matter how hard Hollywood tries, Felten argues, society will eventually choose the latter because "the sheer value of the Net and computers is so much greater than any value that copy protection can provide."

Not even Hollings' Security Systems Standards and Certification Act will keep Hollywood's content safe, some argue.

"Congress may as well legislate that water has to run uphill," says Dan Wallach, a computer science professor at Rice University. "All the legislation in the world can't change the fact that you have this content and if you listen to it or see it, then you can copy it."

"[New technologies and laws] won't work any better than the Federal Prohibition Bureau for curbing illegal alcohol use during prohibition," says Cianessi. "Society will continue to slowly evolve around legislative obstacles, just as it always has."

But if the technology that Hollywood favors is defeatable, why are people like Wallach and Cianessi so worried? Why are geeks fighting so passionately against the shift toward copy protection?

The technology is not what bothers them -- it's the criminalization of the act of copying, and even worse, of the act of discussing copying, that critics find most alarming. Is it really in the public interest to continually increase the level of corporate ownership of ideas and expression? Who should Congress serve?

The DMCA -- which has already been used to threaten Felten and to prevent Web magazines from linking to at least one program deemed illegal by Hollywood -- and the so-called Sonny Bono Act, which extended the length of copyright protection by 20 years, forcing some Internet publishers to take down content that was once available in the public domain, are the leading legal offenders.

Both laws, say legal scholars, show how willing Congress is to comply with entertainment industry demands.

"In the 1970s and the 1980s, there were a substantial number of members of Congress who responded with skepticism when the movie or record business insisted that the threat of widespread unlicensed copying required new laws, and copyright owners who sought the legislation needed to draft it narrowly and make a persuasive case it was actually necessary," Litman says. "That's why, despite [MPAA chairman] Jack Valenti's claim that VCRs spelled the end of the U.S. movie industry, Congress did not enact any of the videotape-recorder/copy-protection bills introduced in the 1980s.

"Twenty years later, thanks in large part to the massive increase in lobbying money spent by the entertainment industries, most members of Congress would agree that more copyright protection is always better than less," says Litman.

The SSSCA fits squarely within this trend. The bill has yet to be introduced, but the draft that leaked to the Net last year would make it illegal "to manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide or otherwise traffic in any interactive digital device that does not include and utilize certified security technologies."

Hollings, who has received $264,534 in campaign contributions from the TV, music and movie industries since 1997, has attempted to argue that standardized copy protection is the key to encouraging the continuing rollout of broadband Net connectivity. According to this theory, customers won't sign up for DSL or cable Internet access if they can't get top-notch entertainment via their computers. But Hollywood won't make that content available unless it is confident it won't be pirated.

"This is what he sees as one of the critical problems -- the piracy of digital content," says Andy Davis, a Hollings spokesman. "And this is the method he sees as a solution for that."

But by outlawing any device that doesn't comply, the SSSCA would potentially make, for example, software that moved your hard drive's contents to a remote computer illegal. It would also make possession of devices and software already on sale a punishable offense.

Furthermore, argues Litman, the theory that broadband adoption is dependent on copy protection just doesn't hold water. The entertainment and information industries made the same argument in the early '90s as part of their lobbying for the DMCA, she notes, pointing out that they were wrong then, and are wrong now.

"In 1993, the White House was interested in developing what it first called the Information Superhighway and then the National Information Infrastructure," says Litman. "Entertainment and information industries argued that unless they were given stronger copyright protection, they'd refuse to make their content available over the NII, and therefore nobody would want to use it, so nobody would build the network. The administration actually endorsed this position in 1994 and 1995 reports, and introduced legislation designed to respond to it. Meanwhile, of course, the Internet was growing by leaps and bounds. Despite the absence of Hollywood movies, Random House books and BMG records, the Internet enjoyed the steepest adoption trajectory of any comparable technological innovation, becoming common in the majority of U.S. households within a decade."

Contrary to Hollywood's claims, the battle is not over broadband -- it's over business models. Though VCRs, DVDs and other new technologies have all added to Hollywood's bottom line, Hollywood is convinced that the world of digital downloads and streams will cost more than it brings in to corporate coffers. And so it has turned once again to Congress.

The legislature's willingness to listen cuts across political lines. The debate doesn't fit neatly into a liberal/conservative framework, says Lessig. It's "controlled vs. free," he writes in "The Future of Ideas," or "old vs. new."

Even Shamoon admits that we're in the midst of an "ugly transition period." Everyone is dreaming of a time "when content exists in the air and follows you around," he says. "I want to be able to walk into a hotel room and have it realize it's me and let me watch my movies from home."

But that ideal seems a long way off, and in the meantime, despite Congress' eagerness to do Hollywood's bidding, there's no clear sign yet as to who is going to win the intellectual-property wars.

Brian Cianessi figures that his CD will end up looking like some sort of omen -- perhaps the thin end of the wedge that marks the end of the golden age of Net file-trading. But he's not sure what will emerge.

"We currently exist during a turning point that will be considered historically significant to coming generations," he says. "I can only hope that when they look back to this time they can see the stand we took on copyright as the fulcrum for the shift of power back to the people and away from big corporations."

I'm experiencing schizophrenia for the first time. While spiders climb all over the room, the psychiatrist leans over his desk and shoves his face close to mine, his eyes squinty, red and evil. He keeps asking me questions, but it's impossible to pay attention. The voices won't let me. "Loser, loser, loser," screams one; "you'll never make anything of yourself," says another. A third goads me to "run, run away."

Instead of taking the voices' advice to flee, I simply stop the madness. I remove the virtual reality goggles and place them by the Apple PowerBook running the simulation. My tour is over. I don't necessarily feel more empathy for schizophrenics -- the five-minute program's goal, according to its sponsor Janssen, a pharmaceutical company -- but it's hard not to be a bit intrigued by the unexpectedness of virtual insanity.

Virtual reality's original prophets saw their technology as a holodeck of pleasure, not pain. Pioneers like Jaron Lanier and Char Davies aimed for beauty, art and emotional rapture. They created computer-generated amusement parks where people floated through objects and lost track of time. Even now, during an era when virtual reality no longer commands the regular headlines it did in the early '90s, veteran visionaries like novelist Richard Powers remain obsessed with the ecstatic promise of the unreal world.

The virtual-schizophrenia booth looks nothing like such dreams. It's a nightmare -- only the latest example of a much larger trend toward building environments that frighten rather than fascinate. Call it real therapy through virtual means: In the name of mental health, scientists are exposing people to virtual Vietnam battles, tarantulas and, for those who fear public speaking, raucous crowds. Hell on earth has been transferred to hell in a head mount. And with 20 million Americans suffering from mental problems that some therapists believe could be solved with V.R. -- now cheaper and more accessible than ever before -- many researchers believe that psychiatry will soon do what the V.R. pioneers have not, and introduce virtual reality to the masses.

"It's going to go beyond the university to private practice and to the arena of public health," says Ken Graap, CEO of VirtuallyBetter, an Atlanta company spun out of research at Georgia Tech that sells V.R. therapy tools. "This could be one of the first applications that brings low-cost V.R. to a broad base of users."

Not everyone agrees that V.R.'s technological sleight of hand is the answer to mental illness, but proponents are increasingly enthusiastic. V.R. therapy should be welcomed, they say, because it's safer and cheaper than "in vivo" options -- and because it works. Patients overcome their fears, moving on to mental health in part because they experience the computer-generated world as completely real. Isn't that what V.R. was supposed to be all about to begin with?

Virtual reality and mental health first started to merge about seven years ago. Inspired by the possibility of creating a new therapeutic and technological tool, two researchers -- Larry Hodges, a computer science professor at Georgia Tech, and Dr. Barbara Rothbaum, a psychiatry professor at Emory, joined forces. First, they built a virtual elevator shaft for use with people who have a fear of heights.

"It was a perfect problem for virtual reality to solve," says Albert Rizzo, a V.R. therapy expert who teaches at the University of Southern California's Integrated Media Systems Center and School of Gerontology. "At the time, V.R. was new and tended to work best with straight lines -- perfect for simulating heights. And all the patients require is exposure. Over time, they see that nothing bad happens, so they get over [their fear]."

Experimentation didn't stop with the fear of falling, though. Indeed, after Rothbaum and Hodges published a groundbreaking study in 1995, arguing that V.R. therapy was effective, research sprouted all over the world. In Italy, Giuseppe Riva, a communications psychologist, began using V.R. to assess neurobiological activity, such as eye movement after a stroke. Hunter Hoffman at the University of Washington's Human Interface Technology Laboratory cured a woman of her phobia of spiders in 1997 with V.R. therapy. And Rizzo -- after spending 1994 and 1995 writing papers about the potential for psychological simulations -- became a hands-on developer in the mid-'90s, beginning work on a virtual classroom in 1997 that now studies and diagnoses attention-deficit disorder. And Rothbaum and Hodges have extended their work to new areas, including Virtual Vietnam, a Huey-filled "Platoon" for veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder.

Yet, even as V.R. therapy was gaining scientific legitimacy, V.R. technology remained primitive. Experts argue that the V.R. hype of the early '90s deserves part of the blame. By the time psychiatry transformed V.R. "from an expensive toy to a useful tool," Rizzo says, users had fallen into "a trough of disillusionment" with the technology. Scientists, the press and everyday users turned off and tuned out, wanting nothing more to do with what Newsweek called "the most barfogenic invention since the tilt-a-whirl."

Crushing costs didn't help the cause either. The initial environments run by Rothbaum, Hodges, Rizzo and others ran on $250,000 Silicon Graphics workstations and often used $50,000 head mounts and tracking sensors. Even as recently as two years ago, prices remained prohibitively high, says Graap of VirtuallyBetter. The PCs needed to run a simulation cost at least $5,000 and the head-mount tracking systems cost about the same. "We didn't even bother trying to convince therapists to buy them," he says. "We only did research."

Then, about a year ago, price declines accelerated to a turning point. With the rollout of Pentium III processors, generic PCs became capable of running V.R. applications, and dropping prices for optical equipment cut head-mount costs by more than half. The result is that therapists can now start treating patients after laying out only about $3,500: $1,500 for a run-of-the-mill PC and $2,000 for a head-mount tracking combo like the VFX3D.

As is the case with most technologies, the lower prices have inspired rising interest. Janssen, for example, introduced a second virtual-schizophrenia experience this year. The company aims to demonstrate it to hundreds of doctors and law enforcement officials in an attempt to heighten their empathy for the mentally ill. And when VirtuallyBetter brought its suite of applications -- for treating the fear of heights, audiences, airplanes, storms and Vietnam -- to the American Psychological Association's conference this year, lines snaked around its booth all four days. Graap gave more than 700 demonstrations and says that more than 200 clinics have since called to inquire about buying the necessary equipment and software.

The "novelty factor" may have played a role, Graap concedes, but therapists are generally not a techno-friendly lot. Give them a couch and a patient and that's all they usually need. But the promise of V.R. has stirred them from their Freudian slumber, says Page Anderson, a therapist who has treated more than 100 patients using V.R. The technology isn't just cool, it's therapeutically compelling, she says. And it gives therapists almost complete control. They can heighten or minimize exposure to heights or other mental catalysts, repeating experiences that work, discarding those that fail. They can track eye movements and heart rates while preserving confidentiality because patients remain in the office. There are some health concerns -- Rothbaum warns that patients and therapists must not rely on technology at the expense of real-world, human interaction -- but overall, "the advantages far outweigh the disadvantages," Rizzo says.

What's more, many patients prefer V.R. therapy, which lets them simultaneously avoid and overcome their greatest fears. When Anderson started a phobia study recently, she asked 15 people whether they'd prefer real-life exposure or V.R. therapy. All but one chose the latter. "It's a new, useful tool," says Anderson. "It's a steppingstone to helping people."

But V.R. therapy is also a weak application of a revolutionary advance, says V.R. pioneer Lanier. Using immersion techniques to frighten people -- especially phobics -- requires far less idealism, innovation and passion than just about any other type of V.R. in use or imagined, he says.

Graap admits that phobics are already "programmed" to react. And Janssen's hallucination-filled schizophrenia program doesn't just increase empathy; it also advertises the company's latest schizophrenia medication in bold letters at both the beginning and the end.

Of course, the push toward fear and marketing in virtual reality "shouldn't come as a surprise," Lanier says. "Our art and culture are always trying to evoke primal fears."

But the trend remains disappointing to Lanier -- a sign, he says, of "our society's weird take on life right now, where our higher priority is coming up with some way to deal with our primal fears, instead of a way to improve life and art. Maybe it's the cult of victimhood, but what a curious priority to set."

Perhaps there's room for V.R. therapy and the aesthetics that Lanier longs for to coexist. Anderson and Graap contend that V.R. therapy may not be the escape that its pioneers initially envisioned, and that their applications represent a transition. The virtual-schizophrenia booth may not feel real to people without the disease -- I sure wasn't all that impressed -- but the sweats and high heart rates of phobics show that full psychological immersion is possible. With ever-improving technologies, the lessons learned in therapy -- about what works and what doesn't, for example -- could open up new avenues of V.R. research and reveal new models for immersion. Soon, people may be helping themselves to over-the-counter V.R. devices at pharmacies while the dreamers and pioneers code cultural epiphanies that reach the masses. With the mix of psychology and more advanced, cheaper processing power, "the sky's the limit," Rizzo says. "The only limitation is software. Whatever we can code, we'll be able to do."

Spam is the bane of Carmela Anderson's existence. Every week she must study the contents of hundreds of spams, looking for clues that might lead her to the senders. Every day the systems administrator of the Internet service provider she works for permanently blocks 15 to 20 addresses from sending more e-mail to its clients.A 1999 California law designed to squelch spam encourages ISPs to sue every time spammers route e-mail through their networks, clogging servers and harassing ISP customers who rarely want "The Internet Spy Guide" and other unsolicited offerings. The law also offers rewards: $50 per message, up to $25,000 per day from each spammer. That kind of money could help reimburse ISPs, which spend about $1 of every user's monthly fee to fight spam, according to a 1999 Gartner Group study.But Anderson and the owners of Redshift, the small Monterey, Calif., ISP where she works, have never taken spammers to court and have never seen much use for the state laws designed to protect them. "For us, the laws haven't really helped at all," Anderson says. "There's just too much spam, and it would cost too much to track spammers down and sue them. It's not worth the effort."Apparently that message hasn't trickled up to Congress, which is trying to enact a similar law on a federal level. After months of haggling, the sponsors of three anti-spam bills -- Heather Wilson, R-N.M., Gary Miller, R-Calif., and Gene Green, D-Texas -- have fused their ideas into House Bill 3113, which aims to eradicate spam by encouraging litigation. Called "Unsolicited Commercial Electronic Mail Act of 2000," the bill has picked up a total of 42 cosponsors and is expected to reach the House floor for a vote in early May, soon after the two-week Easter break.In its present form, 3113 closely resembles the California law, which is made up of three separate pieces of legislation that collectively give ISPs the right to sue spammers who use their networks in violation of posted anti-spam policies or who fail to announce their purpose with "ADV:" in the subject line.By offering a sweeter payoff, the federal law creates a greater incentive to sue. It carries penalties of $500 per message up to $50,000 per day per spammer found guilty. And it offers this financial carrot not just to the ISPs but to you, me and anyone else who receives spam. It also promises to eliminate a common defense spammers invoke against state laws: Spammers who live outside the state that they're being sued in often argue that the state spam laws limit interstate commerce in violation of the Constitution's commerce clause that gives only Congress that power.Ultimately, the bill "creates a large disincentive for spammers" -- one that could severely diminish the amount of spam in people's in boxes, says John Mozena, co-founder of CAUCE, the all-volunteer Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail, and other proponents of the bill."It's going to curtail spam from a broad base of opposition," says Miller, who as a state legislator sponsored California's law that lets ISPs sue.But the people at Redshift and other ISPs say that a federal law can remove some hurdles to litigation, but not all. Spam will not disappear, they insist. A law "won't make a whole lot of difference," says David Sorkin, a spam expert and professor of law at John Marshall University in Chicago. Simply put, spam is too easy to make, say ISPs, and its creators are too hard to find and collect from. No matter the benefits, the cost of litigation remains too high."It's still easier to ban these spammers than to sue them," says Dennis Dayman, director of policy and legal and external affairs for SBC Communications, the parent company of Ameritech, Southwestern Bell, Cellular One and other regional telcos. It operates Pacific Bell in California, where Dayman says the company is looking into a handful of spam suits, but has not filed a single complaint. "These cases are very hard to prosecute," he says."As a practical matter, I'm not so sure a federal law would do us any good," says Kris Rallapalli, owner of Kepnet, a small ISP in San Jose. "Litigation would drag on for years and it would be too expensive."Of course, when anti-spam laws were proposed back in the mid-1990s, and as 15 states succeeded in passing them, few proponents of legislation imagined that the laws wouldn't be used. Indeed, an article in the San Jose Mercury News on Dec. 31, 1998, the day before the law took effect, reported that ISPs welcomed the measure, "and the opportunity to finally rid their systems of a costly problem." It went on to predict "swift enforcement" on the part of ISPs.At the time, few disagreed. "I was really psyched when the law first came out," says Nick Nicholas, former head of the e-mail abuse department of Pacific Bell Internet and the present director of policy and communications for Mail Abuse Prevention Systems LLC, a provider of spam-filtering technologies. "I thought, here's the legal tool that gives ISPs what they need to deal with the abuse of their property."But having a tool is one thing; finding an efficient way to use it is another. So far, few have bothered wielding California's legal weapons. More than a year has passed since the laws took effect and lawyers say only about seven spam-related suits have been brought: One was settled in small-claims court; two others were brought and settled by Yahoo, whose "Yahoo Mail" network was used by spammers; and four are pending.EarthLink and Pacific Bell, two of the largest ISPs in California, say they are looking into a handful of cases each, but neither has filed a complaint nor named the violators."We've been working on it, but we aren't sure what the burden of proof will be," says Dayman of SBC, explaining why the Pacific Bell division hasn't sued. "We don't know if it will be enough to show that the spam always came from the same home phone and that there were several credit cards and e-mails registered to that address."In other words, Dayman isn't sure if he can tie the spam to the spammer.This cat-and-mouse game of identification remains the largest hurdle to litigation. And ironically, despite his doubts, Dayman is closer to winning that game than he realizes. At least he's caught some personal information. Most serious spammers manage to completely avoid giving up such data, say systems administrators. On the Net, "It's just not that hard to hide," says Anderson at Redshift.Indeed, several options are available. Speed is one. Many spammers send thousands, even millions of e-mails from one address, then shut down quickly before someone like Anderson at Redshift blocks them, or before they're added to MAPS Realtime Blackhole List, which blocks all mail coming from ISPs that have allowed spammers to use their networks and going to networks run by RBL members.Others fake their identities. ISPs "in places like Finland and Hong Kong" let users sign up from anywhere, often with no personal, traceable information, says Steve Dougherty, EarthLink's director of technology acquisition and a manager of its e-mail abuse department.And if it's not an international address they're sending from, it's often a stolen one. Sometimes, spammers grab these addresses by hacking into people's accounts; in other cases, they impersonate staffers from an ISP, sending users an e-mail that asks for their password "to fix their account," says Timothy Walton, a Mountain View, Calif., attorney who has filed four lawsuits that attempt to broaden California's laws by allowing consumers to sue. With these addresses in hand, they can route mail through several of them -- a process known as "spoofing" -- and obscure the original IP address."Fewer than one in 1,000 spams offer a real reply address," Walton says. Dougherty doubts that spammers are that hard to find, if only because spam comes not just from professionals, but also "a rotating crop of amateurs" who naively believe that spam will make them rich beyond their wildest dreams.These amateurs can often be traced, but is it worth taking them to court? If someone's been scammed -- forking over $39.95 to some pro spammer for 50,000 e-mail addresses -- should ISPs bother trying to convince a judge that they're criminals, not victims? Dougherty doesn't think so. "Most of them don't even know what they're doing is wrong, and once we tell them, they rarely come back," he says. "That's the problem with the law -- unless it's narrowly defined, it tends to paint with a broad brush."On the other hand, Dougherty would be happy to put the professionals out of business. He estimates that there are a few thousand full-timers, but that this "10 percent of the total [does] 80 percent of the damage." And these repeat offenders know the game. They're not easy to find. "They live in the shadows," Dougherty says. "They'll move and always be there."There are, of course, exceptions. High-profile suits such as those against Sanford Wallace, the self-declared "Spam King," proved that some spammers can be found -- and sued. Together, EarthLink, Concentric, CompuServe and other ISPs won judgments in 1997 for over $2 million from Wallace and his company CyberPromo, which sold bulk e-mail software.And several sites offer tools to help. SamSpade.org will search the Whois database for domain name registrars, and Whew.com will help you find the physical address of a spammer, as will other resources found on sites like Suespammers.org. Attorney Walton says he used several of these search tools to find three of the four spammers that he's suing and none of the searches took more than 30 hours.Still, folks like Wallace and the spammers Walton is suing represent rare cases: spammers who didn't try very hard to hide. Wallace publicly defended his actions, and all but one of Walton's defendants were easily unmasked: One sent marketing-related faxes and e-mails to 4,000 people who attended a marketing conference; another, Friend Finder Inc., is an established online dating service that allegedly sent an unknown number of e-mails to persons it deemed interested. Both spammers identified themselves in the e-mails. A third, Newport Internet Marketing, apparently tried to hide by simply misspelling its own name: "It sends spam under the name 'Neuport,' but was listed at Dogpile.com [a meta-search engine] as 'Newport,'" Walton says.Only one case, relating to pornographic spam sent from an America Online account, required serious digging. And in that case, Walton still hasn't found the defendant. He's charging "John Does 1 through 200" in the meantime.In comparison, the majority of the 3,000 to 4,000 e-mail addresses sitting in Redshift's spam database "are anonymous," Anderson says. "We don't know where we can find the senders."What's more, there is little reason to believe that locating spammers leads to a recouping of the money ISPs spend on processing their mail. EarthLink spends over $1 million a year fighting spam; the median amount spent annually by Internet service providers to filter spam is $387,000, according to a 1999 Gartner Group study.California law and House Bill 3113 are based on the argument that these costs should be paid by spammers. Otherwise, by transferring costs from sender to receiver, spam acts like a collect call ISP clients have no choice but to accept; it "trespasses on one's chattel or property," says David Kramer, an attorney with Palo Alto's Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich & Rosati who drafted the California law that lets ISPs sue.But California's spam cases so far haven't done much to shift those costs. Rallapalli won $600 from a spammer in small-claims court. Yahoo earned an injunction for $44,000 from Information Technologies Corp. and settled with Worldwide Network Marketing on confidential terms that did not disclose whether or not monetary damages were awarded. Walton's four cases are far from judgment. Even Kramer, who worked on the California law, admits that it has afforded "only a marginal improvement."Kramer insists, however, that a federal version would plug some of the loopholes that spammers have squirmed through. For example, under present California law, it's not enough for an ISP to simply put its spam policy on its homepage. An ISP must send a warning e-mail and receive a second offensive message from the same source in order to show that spammers know their messages are going to an ISP in a state that outlaws them.According to Kramer, 3113 would eliminate that defense, "letting ISPs sue any spammer without demonstrating that they were served with notice of the ISP's policy," he says. "It shifts the burden." It also defeats the "commerce clause" defense that was used last month to strike down Washington state's first judgment against a spammer. And it prevents spammers from gaining the advantage of an early warning. "They won't have time to hide," says Nicholas at MAPS.Plus, the federal law could turn up the scrutiny on spammers. By mirroring a Washington state law, 3113 lets all receivers of spam sue, and gain $500 per message, up to a maximum of $50,000 per day. Anecdotally, this has benefited proactive anti-spammers like Bruce Miller, a Washington state resident who says he "collected $3,900 from four spammers." Proponents of the federal bill expect thousands more to do the same."I think we will see quite a number of cases brought against spammers," says Ray Everett-Church, a co-founder of CAUCE, who helped draft 3113. "When you've got a law that says, 'If you do X, damages are presumed to be Y and action can be granted in terms of Z,' then it's much easier to process."Still, ISPs and users have heard all this before. Even if the law passes, which is not a given -- influential lobbyists such as the Direct Marketing Association and Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig are among the opponents -- and even if spammers are sued in droves and pay in kind, the law may not empty our in boxes of spam. In fact, more may be on the way.As the number of Net users grows worldwide, an ever-expanding pool of spammers comes online. Most will be "dumb amateurs," says Dougherty at EarthLink, people who say they believe that "people actually want their product." Others will become professionals, sending out millions of messages, then ducking for cover like new-economy con artists -- or like "u6," a savvy porn spammer who recently found my in box, and promises to remove me if I send mail to endmail@yahoo.com."There's always going to be bulk e-mail because it's easy to do," Dougherty says. "Million dollar fines might put a little bit of a chill on it, but not much." Back at Redshift, Anderson has to agree. "Hopefully the law will scare people," she says. "That would be nice. But that's the only way it would affect us."