The dark side of progress in 2003 was watching the Internet seem to turn into a seething soup of viruses and spam -- is that your e-mail inbox, or a portal to Hell? Whatever it is, our only defense has been to become disturbingly jaded. Something is really wrong when it's relatively normal behavior for office workers to idly think, "Gee, I'm sure having to delete a lot of spam with bestiality pics today." . . . It's hard to remember that such horrors aren't natural byproducts of some kind of Internet physics, but exist because of bad people doing the kind of rotten things bad people do.