The Internet is home to many different social groupings. People with like interests meet and discuss their hobbies, political views, cultural perspectives and bodily functions in places devoted to computers, sexual orientations, favorite genre of fiction, appeal of furry costumes, videogames, fundamentalist religions, adoration of a particular television program, devotion to the research and development of important new emoticons, dislike for garden slugs, and many, many other things. I have one roommate who discusses bootleg MP3s, another who frequents websites devoted to a particular sexual fetish, and another who devours each and every List Of Jokes Of Dubious Humor Content she can find. There are so many of these groups that people can be usefully indexed and categorized according to the unique cross section of the Internet clique universe to which he or she belongs. Someday, I believe Social Security numbers will be generated through numerical encoding of this data.

What I worry about is that I do not belong to any of these cliques. Does this make me nobody?