The Hitchhikers Guide to the New Economy

Adams wants to reinvent creativity itself. "Up until now," he says, "we've pursued knowledge by the scientific method of taking things apart to see how they work. This has led us to the fundamental forces: atoms and quarks. The limitation is that once you take things apart, they don't work anymore. If you take a cat apart to see how it works, you have a nonworking cat on your hands. Computers allow us to reverse the process: We can start putting things together to see how they work. In the future, kids won't be taught frog dissection. They'll be taught frog construction."

Learn to put things together, Adams suggests, and you create wonderful new possibilities. Reverse-engineer your creativity, and the economy begins to open itself up in ways that seem, well, out of this world. "If we put things together to see how they work," Adams says, "we arrive at a different perspective. What binds us together? What are our morals, our beliefs? In the past, a tornado would rip a community apart and turn it into a junkyard. We must arrive at the point where a tornado can sweep through a junkyard and bring up a 747."

Chaos is Adams's oldest friend, his constant traveling companion. There he is, with his thumb out. But this time, he's not looking for a London hack. He's got his eyes peeled for a 747 - or for an even higher-flying vehicle.

Harriet Rubin (hrubin@aol.com) is the founder of Currency/Doubleday Books and the author of The Princessa: Machiavelli for Women. You can visit Douglas Adams and the Digital Village on the Web (www.tdv.com).