I can stop anytime I want to!

From the Atlantic magazine’s Primary Sources – “Addicted to DSL”:

What happens when Internet users are taken offline? To find out, Yahoo and the media agency OMD commissioned a cruel study: a group of Internet users were unhooked for a two-week period and asked to record in diaries what they did and how they felt. The diary entries were almost uniformly miserable: the subjects discovered—doubtless to Yahoo's delight—that the Internet was more deeply embedded in their daily lives than they had realized.

Also, scroll down to “The Costs of Doing Business” for the nitty-gritty on a World Bank report suggesting that poor countries remain poor because of unfathomable corruption and bureaucratic regulation that stifles business development.