Even silicon valley says the world is overconnected, corporations are overwhelmed, and we're heading for another global crisis because the internet is now cowboy country, out of control.

Bill Davidow, a former Silicon Valley high priest at Intel, is a scholar, and a historian, and he thinks the internet may be driving us crazy. No Luddite, he's written a book called Overconnected and what it means not only for each of us personally, but for the global system.

Today on Background Briefing he speaks from the Commonwealth Club of California, and the moderator is head of Adobe Systems, Charles Geschke.

The internet has brought national borders down, and industry, institutions, corporations and individuals are now living globally. At the same time a lot of all this is happening in the light of what Davidow calls 'the invisible freight' of the internet.