One source turns out to be Apple's recent "Mac vs. PC" TV ads (http://www.apple.com/getamac/), which for him have produced the reverse of the intended effect. He loathes Justin Long, playing the Mac, who was the dorky teenager Brandon in Galaxy Quest but acts like a hipster in the Apple ads. And he admires John Hodgman, the PC, who acts like a dork in those ads but, as his regular appearances on The Daily Show (http://www.comedycentral.com/shows/the_daily_show/index.jhtml) certify, actually is hip.

When I probed further, though, I found unmistakable signs of what my colleague Tom Yager, in his memorable 2002 column "Losing My Religion (http://www.infoworld.com/4349)", called technology attachment disorder: "an unshakable, impractical devotion to a brand, platform, product line, or programming language."

As we've long recognized, and as the title of Tom's column reminds us, such devotion is a kind of religion. And although we know it's a force to be reckoned with, we assume that we cannot analyze or understand it.

What if we can, though? That's what the philosopher Daniel Dennett does in his powerful new book, Breaking the Spell. His early work on cognition impressed me decades ago. Later he became a scholar of evolution. Now he's exploring religion as a product of evolutionary processes at work in the domains of biology (genes) and culture (memes).

From a geopolitical perspective, this is clearly an important and timely subject. But because I write for InfoWorld and not Foreign Affairs, why reach for the third rails of evolution and religion? Because both are information systems that we, as information technologists, can understand in those terms.