But in examining where we stand today, while Moore’s Law holds somewhat steady as tech wizards push boundaries with ideas like quantum computing, the Law of More has hit a wall of massive economic crisis. The sort of “more” we’re seeing now? More unemployment, more insecurity, more business going bust. Millions of people are adjusting to having less in their lives—some by choice, some by force. The Law of Less is the one we live by now, and it looks like it’ll determine our path for a while to come. Can we make it work to our advantage in the long term?

We surely don’t want people going short of food and vital resources for lack of money, or wasting their time and talents because they can’t find a job. But for a long time now we’ve been nervously watching cheap, overprocessed food lead to the obesity epidemic, and roads become increasingly choked with traffic, wasting vast amounts of time and fuel. While packing more and more into life felt like an obligation rather than a choice for many people, common sense was beginning to tell us that in a world fast approaching 7 billion people, we have to figure out ways of better managing our resources.

There’s certainly room for eating less, driving less and buying less stuff without diminishing our individual quality of life. But what happens to jobs and incomes if “less” becomes everybody’s new normal? Many of us have lived through downturns that forced a few months of “less” until we could ultimately resume our comfortable consumption. But how will you react when the adjustment isn’t temporary?

I keep thinking back to a particular day in the early 1990s, when I helped organize a “Welcome to Cyberspace” event at Chiat\Day on Maiden Lane. A speaker that afternoon referred to a Time Magazine writer’s theory that cyberspace was just the real world in a new format. (Our fears of the unknown were unrealistic. Our suspicions that deviants populated the online world were unfounded.) My key takeaway? What parent would let their kid walk unsupervised from the Time/Life Building (at Rockefeller Center) to Times Square? Cyberspace is everyplace, the criminals are just concentrated in particular areas (as they once were in Times Square).

When a lawyer acquaintance and I began to debate the Markoff case through our respective professional lenses, his argument reinforced what I have called “That Time Truth of Modern Life” all these years. He hammered facts and figures at me: Prostitutes have always been victims of heinous crimes. The online world just facilitates access, to anything and anyone. A basic truth once upon a time, in the 1990s, and still so a decade and a half later.

June 20-something 2009: I check the news one morning and encounter another alleged Craigslist crime—another person charged with luring victims into his web via the online community bulletin board. Rape this time, rather than murder, and just as frightening: Known film composer Joseph Brooks apparently lured victims with false promises of stardom. It’s sad that we live in a world so vicious. Am I just remembering my suburban childhood through rose-colored glasses, or was life really safer back then? But my next thought on reading the Brooks story was of Craig Newmark, a seemingly decent person and businessperson (he recently offered support for wounded U.S. service men and women via ReMIND.org, a charity I work with). What can Craigslist do about the fact that people are using its listings to seek out victims? Why is this service which has provided me everything from housecleaners to dog walkers to landscapers—some great, some terrible, but none criminal, that I know of—under so much scrutiny when all it has done is offer a digital forum for people to live real life? The truth is, not all online personal connections come to a lecherous end. In fact, one in eight couples that marry this year will have met online. So can we create a system that ensures only upright, legal pursuits are advertised online?

In the early 1990s, a very young version of me did some market research for America Online as the company prepared to face the arrival of competitors Windows 95 and its online service, MSN. I helped conduct focus groups and ethnographies and sat in a war room for days eating all the requisite junk food. I remember looking at pictures of the people we were surveying and having one of those eureka moments: It really is America, online—or it will be. Even then, all kinds of people were communicating in this newfangled way. We couldn’t fight it, but we could work to make it vivid and inclusive and wonderful. And so it was.

Backward to go forward: Craigslist isn’t motivating or permitting or accelerating criminality or even misbehavior. Craigslist simply facilitates modern life. And its postings, with their rich local texture, are an online representation of human behavior at its best and worst. As one New Yorker posted on my Facebook page, Craigslist is like the Port Authority. Lots of deviance, but also lots of good, decent people, rushing about doing what they need to do. Since the 1990s, our online activity has blurred the old accepted boundaries between our lives, our work, our relationships. It’s only fitting that I was working quietly at home this week (a big week for cyber-related news) when I got an e-alert that peaked my interested, and I flicked on the TV. South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford had finally spilled the beans on his disappearance, which had been news fodder off- and online. Via press conference he admitted he’d had a yearlong affair with a woman in Argentina—and it all started with an innocent e-mail relationship.

Life is complex, and the unpleasant and unsavory aspects of it have made their way into cyberspace right along with the rest—what else did we expect?

Millions of people around the globe dived happily into the Web, blending in with countless social networks, publishing personal blogs, sharing private videos and pictures and creating huge webs of countless social contacts. Web 2.0: The Web is us, you know…

Few people did it smartly, realizing that personal information, personal data and private lives are precious and deserve high protection. Few people were careful about what to share with whom, what to publish and where, and how to deal with incoming digital requests.

Others are slowly waking up in a digital nightmare, wondering where it all went wrong.

My prognosis is that 2009 is going to be a year of “unpublish,” “unlist” and “unfriend.” A year in which people will scale down the enthusiastic openness with which they hurried themselves and their families into Flickr, YouTube, Facebook and the like.

Because, yes, there is a difference between a “digital” friend and the normal notion of “friend.” Because Facebook labels contacts as “friends” does not necessary mean it is wise to share life, data and all pictures blindly with the hundreds of people on your list. Would you share your half-naked pictures with all the people in your business contact list? With all the people on the mailing list of your company? So why are they open and unprotected on your Facebook account?

And the millions of very revealing pictures on Flickr? Tanned girlfriends on sunny beaches, drunken in-laws, sweaty karaoke sessions…. all to share with colleagues? And though I love cute babies, finding unprotected pictures of the helpless things draped on their innocent sheepskins on MySpace accounts and other sites makes me extremely uneasy. Do people not realize everyone is watching?

Tread with care. The Web is a social place. It’s not a protected area where you meet only friends. Choose carefully what to share. Protect your intimate life, your dignity, your reputation and your loved ones.

Once it’s online, it is in the open. Pretty much forever. On the Web, “un-anything“ is a myth.