d some
still do.

The Bell ethos was about public service; and that was gratifying; but
it was also about private POWER, and that was gratifying too. As a
corporation, Bell was very special. Bell was privileged. Bell had
snuggled up close to the state. In fact, Bell was as close to
government as you could get in America and still make a whole lot of
legitimate money.

But unlike other companies, Bell was above and beyond the vulgar
commercial fray. Through its regional operating companies, Bell was
omnipresent, local, and intimate, all over America; but the central
ivory towers at its corporate heart were the tallest and the ivoriest
around.

There were other phone companies in America, to be sure; the so-called
independents. Rural cooperatives, mostly; small fry, mostly tolerated,
sometimes warred upon. For many decades, "independent" American phone
companies lived in fear and loathing of the official Bell monopoly (or
the "Bell Octopus," as Ma Bell's nineteenth-century enemies described
her in many angry newspaper manifestos). Some few of these independent
entrepreneurs, while legally in the wrong, fought so bitterly against
the Octopus that their illegal phone networks were cast into the street
by Bell agents and publicly burned.

The pure technical sweetness of the Bell System gave its operators,
inventors and engineers a deeply satisfying sense of power and mastery.
They had devoted their lives to improving this vast nation-spanning
machine; over years, whole human lives, they had watched it improve and
grow. It was like a great technological temple. They were an elite,
and they knew it--even if others did not; in fact, they felt even more
powerful BECAUSE others did not understand.

The deep attraction of this sensation of elite technical power should
never be underestimated. "Technical power" is not for everybody; for
many people it simply has no charm at all. But for some people, it
becomes the core of their lives. For a few, it is overwhelming,
obsessive; it becomes something close to an addiction.
People--especially clever teenage boys whose lives are otherwise mostly
powerless and put-upon--love this sensation of secret power, and are
willing to do all sorts of amazing things to achieve it. The technical
POWER of electronics has motivated many strange acts detailed in this
book, which would otherwise be inexplicable.

So Bell had power beyond mere capitalism. The Bell service ethos