Using your real name, for instance, is taboo. The persona familiar to your friends and family is, well, just not good enough. In cyberspace, it is only natural for an unimpressive school janitor from Birmingham to pretend to be the cigar-chomping owner of a Wall Street brokerage. And if the ageing matron from Powai thinks life would be more interesting as a 17-year-old cricketer, it shall be arranged and even welcomed.

Cyberspace has two shibboleths: anonymity and pseudo-nimity. The former rules that it is your sovereign right to cruise without revealing your real-world identity. The latter, that it is perfectly all right for you to deliberately mislead the people you meet. Together, these criteria rendered real afantasy that dates back to prehistory -- to morph into someone more interesting, more loveable. Its product is a creature that is all mind, an epiphenomenon of the body, inhabiting an electronic world. Someone whom you might accurately term a cyborg. Someone just a little bit scary and unnatural.

Over the last two years, the bulk of the new laws relating to digital media focused on these two shibboleths. The result of conservative political opinion in the US, they sought to put a name and a face to the borg, and to see that he could not, otherwise, get into your home. The process started with the Marc Dutroux paedophilia case in Belgium, which led to a worldwide show of political will, which led to a massive crackdown, which continues today.

True, paedophile rings were discovered to be using the anonymity of the Net to ply their trade. But the fact is that they constituted a ridiculously small proportion of the population of cyberspace. Together, child molesters, stalkers and digital criminals make up asmall handful of bad borgs. But in the general slaughter, vast numbers of thoroughly harmless borgs went down with them. The word was out: take responsibility, be yourself.

In the archives of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has emerged as one of the leading lobbies on communications law, there are reams of papers defending anonymity and pseudonimity. Along with hundreds of other organisations, it has fought the American Right's attempts to introduce real-world accountability into cyberspace. A valiant and thoroughly futile battle, it would now appear. Laws are made to serve humans, not the other way round. Little Sean, who was born on the Net, and Diane and Mike, who are set to consummate their relationship on it, are pointing to the possibility that people prefer their real-world personalities to creatures of fantasy.

It would be puerile to imagine that all this is for the fifteen minutes of fame freely available in the giftshop of the global village. Sean's family disappeared from the frontpages the day he was born. Sure, Diane and Mike are uploading their pictures. But their eyes are blacked out to prevent positive identification and they don't encourage you to go over and see them in person.

What their Websites point to is something more profound -- that we may be living at a watershed of the digital world. That this is the twilight of the borgs.

The first experiment in machine-supported personality is over but hopefully, an increasingly conservative, increasingly fearful humanity will not forget all about it. For it helped to dispel the greatest terror of the technology age, that has been with us from the birth of science fiction. It offered the first real evidence -- discounting the Turing experiments -- that it was possible for people to retain their humanity even when they inhabited other personalities, in other worlds. It produced the most compelling evidence for the primacy of man over machine.