Bill Wasik wants Wired readers to forgive him. "I'm one of you," he insists. His new book, And Then There's This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture, is a critical takedown of the Internet-Media Complex and our unhealthy obsession with memes of the moment. It will likely be lumped in with Internet-backlash works like Andrew Keen's angry The Cult of the Amateur and Lee Siegel's whiny Against the Machine. But that's not company Wasik wants to keep.

In case you've forgotten, the Harper's senior editor engineered the first flash mob. Back in May 2003, he sent his friends an anonymous email asking them to participate in a "project that creates an inexplicable mob of people in New York City for ten minutes or less." A week later, scores of strangers descended upon a Manhattan jewelry shop, stood around for a bit, then dispersed just as mysteriously. By August, flash mobs were popping up in cities around the world and the concept became the subject of countless blog posts and news reports. By mid-September, Wasik and friends staged their final siege, making the phenomenon another fad that, like a flash mob, disappeared as suddenly as it appeared. Wasik became an amateur Internet scientist, hooked on analyzing ephemeral media memes, or what he calls nanostories.

The result is an odd but happy marriage of sociological observation and Gonzo-style adventure, conducted in the same spirit as the flash mob experiment. In his chapter on guerrilla marketing, Wasik becomes a "BzzzAgent," foisting Zip 'n Steam Ziploc bags on friends. In the section on that ficklest of subcultures, indie rock, he mounts an online campaign to halt the rise of the next big "buzz band," Swedish trio Peter Bjorn and John.

Amusing hijinks, but there's a moral here, too: The Internet empowers us to become our own media outlet, even providing metrics—from pageviews to number of followers—to gauge popularity. As a result, Wasik says, we've become obsessed with the kind of one-hit wonders that make up a single day's grist for a site like Gawker. "We've begun treating as trivial subjects that we once took seriously," he says. Naturally, Wasik is worried about coming off like a scolding schoolmarm, especially because his cure for our Internet-fired ADD is a bit obvious: Slow down and consider the long view. His scorn, after all, isn't just directed at us. "This book was written out of a terror in seeing what the Internet had done to me. It's a work of self-loathing."

May I tweet about my brother's Army exploits in Afghanistan? Or should I assume that the Taliban is also using Twitter?

Granted, it's hard to imagine Mullah Omar tapping out quickie descriptions of his daily doings. ("Goat stew w. @binladen, east side Quetta. Delish!") But with lives at stake, the US military prefers to err on the side of caution. "Any technology we're using, we can expect the enemy to be using it, too," says Lee Packnett, an Army public affairs officer at the Pentagon. You should probably assume, then, that whatever you write is being read by men who intend to do your brother harm.

That doesn't mean you have to keep your tweets entirely devoid of Afghan updates. Packnett says it's OK to cite information that's already public knowledge—for example, which unit your brother belongs to or how much you miss him. But avoid any mention of his location or, for God's sake, travel plans. That would be a violation of what's called operational security. And your brother's safety is worth more than 140 characters.

My employer is forcing me to take a two-day, unpaid furlough each month. Can I spend that time freelancing for a competitor?

As long as your employment contract doesn't contain iron-clad noncompete language, you're technically free to spend those unpaid days however you please. But proceed cautiously: Given its obvious financial distress, your employer is probably looking for any reasonable excuse to thin its workforce, even at the risk of being sued. If you're smart, you'll loop in your boss before doing any moonlighting.

Now, if you are axed after working for a rival, you have an excellent shot at successfully contesting the termination. "This is one area where the courts are relatively friendly to employees," says Lewis Maltby, president of the National Workrights Institute. "Courts don't look kindly on efforts to prevent people from working." One caveat: Your employer could emerge victorious if you betrayed trade secrets while freelancing. But providing that you kept your lips zipped while toiling for the competition, the legal odds are in your favor.

The wheels of justice grind slowly, however, so your courtroom triumph could be years in the making. And in the midst of Depression 2.0, do you really want to lose a steady job just to make a point? You might be better off using those furlough days to look for a more stable full-time gig.

A piece of freeware I've been using asks for a $40 donation. That seems a bit steep to me. Would I offend the programmer if I sent in $20?

Freeware's dirty little secret is that benefactors are about as rare as Javan rhinos. Even shareware, which requires payment to function properly, only elicits money from 1 percent of downloaders. Freeware works right out of the virtual box, so a user's sole incentive to kick in is the thrill of heeding the Golden Rule. That's a rather small carrot for more than a handful of conscientious souls. So the programmer ought to be happy to bank your $20—it certainly beats the zero he's accustomed to.

That said, don't send in a sum so trifling that it seems more like a slap than a token of appreciation. How little is too little? Mr. Know-It-All follows the Beer-and-Burger Rule of Freeware: At a bare minimum, the programmer should be able to buy a decent beer and hamburger with your donation. And if you use the program every day, heck, make it a cheeseburger.

Need help navigating life in the 21st century? Email us at mrknowitall@wiredmag.com.

When it comes to messing with the music industry, there's no better instigator than Brian Burton. Better known as Danger Mouse, the visionary DJ redefined the mashup in 2004 with his Jay-Z/Beatles masterpiece called The Grey Album. One of the most popular illegal downloads of all time, it scored millions of fans—and a cease-and-desist from the Fab Four's label, EMI. Danger Mouse has since smuggled his underground sensibility into the mainstream, producing for big names like Beck and topping the charts as one half of the freaky soul duo Gnarls Barkley. For his new album, Dark Night of the Soul (due in June), he collaborated with indie rocker Mark Linkous (aka Sparklehorse) and filmmaker David Lynch. The power trio (shown at left) reinvented the album as a guerrilla art project. "When formatting changed from vinyl to cassette, packaging got smaller. With MP3s, it's completely gone," Burton explains. "I wanted to get back to a time when packaging was a visual fantasy about the music and created a mystery for people to unpack."

First, Burton and Linkous loaded roughly a dozen tracks with a steamer trunk's worth of sound—haunted-house organs, analog synths, circuit-bent guitar effects, and tripped-out lyrics by Wayne Coyne and Steven Drozd (Flaming Lips), Iggy Pop, and James Mercer (the Shins). Then it was time for Lynch's big solo: After collaborating on the dark psychedelic odes, he created images to match. "Musicians who play in bands often tap into one consciousness," Lynch says. "As a filmmaker, I don't often work like that, so I'm glad I got to experience that collectivity." Shot after dark in LA, Lynch's photographs may cause nightmares: In one still, a Norman Rockwell-esque family gathers around the dinner table, preparing to eat a human head.

Like The Grey Album, Dark Night will be distributed independently. The CD features a 100-plus-page booklet, and a multimedia exhibit is in the works. "I've always done exactly what I wanted on my own albums, but no one at the record company knew how to sell it," Linkous says. "Now we can do anything we want—and Brian knows how to sell records in subversive ways."