The culture of business and the politics of the personal have swapped personalities, and work and play are meeting up in the middle.
A few companies, like Personal, have already introduced vault services.
Privately, some Google executives say his activities, both political and personal, have at times become public relations headaches.
Yet in Kiarostami's canny view the political and the personal have an unintended aesthetic correlate: a wondrous, frightening sequence of a thunderstorm in darkest night is the result of government-planned power outages.
By now it has sold more than a million and a half copies, in huge part through his Web site, to which his various television appearances (dramatic, musical and personal) have attracted visitors in startling numbers.
They were asked questions that grew increasingly personal ("Have you ever tried to save a life and failed?"), then were divided and redivided into countless groups based on their answers — a kind of live, shifting pie graph of the region's inhabitants.
