(FORTUNE Magazine) – "Brazil is the country of the future and always will be"--that line is at least 80 years old, which just shows how true it is. The real country of the future, it now seems clear, is Finland, the most wired--and wireless--nation on earth. If you want to see what life in the infotech society will be like in a few years, a live-action preview is playing right now.

Finland is the infotech leader by almost any measure. It was the first country to have more wireless-phone subscribers than land-line subscribers, which is saying something, because it already had one of the highest teledensities--land lines per 100 inhabitants--on earth. About 60% of Finland's population now have cell phones, the highest proportion in the world and about twice the U.S. proportion.

Measuring Internet use is notoriously tough, but Finland ranks at or near the top by every count. Several surveys show more Internet users per capita than any other country: Around 35% of the population is online. Most research finds that its share of the world's Internet users is about 100 times greater than its share of the world's population--not 100% greater, but 100 times.

So what is the globe's infotech mecca teaching us? At least a few things:

--Deregulation is the way to go--mostly. Finland has long been one of the world's least regulated telecom environments, dating from the 19th century, when the czars seized control of the telegraph industry but decided the new telephone invention would not be significant and could be left alone. Result: a tradition of competition and innovation most countries never experienced. But just as important was the decision by Nordic governments in the 1980s to coordinate policies on adoption of technical standards for wireless phones. That's a major reason the world's No. 1 cellular phone maker is Finland's Nokia, followed by Sweden's Ericsson. Who would have imagined?

--Price counts. Let's see...Finland has the most Internet users per capita. Finland also has the cheapest Internet access (tied with Norway), says a recent report from Datamonitor. Going online costs three times more in Britain than in Finland; Finland has three times more Internet users per capita than Britain. If you want a wired country, make it cheap to get wired. Duh.

--Land lines are a new resource. As Finns make cell phones their only phones, the phone companies are finding new uses for all that copper. A huge use is data traffic, obviously. But the telcos are also working on technology to enable anyone to send video to anyone else over land lines.

--The social issues of ubiquitous infotech will only get deeper and stranger. Already, virtually every Finnish teenager has a cell phone; teachers would notice if kids called each other in class, so they send text messages. School administrators are thinking of installing metal detectors--not to keep out guns, as in New York City, but to keep out phones. You can pay for a car wash by calling a posted number from your cell phone; the charge shows up on your phone bill. How far could this be carried? The Finnish term for cell phone means "little hand"; it's an appendage no one can imagine being without. Some technologists note that if you installed a tiny detector in your throat, you could transmit intelligibly by moving your vocal chords as if talking without actually making a sound. Yikes! And this is only the beginning.

HE HAD JUST RETIRED AS CEO of an extremely large Wall Street firm, so when he needed to fly down to Washington one morning, he did not--for the first time in many, many years--have access to the corporate jet. He had to fly commercial. "I asked the flight attendant for ham and eggs," he told a neighbor afterward. Whether his cabin mates actually laughed out loud we do not know, but he was stunned to find that what he got was a styrofoam cup of weak coffee and a cold bagel. "It was the damnedest thing," he mused.

This ludicrous and pathetic reaction to life in the real world is behind the newest CEO perk--the gold standard, still rare, that separates the really big dogs from the rest of the pack: guaranteed use of the corporate jet after retirement.

It's true of many luxuries that once you've tasted them you can never go back, and this may be more true of the company plane than of any other. For anyone who endures the agony of frequently flying commercial, the velvet-lined indulgence of the private jet may induce lightheadedness and a soft whimpering. You're driven to within a few yards of the aircraft. Since its only purpose is to transport you, you're never late, and it takes off a few moments after you step aboard. Every seat is first class, and the galley is stocked with whatever you most like to eat and drink. Maybe the cabin has a shower. Or a bed. Or an office. Or an exercise bike. The plane flies directly to wherever you want to go, and you can change your mind. A friend of mine was in a mogul's jet headed from Cleveland to New York City one winter evening when the pilot stepped into the cabin. "The weather in New York is terrible," he reported, "but we can divert to Palm Beach."

Imagine living like this for a decade or two and then arriving at O'Hare for a flight to Boise, with a two-hour layover in Salt Lake City. It can't be easy. When Al Neuharth retired as chairman of Gannett, he was forced to take his first domestic commercial flight in 19 years. He discovered to his horror that "the young, attractive, enthusiastic female flight attendants" he remembered had been replaced "by aging women who are tired of their jobs or by flighty young men who have trouble balancing a cup of coffee or tea." Hideous as that was, Al couldn't do much but shut up and suffer.

Now a few of today's CEOs won't have to. The key language to look for, buried deep in the proxy statement, goes something like this: "Commencing on retirement, Mr. X is entitled to receive during his lifetime company facilities and services comparable to those provided prior to his retirement." What that means, mostly, is the jet.

This is, without doubt, the latest and greatest CEO perk. Who gets it? Jack Welch of General Electric and Larry Bossidy of AlliedSignal are at the top of the heap, both getting use of the jet for the rest of their lives. Lou Gerstner of IBM gets it for ten years after retirement. Michael Eisner of Disney gets it for a period that's hard to determine from the proxy language.

Bigger question: Why? Partly it's the unending search for new and better perks, says a lawyer familiar with these matters. And you have to admit, it would be hard to find more deserving recipients than these four, all mammoth wealth creators. But even they wouldn't have received this novel perk if not for the advent of fractional jet ownership. Scarcely any company could promise a retiree access to a company-owned jet, but it's easy to hand out shares in a fleet of on-call planes.

Welch was apparently the first to figure this out. But then you already knew he was a smart CEO.

THE HYPE-IT-AND-DUMP-IT METHOD of profiting from IPOs is more venerable than today's Internet investors may realize. In Dickens' Nicholas Nickleby (1839), Nicholas' slimy uncle Ralph does IPOs for a living. A colleague, the pale Mr. Bonney, is especially excited by Ralph's latest, the United Metropolitan Improved Hot Muffin & Crumpet Baking & Punctual Delivery Co.: " 'Why, the very name will get the shares up to a premium in ten days.'

" 'And when they are at a premium,' said Mr. Ralph Nickleby, smiling.

" 'When they are, you know what to do with them as well as any man alive, and how to back quietly out at the right time,' said Mr. Bonney, slapping the capitalist familiarly on the shoulder."