(FORTUNE Magazine) – Call me cynical. When my e-mail box fills up with ILOVEYOU missives from folks I barely know, I don't believe it's my lucky day. I know I'm not that lovable. What's stunning is that so many people around the world apparently think they are. Hundreds of thousands of "knowledge workers" didn't think twice about double-clicking on inappropriate office communications. Lord, what fools these mortals be.

Perhaps poets and psychologists can best explain what makes office workers fools for love rather than healthy skeptics. But the critical issues that surfaced here reflect neither human gullibility nor viral vulnerability. They revolve around the new balance of power in the digital workplace. Consider the dynamic now driving both creative and destructive desktop innovation: Mature technologies appeal to mature innovators while immature technologies appeal to immature innovators.

As the immature technologies--being easier to influence--attract more innovators, the perception of power has shifted away from mature experience and toward youthful experiment. Whether you want to create value or annihilate it in this post-industrial era, demographics will speak louder than words. This is the Age of Ageism: The real innovator's dilemma isn't the threat of "disruptive technologies"; it's the relentless rise of the quasi-adolescents who wield them. After all, the Love Bug was purportedly the crude product of a twentysomething Filipino computer-college student. The Napster phenomenon now roiling the pop music industry offers a lyrical example of this generational shift. This music-swapping software was developed by an American college freshman, so it was easy to call in the suits to try to crush it. But suppose tomorrow's new-media Napster is developed and distributed by a freshman in Bangalore or Budapest or Beijing? You've got teenagers remapping multibillion-dollar intellectual-property markets with software far more potent than a Visual Basic virus.

Immaturity-driven innovation already shapes executive interaction with enterprise technology. It has become a business cliche for young digital troublemakers to offer their "services" to organizations by demonstrating the soft spots in a company's intranet. Gosh, nice little Website you've got there, Mister. It would be a shame if anything were to happen to it.... A growing number of firms have paid arrogant young'uns to try to crash their networks, albeit under adult supervision. A decade ago, these kids were overwhelmingly American. Tomorrow, they'll be as global as McDonald's.

But far more intriguing than a generation of WWWiseguys have been Establishment efforts to turn online adolescents into business advisors for the executive elite. Former American Express chairman-turned-Internet venture capitalist James Robinson III, and even former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, have publicly encouraged FORTUNE 500 CEOs to create advisory boards of high school kids for insights into the technological future. Why not? Today's adolescents probably have a better feel for contemporary technologies than do most middle-aged white guys who grew up coding Cobol and Fortran. Formula One cars aren't driven by jockeys.

Teenagers in affluent America have the luxuries of time and access that allow them to explore digital media in ways that confer fluency as well as literacy. They enjoy a "youth subsidy" while adults pay time taxes on their overcommitments. Youth has inherent comparative advantage.

So Cisco, for a time the world's most valuable corporation, has reached down into the high schools to train teenagers how to run networks. General Electric, General Motors, and even IBM have gone the route of having their youthful hotshots "mentor" their wrong-side-of-the-baby-boom executives on the latest digital innovation. This movement will go global as Europe, Asia, and the developing world imitate America's techno-success.

There's another compelling factor: The rest of the world is much younger; Brazil's median age is a decade lower than the age in the U.S. Demographics suggest that as surely as children are sewing sneakers and soccer balls for global export, they could be similarly exploited to help their countries compete along more digital dimensions. The gating factor: How long will it be before their nation's networks come to resemble the First World's?

Does anyone believe that the median age for Third World digital developers will be the same as Europe's or America's? Before the decade's out, we'll see gangs of 14- and 16-year-olds working as testers and developers in software sweatshops. From the grinding poverty of the Third World to the opulent endowments of the First, child labor--in all its forms--may become the most provocative resource reshaping global economics.

ILOVEYOU's essential message is not that a global epidemic on the desktop is only a virus away, but that our technology will become increasingly dependent upon people who perceive their lack of worldly experience to be less of a bug than a feature. That generational clash of values will shape both how innovative--and how vulnerable--our networks will become.

MICHAEL SCHRAGE is co-director of the MIT Media Lab's e-markets initiative and author of Serious Play. Reach him at michael_schrage@fortunemail.com.