We, the denizens of the Internet, built the World Wide Web, and we let the world know what a great thing we were building. We got press, and some of us figured we could do business online, too. We fought political wars about censorship and data privacy in the Information Age. We built innovative new technologies, pushed the bandwidth envelope, created whole new ways of thinking about technology and its place in the world. That was Revolution.

We realized that you could do publishing online and do away with printing costs and lag time, but we couldn’t quite figure out how to pay for it. Advertising worked for television, so we tried it on the web with lukewarm results. We proceeded to put sales transactions online, so there seemed to be a business model, which made the Internet more financially credible. Revolution? Not really – it was just direct marketing in a new context, a bits & bytes version of the paper catalog.

Geeks built great online stores, and they hacked the stock market so that these stores wouldn’t have to be profitable to be successful. The World Wide Web ceased to be known as a platform for academic or spiritual or aesthetic development. It became a trade center, a bank, a multifaceted shopping mall.

The most impressive edifices in human societies used to be sacred: pyramids, cathedrals, mosques, temples. In the 20th century, banks – repositories of wealth and power – became the more magnificent constructions. In our architectures we organize space relative to consciousness, and the evolution of human consciousness seems to have been from the sacred to the profane and profuse. We seem to have followed the same path with our virtual architectures. In the early ’90s cyberspace was the environment in which Teilhard de Chardin’s noösphere or global spirit/intelligence could evolve, a "temporary autonomous zone" (per Hakim Bey) where you could have your naked lunch and eat it, too ... but by the year 2000 the Internet had become a dot-com-driven "industry" adrenalin-hyped day and night through all media channels everywhere.

What happened to the cyber revolution depends how you define it...cultural revolution, business revolution, technology revolution? The cultural revolution’s in remission, perhaps, but folks dedicated to business and technology are still doubtless feeling dizzy from the persistent revolutionary spin as the Net boom careens along. However booms are cyclical; you have to wonder how well this industry will survive the downturn it has seen begin, and what the cyberspace landscape, now clearly established as a platform for 21st-century schizoid life, will look like five years from now.

By then it’ll be time for a revolution!

Photo by Jason Tors