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Cyberculture was hard to describe — and a good number of us got book contracts paying us to try — but it was undeniably real when experienced first hand. It was characterized by Californian idealism, do-it-yourselfer ingenuity, and an ethic of tolerance above all else. Soon you couldn’t go to a hip party in San Francisco without someone switching on a computer and demonstrating the brand new Mosaic browser for the fledgling World Wide Web. The patience with which experienced hackers walked newbies through their virgin hypertext voyages would make a sexual surrogate ashamed. Coaxing businesses online was simply an extension of this need to share. It was less an act of profiteering than an effort to acquire some long-awaited credibility. Somehow it seemed like the revolution was taking too long; so our best-spoken advocates loaded up their laptops and made presentations to the Fortune 500. Then something happened on NASDAQ, and cyberculture was turned upside down.
It should have come as no surprise that big corporations, whose bottom line depends on public relations, direct selling, and "staying ahead of the curve," would eventually become the driving force behind cyberculture’s evolution. Once the conversation itself was no longer the highest priority, marketing took its place. Though the diehards protested with the fervor of Christ ejecting moneychangers from the temple, the Internet became the domain of businessmen. Perhaps more distressingly, it has become just another place to do business. "Internet speculation" has taken on a whole new meaning as companies jockey for brand recognition, high hit counts, and market share. The question is no longer how browsing the Internet changes the way we look at the world; it’s which browser we’ll be using to buy products from the same old world. Even if the Internet has not yet become altogether ubiquitous, it has certainly been absorbed by the same mainstream culture that denied its existence and resisted its ethos for an awfully long time. True, cyberculture has inalterably changed its co-opter, but in the process has become indistinguishable from it as well. We live in a world where an increasing number of people from an increasing number of countries will be conducting their everyday business online. It promises to be faster, and will probably be more convenient. Convenience. It’s a hell of a lot less romantic than what I was thinking back when they called me cyberboy. |
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