| But
let’s be clear: I’m not saying the Digital Revolution
is over (are the sixties?). The impact of the Internet, Web, and
all manner of new media will continue for decades, and businesses
and individuals will continue to take advantage of digital technology.
In some cases, these transformations will be even more surprising
and radical than any of us supposed. Companies developing new technologies,
building the networks, and shrewdly deploying them are bringing
unprecedented prosperity to Bangalore, Ireland, China. What I am
saying is that I stopped believing that this Revolution would bring
fundamental change–to prevent, for example, a jackass buffoon
like George W. from becoming a serious candidate for the Oval Office.
Like a Tired/Wired list, the Digital Revolution quickly became less SETI@Home, more affiliate networks; less Eric Raymond and "The Cathederal and the Bazaar," more Jay Walker and a patent for the Dutch auction; less happy mutants, more McKinsey wannabes. Strange to tell: in 1995 the very word "e-commerce" held no currency whatsoever; two years later, it had replaced "plastics" as the turnkey solution to any young person’s future. Moreover, copycat start-ups phoning me at Wired (where I’d been assigned to cover business and finance), were all pitching me the same new economic business model that no one else had ever thought of. The future is Web-based calendars-as-portals! The future is buyer’s clubs, aggregating demand online! The future is community™! The Internet sector had begun to power lunch on its own tail. The once-in-a-lifetime peak quality of, say, six to eight months in 1995-96, had begun to feel like a wild weekend in Vegas where you forget most of what happened. The unbound genius of the hive-mind on the one hand, and everyone their own publisher/broadcast network on the other, the thrill of mere amateurs cowing a lascivious president and blood-sucking industries, the New and Good prevailing over the Old and Evil – maybe it meant something. Maybe not. But in the long run (and because of the unrelenting hype), it all became clichéd – even when the stories weren’t really clichés. The tale of Napster, for example, is less a cliché than déjà vu: a wacked "Idées Fortes" story from Wired’s first year or a late model Mondo 2000 come true. |
But
by 1998, the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link (WELL), the pioneering
online forum and my own introduction to life on-screen, had long
since been sold to a shoe salesman, and the Digital Revolution
was no longer a trance party, but a board meeting. In short, it
had become the New Economy, and the New Economy was awash in Me-Too
enterprises competing for public cash in a speculative stock market...
What had been a promise of change had become a magnet for greed.
Instead of a vague, righteous, and alienated Us crashing and subverting
the mainstream culture, the Revolution saw an influx of Them –
straight from the best schools and determined to make a
fortune. There may not have been a melee in the street, but a
schism began in the form of an open break between the hackers
and the bankers, the freaks and the profiteers.
