The nerdiest among us found out first. Then came those of us whose friends were nerds. Then their friends, and so on. Someone would simply insist he had found something you needed to know about - the way a childhood friend lets you in on a secret door leading down to the basement under the Junior High School.
How many of you can remember that first time you watched him log on? How he turned the keyboard over to you and asked what you want to know, where you want to visit, or who you want to meet? That was the magic moment when you 'got it'. Internet fever. There was a whole new world out there, unlimited by the constraints of time and space, appearance and prejudice, gender and power.
It's no wonder so many people compared the 1990s Internet to the psychedelic 1960s. It seemed all we needed to do was get a person online and he or she would be changed forever. And people were. A 60-year-old Midwestern businessman I know found himself logging on every night to engage in a conversation about Jungian archetypes. It lasted for four weeks before he even realized the person with whom he was conversing was a 16-year-oid boy from Tokyo.
It felt as though we were wiring up a global brain. Visionaries of the period, like Ted Nelson, invented words like 'hypertext', and told us how the Internet could be used as a library for everything ever written. A musician named Jaron Lanier invented a bizarre interactive space he called 'virtual reality', in which people would be able to, in his words, "really see what the other means" Starry-eyed authors like me wrote optimistic books like this one - announcing the new global renaissance.
The Internet was no longer a government research project. It was alive. Out of control and delightfully chaotic. What's more, it promoted an agenda all its own.
People who participated online were forever changed. It was as if using a computer mouse and keyboard to access other human beings on the other side of the monitor changed our relationship to media and the power it held. The tube was no longer a place that only a corporate conglomerate could access. It was Rupert Murdoch, Dan Rather, and Heather Locklear's turf no more. The Internet was 'our' space. A portal to Cyberia.
Out there, the do-it-yourself mentality dominated. We called it 'cyberpunk.' Why watch packaged programming on TV when you can make your own online? And once you're doing it online, other sorts of vision-quests seem entirely more within your reach. Who needs corporate content when you can 'be' the content? This was a whole new world we could design ourselves, on our own terms. It felt like a revolution.
That's why it fostered such a deep sense of community. New users were gently escorted around the Internet by more seasoned veterans, and shown where and how to participate. An experienced user would delight in setting up a newbie's Internet connection for him. It was considered an honour to rush out into the night to fix a fellow user's technical problem. To be an Internet user was to be an Internet advocate.
It's also why almost everything to do with the Internet was free. Software was designed by people who wanted to make the Internet a better place. Hackers stayed up late making new programs, and then distributed them free of charge to anyone who cared to use them.
All the programs we use today are actually based on this shareware and freeware. Internet Explorer and Netscape are just fat versions of a program created at the University of Illinois. Streaming media is really just dolled up version of CUSeeMe, a program developed at Cornell. The Internet was built for love, not profit.
And that was the problem, for business, anyway. As more and more people got online, they spent less and less time watching TV Studies showed a direct correlation between time spent on the Internet and time not spent consuming television programs and commercials. Something had to be done.
Thus began the long march to turn the Internet into a profitable enterprise. It started with content. Dozens, then hundreds of online magazines sprang up. But since the Internet had always been free, no one wanted to pay a subscription charge for content. It just wasn't something one did online. So most of the magazines went out of business.
The others, well, they invented the next great Internet catastrophe: the banner ad. Web publishers figured they could sell a little strip on top of each web page to an advertiser, who'd use it as a billboard for commercials. But everyone hated them. They got in the way. It was like scuba diving with someone putting bumper stickers over your mask. And the better we got at ignoring banner ads, the more distractingly busy they grew and the more, time-consuming they were to download. They only taught us to resent whichever advertiser was inhibiting our movement.
So advertising gave way to e-commerce. The Internet would be turned into a direct marketing platform. An interactive mail-order catalogue! This little scheme seemed to hold more promise. So much promise, in fact, that Wall Street investors took notice. Not that many of these e-commerce businesses actually made money. But they looked like someday they could.
Besides, Wall Street cares less about actual revenues than the ability to create the perception that there might be revenues at some point in the future. That's why it's called speculation. Others might call it a pyramid scheme. Here's how it works: Someone writes a business plan for a new land of e-commerce company. That person finds 'angel investors' -very in-the-know people who give him money to write a bigger business plan and hire a CEO. Then comes the 'first round' and 'second round', where other, slightly less in-the-know people invest a few million more. Then come the institutional investors, who underwrite the now-infamous IPO. After that, at the very bottom of the pyramid, come retail investors. That's you and me. We're supposed to log into an E-trading site and invest our money, just around the time that those investors at the top are executing what's called an 'exit strategy' That's another way of saying carpet bag.
So what's all that got to do with the Internet, you ask? Or Cyberia itself? Exactly. The Internet and cyber culture were merely the sexy words, the come-hithers, the bright ideas at the top of the pyramid. Sure, there were and are still plenty of entrepreneurs creating vibrant, successful online businesses - look at Yahoo, Amazon, and EBay. But the Internet wasn't born to support the kind of global economic boom that venture capitalists were envisioning. And by turning the Internet's principle use from socializing towards monetanzing, business went against the Internet's very functionality and against the core ethos of Cyberia.
People doing what comes naturally online, like typing messages to one another, don't generate revenue. The object of the game, for Internet business, was to get people's hands off the keyboard and onto the mouse. Less collaboration, more consumption. Sites were designed to be 'sticky' so people wouldn't leave. Couldn't leave. And 'information architecture' turned into the science of getting people to click on the 'buy' button. The only time we're supposed to take our hands off the keyboard is to enter our credit card number (if it's not already on a cookie, somewhere deep on our hard drive).
By 1999, a person logging on for the first time was encountering something very different from the Cyberia I've described in this book. Browsers and search engines alike were designed to keep users either buying products or consuming commercial content. Most of those helpful hackers were now vested employees of dot.com companies. And most visions of the electronic future had dollar signs before them.
But the real Internet was hiding underneath this investment charade the whole time. It was a little harder to find, perhaps, and no one in the mainstream press was writing about it, anymore, but plenty of people were still sharing stories, emailing relatives, organizing raves, finding new communities, and educating themselves. The spirit of the Internet was dormant, maybe, but very much alive.