We’re long past the frontier days of the world wide web, when the network teemed with pasty social outcasts projecting their disembodied essences into the dark alleys of a virtual world that, at the time, consisted of nothing but dark alleys. Many of these pioneers were libertarian and iconoclastic both by nature and by necessity, and the network was a paradise for them: there were no social norms to follow, no cliques to turn them away, none of the awkwardness and displacement that awaited them around every corner in meatspace. Every path they took was a blazed trail, every encounter a revelation, every idea an innovation. It was an unspoiled world, vast, possibly infinite, and they were its first real colonists, thousands of immaterial Christopher Columbuses come to reap the spoils of the New World.
Over a decade ago, in the dark ages of 1995, Jonathan Franzen wrote this:
The apparent democracy of today’s digital networks is an artifact of their infancy. sooner or later, all social organisms move from anarchy toward hierarchy, and whatever order emerges from the primordial chaos of the net seems as likely to be dystopian as utopian.
A lot’s changed since then. In fact, they were already changing by the time this essay was published. The dogs of capitalism had picked up the scent of profit and were snuffling around the web’s edges, probing, digging, lifting their legs to mark their first tentative swathes of territory. Mosaic became Netscape, went public, and was promptly rewarded for its inability to generate a profit with massive infusions of cash — the template for many dotcom IPOs to come. The hype machine churned out then devoured hundreds of glorious failures: pets.com and Webvan and eToys and their ilk. Rampant stock market speculation, an explosion in day-trading, massive venture capital investments: it was a giant city of hype built on a foundation of greed and insanity and thin air.
It collapsed, of course. It had to. But it left its mark. The internet had changed. The gleaming skyscrapers that sprang up along its virtual avenues may have fallen in on themselves, but new structures sprang up from their ruins, unassuming office parks populated by smart people who know that there really was a revolution to be had here. They’ve given us del.icio.us and Flickr, MySpace and Craigslist, Google and Salesforce.com: useful — even occasionally profitable — services built on common sense and an actual public need. There’s still a lot of hype going around, of course, but there are also far fewer removes between fantasy and reality these days. The internet has grown up.
But, in the process, it’s also become a tool of the corporate world. We buy stuff online, we store our most private information on distant servers, we read browser ads, we submit to all manner of viral marketing. Digital agents track our movements and amass massive databases of our habits, our preferences, our purchases, our searches. Companies block workers’ access to sites they deem unsuitable, and use the DMCA as a cudgel to force smaller sites to remove content they find objectionable.
Where does that leave the original colonists? Some of them have been absorbed into the new reality, some of them have turned away in disgust, but many are still there, trumpeting their libertarian message of internet anarchism to an increasingly uninterested public. And so it turns out that, far from being Columbuses, these geek pioneers were the Native Americans, scattered aboriginal tribes overrun by imperialist invaders whose numbers and sophistication dwarfed their own.
Has the net become a dystopia? From the point of view of its pioneers, yes, of course it has. And there certainly are the seeds of dystopia here: our government makes daily progress in its efforts to spy on us. But, really, I think what we’ve wound up with is something somewhat less dire, but no less depressing: a failed utopia. Like all utopian fantasies, the original ideal of a purely democratic social space, an unspoiled meritocracy, a community of equals, was probably doomed from the very beginning. But that doesn’t make its passing any less sad.