Streeter, T. (2011) The Moment of Wired, Chapter 4 in The Net Effect: Romanticism, Capitalism, and the Internet. New York and London: New York University Press.
\n\nhttps://dokumen.pub/the-net-effect-romanticism-capitalism-and-the-internet-0814741169-9780814741160.html
\n\n\n\n\n\nWhen it comes to smashing a paradigm, pleasure is not the most important thing. It is the only thing. [The web browser] Mosaic is not the most direct way to find online information. Nor is it the most powerful. It is merely the most pleasurable way, and in the 18 months since it was released, Mosaic has incited a rush of excitement and commercial energy unprecedented in the history of the Net.
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—Wired, Oct. 1994 (10 months before the Netscape IPO)
\nRecall—or, if you are young enough, imagine—what it was like to go online in the early 1990s. At the time, desktop computers had recently lost their novelty and become a routine part of office life. Word processing had, in the preceding five years, become a standard secretarial skill, and a new desktop computer was a standard part of an academic job offer. The desktop computer had become just another part of office routine, like the photocopier.
\n\nIn most offices, however, people who used email were still a small minority, and web browsing was unknown. Those who had experimented with email a bit had done so typically within specific, confined worlds like CompuServe, Prodigy, local bulletin boards, or one of several restricted academic or corporate networks. Going online at the time was thus technically possible with the computers that were on the desks of journalists, academics, and other professionals, but it was a little out of the ordinary. If you weren’t a computer professional, it was something you did out of curiosity; it took a substantial amount of time and was unlikely to yield much in the way of immediate practical value. For the vast majority, communications that mattered still happened exclusively on paper or on the phone. If you went online you knew that most people around you did not.
\n\nGoing online typically required purchasing and plugging in a roughly paperback- sized modem (computers did not routinely come equipped with them). The modem had a bank of mysterious flashing red lights, and using it involved installing, configuring, and then running a terminal program, typing commands, listening to the squealing modem, and typing in another cryptic series of commands and passwords. There was no pointing and clicking yet in the online world. Just getting it all going was at least a forty-five-minute time investment. And then figuring out what to do once signed on was a further challenge. Gateways between computer networks were still being constructed. As a result, to send, say, an email from the BITNET network—then common at less technical universities— across the still limited internet, the email addresses had to be sandwiched between quote marks and prefaced by IN%—thusly: IN%”T_STREETER@uvmvax.uvm.edu”—and this technical detail was not easy to find out.
\n\nBut, once you mastered such arcana, you could then enter into a secret world.
\n\nThis was the context in which a message appeared on a number of discussion lists in February 1993, prefaced with the following:
\n\nFrom:IN%”TNC@GITVM1.BITNET” “’TECHNOCULTURE’ discussion\nlist” 22-FEB-1993 11:48:56.39\n To:IN%”T_STREETER@uvmvax.uvm.edu” “Thomas Streeter”\n Subject: John Perry Barlow meets the spooks\n Folks,\n This lovely missive came from SURFPUNKs (subscription info below). The\n idea of JPB giving an invited address on technology to the intelligence (sic) community\n is just soooo sweet. And it’s a good speech, too.\n Larry Hunter\nThe bulk of the message was the text of an address given a few months before, in December 1992, by Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) cofounder John Perry Barlow to a conference on National Security outside of Washington, DC.1 As the message made clear, many members of the U.S. intelligence community (that is, the CIA, NSA, FBI) were present. Barlow’s agenda as EFF representative was to educate this community about the value of protecting free speech and privacy in the digital realm.
\n\nOrdinarily, when speaking to a skeptical audience, most of us are likely to adopt a careful, formal, conformist rhetorical strategy. We would downplay our disagreements and differences and represent ourselves as having deep respect for the audience members. Barlow, however, began his talk this way:
\n\n\n\n\nI can’t tell you the sense of strangeness that comes over someone who earns his living writing Grateful Dead songs, addressing people who earn their livings as many of you do, especially after hearing the last speaker. If you don’t appreciate the irony of our appearing in succession, you have no sense of irony at all. . . . .
\n\nThe reason I am here has absolutely nothing to do with the Grateful Dead. I’m here because I met a fellow named Mitch Kapor in 1989. Despite obvious differences, I felt as if we’d both been up in the same saucer or something . . . . that we shared a sense of computers being more than just better adding machines or a better typewriters. We saw that computers, connected together, had the capacity to create an environment which human beings could and did inhabit. . . . . The people who share this awareness are natives of the future. People who have a hard time with it may always be immigrants.
\n\nWhen Mitch and I saw that computers had created a place, we started asking some questions about what kind of place it was. . . . . We decided to name it Cyberspace, after Bill Gibson’s description of a futuristic place rather like it which we found in his novel Neuromancer.2
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Here is a central example of some habits of talk and thought that would soon be moving into the mainstream with enormous impact. Barlow was the key figure in importing the term cyberspace from the world of science-fiction fan programmers into middlebrow discourse; hereafter, the internet could be envisioned, not just as a tool or set of devices with predictable potentials, but as an unknown space to be explored and thus available for any number of collective projections, particularly the frontier metaphor—made explicit in the name of Barlow’s foundation. But this particular refiguring of the frontier metaphor was also heavily inflected with tropes from the 1960s counterculture; Barlow’s missive featured a studied informality (“we’d both been up in the same saucer or something,” “Mitch,” “Bill”); a pleasure in iconoclasm (“if you don’t appreciate the irony”); and a flamboyant individualism (in the EFF’s relentless focus on personal privacy and liberties). But this bit of computer counterculturalism also had an association with power (the CIA!). And, crucially, in a classic countercultural maneuver, instead of flattering his audience or downplaying his differences from them, Barlow offers them a choice between being one who gets it and one who doesn’t. Accept his rhetorical universe, and you are a “native of the future.” Reject it, however, and you are threatened with always being an immigrant there.
\n\nAt the time, reading a missive like this on a monochrome screen, perhaps during a slow day at the office or perhaps late at night at home, had an arresting effect. Barlow’s email suggested to the lone cubicle dweller who had mastered email that a new sense of energy was emerging in the online world. The incongruous juxtaposition of a Grateful Dead lyricist with CIA officials was funny, of course, but also enticing; how many people get invitations to talk to CIA officials, much less go on to tweak the officials’ noses and get away with it? Here was someone whose tax bracket and espionage experience were probably comparable to yours, yet he was boldly preaching to an established, powerful, and sometimes violent institution. The situation suggested a new opening, a new avenue towards power. As a white-collar reader of this text in early 1993, you felt uniquely privy to this intriguing opening because you were among the elite few who had mastered the arcane art of online access. The relative obscurity of the procedures needed to get the message only added to the aura of being part of a special group. You, who both got the joke and technically could get access to it, were invited to be one of the vanguard, one of Barlow’s “natives of the future.” It gave you a new sense of what it meant to be sitting in one’s office typing, a new, hipper, less ordinary, sense of self.
\n\nThe effect was indeed delicious.
\n\nIn the early 1990s, growing numbers of professionals and white-collar workers were being surprised by this kind of experience on their desktop computers. As the number of people with some variety of online access increased from month to month, more and more people had an experience of stumbling upon something striking; it could be a surprising exchange on an email discussion list, involving a tidbit of insider information from afar. Or it could be a titillating personal revelation; this was the moment when stories of email romances began to circulate in popular folklore. It could be a new form of access to something or someone, like the personal MTV gopher created as a hobby by MTV vee-jay Adam Curry; accessing his gopher gave one a kind of personal access to a media figure, to someone ordinarily shielded behind the glossy professionalism of the television screen. (Fans of this gopher were treated to a Barlow-like iconoclastic moment in April 1994 when Curry, with a 1960s flourish of rebellion, announced his resignation from MTV on air. He was resigning in order to pursue his digital activities full time, on the then-astonishing theory that the digital world was the wave of the future, and television was obsolete.)3 Something out of the ordinary, it seemed, was afoot.
\n\nBy the early 1990s in the United States, the microcomputer industry had triumphed, but it was no longer enchanting. Microcomputers so far were turning out to be office machines, and most of the computers in the home turned out to be mostly ways to do office work after hours. Most of the 1980s efforts to sell computers specifically for the home market—for example, the Sinclair, the Commodore 64, the Atari, the IBM PCJr—had gradually disappeared. The little computers did not seem quite so personal anymore. Not only had the desktop computer become a commonplace of office life, with all its associations with bureaucracy, but the companies that made microcomputers no longer seemed like the boisterous garage start-ups of popular capitalist mythology; by 1990, Microsoft had pushed aside the grey, arrogant, predictable monopoly of IBM—and replaced it with another grey, arrogant, predictable monopoly.
\n\nAnd, as Barlow’s message was circulating in email discussion lists and newsgroups, the first issue of Wired had just hit the newsstands; within a year it would have a circulation of over 100,000 and a curious readership several times that.4
\n\nThe internet enthusiasms of the 1990s have frequently been described as utopian, but it was really the information superhighway scenario that was utopian, in the sense of offering a blueprint for a better future. Cyberspace, by contrast, was made famous in the precedent-setting novel of cyberpunk fiction, Gibson’s Neuromancer, which depicts a near-future world of technological violence, cruelty, manipulation, and cynical disaffection—a world that is distinctly dystopian. The appeal of Neuromancer is less utopian than romantic. Its tale of a “console cowboy” is a narrative of an outcast hero on a desperate quest initiated by a search, not for wealth, but for inner transformation—for love, comradeship, and meaning, but also, as if to make the inner transformation point vivid, an internal physical reprogramming so as to allow for better net traveling.
\n\nTo the computer-operating white-collar worker in the early 1990s, Neuromancer provided a story line that redefined the act of sitting at a keyboard entering commands from one of white-collar drudgery into an act of exploration and adventure. Cyberspace, by defining the internet as a space, a territory for adventure, rather than as merely a highway, a means towards the end of accessing already organized information, suggested a new potential self-definition for knowledge workers. Information superhighway sounds clean, obedient, and orderly. The connotations of cyberspace are darker, less regimented, more scary—but thereby more thrilling. Late at night, alone in one’s cubicle, cyberspace had a much more alluring ring. Cyberspace did not offer a utopia, a perfected world; it offered a taste of rebel-hero selfhood.
\n\nWe like to think that romances and revolutions come from nowhere, as if they are their own explanation and driving force. But of course there’s generally a context like a mid-life crisis or a frustrated and underemployed middle class that sets the conditions for the change. The same is true of the spread of online computing in the early 1990s.
\n\nTo understand why cyberspace outlived information superhighway in popular usage, it helps to consider exactly what kinds of people were getting online access in the early 1990s. Typical discussions of social class and computer use focus on a haves versus have-nots continuum, where the concern is extending the benefits of computer use lower down on the class ladder. But it is also illuminating to look upwards on the ladder as well: Both Bill Gates and the janitor that empties your office trash bin can get along fine without desktop computers in the day-to-day of their work lives. Computers have become a central feature of the work lives specifically of the knowledge or professional classes, a group that includes middle managers, engineers, mid-level government bureaucrats, academics, and journalists— white-collar knowledge workers.
\n\nCrucial to the character of the early 1990s, then, was the fact that online access came first among those who did their own word processing and thus had the necessary equipment and experience readily at hand. Graduate students and assistant professors were online before university presidents and provosts. Middle managers, technicians, and engineers were online before vice presidents and CEOs. Mid-level journalists were online before editors and managers. This is a relatively unusual pattern of technological diffusion; networking entered social life through the same portal as the photocopy machine rather than through the top-down diffusion patterns of the telephone or the consumer-distribution patterns of television. This pattern thus meant that the sense of something important happening in networking would hit the middle ranks of the knowledge class before it hit their superiors.
\n\nThe information superhighway, and the corporate liberal technology policy for which it stood, may have been reasonable, forward looking, and economically rational. But it lacked a sense of enchantment. Developing government-business partnerships that would encourage investment in wide-area computer networking for purposes of information exchange may have been a good idea, but, for the typical cubicle dweller, it did not generate much fire in the belly.
\n\nIn the years leading up to 1995, the stage was thus set for the middle ranks to be treated to a drama of obliviousness from above, an object lesson in highlevel bewilderment. It was the people who typed their own memos, reports, term papers, and journal articles who sensed the importance of the internet first and then watched the higher-ups struggle to catch up with them. Cyberspace, with its romantic hint of a rebellious self image, better captured the sense of pleasure and open-ended possibility they felt in watching their secret world trump the staid world of their superiors.
\n\nLouis Rossetto, cofounder of Wired, had experienced both the original 1960s counterculture and its emerging computer-culture variant, the former as a college student, the latter as the editor of a small journal about desktop computer publishing, Electric Word.5 He has said he modeled Wired on the early Rolling Stone—the sincere, preironic, early 1970s Rolling Stone, when it was based in San Francisco and celebrated rock stars as oracles of a revolution in human consciousness.6 Rossetto frequently dismissed mainstream media’s technology coverage with the phrase, “they just don’t get it.”7 The phrase is part of the rhetorical foundation of outlets like the hacker website Slashdot or Wired; in the constant cavalier dismissal of vaguely defined, “old” institutions and points of view (for example, Microsoft, television networks, government bureaucracies, Keynesianism) these media are flattering readers by implicitly including them in the knowledgeable avant-garde. As John Perry Barlow was fond of implying, You are one of us, the mammals, and those powerful people are the dinosaurs.
\n\nWhen a marginal social movement accurately anticipates in the public eye a significant historical failure of judgment on the part of leadership, the effect can be powerful. Being right about something when the powers that be were wrong, for example, was a central collective experience of the 1960s counterculture; by 1969, the world had watched the television networks, the New York Times, and many members of the political establishment change their position on the Vietnam War. In the mid-1990s, it would be the failure to anticipate the importance of the internet, and, in the late 1990s the value of open software. And part of the power of such moments is that they open the door to iconoclasm and to new currents of thought; if the authorities are wrong about that one thing, what else might they have missed?
\n\nAt the same time, this kind of collective experience establishes the conditions for a less clearly beneficial drawing of boundaries between those who knew and those who didn’t. What this phrase does is tell the listener that he or she and the speaker are part of the elite group who get it. The ones who don’t could be the Pentagon, the media, or your parents; in any case, there’s a thrill in the implication that you and I stand apart from despised others in the world.
\n\nIf being right about some central event like Vietnam or the internet gives the rhetoric of getting it force, accuracy in general is not necessary or even a precondition for the rhetoric to work. The internet was only discussed in passing in Wired’s first issue; Rossetto had to catch up to the centrality of the internet like everyone else in the media. And, more importantly, once the rhetorical ground is established by whatever means, a powerful trope for shutting down inquiry is made available. In the interview mentioned above, when Rossetto was asked if he’s religious, he replied “no.” When asked if he’s an atheist, he also replied “no,” and then continued: “It’s not worth thinking about. . . . . I mean, I’ve gone beyond it.”8 The rhetoric of “they just don’t get it” can create conditions that make this kind of shutting down of inquiry sound wise. The reader or hearer is made automatically wary of voicing any criticism, questioning, or complexity, even to themselves. Express doubts, and you risk being worse than wrong, you risk revealing yourself to be a dinosaur and thus no longer part of the privileged club; you just don’t get it.
\n\nBy mid-1993, then, a growing crowd of mid-rank white-collar computer users was quietly gaining access to networked computing; and a growing portion of these were learning about and using the nonprofit, nonproprietary internet. These experiences were becoming increasingly inflected with countercultural habits and iconoclasm, and the higher ranks of leadership, the CEOs and politicians, were largely oblivious to it all. This context proved extremely fertile ground for a new, freely distributed computer program called Mosaic, the first successful graphical web browser. Mosaic 1.0 for the Macintosh and PC was released in August 1993 and spread like wildfire through the fall of that year. The program created an almost instant wow effect, motivating ordinarily bored or preoccupied cubicle dwellers to call a colleague and tell them, “you gotta try this thing.” This was where it all started. This was the moment of take-off in the internet frenzy of the 1990s.
\n\nMosaic, it needs be said, was neither the first web browser nor even the first graphical web browser.9 When two employees of the University of Illinois’s National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), Eric Beena and undergraduate Marc Andreessen, decided to program a better browser near the end of 1992, they were simply making their own contribution to an ongoing networking software evolution based on ideas that were already very much in the air. Their main technical contribution in the first version of Mosaic for Unix was the ability to display images within the page and a slicker, more inviting interface. Another important contribution was the production of PC and Macintosh versions of the browser released in August 1993. These versions, programmed by a larger team of mostly undergraduate programmers, made the browsing experience more widely available.
\n\nTechnically speaking, then, Mosaic was a useful but modest contribution, arguably not as important as, say, SMTP, the WWW protocol itself, or the SLIP and PPP protocols that enabled connection to the internet via a modem. And Mosaic was clearly not as important a technical contribution as the underlying TCP/IP packet switching protocol and all the software that had been written to implement it on a wide variety of computers. Mosaic did not make it possible to connect to the internet. Other programs and protocols did that. And Mosaic did not make the internet friendly; it simply made it somewhat friendlier. And it is safe to say that it was not a question of efficiency; Mosaic was a slow and cumbersome way to get information, particularly on the graphics-impaired computers of the first years. Mosaic was a fine program, but it was not a revolutionary work of genius by any definition.
\n\nSo why did Mosaic become the killer app of the internet? Why did its direct successor Netscape launch the “internet economy” of the 1990s? Part of it was simply the cumulative critical mass of people and technologies, what some economists call network effects; enough computers were becoming graphics-capable, enough of those computers were becoming connected to LANs, and enough of those LANs were being connected to the internet, that being on the internet was becoming more and more valuable.
\n\nBut it’s crucial that Mosaic wasn’t so much efficient as it was pleasurable; using Mosaic was one of the first really compelling, fun experiences available on the internet. Some computer professionals tried to downplay it for that very reason: “Mostly, people use Mosaic to show off the money they spent on their PCs,” observed one software executive, “you can call somebody over and say, ‘Look at this.’ It has got that kind of whiz-bang appeal. . . . . It’s like the first time you go through the library: It’s fun to wander through the stacks, pulling down books. But that does wear off.”10 But of course we now know in retrospect that the fun of web browsing was not about to wear off any time soon.
\n\nWhat kind of pleasure did Mosaic offer? Mosaic did not satisfy desire, it provoked it. Colin Campbell has described what he calls “modern autonomous imaginative hedonism,” a distinctly modern structure of pleasure in which the anticipation of pleasure becomes part of the pleasure itself and which is characteristic of the consumer culture and romanticism generally.11 What one wants in this peculiarly modern form of pleasure, Campbell argues, is not the satiation of desire but desire itself; it is the desire to desire. Mosaic did not so much show someone something they wanted or needed to see as it stimulated one to imagine what one might see. One of the early classic ways to demonstrate the web was to click onto the website for the Louvre, to watch grainy images of paintings slowly appear on the screen. This was not pleasurable so much in what it actually delivered—better versions of the same images generally could be found in any number of art books—but in how the experience inspired the viewer to imagine what else might be delivered. Mosaic enacted a kind of hope; it did not deliver new things so much as a sense of the possibility of new things. Surfing the web using Mosaic in the early days shared certain features with the early stages of a romantic affair or the first phases of a revolutionary movement; pointing, clicking, and watching images slowly appear generated a sense of anticipation, of possibility. To engage in the dreamlike, compulsive quality of web surfing in the early days was an immersion in an endless what’s next?
\n\nBy May 1993, white-collar workers scattered in cubicles and offices across the land were quietly discovering the thrills of going online, as Andreessen and others worked on the code for Mosaic, as the likes of John Perry Barlow and the editorial staff of Wired were spreading the tropes of the computer counterculture to the middle ranks. But the mainstream was still thinking other things. That month, U.S. News and World Report published a “technology report” about the coming future of networked computing. The article, clearly a response to the enthusiasm surrounding Vice President Al Gore’s information superhighway initiatives, had no mention of the internet. It began,
\n\n\n\n\nThe melding of the telephone, television and personal computer today has unleashed a dynamic digital revolution that promises to radically alter the way people live, work and play around the world. What new products and services can we expect from this technological upheaval? How big a market, exactly, are we talking about? And what, if anything, should the Clinton administration do to help foster these emerging technologies in America?12
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This was the conventional way of understanding things at the time—in the business terminology of products, services, and markets. From there the article went on to seek answers from “seven titans of technology”: Bill Gates, shopping-channel pioneer Barry Diller, AT&T Chair Robert Allen, cable TV tycoon John Malone, IBM board vice chairman Jack Kuehler, cell phone magnate Craig McCaw, and Motorola chair George Fisher. The article was thus organized around the assumption that, whatever happened, it would be shaped primarily by corporate leadership and corporate concerns, perhaps in interactions with government regulators spurred on by initiatives coming from the White House. Gates predicted a wallet-sized personal PC interconnected with home appliances. Others forecast a lucrative cornucopia of online shopping, ubiquitous multimedia communication for business executives, movies-on-demand, distance education via cable TV, and growing wireless data services. All expressed an ambivalence about government’s role, expressing appreciation for the excitement generated by Gore and the Clinton White House but cautioning government regulators to stay out of the way of corporate initiatives. This was a view from the top.
\n\nThree months later, as Andreessen and his colleagues were quietly releasing the first version of Mosaic for the Macintosh and the PC, the August issue of Scientific American appeared with a similar overview article.13 In keeping with its more sophisticated readership, the article contained much more technical detail, comparing the bandwidth and cost of various transmission technologies like fiber optic cable and ISDN, for example, and its interviewees were generally further from the boardroom and closer to the research lab. But the basic organizing assumptions of the article were the same as the recent US News piece; the bulk of the article focused on various corporations and their technologically linked interests, comparing and contrasting the schemes of various cable, phone, and media companies, interspersed with various inside-the-beltway regulatory concerns, such as common carrier principles. The list of possible applications of the coming technology leaned a little more towards information and education than shopping: a cut-out box contained descriptions of school children communicating by email with a researcher in Antarctica, a broadcast engineer who helped diagnose his daughter’s rare disease using online databases and email, an experiment with sending dental X-rays across the Atlantic, and a group of New Jersey schoolchildren communicating with teachers in Russia.14 The World Wide Web was not mentioned.
\n\nThis article, however, does mention the internet. It opens with an anecdote about Internet Society President Vinton Cerf preparing for a Congressional hearing by contacting thousands of enthusiasts over the internet, pointing to the rapidly growing activity on the internet as a potential “seed” of Gore’s “National Information Infrastructure.”15 And the article is titled “Domesticating Cyberspace” and closes with a Congressional Representative echoing Barlow’s metaphorical construction of the online world as a frontier: “Anything is a danger in cyberspace. . . . . There are no rules. It’s the Wild West.”16 The Barlow-inspired metaphorical constructs of its title and opening and closing paragraphs—a vision of a wild, expansive, exciting space in the internet—would prove to resonate more profoundly than the content about corporate struggles, educational applications, and competing delivery technologies. Perhaps Scientific American’s readership is specialized, but that readership includes politicians, executives, and, most importantly at this moment in history, reporters—reporters being among the category of people who do their own word processing.
\n\nThis was the moment that the internet hit the media radar. As summer turned to fall in 1993, the internet rather suddenly became an object of media fascination. Scott Bradner, a long-time internet insider,17 observed with some bewilderment that “the Internet is suddenly popular. . . . . For reasons best known to the media gods, articles about the Internet seem to be the thing to do these days.” He pointed out that during the fall of 1993, a time when only a miniscule number of people actually had internet access, 170 articles appeared in major U.S. publications mentioning the internet, as compared to 22 articles in the same period a year before.18 He continued,
\n\n\n\n\nAll this attention is flattering to those of us who have been proselytizing this technology for years. The problem is that I don’t see any logical reason for the current attention. The Internet has been around and growing for more than a decade. Sure, it’s big (almost 2 million interconnected computers world wide) and growing fast (more than 7% a month), but it’s been big and growing fast for quite a while now. It was certainly growing at least at this rate when Time & Newsweek were forecasting national video parlors for the kiddies instead of international on-line, real time, interactive current affairs in the schools. . . . . Last month, I even found an article on the Internet in an airline flight magazine.19
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As the excitement around the internet gathered in the media, as Wired and John Perry Barlow framed computer networking in breathless countercultural terms, as Mosaic circulated onto the increasing number of internet-connected LANs, members of the business world began to take note. In part, with their attention already directed towards networking by the information superhighway rhetoric, it might be unsurprising that those looking for business opportunities might follow the media towards the internet. But another key factor was the Microsoft monopoly, which played a dual role. On the one hand, Microsoft’s dominance in operating systems represented the uninspiring end of the garage start-up days in microcomputing, thus motivating romantic entrepreneurs to look for something new. On the other, it was well known that Bill Gates had just become one of the richest men in the world and that those who had heavily invested in Microsoft in the late 1980s were beginning to reap fabulous rewards. Microsoft was thus both a reviled corporate monolith and an object lesson: might something overthrow Microsoft just as Microsoft had overthrown IBM? Might that something have to do with the internet? And might there be similar rewards to be reaped by those who accurately guessed what the next best thing would be?
\n\nEnter Netscape. Jim Clark, student of Lynn Conway and founder of graphics workstation company Silicon Graphics (SGI), was by that time an executive who did not need to do his own word processing. But sometime in the late fall of 1993, just as the internet craze and Mosaic were entering mainstream attention, Clark stumbled upon Mosaic when, in search of a new direction in technology, he was introduced to the web browser by an underling at SGI. Clark resigned from SGI in February 1994, flew to the NCSA in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, found Marc Andreessen, and founded a company to commercialize the program in spring 1994.20 With unprecedented haste, he launched the Netscape IPO just over a year later. This became the most successful IPO in history to that point and the model for many subsequent IPOs, setting off the internet stock craze. The largest party that capitalism has ever thrown had begun.
\n\nSo why did Netscape get all this swooning attention? In part, Netscape grabbed the headlines because it was in Silicon Valley, in part because of Jim Clark’s previous track record with SGI, and in part because Netscape hired Andreessen and many of the other original programmers of Mosaic. And Netscape’s first browser was a good one, particularly as it channeled its start-up funds heavily into rapidly improving the program, releasing frequent free updates over the internet and quickly becoming the most popular browser. Yet it needs to be remembered that at the time of the IPO the company had no profit and almost no revenues. It was giving its principle product away for free and had no crucial patents or other dramatic advantage in the browser market: Netscape was just one of about ten companies trying to commercialize Mosaic.21
\n\nTo a very significant degree, Netscape gained so much attention because it followed a deliberate strategy of creating a media narrative heavily centered on a romanticized, heroic construction of the computer counterculture, which proved very popular with the media itself. Netscape depicted itself as enchanting. Very early on, Clark hired a publicist, Rosanne Siino from SGI, and told her to present Andreessen as the rock star of the company.22 Siino then developed a strategy that carefully cultivated media attention framed in terms of geek chic, deliberately taking reporters into the back rooms to show the chaos of the programmers’ cubicles, programmers sleeping under their desks, and so forth.23 And she successfully turned Andreessen into a celebrity; in 1995, Andreessen appeared on the cover of Forbes ASAP with the blurb: “This Kid Can Topple Bill Gates.”24 Andreessen would soon be featured in People magazine and appear on the cover of Time in his bare feet.25
\n\nArguably, none of this would have worked without Wired magazine. Wired was barely more than a year old when Clark hired Andreessen, and in that year it had been full of adolescent hyperbole (Rossetto claimed that computer technology was creating “social changes so profound their only parallel is probably the discovery of fire”),26 and inaccurate predictions (besides mentioning the internet only in passing in the first issue, the second implied that Richard Stallman’s Free Software project was outmoded and doomed).27 And its eye-catching Day-Glo graphics and layout were sometimes unreadable. Wired did not, furthermore, invent the idea that Mosaic was the killer app of the internet.28
\n\nBut it popularized the idea and did so in a particular way. Wired published its first substantial piece on the Mosaic phenomenon in October 1994, when the web was well known to internet aficionados but just beginning to attract the attention of the wider world.29 Titled “The (Second Phase of the) Revolution Has Begun,” the article, by Gary Wolf, didn’t just target a good investment or new technology as a normal trade magazine piece might have. Instead, it used colloquial language and emphasized revolutionary change, pleasure, and personal expression. “When it comes to smashing a paradigm,” the article began, “pleasure is not the most important thing. It is the only thing.” In a section titled, “Why I Dig Mosaic,” Wolf observed that “Mosaic functions lurchingly, with many gasps and wheezes,” and described an experience of setting off to find technical information on the nascent web and getting distracted by the process of clicking from link to link, eventually ending up on a physicist’s personal page. But while a standard review of computer software might point to these as problems, Wolf did not. “The whole experience,” Wolf wrote, “gave an intense illusion, not of information, but of personality.” Now that personal computers had revealed themselves to be just office machines and therefore not all that personal, Wolf was locating personality in the act of web surfing.
\n\nAnd, as if to give substance to the rather thin idea of the personality of the web, Wolf crafts an image of the personality of Mark Andreessen. Another journalist might have interviewed the senior partner of the company, but Wolf focused on the twenty-something junior partner and notes personal details. “A little way into the interview,” Wolf notes, “Andreessen removes his dress shirt and answers the rest of my questions in a white T-shirt. This gesture leaves the impression of a man doing battle against the businesslike backdrop” of Netscape’s headquarters. And Wolf focuses on Andreessen’s dragon-slaying attitude; working for Netscape, Wolf notes, “offers [Andreessen] a chance to keep him free from the grip of a company he sees as one of the forces of darkness—Microsoft.”
\n\nBy zeroing in on Netscape and Andreessen, this Wired profile, not only amplified the belief that Mosaic was the killer app of the internet and that Netscape would be its primary beneficiary, but also offered a romantic lens through which to see the phenomenon. As the Clinton White House and Congress took the information superhighway rhetoric off into dry committees, spouting inside-the-beltway acronyms, businessmen could increasingly be seen thumbing through copies of Wired on airplanes, and terms like cyberspace and frontier metaphors began cropping up in newspaper articles and politicians’ sound bites. Without Wired, it’s not obvious that this libertarian-flavored countercultural framing of computer networking would have taken hold in the mainstream.
\n\nIn the ensuing years, as we all know, take hold it did. Being part of the knowledgeable vanguard was a central part of the ethos at the time. Mary Meeker, who later would be dubbed “the girl in the bubble,” was a stock analyst at Morgan Stanley and key player in the Netscape IPO and many subsequent dot com IPOs. She said, “I remember that in 1995 I would speak with Marc Andreessen and we would try to count up how many people understood this stuff. We thought it was about four hundred.”30 Soon after the Netscape IPO, a young visionary called Jeffrey Skilling began leading a rising corporation called Enron into new territory based on the speculative trading of energy and internet-related activities; of skeptics of his strategy, Skilling is reported to have scoffed, Rossetto-like, “there were two kinds of people in the world: those who got it and those who didn’t.”31 And it left its mark in politics; in the summer of 1994, conservative pundit George Gilder teamed up with futurologist Alvin Toffler and others to release a rousing document called “Cyberspace and the American Dream: A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age”; the document declared a new era in which free markets and technology would make governments obsolete, a set of themes that would soon be picked up by then-Congressman Newt Gingrich.
\n\nAfter a point, it does little good to scoff at these patterns with a smug “I told you so.” Many thoughtful observers knew the stock prices of the late 1990s were irrational, and many of them said so. The evidence and arguments were there, but the bubble kept expanding nonetheless. It is worth ferreting out those who took advantage of the heady atmosphere to engage in various degrees of outright fraud. But one cannot blame the heady atmosphere itself only on occasional instances of exaggerated reporting, conflicts of interest, or dishonesty.
\n\nThis overheated atmosphere was precisely a fusion of the desire for wealth with romantic dreams of freedom, self-expression, and the dramatic overthrow of the powers that be. Without the romantic visions of freedom and revolution, there would have been nothing to get excited about; there was no gold in this gold rush, no valuable raw material, just castles in the air made of projections onto immaterial digital bits; something had to make those projections seem valuable. Yet without the hope of getting rich, the enthusiasm would never have had the energy it needed to spread. Change the world, overthrow hierarchy, express yourself, and get rich; it was precisely the heady mix of all of these hopes that had such a galvanizing effect.
\n\nThe development and character of capitalism sometimes tends to be imagined in terms of things in the guns, germs, and steel category, things like technologies, resources, and geography. Economic development, we like to assume, is about the efficiency with which the prosaic fundamentals of human life are produced and distributed or about things that change how much we have to eat or how long we live. Yet this way of thinking, for all its insight, can make us forget just how frivolous the development of capitalism has been at times. Think of the role of gold, spices, tea, tobacco, and beaver pelts in the development of mercantile systems and the early phases of the European colonization of the Americas. These were all trivial commodities, of no major practical value, whose popularity largely reflected the whims of European upper-class fashion. Yet the basic systems of accounting and trade that laid the foundations for early modern capitalism, some would say for capitalism and the world system itself, were created around them.
\n\nThe internet of the 1990s may have been less like the steam engine or the radio and more like spices and beaver pelts. What the internet offered, however, was not so much fashions for decorating our bodies or our food as fashions for clothing the self.
\n\nIn a few short years, between 1992 and 1996, the internet went from being a quiet experiment to a global institution whose name seemed to be on everyone’s lips and whose existence and importance was taken for granted. By 1995, the remaining consumer computer communication systems from the 1980s like Compuserve and Prodigy were all selling themselves as means of access to the internet rather than the other way around, the Congress was revising the structure of its communications law for the first time in more than half a century, major corporations from the phone companies to Microsoft to the television networks were radically revamping core strategies, television ads for Coke and Pepsi routinely displayed URLs, and the stock bubble was underway.
\n\nIn the history of media, this is an extraordinarily rapid shift. In comparison, the early histories of most other media suggest something well coordinated and planned. For example, the general outlines of the TV industry in the United States—the major corporate players, the advertising system, networks providing programming to affiliate stations, even much of the programming like soap operas and variety shows—were clearly mapped out by the mid- to late-1930s, more than a decade before its full-scale introduction around 1950. (RCA/NBC made television a central part of its plans for the future by 1932, just as the networked/ advertising-supported radio broadcast system was becoming consolidated.)32 For all the complexities and struggles associated with their development, film, television, and VCRs were disseminated in a context in which industry leaders, government regulators, and manufacturers all shared similar broad general outlines of what the new industries were going to be about, and disputes were limited to fine points of technical standards (for example, Betamax versus VHS), revenue distribution (for example, cable and videotape copyright issues), and the like. Historians of technology are correct to scoff at hyperbolic claims about the internet (for example, that the internet is the biggest invention since the book). But one of its striking features is just how much, for a period in the 1990s, it took people by surprise. Arguably, the only communication system of the twentieth century that came with similar unexpectedness was radio broadcasting (which also played a significant role in that other stock bubble in the 1920s).33
\n\nMany might ask: Did not the internet triumph because it offered new efficiencies, new flexibilities, and a new ease of access to information and knowledge creation, which together were really the driving force of the internet itself and its contribution to the new market dynamism, globalization, and the flattening of economic relations? Could that much money and effort really be driven by something as ephemeral and irrational as a particular kind of romantic self-concept?
\n\nOther factors mattered, of course. But it seems likely that the romantic entrepreneurial self-concept was a necessary if not sufficient component of the internet explosion of the 1990s. It helps to remember the order of events. Everything changed before significant numbers of individuals were successfully making a profit selling via the internet and even before internet access was widely available. It was not as if people started using the internet to make money and then the business world at large responded; in 1995, there was no appreciable nonmetaphorical market yet, no substantial population of individuals competitively buying and selling things over the internet. There were, by and large, only experimenters, speculators, and enthusiasts, people who expected a market to emerge where one did not yet exist. (Yes, there were those graphs showing skyrocketing numbers of internet nodes and users, forming almost perfect triangles as the lines headed for the upper right corner. But one could produce similar graphs for the sales of the latest new pop rock sensation, and the internet had been growing at a similar rate long before 1993.) Understood as a practical technology, the internet could not have caused these changes because the internet was not practical yet. Many of the more important changes that set the stage for the explosion of the internet and the internet economy, then, happened before the technology itself had a chance to have much concrete effect at all.
\n\nThe fact is, the internet that appeared in the 1993–95 period wasn’t just a technology; it was the enactment of a hope. The changes of 1993–95 were very much anticipatory, changes based on what people imagined could happen, not what had already happened. In the early 1990s, the internet did not so much cause new things to happen as it served to inspire people to imagine that new things would happen. The shared embodied experience of an immersion in an endless what’s next? that Mosaic unleashed, coupled to the enormous awe accorded new technology and the opportunity to step into the role of the romantic entrepreneur, enabled new behaviors on the part of significant segments of the population. People behaved differently, not just because the internet enabled them to do different things, but because its presence inspired people to imagine how things might change, how things might be transformed. Many of the things said and done in the name of the internet in the 1990s we now know to be misjudgments, some of them colossal ones; those misjudgments, however, were not random. They were part of a pattern of shared collective vision, and that vision had an impact even if it was based on some shaky foundations.
\n\nThat impact, moreover, was not fleeting. The internet enthusiasm was not just a Tulip mania, a mediocre idea that eventually washed away in lost fortunes. On the one hand, the internet bubble unleashed a flood of money into the telecommunications infrastructure, effectively making TCP/IP the standard for the foreseeable future and resulting in a build-out of high-bandwidth lines that remained important even after the bubble burst. On the other hand, less concretely but perhaps more profoundly, the internet surprise helped revived neoliberalism. As we have noted, neoliberalism looked like it might be in serious decline at the time of Bill Clinton’s election in 1992; both corporate leadership and government were moving back towards a more classic corporate liberal point of view involving coordinated private/public partnerships. But somewhere between the collapse of the Soviet Union and the internet bubble, the blind faith in markets was given new energy. The internet, because it took the establishment by surprise, because it occasioned a confluence of the counterculture with spectacularly speculative capitalism, created an opening for big ideas.
\n\nGiven the political alignments of the early 1990s, the first intellectual bloc to jump into that opening were the libertarians, and they successfully fostered an equation of the romantic individualist vision of the internet with a free market vision of the internet. Esther Dyson—a business consultant with a background in journalism, a door-opening last name, and libertarian leanings (she told Reason magazine that what she likes about the market economy is “number one, that it works. Number two, that it’s moral”)34—noticed the emerging internet as an opportunity and made it the core of her career. Republican speech writer George Gilder, previously famous for books attacking feminism and welfare, turned to technology with a book on the end of television in 1990; the book proved not to be all that accurate in its predictions but its enthusiastic reception at the time taught Gilder the power of technological prognostication as a route to an audience. Libertarian journalist Declan McCullough started an online website devoted to the internet and politics in 1994 and soon became a regular contributor to Wired. This group was able to take the framework laid out by de Sola Pool’s Technologies of Freedom, in which free markets are equated with free speech and government regulation is construed as the enemy of both, and apply it to the exploding activity around the internet.
\n\nTo see how this feat of rhetorical association worked, consider a 1995 essay about the internet in The Economist. Author (and eventually, Wired editor) Christopher Anderson wrote, “the Internet revolution has challenged the corporatetitan model of the information superhighway. The growth of the Net is not a fluke or a fad, but the consequence of unleashing the power of individual creativity. If it were an economy, it would be the triumph of the free market over central planning. In music, jazz over Bach. Democracy over dictatorship.”35 This vision of individual creativity unleashed (and the associated rhetorical flourishes) was orthodox romantic individualism. But this was in The Economist, not Wired, and what readers of the magazine first saw when they opened the issue added a telling twist. A nameless editor at The Economist compressed Anderson’s romantic passage into a pull quote that graced the first page of the printed version of the article: “The explosive growth of the internet is not just a fad or a fluke, but the result of a digital free market unleashed.”36 Readers of The Economist were subtly invited to leap from “if it were an economy” to it is a “digital free market.” This associative leap from market metaphor to actual market, repeated over and over again in the culture at the time, allowed a technological system based on nonproprietary standards and with roots in a mix of private and government funding to become a powerful archetype of both the free market and free expression in the broad public mind. The iconoclastic rhythms by which the internet appeared in the cubicles of America were thus harnessed to a Lockean market projection. The illogical leaps inherent in all this were swept aside by the speed of events and by the constant threat of being labeled as a dinosaur by Wired-style countercultural rhetoric.
\n\nThese events, occurring in the wake of the astonishing collapse of the Soviet Union and the quick triumph of the United States in the 1991 Persian Gulf war, created a context in which neoliberalism was given new life. In law, politics, and business management, most of the talk of industrial policy and related corporate liberal terms disappeared into the background, and the faith in markets as the source of all innovation (and of freedom itself ) was revived as forcefully as ever. In 1994, just as Netscape was plotting its IPO, the New York Times transferred a Middle East foreign correspondent named Thomas Friedman to covering the White House and economics. The following year, as the stock bubble began its climb, Friedman became a regular op-ed writer, and he cultivated an avuncular, anecdotally driven, free market fundamentalism that over time he coupled to a subtle nationalist triumphalism. In the face of all this, those who initially raised doubts about specific neoliberal decisions, such as economist Jeffrey Sachs’s belief in shock therapy for the former Soviet Union to drive it into a market economy— with results that even Sachs admits were mixed, and many would argue were disastrous—were largely rendered mute throughout the 1990s, cowed by the apparent irrefutability of the market vision, buoyed as it was by the flood of events, the energy around the internet, and the associated meteoric rise of the stock markets. Thanks to the way the internet was embraced by the culture, Margaret Thatcher’s 1980s claim that “there is no alternative” to neoliberalism on the world stage was given new life.
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