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In Silicon Valley, meanwhile, inflated as it was by "irrational exuberance" and then deflated just as quickly, the book may meet with a weary, knowing nod, if not a full endorsement.
"Very little of the original brave new world rhetoric remains," says Steve Barnett, an e-commerce consultant and professor of business at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. "I've
witnessed a sea-change from 'let's try anything' to 'tell me the roi [return on investment] upfront.' As we move from one extreme to the other, the middle drops out. It's a change from 'the Internet will transform our society' to 'the Internet is just another way of doing business.' Or from gee-whiz to ho-hum."
"Not much rhetoric around here these days, except some rather subdued talk about biotech," says author Stewart Brand, cofounder of the Global Business Network, a futurist consultant organization. "The discourse pretty much is, 'Oh well, back to the old drawing board.' "
Virginia Postrel, author and columnist and editor of Reason magazine, who maintains a popular weblog at www.vpostrel.com, is one insider who has not lost faith in the broader social vision of the Internet. "The promise of the Internet is what it has always been," she says. "It lowers the cost of information. It lowers the cost of any venture that primarily deals in bits—from producing music to producing political commentary. Witness all the recent attention to blogs and, notably, the ability of Glenn Reynolds's Instapundit site to become a major information hub in a matter of months. The Internet makes it possible for people with specialized tastes or interests to find each other. It reduces the disadvantages of geographical distance. It saves research time."
Still, the utopianism that spawned the digital revolution seems to be fading in the light of practical financial calculations after the burst of the dot-com bubble (although Brand points out that roughly one fourth of publicly held Internet companies are already profitable, and another one fourth will be "soon"). Which may be both good and bad in light of Schultze's book. On the one hand, the more sober outlook is a welcome shift from e-utopianism, which Schultze describes as a religion unto itself (an early draft of his book called it "informational fundamentalism"). On the other hand, the new pragmatism doesn't encourage reflection on how technology shapes—and sometimes distorts—our understanding of community and virtue.
Instead of utopian claims, the cyber-elite are likely to offer strikingly modest visions of community. "Prior relationships and 'community' had usually always been created based on accidents of geography and chance," says Jon Rochmis, executive editor of WiredNews.com. "Your friends were your neighbors or school chums or work mates. Now, a fan of Yo Yo Ma in Austria can easily find one in Omaha, for example. Some of my closest friends now are people I've met through email who share my common interests."
"The Internet isn't a substitute for face-to-face friendships, but neither is the phone," says Postrel. "But by making communication at a distance easier, the Internet allows people to maintain and develop relationships that wouldn't be otherwise possible. My experience around September 11 illustrates some of the power of the Internet. My website became a hub for all sorts of people to communicate with a virtual community. Email allowed me to communicate easily with friends and family even in the New York area." (On a more mundane level, my conversation with Postrel, like all of the interviews for this article, was conducted via email.)
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