Does their source, however, make them less dubious? Hardly. Imagine America without the telegraph—without an opportunity to forge lucrative commercial ties with the Old World, or to strengthen Texas’s ties to Washington. As it turned out, Texas and the rest of the country had plenty to say. So did railroad employees talking to each other; companies could more easily use single tracks to handle traffic in both directions, knowing that the telegraph was there to handle scheduling.[[1.9]] In other fields, such as medicine, the telegraph undoubtedly hastened progress as well. It also helped friends and families keep in touch as the country was settled; today the Net does the same with people in this era of international travel. Technology, then, while ripe with opportunities for abuse, can do far more than recruit “Girls of the Net” or spread word of a princess’s whooping cough.
Ironically, if the Cliff Stolls prevail, and if too many white hats abandon the nets as “devoid of warmth and human kindness,” then his predictions will come to pass; the greedy will take over, confident that others won’t mind so much.
Together with millions of other Netfolks, I’ll remember the Great Spamming of ’94. Laurence A. Canter and Martha S. Siegel, husband-and-wife partners in an Arizona law firm called Canter and Siegel, wanted to sell their services as immigration experts. So they splattered a “Green Card” ad—as if hurling spam against a wall—across some 6,000 newsgroups on Usenet. They didn’t care if you preferred to read about baseball or UNIX; they wanted your eyeballs. The Net seethed. I myself disliked many of the tactics used against Canter and Siegel—was it really necessary to threaten death or favor them with a slew of unsought magazine subscriptions?—but clearly they merited some good, strong, healthy loathing. I complained to the American Bar Association, which, at the time, was spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a PR campaign to upgrade the image of lawyers. You might say that C & S set the goodwill account back by several million.
My big regret is that I lacked more time to raise hell against Canter and his wife online and in other ways. The glory of the Net, this series of communities, was and is diversity; here C & S were dumbing it down to the broadcast model where one program served all. But Canter and Siegel didn’t give a whit about the Net as it existed, about the outrage that so many unwilling people were bearing the costs of sending and storing their unwanted messages, about the fact that Usenet couldn’t survive continued assaults in this vein, about the damage they were doing to the various forms of Net culture, a phrase that C & S would undoubtedly have dismissed as an oxymoron.
Canter and Siegel later added to the insult with How to Make a Fortune on the Information Superhighway, the 1990s equivalent of a guide to exterminating buffalo.[[1.10]] The book talked of selling to 30 million people, which was malarkey. Some Net demographers challenged the figure at the time—reality may finally have caught up—but more important, most of those 30 million could only send and receive electronic mail as opposed to using services such as the World Wide Web. And just how many people wanted to receive junk mail from marketers? Of course C & S might suggest mailing lists for the receptive—nothing wrong there—but without access to the right Net services, fewer people would know of the lists in the first place.
Does this mean that the Internet should be free of commerce? Quite the opposite. The challenge is simply to avoid letting the hardsellers overwhelm the Internet. Countless areas of the Net exist where people not only tolerate ads, they want to read them. Besides, the commercial and noncommercial can build on each other. When I put my TeleRead proposal on the World Wide Web—that is, my call for a well-stocked national digital library with copyrighted books included—I built in hypertext links[[1.11]] to Web sites that could be useful. And several just happened to be commercial. The Minneapolis Star Tribune, for example, had done a Pulitzer-quality expose of the thousands of dollars that West Publishing had doled out in trips for some Supreme Court justices who passed judgment on copyright matters. Just why should I have avoided this superb material when a commercial publication was good enough to share it with the Net for free?
Electronic cafes, found in San Francisco, Seattle, London, and Hong Kong, among other locations, are another good example of how the commercial and noncommercial can strengthen each other. Cafes with Internet hookups can even help bridge the gap between Net and life. The Internet Cafe at 1363 4th Avenue in Prince George, British Columbia, doesn’t just offer a coffee bar. Customers of the local Internet provider can pick up their e-mail there and wander around the Net, read “a good, old-fashioned cork bulletin board for community information exchanges,” learn about local service agencies, watch resident artists at work, buy crafts from all over the world, and even get advice from a local psychologist, Russ Winterbotham, who just happens to own the place.
When Stoll writes about an Ontario bookstore with a water garden and three cats, it’s easy to appreciate the potential charms of commerce offline. But clearly the Net itself can spice up a traditional business. In London, you can drop by the Cyberia cafe at 39 Whitfield Street and plunk down £1.50 for a large cappuccino and £2.50 for a half-hour on the Net. The word is that the cafe has drawn “more media coverage than a small war.” I’m not surprised. Even if prices might be a bit lower by my standards, Cyberia is meeting a definite need. Of course Stoll would complain that the customers in the electronic cafes are “surrounded by people, yet escaping into conversations with distant strangers.” Isn’t he forgetting something, however: The way many Net aficionados love to meet the like-minded in person?
I’m also keen, needless to say, on the pioneering work that thousands of small businesses are doing on the World Wide Web itself—rather than posting in-your-face ads to nonrelevant newsgroups.
No, Web businesses aren’t charities or consumer service organizations. But by offering details about their products and services, they are respecting our intelligence far more than does the huckstery on television. You wouldn’t want to buy a new Buick or Volvo if you simply went by statistics and photos on the Web. But you just might learn more about gas mileage and safety claims than if you relied simply on the sales rep and brochures in the showroom. The more you shop this way, the more you’ll encourage manufacturers to improve their products and services rather than just to shell out megabucks on more Super Bowl ads. Net business, major limitations notwithstanding, is indeed A Good Thing.