The Stock Market, Armageddon, the Net & OSS

Fear and greed -- technology's historical buddies -- are stalking the Net. Analysts are still reeling from all the cash raked in by online Xmas retailers. And technology stocks have reached surreal, almost frighteningly unrealistic levels. In response, new phobias about the Internet and work, taxes and the value of property itself are popping up all over business and in the press. Once again, technology seems to be scaring the hell out of everybody. Will we all get rich or crash and burn together? The experts sure have no idea. This might be time to control your own technology.

It's easy to lose sight of how much fear new cultures like the Internet can generate, just how unnerved all the people Out There are about all the things people here are learning and doing.

Sometimes, as with the Communications Decency Act, or with journalist's obsession over computer hackers, or politicians' indignation about digitally-driven sexual imagery, the moral backlash is obvious.

At other times it's more submerged. Notice the panic hitting the business community in the weeks after Internet Christmas shopping surpassed expectations.

Or the zooming prices of Internet stocks - Amazon, Yahoo, Intel - which appear to have crazed investors and are pulling financial markets higher and higher, nearly by themselves.

If any response to new technology is more pronounced than fear, it's hype and greed. Amazon.com now trades for more than 50 times the price at which it went public in l997. Ebay, the auction house, is valued at 13 times what its investors paid four months ago. Yahoo is valued at about $39 billion, nearly 100 times its valuation when it first went public, more than Boeing or Anheuser-Busch. "I can't tell you what's going on," an unnerved Wall Street technology analyst told an online trading and financial news service. "I have no idea."

This skyrocketing new valuation of the Internet marks the advent of a new era for the online world. No longer perceived as the playground for cybergurus, hackers, college geeks or fuzzy-head academics, the Internet now has the full attention of decision makers in Washington and on Wall Street. Historically, that's never meant anything good.

This week, the press has been full of Armageddon-like reports of the end of off-line retailing, normal shopping and ordinary work. An NPR station reported that developers are getting nervous about building more malls, since national retailers are increasingly finding online sales easier and more profitable. CBS Radio reported that Land's End was closing some discount outlets, since it was more efficient to liquidate its surplus stock online, and laying off hundreds of employees.

In an editorial page essay headlined "What Will the Internet Economy Look Like?," the New York Times suggested the answer will be grim. Property values will fall as stores close, "creating a glut of retail space and falling rents as Internet sales represent transactions not made in stores." Thousands of jobs would evaporate with them, along with state and municipal budgets, deprived of sales tax revenues.

The stock market, warned the Times, hasn't yet anticipated the economic dislocations that would come along with an Internet economy. "A recession could easily result just from the upheavals created by filing retailers and plunging commercial real estate values."

The creators of popular culture are, inevitably beginning to express these fears about technology as entertainment. In movies like the "Net," the humans are portrayed as dangerously -even murderously-isolated by computer technology. In "Enemy Of The State" geeks are given their most powerful and evil starring role yet, as morally oblivious, enthusiastic manipulators of privacy-invading, freedom-depriving -- and also murderous -- government technology. Even "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" showed the Net as a super-highway for witches in the already vampire and demon-haunted town of Sunnyvale.

The history of technology suggests that periods of enormous technological growth, such as the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, are followed not only by periods of religious and moral upheaval, but also by periods of slower technological growth and greater stability, as humans try and digest the new things in their life.

But so far, at least, the Internet has defied history. No one imagined that the Internet would spring from ARPANet, or that the Net would give birth to the World Wide Web. Like that wretched rabbit, it just keeps on going and going.

The Internet is the first organic technological revolution, the first one that and self-replicates. The number of things that can be done on the Net and Web only increases each day, from e-mail to MP3's to OSS to Videostreaming, to intuitive search engines and voice recognition software. On the Net, it's impossible not to see a culture that, far from slowing down, is only beginning to grow. And most Americans aren't even online yet.

If history is any useful guide, it suggests not that the technological change brought about by computing will halt or slow, but that the fear and hostility it engenders will intensify.

Still, no technological or other force can meet the insanely over-hyped financial expectations suddenly surrounding the Internet. Drooling investors and manipulable business reporters ought to consider the history of technology - some of the hype will come true, but not nearly all of it. When the dust settles, most people will still shop in stores and malls, still want to get some pizza and see a movie afterwards, and still want to see most of what they buy before they buy it.

Life will continue in recognizable form, and lots of investors are going to get roasted alive. It would be almost unbelievably ironic if what brought the soaring stock market down wasn't the collapse of the economy, but the inevitable return to earth of extraterrestrial expectations about the financial performance of Net companies. Perhaps some of those fears about the Internet are justified after all.

One symptom of a profound stress affecting modern thought, writes political scientist and technology historian Langdon Winner, is the growing prevalence of the idea - seen almost daily in media and public perceptions of the Internet - of autonomous technology. This is the belief that somehow technology has gotten out of control and follows its own course, independent of human direction. That this notion is patently bizarre hasn't prevented it from becoming a central obsession of the twentieth century.

There are several important reasons why the Open Source Software movement is an idea whose time has come, and whose message needs to be spread beyond the brainy geeks inventing, improving and distributing it. The notion of autonomous technology is one of those reasons.

OSS promises to give individuals some sense of perceived and real control of their technology. It offers real security: it isn't an out of control force that threatens their way of life, but a vital new tool of technological empowerment, a means of feeling - and being - in control. Operating systems like Linux aren't something a corporation sells and that people use without ever fully understanding it. They represent, instead the rarest idea in all technology: an important tool that people built for themselves, and can improve collectively and for free. And that companies can use to understand and deploy new technologies efficiently and wisely.

As the Net continues to grow at as a rapidly evolving, sometimes even frightening engine of social, cultural and commercial change, so will the hostility of diminished, even endangered institutions in politics, information and commerce: politics, journalism, the music industry, institutional stockbrokers, to name just a few contemporary examples.

At such a time, and for all sorts of good and obvious reasons, people need to feel in control of their own lives. They need to answer yes to philosopher Paul Valery's elemental question about technology: "Can the human mind master what the human mind has made?"

you can e-mail me at jonkatz@bellatlantic.net