To warp a coinage, the love of e-commerce is the root of all evil. Or at least, the root of some really,
really boring press releases. An hour doesn't go by that I don't get a release extolling the latest
e-commerce or B2B (business-to-boring-business) revolution. At last count (as of 7:04 p.m. today), 319
e-commerce revolutions have taken place. And not one of them has benefited humankind, animalkind,
plantkind, or even viruskind in the least.
While I'm no enemy of business--after all, we all sell something, even if it's just words--enough is
enough! Day after day, in the newspaper, on the radio and TV, in magazines, and on Web sites--and in a
million other venues--we're pounded with someone promoting another dot-com. It's almost always a site
selling you something or helping you sell something or helping you sift through other sites selling something
or someone creating a product that helps one company help another company sell something to still another
company.
"Enough!" I cry, as I pound my hairy chest (thanks to implants) and begin to think dark thoughts.
To warp another coinage, what is good for the Internet is good for the country. And I think it's no damn
good.
Again, I'm no aesthete, living my austere, e-commerceless life on the Rive Gauche, my beret tilted at a
jaunty (and not unsexy) angle. I have been known to prowl the mall now and then. I've engaged in a little
consumer therapy, to be honest. I have skulked down the back alleys of the Internet to buy my beloved a
yo-yo, a book, those roses, that little skein of Mikimoto pearls. I have leveraged the infrastructure of the
digital megamall and bought bought bought.
But for Berners-Lee's sake, not all the time. Not 24/7! Not every ftp'ing second. But that, alas, is
where the Internet is heading. At least it took a generation before television was declared a vast wasteland,
but not the Internet. We live in Internet time, and in just five years, what seemed a great little way to
connect people and ideas and yes, buy some stuff, has turned into the info strip mall from hell.
Welcome to the Intercrap. The endless, blind pursuit of mammon; comparison shopping that drives
merchants to the edge of bankruptcy; IPO remnants; angel/bridge/second-tier money; leveraged buyouts;
paper millionaires; and more.
Can we all click the Stop button for a second? Can we pause and say hello to the day and stop and smell
the ozone? Can we think about maybe not driving our car just once (remember that little thing called global
warming?), give the starving guy on the corner $10, write a kick-ass letter to our local representative
reminding him/her to get off his/her keister and fix something? Can we pause in our pell-mell click-click to
tell the one we love that, yes, we really do love them even if they hate the CDs we buy them? Can we try
to really, truly clean out that back closet we've been meaning to clean out since the Reformation? And
while we're at it, can we do something, anything, to make a positive difference in the world?
In our blind rush to capitalize on the Web commerce boom, to get those stock options, jump to that hot
startup, to buy those Elvis boxer shorts on eBay, to consume consume consume, we've forgotten what the
hell we're here for. What even computers are here for. Computers are supposed to make our lives easier,
our work more efficient, to help us create better information, not just more information, to free us
from--not enslave us to--every knickknack we can buy on the Net.
I say, let's burn down the Internet and start over.
And now I'll go back to editing e-commerce stories, thank you very much.
Consummate computer curmudgeon Robert Luhn is the former Web Editor In Chief for
ComputerUser.com.
