The Nineties: A Book

by Chuck Klosterman

The optimism was fueled by a simplistic brand of ad hoc Marxism crossed with social libertarianism, though such political terminology was still verboten and rarely expressed: The internet would eradicate the institutional obstacles that could traditionally be overcome only with money or status. This process would democratize the culture as a whole. It would reset society by flattening the hierarchy. Within the digital sphere, that premise was already self-evident, at least socially: Becoming “internet famous” had no connection to fame in the conventional world (in 1993, Wired claimed “the best-known online personality in the country” was a sixty-four-year-old retired army colonel named Dave Hughes). It would now be possible, or so it was believed, to construct a competing version of reality that would be governed by the morally neutral meritocracy of an agenda-free network. Every online citizen would be exactly the same. Handing the reins of society over to the machines was not seen as a risk. The risks came from conventional society. Internet pioneers believed governments would try to invade the virtual sphere and legally impose the same constrictions the web had eliminated. That was the inside view. The outside view was that what internet insiders valued was the central danger. When Time magazine ran its first major article on the subject, a 1994 cover story ominously titled “The Strange New World of the Internet,” its inadvertent emphasis was on the potential chaos gene...