The Future Will Resume in 15 Days December 1999 In the beginning there was sex. Then there was violence. Then there was apocalypse. And finally there was shopping. Such has been the narrative -- part Old Testament, part old Judith Krantz -- of the Internet thus far. As we have tried to grapple with the daunting growth of a medium unknown to most of us five years ago, we have successively focused on its capacity for spreading pornography and sex scandal, for fomenting explosive political extremism, for compounding the alleged chaos of Y2K, for creating wealth and for letting us shop till we drop without getting dressed. We have made folk legends out of young dot-com zillionaires, national goblins out of online Nazis proselytizing to the young. We have learned of an alternate universe where people live by Internet time and are paid in Internet money. We cannot venture anywhere in the "real" world without consuming ads for Web sites we've never heard of that want to take us to virtual destinations unknown. But in truth we ain't seen nothin' yet, and much of our national conversation to date about the Internet, especially that to be found in the mainstream media-political culture, is not keeping up with the pace of change. At this moment, only somewhere between a third and a half of America is online, and much of that on slow phone connections. Nonetheless, we already send three times as much e-mail as we do regular mail. Internet traffic is doubling every 95 days. Americans alone are adding two million pages to the Web daily. What will happen in the not-that-distant future when broadband -- that is to say, fast -- connections are ubiquitous rather than a luxury for a tiny minority? What happens once the Internet is always on, seamlessly built into our lives at home and at work, and all other media, from high-quality video to new forms yet to be seen, are instantly accessible through it? We're only at the beginning of this transformation -- the top half of the first inning, as one of the many metaphors applied to the Internet would have it. Depending on whom you listen to, what is still to come, even as the gold rush continues, is analogous to the advent of movable type, the Industrial Revolution, the arrival of electricity or the phone, the building of the transcontinental railroad, the creation of metal currency or the invention of the Arabic zero. But Zo? Baird, who now runs the Markle Foundation, which is committed to provoking tough policy questions about the Internet's future, observes that even these historical metaphors may fail to do justice to the digital universe that awaits us. Technological leaps of the past may not have had so "pervasive [an] influence in all spheres of public and private life," she says. The Internet's capacity to have a "global impact in transforming culture and politics and social interaction can create a world we've never seen before in its thrilling potential, or create tremendous instability." Even at this early point, the flashier changes making headlines just in the past few weeks are random and dizzying, whether trivial or profound. Encyclopedia Britannica was forced by the e-market environment to give away its costly content free on the Web. Ford and General Motors, which epitomize old-tech industry, are moving their huge purchasing operations to the Internet. The University of Texas library reports that while book circulation is down, that of e-books is up, and publishers and retail book chains alike are scrambling to digitize every book possible, so that any title will be instantly available in any form the customer chooses (paper included). Prestigious business schools and Wall Street financial institutions now report a growing brain drain, as young talent splits to join tech start-ups. In Boston, Hale & Dorr, the echt-Yankee law firm, officially ended its jacket-and-tie dress code last month, lest its techie clientele in T-shirts feel out of place. (How much longer will TV news shows, already abandoned by the digital generations, be anchored by guys dressed like 80's investment bankers?) The annual sales of digital video games now match Hollywood's annual box office and have sent companies like Hasbro, still marketing the pass?, pre-digital sci-fi of "Star Wars" toys, into free fall. When E-Bay added some six million new users over the past year and Amazon.com some eight million, that was not just a shopping phenomenon. "These are huge communities," says Eric Schmidt, C.E.O. of Novell, a leader in corporate network software. Unlimited by physical borders, they are not only expanding faster than any communities in history but their citizens "cross cultural, language and income barriers which we've never seen crossed before." Indeed, Steven Johnson, a writer ("Interface Culture") who looks at the Internet in urban-planning metaphors, says that "it's no longer possible to talk about one Web." For every wide-open community like E-Bay, there's a members-only gated community, not to mention the loud parasite communities that spring up opportunistically. Each has its own dynamic and tribal rituals. Mr. Schmidt, Ms. Baird and Eric Benhamou, the C.E.O. of 3Com (of Palm Pilot fame), were among the participants this week in a panel on the "digital divide" held by the New America Foundation. Both in their forum and in conversations I had with them later, they spoke urgently of issues overlooked amidst our dot-com and Y2K mania. Ms. Baird points out that poorer communities left unwired, whether urban or rural, are as likely to wither as the towns that were bypassed by our interstate highway system. Mr. Schmidt and Mr. Benhamou are alarmed by the failure of black and Hispanic Americans to enter their work force, and by the failure of our schools to deliver the right training. (Hooking up classrooms to computers, though proceeding apace, is barely a first step.) The chasm separating the haves and have-nots of the Net, like all other digital issues, is global; a minuscule number of Africans are on line. The other digital divide -- generational -- has its own fallout. A perusal of the major presidential candidates' Web sites suggests that only Al Gore is trying to move beyond boilerplate in addressing Net issues. It's not clear if his rivals are much more technologically literate than Bill Clinton, who last month held a bogus first presidential Internet chat in which he never touched the laptop in front of him. So far the campaign's digital policy conflicts have mainly consisted of either pandering or hedging on the issue of an Internet sales tax, and of Orrin Hatch's silly critique of George W. Bush's Web site for not being "user friendly." All the candidates have user-friendly Web sites -- for raising money, not for raising the level of digital debate. To see how the generation gap wreaks havoc in the private sector, look at any major media corporation, such as Time Warner, that has thrown away millions on an ill-conceived Web portal; chances are you'll find hands-on Internet ignorance among the analog suits at the top (much as the movie moguls of an earlier generation failed to "get" television). As James Fallows writes in The Industry Standard of the newsman Sam Donaldson's clueless daily Webcasts, "This is how it must have been for Ramon Novarro or Theda Bara, great silent-era stars trying to figure out what had changed when the talkies arrived." "If you want to understand the Internet," says Eric Schmidt, "rent, buy or borrow a teenager. Their view of technology is radically different from the rest of the culture." And there's no time to waste. Once the infrastructure of the virtual world is more or less built, once it is the principal place where we live and work, it will be much harder to address and adjudicate such issues as equity, privacy, intellectual property rights and education than it is when its architecture is still in flux. Eric Benhamou of 3Com believes that when the obsession with Y2K is history -- Jan. 2 is a mere 15 days from now, whatever happens -- we'll at last start to focus on the extraordinary questions that are rushing at us. As no less a futurist than Stan Lee, the wizard of Marvel comics, declares in Wired, "If you're interested in technology and the progress of humankind, this is the most exciting period ever." He's right, but most of us know even less about the huge social choices raised by software code than those inherent in biological science's parallel breakthroughs in manipulating genetic code. Even a year or two after Y2K, a 1999 fixation like "Will my e-gifts arrive in time?" may seem as quaint and distant as the horse and buggy of a century ago.