Comment Articles

The net is rubbish

Tags:
Dotcom,
Bust,
Boom,
Net

Tony Westbrook AnchorDesk

Published: 26 May 2000 15:01 BST

Actually this really started last summer when a disgruntled online trader, Mark Barton, ran amok at the Atlanta offices of the online brokerage, killing ten people before turning the gun on himself as well.

Fortunately few critics of the web take their views to this extreme, but the horror highlighted the dark side of the net in our society. As with any sunrise industry, we take it for granted that everything about this new technology is good. The web is, after all, an enabling technology that allows us to do more things with less resources, to save money, to shop from home, to communicate without friends and family and so on and so on.

Of course there have always been the Jeremiahs and soothsayers who try to fit today's technology trends into their five-hundred year time lines of catastrophe -- just as they have done with every development before. And there are the Luddites who don't want anything to do with any technology, seeing it all as inherently evil, missing the point that without it they would be dead through starvation.

But these extremist views tend to obscure the opinions of the masses. These are based on real issues, which are not unique to the new economy, but perhaps only now becoming apparent in it. Namely that new and better does not always translate in the best interests of individuals -- both in the old economy when bankers were leaping from high buildings on the day of the crash, or in the new economy when the same exchanges saw even bigger fluctuations.

Easier online trading means more exposure to risk. Easier access to online credit and purchases means it is also easier to spend beyond your means and get into debt. More efficient intermediation between buyers and sellers means less jobs on all the traditional trades that used to do these jobs. More globalisation makes it easier to pick up and drop suppliers around the world with all the concomitant job implications that has...

There is no doubt that many more than the stock-market day traders have justification in being somewhat sceptical of the new economy following recent events. The trouble is that the new economy was promoted at the expense of the old one, even though our heads told us this should not be so. Even as we muttered it seemed illogical that an online company with less than a hundred people and a massive overdraft was valued at more that a multinational corporation with thousands of employees, profits and shareholder dividends; it was hard to deny the fact that dot com valuations were shooting upward day by day.

Read on...