This growing season was the first year that I have eaten garden-fresh vegetables from my very own backyard. I cannot take any of the credit for the garden personally, for my wife did all the work and spent all the hours planting and tending to it. My participation notwithstanding, it has been a wonderful experience. To watch as a blank patch of upturned earth turns into a teeming jungle of blossoms and vines, leaves and roots, has been a remarkable experience. To pick a pea pod directly from the vine and eat it whole--tasting the sunshine that it ate in order to grow--has been nothing short of a spiritual exercise.

It is just one more little piece of experiential knowledge and personal revelation that contributes to my growing conviction that the future is not a dot.com. My belief is that the present craze and hype surrounding the dot.com world will, in the end, contribute very little to the future of humankind. This is not to say that it won't change the future of humankind, for that is undeniable. It has and will continue to alter the human landscape in many diverse and profound ways. However, inflicting and enforcing change upon the world, and making a contribution to the world, are very different things, and I believe the contribution of the dot.com world will be negligible at best.

At this point I must urge you not to write me off as some neo-Luddite on a soap-box, for I participate in and enjoy many of the 'conveniences' and 'entertainments' that the Internet (and its culture) have to offer. I am a one-seventh partner in this very online magazine you are reading, and rarely a day goes by that I do not look for some form of information or entertainment online. I especially enjoy the communication aspect of this technology--using email and instant messaging daily in order to organize my life and maintain relationships. My point is not that we should abandon the dot.com world, or throw out our computers, but only that this present madness over dot-coms has very little to offer of lasting value.

Eight years ago when I first logged on with my 9800 bps modem, the Internet was primarily educational sites, personal homepages, and information offerings. Now it is all entertainment and e-business. It has been transformed by materialism and greed run rampant. Almost every person I know dreams of being involved in an Internet start-up and making it rich through an IPO. This is absolutely ridiculous. Dot.coms will not grow our food or fix the problem of soil erosion, environmental devastation, human suffering or corporate greed, so why are we all so fixated on this phenomenon? Websites can and do provide information that can lead to individual action, which is wonderful. They connect people and places in ways that can lead to changed lives (for better and for worse I suppose.) I applaud sites like Adbusters.com that use the Internet to attract support for good causes, and use it to put pressure on corporations to change their destructive ways (i.e. the recent attack on Coca-Cola.) However, these types of actions are rare in the dot.com world, and are not part of the current online craze.

It is possible that I am wrong in my opinions regarding the dot.com world, and I invite one and all to inform me as to its long-term value, for being able to buy dog food online is not my idea of a lasting or worthwhile contribution. As computers increasingly infiltrate our lives and mediate the way we access the world and our experience of it--relationships, thoughts, actions--as their 'convenience' continues to speed up the pace of our already hectic lives, I am afraid that much of ourselves will be lost.

Lewis Mumford said that "simplicity does not avoid mechanical [technological] aids, it seeks only not to be victimized by them." This is what I strive for, not the abandonment of technology, but the wherewithal not to be controlled, manipulated, abused, and victimized by it. What this current craze lacks is this simplicity. In our rush to go online with absolutely everything we have forgotten or discarded so much of what constitutes lasting value. You only need to look a little bit beyond the surface to see that the dot.com world is driven by and encourages materialism, greed, shallowness, isolation, and dependence.

The future is not a dot.com. So what is?

I say the future is growing a garden--a bigger one each year.
The future is driving a Volkswagen Van across the continent instead of working to make money to buy things I don't want and don't need--instead of paying off an astronomical mortgage for a crappy little stucco-sided house in the suburbs.
The future is spending more time with my wife than with my computer.
The future is real experience instead of digital experience.
The future is a life mediated through touch, smell, taste, sound and sight instead of flat-screen technology.
The future is sunsets on beaches instead of Flash movies.
The future is my own and not Microsoft's or Time-Warner-AOL's to control.
The future begins now.

By the time this article appears in *spark-online issue eleven, Darren C Anderson will have left his job, packed up the Van, and left town with his wife of six months in order to drive across the continent for an undefined period of time. He is one of the founding members of *spark-online.

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