O glorious Internet. Pathless frontierland of freedom. Maybe destined to be a Disneyland "land" someday--Internetland, between Tomorrowland and Tom Sawyer's Island. Infinite Porn subterranean ride over here; over there, the Surf the Lunatic Fringe ride.

There's a topic on the Well's Mirrorshades conference, titled something like, "They had to go to the Internet to be free". (That's not exactly it; I don't want to name it precisely). Yes the delicious freedom of the Internet. The freedom, for example, to harass saintly single-mothers working in their free time for the benefit of the public. Maybe you read in the papers, recently, about the woman in the Northeast U.S. who was working to change laws that allowed Real Estate developers to exclude blacks--a racist, Neo-nazi website posted her picture and name and whereabouts as part of a WANTED poster. Wanted, they said, for treason against the white race. The harassment began. Death threats, hundreds of threatening, obscene phone calls at all hours, prowlers, real danger to her life. She pulled up stakes and fled the state--they found her and ran a picture of her being blown up with a bomb. Information about her was traded from site to site and by email to legions of racist morons who thrive on the web…She's had to move again and again and again, and still they find her, and still they stalk her. Yes a glowing real-life testimonial to the power of the Internet.

A friend was recently offered a job at a new site that's to be a public offering; you can buy stock in it. I won't mention any names, or the name of the site, because my friend signed a non-disclosure form, but the site is essentially a New Age "advice" service. It sells--that's "sells", not gives away--advice about spirituality, in general and individually-tailored, partly through a crew of "spiritual sensitives" aka "psychics" and "channellers" who'll tell you how to run your life for a fee, though they know nothing about you except your email address (to which, of course, they'll send New Age product spam). The prospectus for the site pointed out to investors the MANY MILLIONS OF DOLLARS made by PSYCHIC HOTLINES, especially in California.

(Quick aside--why is it illegal to defraud people by selling them bogus 'cancer cures' but it's okay to defraud people by selling them bogus 'psychic' advice over the phone? Why are psychic hotlines, on phone or Internet, staffed and promoted by con artists, legal at all?)

The prospectus asked: If those MANY MILLIONS OF DOLLARS could be made by "psychics" via telephone, why not make that kind of money by the internet too? But ultimately, the site creators asserted, the site is for the SPIRITUAL BETTERMENT of mankind…

I mean, hey, when a man makes a million dollars, it really bucks up his spirit.

The point? The Internet is delightfully open--but so are the legs of a slut.

People are only just beginning to understand that "because it's on the Internet it's true" isn't true.

For a great example of the ludicrous misuse of the Internet, (I'll take a chance on promoting something I disapprove of here, because it's already so popular it doesn't matter…millions of hits…) go to www.sightings.com. Not long after the Columbine tragedy they ran a series of 'articles' suggesting that someone had spotted a United Nations truck in news footage of Columbine, and they hinted that the U.N. had somehow deliberately created the Columbine Massacre in order to test its ability to create chaos (or some equally inane, wildly improbable purpose), in the USA as part of its Evil Plan to crush the USA under the heel of the New World Order. This is one of the most irresponsible, downright cruel items I've seen on the Internet--but it's not atypical of www.sightings.com. During the bombing of Kosovo they ran propaganda that came directly from the Serbs, from Milosovec, suggesting that the USA was deliberately targeting civilians with cluster bombs. This site is hugely popular. You'd think this kind of pseudo information appearing amid a breathtakingly non-selective plethora of pieces about UFOs, Roswell, reptilian-alien-underground-bases, and the like, would make people doubt its veracity. But…no, it's on the Internet. It must be true.

I was taking a walk in my own neighborhood when I heard a middle-aged gentleman talking to a retired military man, an elderly gentleman. Middle-aged pointed to a simple grid of USAF jet contrails overhead and said, "You know what that is? That grid pattern means that military intelligence is testing biological warfare stuff on us here--it's mixed in the exhaust, see. Why else do they fly in that grid pattern?"

The older man said he was a retired USAF man and he said that the grid pattern represented a training program having to do with search patterns, and was well familiar to him.

The middle-aged man, spraying spittle, his eyes wild, said, "Hey--I'm telling you what it really is. I saw it on the Internet--they got all kinds of documentation…"

I stepped up and asked what site he'd seen this at. Guess which one…

And the Internet is being ridiculously over-touted, by Al Gore among others, as a wonderful learning tool--as an educational device. Well yeah, if you're a kid who wants to see what anal sex looks like. Then it's educational. But when my kids use the Internet to help them with their schoolwork, their tendency is to do a search about the subject matter assigned, then to copy out some relevant pictures and the invariably superficial information about the subject they locate on the web. If they stumble across an Encyclopedia Britannica Online entry, which will go on at some length, they'll pass over that and search further for something brief, superficial, easy to absorb--because that's the way everyone absorbs information on the web. They browse, they graze here and there--but they almost never read in depth.

So I'd better end this column right here--don't you think?

And just conclude by saying that, yes, it would be a damned shame to limit access to the Internet--to choke off the good because of the bad. It's something we just can't do. So in place of that we need to enter the web with a skeptical attitude, with wariness--like pioneers entering a real frontier, wary of hostile Comanches, bands of outlaws, blistering deserts, poisoned waterholes, scorpions and wolves…

Copyright © 2000 John Shirley All Rights Reserved

John Shirley is the award winning author of Black Butterflies, Wetbones, "Really Really Really Really Weird Stories", and Eclipse, among many others. Eclipse, the first book of his cyberpunk trilogy, has just been reissued, revised and updated, by Babbage Press, www.babbagepress.com

Check out the official authorized John Shirley Website at:

www.darkecho.com/johnshirley