Douglas Rushkoff is down on the Internet:
I thought that it would change people. I thought it would allow us to build a new world through which we could model new behaviors, values, and relationships. In the 90's, I thought the experience of going online for the first time would change a person's consciousness as much as if they had dropped acid in the 60's.
… For now, at least, it's turned out to be different.
… The businesspeople running Facebook and MySpace are rivaled only by the members of these online “communities” in their willingness to surrender their identities and ideals for a buck, a click-through, or a better market valuation.
The open source ethos has been reinterpreted through the lens of corporatism as “crowd sourcing” — meaning just another way to get people to do work for no compensation.
… Sadly, cyberspace has become just another place to do business. The question is no longer how browsing the Internet changes the way we look at the world; it's which browser we'll be using to buy and sell stuff in the same old world.