The place is the CyberSalon - a monthly gathering of London's cyber-gentsia; only half a year young but already showing the first signs of disillusionment at the increasing formality borne of its own success.

The time is April 1998 ö in the cold dawn of a 'post-hype' internet culture. The speaker is Heath Bunting ö a pioneer net artist and techno-prankster ö who confidently tells the audience that the days of the internet's revolutionary potential are truly over. He suggests that the eco-economical time bomb of bio-technology could be the new site of radicalism. Obviously the odd degree in embryology wouldn't go amiss when volunteering one's interventionist services to the cause, but OK.

Heath Bunting is far from the only person to be calling time on the internet revolution. He is also joined by old-timers Geert Lovink and Pit Schultz, the founders and moderators of the nettime mailing list, where cyberologists daily run the gauntlet on this intellectually and politically high stakes discussion forum. In two recent postings on the nettime and eyebeam lists, they have both expressed the view that the days of 'the hype' or 'net.hype' are over and the age of what Lovink rather pointedly calls 'radical pragmatism' are upon us. Contrary to the incessant eulogising of the internet which most of us continue to experience through media and advertising, these two seasoned net.riot boys can only be referring to the demise of the communitarian aspirations of its early years which have steadily slipped into the out-of-control, free market rhetoric notoriously championed in Wired magazine. This ideological sell-out has been prompted by what Lovink calls the, "accelerated growth of the mediascape" coupled with the ineffectual attempts by nation states at regulation.

The up-shot is the depressingly moderate and fatally compromised climate former net radicals are finding themselves defeated by, characteristically forced to capitulate by escalating economic pressures. The fire of revolutionary zeal, which cast cyberspace as the domain in which renegades from the pervasive power vectors of off-line realities could conceive radically non-material(ist) alternative cultures and communities, has produced a bastard child: "The pseudo-democratic mass consumer panic of internet-for-all", in Schultz's terms. This brave new net has become what Schultz describes as, "the sleeping colossus of the collective body of the couch potatoes of all lands". As ever, the avant-garde and the masses tend not to mix....

But, regardless of the undoubted commercialisation which has changed the face of the net and brought that "short 'divine' time" from 95-97 to an end, 'radical pragmatism' has become the trope with which to paradoxically claim both the authentic radicality of those early years and the repetitious inevitability of history. This stance, far from falling into the obvious traps of revolutionary idealism, brings the chapter to a close and knowingly adjusts itself back to business-as-usual mode. It lets out a sigh of superior wisdom and claims to know what's in store for us because, being realistic, nothing has really changed has it? As Lovink concludes in his post,"perhaps there are not any fundamentally new aspects to the 'cybereconomy'. After all, business is business, and the same goes for politics, culture, the arts, and so on." But hold on, is all the revolutionary promise of the net really come to this? All those hopes and dreams in which such theorists played high profile roles just a childish daydream? Maybe not because, as we learn from Lovink, "The magic of (shared) communication in itself remains untouched by these developments. What counts are illusion and imagination, in whatever environment". So networked communication isn't really so different from a night's clubbing? Er, that's not quite it either; clearly there was something different about this internet business, and that does need to be protected because confusingly: "these fluid untamed elements are precisely what is endangered now."

Reading these posts I can feel a severe dose of world-weary pragmatism coming on myself, because we've repeatedly seen critics frame alternative or avant-garde culture in this way before. Critiques, such as Peter BŸrger's famous 70s tract, "Theory of the Avant-Garde", which distinguish an avant-garde whose transformative practice is deemed authentic and historically effective (the 'historical avant-garde' i.e. pre WW2) from the belated, redundant and repetitious gestures of the ensuing generations (the neo-avant garde i.e.post WW2). A distinction which condemns anything falling outside a synchronous enlightened pin-point in history to emptiness and insignificance (ah...those heady days of 95-97) . One which nostalgically romanticises a by-gone moment of radicality while refusing a similar possibility for contemporary culture and society. It seems that a similar sentiment, however steeped in self-conscious irony, underpins discussions of the brave new net and calls to either resign oneself to the inevitable or decamp to a new revolutionary address. Given that radical departures in media on the scale of the internet don't come along too often, it's hard to see where the next Arcadia is coming from.

Josephine Berry [josie@metamute.com]