Rumour has it that we are now experiencing a cyber-comedown; the hype about the rosy democratic future imbued by the internet is over. Cyber-libertarians are left with a feeling of betrayal that the net hasn't lived up to those early dreams, and nostalgia about the net grassroots culture we have lost.

But such sentiments as these display all that is wrong with the current paradigm for perceiving and discussing the net. In short don't believe the hype, the comedown is not innocent. The mourning keeps one from finding parallels between the hype and the comedown; it effaces the shortcomings of the hype and how these are prevalent in the comedown. We are called on to sympathise and not to blame those in mourning for these shortcomings. Unfortunately, nostalgia legitimates complacency, and the sense of betrayal disposes with any sense of guilt. Not least because talking of a comedown is somewhat of an insult for those who have not yet been on-line.

If you need convincing that the hype is not yet over for everyone, read the last copy of Wired. The feeling of comedown obscures the connections between two essential characteristics of the neo-liberal ideology and the fate of the internet: anti-statism and free marketeering. The former is manifested in a obsession with the freedom of speech, cherished by the Clinton administration and flirted with by the Blairites. The latter has convinced society that the internet is an efficient economy of abundance.

What this has left out of the agenda are of course the issues of egalitarianism, structuration, representation, diversity, cultural pluralism and heterogeneity. Hype and comedown silence these issues ö the first through neo-liberal, technologically deterministic free-market aggression and the latter because mourning suspends responsibility. The important thing is not how much this leaves out of the agenda but how the net has become a way to legitimise a particular agenda. How it is the symbol for the agenda itself. A prime example of which is the failure by all net analysts and writers to question the theoretical and political validity of introducing electronic commerce into something which is a communications medium.

This is a call for a paradigmatic shift in the way we conceptualise the internet. Authority, power, regulation, social structures, media industries, the rational subject, the nation state, cultural capital and geo-power cannot be made redundant by any technology whatever its alleged inherent decentralising qualities may be. Anybody that thinks otherwise is a technological determinist. We make technology and the socio-political legislative policy to go with it. Important decisions are being made about the future of the internet, policies are being implemented and saying that they should not be made does not change the fact they are. In the US, the existence of the Telecommunication Act, the GII and the Electronic Commerce Initiative help euphemise deregulation and support minimum government intervention.

Democracy has always been about difficult choices that anti-statism supposedly avoids; the problem of direct democracy has always been its inability to make those choices. The comedown has paralysed everybody into this pathetic position of resignation; particularly bad tempered Digerati who once dreamt about not having to make choices. A public service internet could facilitate an environment in which those now absent issues can form the platform for problematising the future of the Net.

Korinna Patelis [cop02kp@gold.ac.uk]