So over at Hugh's blog I just left a snarky rejoinder to his posting of this handy little slide-show-of-negativity internetishsit an uber hipper-then-thou statement of disillusionment with the promise of new media.

Just in case you don't believe the hipness, I would draw you attention to the purple background. Purple is/was the hip colour of fall winter 2007/08 check out the H&M catalogue if you still aren't convinced.

So what makes me so full of hate for the little shit piece there?

What I basically take exception to is outlined as a chronology to help us all comprehend:

1992 - 2000 : Development of internets largely though not entirely a misunderstood phenom, use of words like information superhighway and virtual reality and cyberspace. E-commerce becomes new wave of future capitalism, general lack of understanding of what e-commerce signifies.

2000- 2003: CRASH! (In more ways than one, as the towers fall at this point too, leading to a giant spiritual cavern in the souls of most westerners, but esp: those that believed wholeheartedly in the logic of the free market and the ultimate perfectability of the western way of life. This is important but I'll get to it later.) Suddenly Western style capitalism is brought face to screeching face with the world on the other sides of the oceans. It's amazing the west didn't notice the starving hate-filled hordes earlier, but then again, maybe they did notice but didn't really think anyone would get up the guts to do anything?

2003 - 2005: The internets live again! This time, the flow of traffic is much more bi-directional as Joe-user has an easier time putting their thoughts feelings and opinions out into the (web-accessible and onscreen) world at large. Web 2.0 quickly becomes about more then just literacy or connectivity. The spiritual vacuum left by 9/11 is replaced by belief in a new tool to promote global understanding and even perhaps a new definition of citizenship and responsibility not tied to the (now comparatively dangerous) nation-state as previously understood. With Web2.0 we are all digital citizens and we can make global alliances and form communities of practice and maximize our innately good human capacity to transform the world from being the violent scary place it has become to a more halcyon reality, kind like the salons of the 17th century, or a Greek agora.

2005 - 2007: IT'S NOT WORKING! We're still at war(s), people still treat each other like crap, I still get frisked like there's no tomorrow at the airport, the gap between rich and poor is growing and there is little sense that by publishing this blog piece I am going to manifestly change any of the above issues. Also I still only speak and read English so if there is a giant global community forming, and I don't know Spanish, French, Parsi, Chinese or Russian I basically have no clue what's going on anyways.

THIS IS CLEARLY THE TECHNOLOGIES FAULT. OR WORSE YET IT'S BECAUSE NO-ONE IS USING THE TECHNOLOGY TO MAKE GOOD STUFF!

Ahem.. I would like to propose that a fundamental shift needs to take place because I never want to hear/read another "why the internets failed" type post again.

#1/ The internets haven't failed anyone yet. They haven't been deployed to 100% capacity, but they certainly haven't failed. Internets are a very fancy pencil, since when did a pencil ever fundamentally let anyone down (unless the lead gets shattered and the tip falls out again and again which is annoying) ?

#2/ If a group of technocrats and pundits make ideological predictions about what a given tool will do to a culture and more surprisingly to a global population, and it turns out their predictions were wrong (which is less surprising given the breadth of their assumed predictive capacity). It is the technocrats and pundits who have failed, not to the tools and not the populations.

Let's stop talking in extremes, if we swing the pendulum all the way back to saying the internets are not working then we will have learned absolutely nothing and we will also be ignoring the several interesting and important ways that web technologies can and do contribute to human progress.