1. Access to information will be unlimited and universal. A modem and PC will be the rake and barrow of the cyber-yeoman.

2. The little guy will be equal to big guy. Technology will level the playing field.

3. Build a better browser and the world will beat a path to your door. Entrepreneurs can do battle with giants and prevail.

4. Society will divide into techno-haves and have-nots. Those not in the know will be servants of those who are.

5. The old laws will melt away in acknowledgment of their unenforceability in the cyber regions.

But lately these ideals have all been taking a beating.

First, the growth of the Internet, and even of computer sales generally, is finally slowing down. People who want to be on appear to be on, and people who aren't see that they haven't melted or been blasted by lightning, and see no need to join the rush.

The inevitable now appears to have been only a bubble. The computer industry is holding its breath, praying their products are not downgraded once again to fad status, hula hoops with I/O ports. Bubbles need to grow continuously or else they pop. Could the online world be just another bubble, like tulip bulbs and Arizona real estate? Ack!

Second, the big guys are taking over, just like they do in real life. I got a call a month ago from a TV producer making a show on the Web, who needed a writer. His show would focus on interesting web sites.

"I'm your man, then," I said. "I know lots of interesting places."

"Oh, we don't need that kind of knowledge," the producer said. "We're only going to highlight sites that pay for the exposure."

"But -- then you'll only be showing corporate sites, like Bank of America and Chrysler," I said.

"They told me you were quick," the producer replied.

Third, In this issue of PC Magazine, John Dvorak pronounces Netscape Navigator, the high-flying web browser, dead. Why? Because Dvorak met the CEO of Netscape wouldn't share a cab ride with him, and because Microsoft prefers not to let competitors live.

Conclusion: sell your Netscape stock, toot sweet.

Fourth, the have-nots are having the time of their lives. Not only is Weird Al Yankovic scoring big with his hit song "Amish Paradise," but the anti-techology crowd is buoyed up as one of their own, Ted "Unabomber" Kaczynski, was led away to jail while investigators in Montana pored through his 8x12 tin shack.

Last month a group called The Luddite Congress held its second annual meeting, in bustling downtown Barnsville, Ohio. In attendance was Kirkpatrick Sale, author of an excellent history of the Luddite uprising in England in 1811. Sale has carved a niche for himself as an anti-progress academic. He is given to saying things such as, "I find talking on the phone a physical pain, as well as a mental anguish." Sale and fellow neo-Luddites Wendell Berry have no illusions technology will go away any time soon, but they are convinced ours would be a better world without nasty things like computers, printing presses, and booster shots.

His book, Rebels Against the Future (Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, $13) was a minor hit last year in hardcover and has just been reissued in paperback. It tells the story of the weavers of the early Industrial Revolution who glimpsed the future of weaving machines and jacquard looms and went berserk, trashing the looms and shaking England to her foundation garments. Fourteen Luddites were hanged in Nottingham, but their truth goes marching on.

Fifth, Internetizens are still shaken from the effortless passage of James Exon's Telecommunications Reform Act of 1996, passed back in February. Language forbidding "lewd, lascivious, filthy, or indecent" imagery in cyberspace was appended to a major bill overhauling telecommunications law. Passage means that the sense people had that the net was a law to itself, untouchable by the tainted hands of older generations, was just an illusion.

You would not believe how badly some people are taking this defeat. Listen to the first paragraph of a manifesto penned by John Perry Barlow, cofounder of the Electronic Freedom Foundation:

"Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather."

Does that note have a familiar ring? Hint: Besides being a net guru, Barlow used to write lyrics for the Grateful Dead.

Turn back your hourglasses to another era, when rifle barrels sprouted flowers and an age of peace and happiness was dawning that would plow the killing fields into marijuana patches.

That never happened, either. For the babes of technology, the events of the past few weeks are the first setbacks they have ever experienced. A world in which their wisdom is the accepted wisdom may take a little longer to become reality than they expected.

When will they ever learn? When will they ever learn?

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