by Clifford Stoll

About the author: Clifford Stoll is the author of Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway.

After two decades online, I’m perplexed. It’s not that I haven’t had a gas of a good time on the Internet. I’ve met great people and even caught a hacker or two. But today I’m uneasy about this most trendy and oversold community. Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.

Computer Hype vs. Reality

Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth is no online database...