Maclean's: the Internet sucks

Maclean's senior editor and national business columnist Steve Maich wrote a cover story.  (UPDATE 2006-10-25 I should mention for non-Canadians that Maclean's is a Canadian national news magazine, along the lines of Time or Newsweek. It is available at most any newstand here.  ENDUPDATE)  Let's see if you can figure out his opinion.

Cover: After all the hype, it's a trillion-dollar disappointment and a haven for cranks, liars and perverts.  The Internet Sucks.

(For some reason the cover is set with a Star Wars receeding-text effect.  What Star Wars has to do with Internet, I really can't figure out.)

Table of Contents: The Web Sucks.  Pirates, thieves, pedophiles and porn.  Where did the Internet, and its promise to improve our lives, go wrong?

Title (page 44): Pornography, gambling, lies, theft and terrorism: The Internet sucks (Where did we go wrong?)

I found the article rather bizarre.
It is a great source of eccentric opinions.

Robert Gordon, an economics professor at Northwestern University... The trouble with the Net, he says, it that is has produced precious little that is really new.  Just about everything that's available through the Web was available through other means before.  Email is fine, for instance, but it pales next to the achievement of the telegraph... The internal combustion engine, refrigeration, even air conditioning, had profound impacts on our lives... The Web does nothing of the sort.

Yeah, I can't tell you what a great boon the telegraph is in my life.
But wait, there's more

In 1995, the U.S. government's top copyright officer, Marybeth Peters, called the Internet "the world's biggest copying machine." ... Within a couple of years, however, the full force of the Web's assault on intellectual property rights would come into focus.
...
... illegal downloads ... continue to outnumber legal ones by a wide margin. 
...
The whole system of ascribing an economic value to works of art has been thrown out the window.

Now let's see, Maclean's proclaims itself "Canada's magazine of the year".  I tried to find a single mention of Canadian law, Internet use in Canada, any fricking mention of Canada whatsoever in this article.  Zip.  Zero.  Nada.  Oh wait, he does mention a Canadian-based infidelity site. 

For example, it might be useful to mention that I PAY A BLANK MEDIA LEVY, so the courts, you know those pesky things?  have currently ruled that downloading music in Canada is LEGAL. 

And what about the wooden wagon industry?  The whole system of ascribing economic value to horse-drawn carriages has been THROWN OUT THE WINDOW.

It is no surprise that the article is not available online, and there is no invitation at the end of the article to continue the discussion online.

I am really at a loss to understand this bizarre hatchet-job, particularly its "cover story" status.
He also uses this odd construction of "we", which means whatever group he wants it to mean.
Apparently "we" made a big, wasted investment in the Internet.  Gee, I knew I spent that billion dollars somewhere.

He concludes with

...you can't help but wonder, what else might we have done with all that time and money if we hadn't blown it on the Internet?

Err, no, *I* can't help but wonder what else might have been the Maclean's cover story, if we hadn't blown it on the ridiculous sucking Internet screed.

UPDATE 2006-10-26: I enjoyed the commentary on this article by Shane Schick of ITbusiness.ca

There’s an old adage that the Canadian market lags the rest of the world by about six to 18 months, but even for a weekly publication Maich’s feature story reads like something unearthed from a time capsule.

IT Business - Why Maclean's scathing state-of-the-Internet feature is so off the mark - October 23, 2006

UPDATE 2006-10-27: Thanks to commenter Steve Lawson for pointing out that the majestic misguidedness that is the article is now online.

UPDATE 2006-10-29: TVO's The Agenda had a debate (on October 25, 2006) about the article, including the author.  You can see the participants on the show page, and the video (for now anyway) is on the video page.  The segment is about half-way through the video.  The debate isn't in their podcast, which only has the feature story from The Agenda.

Comments

[Maxine]

Well I love the internet. And I am quite happy for my daughters to use it as much as they want, too. Yes, there are probably lots of rubbish things out there, and worse. Welcome to the world! But the creative activities you can do on the internet, thanks to all that wonderful free software that people have given, are just fantastic. And the ease with which one can find information -- well, I don't need to preach to the choir, but this guy is nuts from the sounds of it.

[Steve Lawson]

You might like the MetaFilter thread on this story (they found a link to the original story online, too).

[Ricardo Tabone]

Here is my letter to MacLean's

The Internet is much more than a haven for vices. The vices existed before: phone scams, stalking, gambling, etc. Out of curiosity, a Google search for "porn" yields 124,000,000 hits, while a search for "religion" yields 441,000,000. Now, which one worries you more?
People who use their brains for research and higher learning rely heavily on the Internet. We find our articles, manuscripts, books online, we communicate with our peers around the world almost instantly. We exchange ideas and collaborate on research. Of course, we could have done the same flying, sailing, or riding horses, but the Internet made it more practical. Moreover, consider what people who live away from family and friends can do. They can talk to their relatives and friends in distant places for a very small price. Smoke signals just don't cut it. Has the Internet gone wrong for these people?
In my view, the Internet is about empowerment. It's not about what "the Man" allows me to see.
It's all about what "I" choose to see.
By the way, I read this article online and replied by e-mail. If you lower the price of that ad magnet, I might buy it and if you fire up your telegraph, I might just send this again in morse code.

[Jordan]

Hey, thanks for this post. I read this article and thought the exact same things that you did. I'm glad that other people are believing the same thing that I am on this subject.

Cheers!