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The Internet Gets the Bomb
Weâll try to stay serene and calm, when Alabama gets the bomb.
âTom Lehrer, âWhoâs Next?â
Can you catch a virus from your computer?
That used to be one of those questions a technical support person would tell you about to make you understand how little the people they dealt with knew about the computers they were trying to use. But in August 1999, this was the headline on a Reuters story that got picked up by everyone from ABC News to Nando Net: âSyphilis Outbreak Traced to Chat Room.â1 In fact, the story was that a number of men diagnosed with syphilis had met their last sexual contacts in a gay America Online chat room (confusing AOL with the Internet yet again). This story fails the âphone testâ some of my editors like to use: if you substitute a telephone for the Internet, would it still be a story? The one aspect of the story that didnât fail the test was the privacy question: Should AOL protect the identities of the men using the chat room as public health officials tried to trace and alert contacts? In the end, staff from the online gay and lesbian community service PlanetOut spent a couple of weeks visiting the chat room and posting warnings. Another interesting follow-up that didnât get much play offline was the story that the publicity made the chat roomâs users targets of hate email.
There is barely a human disaster story of the last five years that hasnât been blamed on the Internet for at least the first day or two. The Heavenâs Gate UFO cultâs group suicide: one of their number first researched the group via its Web site. The school shootings in Littleton, Colorado: those kids played Doom and used the Internet. Naturally, itâs the experience of shooting things on-screen in Doom that flipped them over the edge, rather than the ready availability of guns.
This is, of course, not peculiar to the Internet. Every new technology is societyâs prime demon for a while. Whatâs maddening is that itâs so inconsistent. One day, kids are logging on to learn how to blow up their teachers; the next, wiring every classroom to the Internet is going to solve all our educational problems. One year, Oprah is claiming that 90 percent of the time people arenât who they say they are online (nonsense); the next, sheâs sympathetic to the cause of free speech when a couple of women get fired for posting nude pictures of themselves on the Web. One day, NBC News is warning of the prevalence of dangerous medical misinformation on the Net; the next, itâs telling people to research online to protect themselves against doctorsâ mistakes. Like the media-friendly serial killer Mickey Knox said in Natural Born Killers, âMedia is like the weatherâonly itâs man-made weather.â
All subcultures, as large parts of the Net still are, tend to feel misunderstood by the rest of the world. When I was on the folk scene, a lot of people thought âthe mediaâ failed to appreciate any music that wasnât slick, commercial, and heavily hyped. Among skeptics, itâs accepted wisdom that âthe mediaâ prefer the sensational story of a paranormal claim to the more sober, rational truth that usually emerges if you investigate carefully enough. Many newspapers, for example, ran the story in early July 1999 about Nostradamusâs prediction that the world would end on July 4. So for geeks and Net-heads to feel misunderstood and sensationalized is not surprising. Whatâs funny is realizing that even after ten years as a journalist, for me the media are still always âthem.â
On the other hand, there is a reason why the 1998 Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference had a panel entitled âWhat Have the Media Been Smoking?â Trivial, stupid, and just plain wrong stories make the rounds, as if all the media were in lock-step. Why did every outlet have to cover Nostradamus, anyway? The manâs been dead for five hundred years. Didnât anybody think it was ridiculous to write a story about the world ending on July 4 while planning the July 5 edition? What follows is a small sample of the more popular Internet stories of 1998 and 1999.
Spies under threat. In July 1999 the news broke that the names and addresses of 115 members of the MI6, Britainâs secret service, had been posted on the Net. The media were alerted to the story by the Department of Defence, which sent out a notice asking newspaper editors not to publish the Web address where the information was posted. This provided good fodder for conspiracy theorists. One would think that in the event life-threatening information was leaked, the logical first move would be to move the endangered people, then alert the media. Since MI6 didnât do this, the natural conclusion was that they must have had an ulterior motive. Until the spooks had alerted everyone to the listâs existence, few people knew it was out there. Found on the Lyndon LaRouche Web site, it was then posted to Usenet, where it could have gone extensively ignored for years.2 Since weâre supposed to think MI6 is made up of smart people, the logical conclusion was that they had acted deliberately to ensure maximum coverage. This way, the next time someone official wanted the Internet regulated, the evidence that it was necessary would be ready to hand. Said one newspaper editor at the time, âThere is no free speech issue here. This is putting peopleâs lives in danger.â
Day trading. A persistent theme throughout 1999 was online day trading: why itâs gambling, why small investors do better by buying and holding, and how it contributed to (Newsweek, ABC News) or was irrelevant to (Time) the state of mind that led day trader Mark Barton to shoot thirteen people and himself in Atlanta on July 27.3 Related stories included the widely reported University of California at Davis study that showed that even experienced traders tended to perform less well when they moved from phone-based trading via a broker to trading online,4 as well as the scare stories that most day traders lose all their money in six months, where the Securities and Exchange Commissionâs alert to investors merely warned that most day traders suffer severe financial losses and never recoup them. What the stories never mentioned is that day trading is a minority phenomenon. An August 1999 report from the North American Securities Administrators Association quoted estimates from the Electronic Traders Association that only about 4,000 to 5,000 people trade full-time through day trading brokerages.5 However, those traders make 150,000 to 200,000 trades per day and account for nearly 15 percent of NASDAQ volume.
Overactive trading used to be a problem with unscrupulous brokers, who preyed on inexperienced investors by âchurningâ their portfolios. While the broker racked up commissions, your assets generally shrank. A Cornell study explained the poor performance of short-term traders: they sell their winners and pay multiple commissions plus capital gains tax.6
âI have no doubt this craze is only momentary. The poor economics of active day trading cannot support its sustained, widespread use,â Thomas Gardner, co-founder of the financial Web site Motley Fool, told a congressional subcommittee in early 1999.7
Internet addiction. Itâs always fun to show that people who spend a lot of time online or using computers are poorly socialized, pathetic, lonely, depressed people with no lives. Kimberly S. Young and her 1998 book Caught in the Net played right into this sweet spot with case studies of Internet addicts, pretty much all of whom had other very serious problems such as failed marriages, alcoholism, or drug abuse before getting online. On Youngâs checklist for determining whether youâre addicted, I score just inside the category of people who have a problem, because you get points for spending many hours online, even if itâs for work, and also for forming relationships with people you meet onlineâlike thatâs a bad thing.
These stories were particularly galling to users of the Internet. The implication is that if you are one of the millions of people who spend time online connecting with other human beings who may become real-life friends, youâre pathetic. But after the August 1998 death of Diana, Princess of Wales, when thousands of people stood on line in the rain for fifteen hours to sign books of condolences that no one will ever read and cried over someone theyâd never metâthat was portrayed as a healthy release of genuine emotion. And weâre supposed to be the ones having the fantasy relationships?
Internet-related depression. A Carnegie-Mellon study showed that people using the Internet for as little as a few hours a month were more depressed than they were before they got online.8 To be fair, this was a $1.5 million study sponsored by companies like Hewlett-Packard and AT&T and carried out by scientists Robert Kraut and Sara Kiesler, who have turned out good, carefully conducted work on the nature of online interactions. In the New York Times story on the study, researchers, sponsoring organizations, and even the subjects all said they were surprised by the results. However, several standard elements were missing from the study, notably random selection (the subjects chosen were all teens lacking PCs and Internet access of their own), regular follow-ups (the teensâ state of mind was measured only at the beginning and end of the study) and, especially, a control group. The work needs to be replicated by other researchers. However, it did appear in the peer-reviewed journal The American Psychologist.9 Nonetheless, the studyâs conclusionâthat the Internet needs to be redesigned to prevent depressionâstruck a lot of people as absurd, and even under the studyâs findings youâd have to spend an awful lot of time online to get significantly depressed.
The strange career of Matt Drudge. Matt Drudge became the poster boy for Internet stardom in 1997, when he made headlines by getting sued by White House aide Sidney Blumenthal over a story he didnât check out carefully enough before posting it on his Web site and emailing it to his estimated 60,000 readers. Although professional journalists love to despise Drudgeâheâs pointed to as the worst example of all thatâs wrong with Internet journalismâhis Web site, where he maintains a complete list of links to all of Americaâs syndicated columnists plus little search engines for the main news wires, is actually very useful.10
Supermodelsâ eggs. Shock! Horror! Designer babies! Despicable trading in human life! Someone set up a Web site to sell supermodelsâ eggs to would-be parents! This is a case where itâs not the disreputable media we have to worry about most, itâs the reputable media. The selling-supermodelsâ-eggs-on-the-Web story appeared first, according to Britainâs wonderfully sarcastic and net-savvy Need to Know (Now) ezine (NTK for short), in the New York Times, from where it made the rounds of almost every respectable print or broadcast publication. As NTK put it,
A story like that is fit to print whether itâs true or not, so maybe itâs understandable that the Timesâ journalists didnât bother to look too closely at the RONSANGELS.COMâS [the site advertising the eggs] credentials: like, for example, the fact that the site invited potential fathers to pay $24.95 a month to look at âlarger picturesâ of said models. Or that RONSAN-GELSâ sister sites included eroticboxoffice.com and the Creative Nude Network. Without getting too distasteful about it, it looks like RONSAN-GELSâ ovary play was rather more intent on re-directing sperm than distributing eggs.11
Of course, the media are not the only people reacting irrationally to the Internet. Senator Dianne Feinsteinâs (D-CA) instinctive reaction to the Oklahoma City bombing was: Get those bomb recipes off the Net.12 All right, we all know that in the immediate wake of a disaster peopleâs reactions arenât always saneâfirst theories of the Oklahoma City bomb involved Iraqi terrorists, a theory that evaporated as soon as you remembered that people outside the United States have barely ever heard of the place. The danger, however, is not the availability of bomb-making information on the Internet, but the availability of the necessary ingredients off the Internet. To put Feinsteinâs panic into context, it might be worth remembering the story of David Hahn, the New York State Boy Scout who in 1995 was caught building a breeder reactor in his motherâs potting shed. Hahn assembled all the materials and information he needed without known assistance from the Net. Hackerlike, he wrote to a variety of officials and companies posing as a teacher.13
Hacking is also relevant to the Internet addiction story, because the concept probably began as a defense in a hacker case. In Kevin Mitnickâs first trial, in 1988, his lawyer successfully argued that Mitnick was addicted to computing as a way of explaining his clientâs obsession with hacking into a variety of large computers. Mitnick was sentenced to a year in jail, followed by six months in a rehabilitation program modeled on Alcoholics Anonymousâs twelve steps.14 In a similar case in Britain in 1993, Paul Bedworth was acquitted after copying this defense. Not everyone bought the defenseâs contention that Bedworth was addicted; as security consultant Robert Schifreen quipped at the time, âI feel an addiction to bank robbing coming on.â15
Whether it was a reasonable defense or not, some people do get obsessive about playing with computers or the Internet. In her 1995 book Life on the Screen, MIT psychologist Sherry Turkle examines several cases of college students who seemed addicted to online interactive fantasy games known as MUDs (for âmulti-user dungeonsâ) but in fact used (or attempted to use) them as a way of working through personal troubles. One of the students turned down social gatherings to work on the MUD where he had administrative responsibilities. In his case, however, working on the computer meant he didnât continue a lifestyle of drinking and partying that he believed was leading him into alcoholism.16
In 1996, New York psychologist Ivan K. Goldberg coined the term âInternet Addiction Disorderâ as a joke and wrote up a set of symptoms as a parody of DSM-IV, the diagnostic classification system used for psychiatric illnesses including conditions such as compulsive gambling and drug addiction.17 Goldberg, who specializes in treating people with various types of mood disorders and runs a support Web site for people with depression,18 extended the joke by starting an online support group for Internet addicts, sort of the equivalent of holding an AA meeting in a bar.
Ever since, joke lists of symptoms have proliferated all over the Net: stopping and checking your email on your way back to bed after getting up at 3 A.M. to go to the bathroom (done that one); trying to connect to the Internet by dialing your service providerâs phone number and humming to the modem; succeeding in connecting that way. Goldberg himself has said that if there is a disorder connected with Internet overuse it would be fairer to compare it to compulsive gambling than to addiction, which implies the ingestion of a substance.
Nonetheless, the idea took rootâthatâs the most dangerous side of hoaxesâand since then a few researchers have attempted to study Internet addiction with a view to determining how big a problem it might be. Kimberley S. Young, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Pittsburgh and founder of the Center for Online Addiction, is the most visible of these researchers. Youngâs interest is clearly in finding a problem of major proportions, and she has: in a survey of 496 Internet users responding to online and offline ads for âavid Internet users,â she identified 396 (157 men and 239 women) as Internet addicts. Her Web site offers personal counseling for addicts starting at $30 for an email consultation. âWe had been ignoring the dark side of cyberspace,â she writes in her 1998 book, apparently oblivious to the fact that easily half of all Internet coverage focuses on some kind of âdark sideâ of the Internet.
Youngâs findings sound impressive at first glance, but the studyâs self-selected sample population inevitably skews its results. The survey says nothing about what percentage of the worldâs estimated 100 million Internet users might have a problem. By contrast, Nottingham Trent Universityâs Mark Griffiths, a specialist in non-substance addiction, says that of the thirty-five to forty cases that have come his way he would class only four as addicts. âI think Internet addiction exists,â says Griffiths, âbut itâs a very small problem.â Apart from anything else, the Internet isnât a single entity. Instead, itâs a medium that supports many kinds of interactions. He believes only the real-time facilities, like ...