This all happens on my Internet—anyway the one I’ll describe here. Let me offer an inevitable caveat, however: The Net is too vast for one writer to cover everything. So I won’t bother with Internet Relay Chat, where you instantly see the other people’s typing. As a temporary habitué of these regions, J. C. Hertz started to regard the Internet as “a Sartrean hell—too many people talking at one time.”[1.7] Yes! Net chat brings Hemingwayesque accounts from witnesses to Japanese earthquakes or Russian coups, and I’m happy it’s around for the aficionados, especially net.lovers, who can retreat to their own private channels; but I myself favor electronic mail and newsgroups, which I can read on my own terms without parrying incessantly with dyspeptic strangers half a planet removed. I promise, dear readers: I’ll inflict nary a chat transcript on you. Certain omissions, however, really pain me. Given more time, I’d have loved to cover the growth of the community network movement. For free, in many cities, you can open up an Internet account and tap into electronic libraries all over the world or receive electronic mail. Best of all, “communets” can bring communities together. The Net is one of the big lures to get people online, but once there, they may be able to fetch the schedule of their local public radio stations, find out about local charities, and talk back electronically to officials of city halls. What’s fascinating is the resemblance between these local nets and the Net at large. People on both would rather chat with other citizens than swap e-mail with the politicians or other celebrities. And why not? Communets are communities, just as the Net, serving so many interests, is a _series_ of communities. Alas, Stoll does not appreciate the possibilities here. Stoll is an astronomer, not just a hacker, and his makes me feel as if he is using a scratchy pair of binoculars to look for life on Mars. Fixated on negatives, he has downplayed even the obvious: the Net equivalent of Martian mountains. Has Stoll dropped by alt.music.chapel-hill, or rec.arts.dance, or alt.christnet.christianlife, or the Dallas Virtual Jewish Community Center Home Page, or the American Ireland Fund, or the Voter Education Project? And how about the thousands of other Web pages in which individual Netfolks can share with the world their love of families and pets, or gardening, or , or old Chevies, or whatever else they enjoy, at or away from their computers? Item by item, those are tiny, almost invisible slices of Netlife; but en masse, they rise up as mountains. Yes, yes, sex _areas_ thrive on the Internet. But it is that way offline, too; do snack-food stores turn millions each year off Chaucer or _Playboy_? Of course Chaucer himself could be randy at times, as could Shakespeare and Joyce and hundreds of other literary greats—an inconvenient fact for the American ayatollahs who hope to censor the Net.