Hollywood is gambling on a movie called _The Net_, and _Time_ and _Newsweek_ have done several cover stories. Could the _Time_ curse be at work here? Is everything else downhill, now that the Net has landed on The Cover? Not if you go by the stats. Internet demographers love to squabble about the exact number of people on the Internet, but at the very least, some 25-30 million can reach it by way of electronic mail; and in a few years, if the braver prophets are right, hundreds of millions may be wired in. For the snobs, of course, the old cachet is gone. A humor columnist says the Net is like citizens band radio with typing. Is the Internet, then, about to become a 500,000-channel wasteland? Just what are all these millions _really_ doing on the Net? Some politicians would have you think that a disturbing number of Netfolks are busy corrupting the morals of minors, and shouldn’t we ban smut from the public areas of cyberspace? And if you believe some American security bureaucrats, the Net might turn out to be a haven for spies and dope dealers. “Shouldn’t Washington,” they more or less ask, “be able to snoop on pervs and subversives who scramble their messages?” The counterrevolution has begun, and I feel grouchy. Everyone is trying to reinvent the Internet in his or her own image, even if, with these changes, the Net would no longer be the Net. What’s really pathetic is the ignorance of the would-be meddlers. Censoring the Net would be about as successful as trying to dam the Pacific. The same decentralization that made the Net more nuke-resistant, in the Cold War days, makes it harder to control. And how can Washington sell the Net on Fed-friendly chips for coded messages when scores of powerful encryption products are on sale in Russia and the rest of Europe? At the same time, certain writers are now attacking the Internet as Cold and Heartless, or for other sins; some are even Pulling the Plug, at least temporarily, to protect their delicate brains against Information Overload. “Don’t make me go back!” J. C. Hertz recalls telling her editors when they wanted her to log back on the Net to wind down a book called _Surfing the Internet_. “Please, don’t make me go back there.” Stephen L. Talbott, a computer editor and author of _The Future Does Not Compute_, proclaims that he “immediately felt very good” when he Unplugged. Bill Henderson of the Push Cart Press says he’ll publish a book with “cries from the heart about what electronics has done to people.”[1.1] Perhaps a new literary genre is aborning—that of the Snubbites, the new Luddites[1.2] who feel all Netted Up. The definition might go something like this: _Snubbite:—n. One who, partly out of snobbery, partly out of boredom, partly out of sheer contrariness, snubs the computer technology that could help millions of others._