A typical Snubbite is upper-middle class and very possibly Ivy League. Snubbites could afford computer and Internet connections—or more likely enjoyed them at others’ expense—years before average people were even allowed on the Net. Often Snubbites live near large libraries or can catch up with books easily enough in other ways. Snubbites may have already used the Net to help stock up on their quota of friends and professional contacts. Most Snubbites are harmless and even charmingly eccentric; they worry me only when they start confusing their own needs and non-needs with those of society at large. Cliff Stoll himself is very much on the Internet (“I still love my networked community”) even now; to this day, I suspect, he truly enjoys seeing people home-brew their own machines. But in stretches of his book he could almost be mistaken for a Snubbite anyway, based on sheer fervor. “It is an overpromoted, hollow world, devoid of warmth and human kindness,” Stoll writes of cyberspace, and goes on to say that nets address “few social needs or business concerns” and threaten “precious parts of our society, including schools, libraries, and social institutions.” He complains, “No birds sing.” Have I been hallucinating? The Internet isn’t Woodstock, the Vatican, or an aviary, but it is bringing together people for religion, education, business, love, and suicide prevention. Just what is Stoll writing about? Does the Net have an evil twin? Jews, Moslems, Lutherans, and Catholics—they are all using the Net to exchange prayers or electronic newsletters. Up in Canada an Anglican priest will even take confessions via e-mail. I doubt he’d agree with the author of _Snake Oil_. Nor, I suspect, would the members of Walkers in Darkness. Walkers is a mailing list for people with chronic depression, and each week more than 300 messages whiz across the Net from Australia to Israel, from South Africa to California. I’m not depressed, but someone close to me is, and she spends hour after hour with her laptop, gazing at the blue-and-white on the screen, reading scores of messages, keeping up with the gossip about people and drugs, wondering what she would do without her Net connection. Being depressed is like kayaking or hang gliding: You won’t die immediately if you skip the homework, but in a pinch you’ll stand a much better chance if you’ve gone far beyond the basics. Walkers is in the grand tradition of the Net. Its members don’t blindingly trust authority figures—their own shrinks—and they are reaching out to other patients and to an online psychiatrist. Tell us, Ivan, some Walkers ask, is Parnate as good a drug as it’s cracked up to be? What about Nardil? Can you take it without your body swelling up?