Is the Internet a bad, bad boy?

San Francisco's anti-growth Proposition L is an unnecessarily harsh referendum on the merits of the new economy.

By Damien Cave

Nov 6, 2000 | Four hundred black-clad San Franciscans are marching to City Hall on a sunny Saturday afternoon. They're mourning the death of the arts and demanding that government punish the Internet economy that killed it. Never mind that a good number of them work for these murderous dot-coms (the term now used across the United States to deride all forms of high-tech business). Or that the Internet does have its good points, especially e-mail, which is how most of them learned about the mock funeral procession. It's just not enough, they argue. The benefits do not outweigh the costs. The Internet has brought sky-high rents, gentrification, thousands of evictions and sent the price of sushi through the roof. The message of the protest is clear: We'd all be better off without it.

"[The Internet] hasn't made the world a better place," says Debra Walker, an organizer of the day's event. "It's just a vehicle for capitalization, a pyramid scheme. A few people have made a lot of money and the rest of us haven't and won't."

Given a choice, says Susan Lofthouse, 36, a theater technician who has lived in San Francisco since 1985, "I'd choose the arts over the new economy. I liked things the way they were."

She's hardly alone. The Internet, once the darling of Northern California, is now an almost malign presence. Few people recall how the Internet boom helped pull California, and possibly the world, out of a disastrous recession. The new economy is no longer a savior. Instead, as one protesting musician put it, it's "a bad, bad boy that needs to be punished."

San Francisco represents the physical heart of the anti-dot-com movement -- on Tuesday, the city's voters will decide whether or not to approve "Proposition L," one of the most extreme anti-growth ballot initiatives in San Francisco history, but the debate over the worth of the Internet is now a national phenomenon. Full page ads attacking the Internet and the high-tech economy appear regularly in the New York Times. Dot-com excesses have become a national symbol for ludicrously out-of-control capitalism.

Gentrification fears fuel the fervor. There are 33 development-related questions on ballots in 17 states, according to the Sprawl Watch Clearinghouse in Washington, which tracks land-use policies. Capturing the collective mood perfectly, an Oct. 23 San Francisco Chronicle story reported that cities in once-friendly Silicon Valley were "closing ranks in a simmering battle against dot-coms that swarmed into once sleepy downtowns." Even Palo Alto, home of Stanford University and Xerox PARC, has turned on its kin, enacting an emergency ordinance in late October that bans companies from street-level retail spaces.

But the battle over gentrification is, in some ways, just a surface skirmish obscuring a more fundamental clash -- a struggle over the merits of technological progress itself.

Americans have always had a love-hate affair with technology. Ever since Eli Whitney memorized plans for the cotton gin and brought them to U.S. shores, Americans have struggled with whether the sociocultural changes wrought by new technologies are to be ultimately appreciated or denounced. The Net, despite its revolutionary nature, appears to be no exception. Like electricity, nuclear power, the automobile, airplanes and television before it, the Internet inspires both love and hate.

What's so interesting about today's incarnation of American techno-schizophrenia is, first, how fast love turned into hate -- after all, it really wasn't that long ago that the "empowering" and "democratic" possibilities of the Internet were being endlessly hyped in every cafe from San Jose to Sonoma. And second, how the two sides in the current debate in San Francisco -- the anti-growth protesters whose civic strength draws on a long and proud history of local progressive politics, and the dot-com boosters who are convinced that they are single-handedly ushering in a new economic golden age -- are intimately connected.

The computer culture and the counterculture grow from the same soil in the Bay Area. Dot-commers are just as much an organic outgrowth of local conditions as are the half-naked bands of tribal drummers that, given the slightest excuse, roam down Market Street in broad daylight. If one side devours the other -- if, for example, venture capital greed snuffs out art and culture, or crusading activists strangle new economy growth, San Francisco, and by extension the world, will be all the poorer.

Next Page: Why won't whiny preservations shut up?

• View blog reactions