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What is new is the promiscuous pooling of knowledge that previously existed only in tiny, discrete pockets, and the force that comes when disparate individuals are able to discover their common interests and work together. The best example of this is the story of Scientology versus the Net (see chapter 6), where threaded through in-fighting, viciousness, and some sheer stupidity is a serious attempt to build, piece by piece, a multinational knowledge base about a large, multinational, well-funded, and relatively secretive organization that some people believe to be truly dangerous. Whether the Net's activities, which the Church of Scientology claims violate its intellectual property rights, are legal or not will be settled by courts of law. In the meantime, for better or worse, the Net in this case has empowered individuals who in a previous era would not have known of each other's existence.

The increased reach and scope that the Net can give an individual is one reason why some people think that what is happening there is so important that it's worth battling over the laws being created to control it. "The Internet changes the economies of scale in favor of the little guy," Electronic Frontier Foundation chair Esther Dyson says in Digerati, a 1996 collection of profiles of leaders of the digital revolution.[17] "It used to be only big guys could send stuff, only big guys could advertise, only big guys could have newspapers. Suddenly, everybody can reach the audiences they deserve, more or less for free. They won't necessarily get mass audiences, because they may not be worth listening to, but everybody can distribute their information pretty much as widely as they want, almost without cost."

Dyson may be a little over-enthusiastic on that "almost without cost." True, the costs are decreasing almost weekly, and starting up an electronic newsletter is far cheaper than starting a full-fledged newspaper, even a local one, but "almost without cost" is only true if you already have a computer, a modem, an Internet connection, and a telephone line. These are not "no cost" if you live the kind of life where you have to walk four miles to get water.

The belief in the Net is also being challenged as fancier effects that are harder (and therefore more expensive) to produce become commonplace. As Seabrook points out in his book Deeper,

In an information society such as the Web, all the members have to have their nuggets of information, and the poorest had only charcoal to set in front of their corrugated-tin huts, while the richest had glittering and irresistible palaces of mind candy.... The superior graphics and other bells and whistles effectively wiped out the democratizing potential of a distributed network. And since no one had yet figured out any way of making much money from Web sites, only corporations with large promotion and marketing budgets could afford to build expensive ones.[18]

That was true in early 1996, when Seabrook was writing. But things were already beginning to change again. Democracy has to some extent reasserted itself via the search engines, high-speed computer systems that search the millions of pages of information on the Web and tell you where to look for what you want. Several of the best of these, such as Altavista, only became available at the end of 1995. The big guy with the known brand name has the advantage if you get your Web addresses from TV ads and go straight to those addresses (correctly known as URLs, for Uniform Resource Locators). But computers searching through their indexes of Web pages for the keywords you've entered know nothing about fancy graphics or jazzy animations. They see only hits and misses, and it's not until you go clicking through the pages of hits that you find out whether an individual site is fancy or not; if it has the information you need you may not care. So far, attempts to force specific pages to appear at the top of the list have been defeated by changes to the search engines.