Cyberspace Cowboys

From Democracy Inc.--Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism: "Outer space was soon overshadowed by the discovery of "cyberspace," the domain where [Jackson] Turner's fromtier thesis took on new meaning as its champions proclaimed that democracy had been reinvented. A band of young pioneers, personified in Bill Gates, explored and exploited a hitherto unknown world where physical power was irrelevant. The new frontiersmen were enterprising in the extreme, hypercompetitive, ruthless in their methods ("take no prisoners"), and able to create staggering amounts of wealth in a relatively brief time. Above all they invented forms of technology that appeared to have the potential for endless innovation: Turner's utopia, a frontier land that, like the universe, appeared to have no borders. Predictably, the introduction of the Internet was hailed as the perfect expression of democracy: that everyone could enter the Web and voice whatever happened to be on his or her mind=democracy.