The magic of the internet?

Here we were - or I was - all set to tell you a moving story of a small boy fishing the benign waters of the Irish Sea way back in 1917.

Have no fear, it led straight to the Great Lakes and the noble Hudson River and on, unerringly, to President-elect Bush's cabinet choices and high hopes of a lovely lady who is one of them.

But then there was a thunderclap on a sunny morning, or better the sudden emergence of a rainbow on a grey, sombre day which was Wednesday when Governor Bush was holding a private conference with a bunch of money experts - economists, financiers - about the sliding or dimming of the economy.

And in a flash the word came to him and the rest of the country that the national wizard - Mr Alan Greenspan - off his own bat, without even calling a meeting of the Federal Reserve, announced he was cutting the prime interest rate by one half per cent. Wow!

The effect was like VJ Day, though I don't know whether sailors on shore leave grabbed passing girls. Many must have felt like it.

The stock market, the industrials, jumped 299 points in 10 minutes.

The high technology stocks, which had been our pet anxiety since the late fall, made an all-time record high jump of 324 points, regaining at least half of the value they have lost since last spring.

Within minutes all the television pundits were talking about shock therapy, the shot of adrenaline to a fainting patient. The economy recovered at a bound, ecstasy abounded.

Governor Bush - I'm relieved to say - was not in ecstasy. He said very good for the time being, wait and see, all this means is more reason for a big, big tax cut.

And for the first time the Democrats said: "Well, maybe."

Then a little later on came the more thoughtful ones, saying that the internet had dumped finally the lightweights, cleaned out what they call "the weak money".

Good old internet, a new weapon to regulate the economy. Which is nonsense.

Well, a little more than a year ago before the Christmas shopping of 1999 the Wall Street wiseacres were explaining, in a rush of euphoria, the transformation of daily shopping which some double dome economist had called "the primary act of consumerism." Don't you love it.

Well, so at Christmas time 1999 they were warning us all that bricks and mortar shopping - going round the corner to the grocer's, the newsagent, the tobacco shop - was on its last legs.

From now on present and following generations would do their shopping on the internet.

Dazzling figures were quoted about the actual millions of Americans who that Christmas had ordered their presents that way - everything from a bestseller to booking a theatre seat or an airplane ticket or a meal in a restaurant to honing in on a real estate agent, having him post on your screen visual tours of a whole range of different houses to help you pick one.

And with two more flicks of the wrist or nudge of mouse, sign for a bank loan and take out a mortgage.

And then budding philosophers competed with each other in trying to explain a larger truth about this colossal change in the whole running of our economies. The magic of the internet.

Well last week you couldn't turn a page of the newspapers without reading that a world famous, globally organised, bookseller is in perilous financial shape.

Wall Street or the beaches perhaps of the south shore of Long Island were littered with the egos of dot.com millionaires who have gone belly up.

A typical, if horrendous, story is that of a company, web-based, that started in 1998 with one businessman and a chef and their friends and some family who scratched together what we now call venture capital.

The idea was, like that of a thousand more registered company sites, simple and exhilarating: Instead of telephoning a restaurant to make a reservation for a party why not do it through us, hitting Make a Date (that was not its name).

It started with a dozen restaurants, then a score, signed them up at a cost of $1 for being online.

After starting slowly and cautiously its more eager venturists were willing to throw big money after little and at the end of its first year it was operating in 20 cities from Boston to San Francisco, a roaring example of how to spawn instant millionaires.

Well came the fall - how much more apt this last year than "the autumn" - the fall of 2000 and the steady downturn in the market - worse, the steady slump in high technology stocks, just when we knew for keeps that more and more companies would be buying more and more hi-tech equipment, more and better software, just when Bill Gates told us that another revolution was under way in computer design that would simplify and speed up everything and make us rich beyond dreaming.

So Make a Date saw then it had lost 30 millions in 13 months.

Well perhaps it was a touch over-employed. Last August it started laying off 10% of its 150 employees - imagine, only 150.

So, to cut the story mercifully short, this week Make a Date filed for bankruptcy.

By the way the returns on Christmas shopping, either by mouse or by bricks and mortar, which had been woeful last year, doubled this year.

But we were reminded that as for the home deliveries of books, chocolates, presents in general ordered over the internet, one in four went to the wrong address or weren't delivered.

This was to make all of us feel better who go round the corner to the bricks and mortar.

I'm afraid that the yahoo or philistine reaction to these sorry stories will be a great sigh of relief at the thought that the internet is really something of a fraud.

No need yet to abandon the shopping bag and the typewriter - or in the case of some of my older friends, the quill pen. Nothing could be more stupid.

The dot.com failures that I have cited do not reflect any flaw in the institution of the internet but in the human frailty of the people using it.

The former president of Make a Date said, ruefully on his way to bankruptcy court, the backers had ignored the rules of business, the main fault being the impatience or greed of some of the venturists in wanting the business to double in a month instead of a year.

So in the fall they had a hard time selling to restaurants the excessive amount of software they'd acquired on borrowed money.

What the economic slow-down or recession, or whatever you want to call it, what it has done that sooner or later would have to be done was to debunk the pseudo philosophy of magic that has enveloped the internet and misled thousands of people into, well, into failure.

I don't think anybody has pierced this fallacy better than our greatest living novelist, Tom Wolfe. He wrote a piece, some time last year - it must have been six months ago - long before, anyway, the high tech stocks started to slump.

And I hope I can stay within the statutory 200 words because the tendency when you come on a Wolfe piece, at least my tendency, is to want to go on and on.

Anyway here it is. It was published in Forbes magazine last year. And this is what he considers to be the fallacy:

"The internet spreads over the globe, the human mind spreads with it. Now magical beliefs are leaps of logic based on proximity or resemblance. Many primitive tribes have associated the waving of crops or the tall grass in the wind with the rain that follows and they organise dances so that they themselves mimic the waving of the crops in order to induce the rain.

Similarly we have the current magical web euphoria - a computer is a computer and the human brain is a computer, therefore a computer is a brain too. And if we get a sufficient number of them operating all over the world we'll have a super brain that converges on a plane far above such old fashioned concerns as nationalism and racial and ethnic competition.

I hate to be the one who brings this news to the tribe but ... the simple truth is that the web - the internet - does one thing. It speeds up the retrieval and dissemination of information - messages, images - partially eliminating such chores as having to go outdoors to the mailbox or the adult bookstore, or having to pick up a phone to get hold of your stockbroker, or some buddies to shoot the breeze with. That one thing the internet does and only that, the rest is Digibabble."

End of Wolfe.

In cruder words, the internet didn't make all those overnight fortunes or lose them.

And what the downturn or decline, or if we dare the coming recession, will do on the side is simply make the point over and over again that the internet is like Mr Gutenberg's printing machine, or television - it's not a fact but a medium and it's a medium that can transmit an order, a brainwave, a good idea, a deal, faster than anything we've ever known.

It can also transmit a rash act, a bad deal and a stupidity just as fast.

It comes down to that old contradictory parrot talk of the gun lobby - guns don't kill, people do.

The simple truth is, people with guns kill people.