This article appeared in the Wall Street Journal on January 4, 2002.
The Internet is less a creation dictated by economics than it is a miracle and a gift.
In our disappointment of grand riches, we have failed to see the miracle on our desks.
The idea of a universal information port was considered uneconomical, and too futuristic to be real in our lifetimes.
This abundance simply overwhelms what was promised by the most optimistic guru.
So much money flew around dot-coms, that it hid the main event on the web, which is the exchange of gifts.
While the most popular 50 websites are crassly commercial, most of the 3 billion web pages in the world are not.
The answer to the mystery of why people would make 3 billion web pages in 2,000 days is simple: sharing.
As the Internet continues to expand in volume and diversity without interruption, only a relatively small percent of its total mass will be money-making. The rest will be created and maintained out of passion, enthusiasm, a sense of civic obligation
or simply on the faith that it may later provide some economic use.
while millions of smaller sites and hundreds of millions of users do the heavy work of creating content that is used and linked. These will be paid entirely in the gift economy.
Perhaps as more of the world wins access to it, and more of our books, and movies, and history are added, we will come to see it as a dream come true, a collective dream created by people like you and me, sharing what they love.
