The Decade in Computing, Part 3: Trends

The tale of the young Net head girl lured from her nice suburban home into the lair of a big-city-dwelling child-pornographer has become the stuff of modern legend. The frightening thing is that this urban myth actually does have a basis in reality. For every genealogy research site or children's author resource on the Web, there is an equal if not greater number of sites dedicated to hate groups, UFO cultists, and directions for making bombs out of everyday objects. The biggest bad guy in the media this decade has not been rock music or even domestic terrorists, it's been the World Wide Web.


		Sen. Marshall Law, R-Utah You'd think that politicians would be trying to alleviate rather than aggravate Y2K panic. But that's exactly what Senator Robert Bennet did in 1998. According to Salon.com, he was "already talking to the Department of Defense about the possibility of martial law in early 2000."

Blame It on the Net
No one ever blamed the phone company for creating obscene phone calls. But the paranoia surrounding potential pedophilic predators lurking around the AOL chat rooms is real enough for Congress to have launched an entire committee to come up with a policy for policing porn and other crime on the Net, including credit card fraud and identity theft.

But sex crimes are not the only scary thing online by any stretch of the imagination. A simple search brings up countless sites for bomb-building, homemade poisons, and how-to-break-out-of-prison manuals. There are even Web sites that let you send email and chat with incarcerated criminals. And the Heaven's Gate suicides, the Columbine High School massacre, and Indiana white supremacist shootings have all been linked back to the Internet in some form or another. (The Heaven's Gate cultists even made their living designing Web sites.)

Fear of Y2K
It's enough to make you head for the hills, which is exactly what some people are doing to escape what they fear will be the worst side effect of technology, the Y2K bug. If you believe the worst case scenarios, Y2K won't just shut down computers but will knock out everything, including electricity and the water supply, spreading mass panic and anarchy within minutes of the turn of the millennium.

Even though recent government reports claim that we'll be pretty much fine when the big ball drops, Y2K survivalists have already begun to turn their back on modern society. And the irony of it all is that they are spreading their paranoia by the very vehicle they are condemning: the Web. These are just a few of the Y2K survivalist home pages you'll find online:

•	Independent Urban Dwelling Complete with sound clips, but you'd better listen now. Your Real Player won't work on this site once your computer dies.
•	B&BL Farms Y2K Foods Site Buy supplies and check out links to sites covering the other big threat, nuclear war.
•	GaryNorth.com Even has a relocation board, in case you want to reserve a spot in the hills now.
•	Heritage West 2000 Five hundred half-acre, self-sufficient home sites in Arizona available for purchase. Quote: "The new Golden Age can begin right here."

Of course, it remains to be seen what will actually happen at midnight this New Year's Eve. But no matter what does happen, computers and the Net won't be getting off the hook anytime soon. At least Judas Priest and Ozzy Osbourne, the scapegoats of the '80s, can rest easy...

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