Courtesy of the Collection Centre Canadien D'Architecture/Canadian Center for Architecture, Montreal
Above: Electrically powered mechanical classifier, Social Insurance Head Office, Prague, by Josef Ehm, 1936. Veteran journalist Michael Zielenziger discusses how the Internet has hastened the decline of newspapers. His special report appears (with some small irony) exclusively on the web. Dollars and sense: In recent months, the University of california has become embroiled in controversy over its compensation policies as a result of a series of articles by San Francisco Chronicle reporters Tanya Schevitz and Todd Wallack. The articles have raised uncomfortable questions on campus, in the legislature, and among our alumni. The original articles can be accessed at sfgate.com. For related articles and documents, including a Q&A with Chancellor Robert Birgeneau, visit the UC Berkeley NewsCenter. Also in the next issue: Ken Brower reports new research on how Yosemite is changing forever.

I have another friend who is better described as an "early resister." Touting the advantages of, say, a cell phone or a Palm Pilot is likely to draw from her a derisive chortle or a blank stare. Because she works in an office, she’s been forced to interface like the rest of us. But ordinary problems that might send me to a more tech-savvy colleague drive her to sighs, then grimaces, and then to "I-told-you-so" lectures on the advantages of old-fashioned pen and paper.

She is not, as you might imagine, mathematically or technically challenged, at least in the traditional sense. She aced math. She can explain the workings of the human body with great clarity and in great detail. She pursues crafts such as jewelry making and fabric arts that require precision and a three-dimensional imagination. my friend’s complaint is that while our new electronically driven world may empower us, it simultaneously disempowers us. To my surprise, Bill Gates said much the same thing to a crowd at Zellerbach last year: Our electronic tools really aren’t that good yet. They require us to fit our lives around them rather than vice versa.

I remember my thrill and awe the first time I watched someone plug a name into a search engine and saw what arrived on the screen in seconds. The Internet was so exhilarating because it was so powerful. The triumphalist rhetoric of digital age boosters—John Perry Barlow, who in this issue revisits his famous manifesto composed a decade ago, was one of them—seemed suddenly plausible to me. An assumption of those early boosters, who tended toward the libertarian, was that the Internet’s power was a distributed power. Individuals, armed with shared information and a new form of community, would erode the monopolies of information that underlay so much institutional power. Everything knowable would eventually be available to everyone—an idea that is still very much alive. I recently heard a prominent search engine executive express unbridled confidence that his company would eventually make available virtually all human knowledge.

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