I asked Sal what he thought of the magazine and he said that he didn't agree with many of its positions, but still found it a good read. He especially loved the contributions of Nicholas Negroponte. I have often felt that Negroponte and I stood at opposite ends of the court as regards the future of the 'Net, but I was still willing to consider his latest opinions.

When I moved to the mid-Atlantic region of the United States, what I then erroneously believed would be my last relocation for a few years, I decided to subscribe to WIRED once again.

It's a love-hate relationship. I think that WIRED celebrates too many things about the Internet and the emerging global economy which I would prefer to denigrate. The most recent edition is a classic example. Besides focusing on the relationship between Silicon Valley movers-and-shakers and the U.S. Presidential candidacy of Vice President Gore, it runs a Vanity Fair-esque Tina-Brown-era type gush piece on Klaus Schwab, the organizer of the World Economic Forum of Davos, Switzerland, power-networking confab.

1. They reinforce the impression that the future of the Internet and the Web are ultimately to be determined by multinational corporations, celebrity heads of state and uber-schmoozers. [Your company has to have annual revenues of over a billion --- that's with a B --- dollars (USD) in order to qualify for a possible invitation to Davos. AND the fees are then over $17,000 (USD) per attendee.]
2. They help to perpetuate the self-congratulations of the powerful, purposefully exclude the marginalized, and reinforce the flow of capital to a Chosen Few enterprises being supported by people already in the state-celebrity loop. I can't see how this fosters innovation or contributes to balancing the hemispheric, Ameri-Euro centric nature of commerce.

If, as Felicity Ussher argued in last week's MEMOIR, the "...information age is all about choices - having a range of options, and chosing the one which best suits the context," then both WIRED and Davos seem bent on limiting the choices and the choosers.

The message which should be sent IS the message of choice and opportunity.

The message which should be sent, but that is increasingly being drowned out by the cacophony about IPOs, mergers, aggregation and the triumph of the 800-pound gorillas dominating the medium today, is that

today's Internet is to its future as the crank, operator-required telephone is to satellite communications. Nobody, no matter how well-financed, has a clue about what the Next Generation Internet will look like and who will be its leading players.