Unfortunately, however, I can now see that this was not entirely the case. Armed with the anonymity of a personal computer network, many people felt free to engage in every kind of possible character assassination. What’s worse, some of these groups and individuals felt that their intellectual and technical prowess in being able to master the Net made their opinions more worthwhile than those of people who might disagree. They felt they had the right to disparage and destroy their “adversaries” in every imaginable way over the Net.

I am no stranger to these intellectual elitist practices. At Harvard I couldn’t help but notice that much of the faculty was politically left-wing. Those who were not complete socialists in their hearts were, at the very least, ardent advocates for the welfare state. Few and far between were the champions of individualism or laissez-faire capitalism. Sure, the buildings may have been named after great capitalists and chairs were endowed in their names, but it would be a cold day in July before you’d hear any of the occupants of these chairs say a good word about the values of the benefactors who were paying their salaries. Frankly, it occurred to me that what was at work here was simple guilt and envy. The professors felt guilty that rather than contributing anything productive to society, they were sitting in the university, living on someone else’s largesse, someone they held in intellectual contempt.

The only time and place in history that the intellectual elite was not sequestered away in a university, or a church, or as a vassal of some aristocratic patron, was in America around the time of the Revolution. And the true intellectual giants, men like Jefferson, Adams, and Hancock, were also successful businessmen. They operated farms, invented things, engaged in commerce, did import-export, and the like. They dirtied their hands. They competed. Sometimes they failed, but more often they succeeded. They participated in economic life, and didn’t just study it. Is it any wonder that the quintessential documents of liberty were drafted by this generation?

Computer society and the Internet are, like it or not, outgrowths of the universities. As such, they embraces many of the universities’ values. As more and more businesspeople log on to the Net, these values are becoming somewhat moderated. But they still exist because it is as difficult to remove the founding values from an institution as it is to take the values a child is brought up with and try to change them as an adult.

I am not comfortable with intellectual elitists. I just don’t like or agree with them. They think the whole world exists only in the minds of those who share their values. Computer people often exhibit the worst traits of this elite. Many of them honestly believe that the whole world exists only on the Internet. What’s on the Net is what matters, and what’s not just doesn’t. I don’t want to become estranged from the real world outside of computers. That’s one of the reasons I don’t use a computer, not at home and not at work. Never. Even this book was written in longhand. A lot of industry bigwigs are disturbed by the fact that I don’t use a computer and don’t even have an E-mail address on my business cards. You’ll never be a Bill Gates with this attitude, they tell me. Frankly, that’s fine with me. I’d rather read a book than play on a computer anyway. Thomas Jefferson is my hero.