Left behind.

• Author: Koerner, Brendan I.
• Position: Political Booknotes

THE INTERNET POST-MORTEMS are coming fast and furious nowadays, from John Cassidy's trifling Dot.con to James Ledbetter's forthcoming Starving to Death on $200 Million a Year, a tell-all about The Industry Standard's fleeting hey-day. So far, this literature of failure has portrayed the technology boom as a madcap adventure, and the subsequent bust as little more than a sitcom comeuppance for a handful of arrogant louts. Sure, a couple billion dollars got lost in the shuffle, and some twenty-somethings had to move back in with mom and dad for a spell. But no real harm done.

Nathan Newman, a union lawyer and author of Net Loss: Internet Prophets, Private Profits, and the Costs to Community, isn't so dismissive of the New Econ omy's toll. His victims are not the dot-com employees whose options evaporated, nor the mom-and-pop investors who let Junior's college fund ride on the NASDAQ 100. Newman's big losers are the low-wage workers who spent the last decade falling further and further behind a techno-elite indifferent to local communities. The Internet, Newman argues, has made it easier for corporations to deal with global actors one-on-one, and thus to bypass unions, public-interest groups, and other pesky members of the left. The lack of an effective online tax scheme has robbed municipal governments of billions, leading to slashed services for poor urban residents. And the chasm between knowledge workers (i.e., geeks) and blue-collar stiffs has grown to the point where mobility between the two classes is almost nonexistent.

Newman's depiction of the Internet as an engine of inequality is Net Loss' most intriguing thread. If only he'd stopped there instead of stuffing the book's 300-plus pages with half-baked takes on globalization, privacy, and "the marketization of fixed capital." Newman's sharp lefty treatment of the Internet's labor-unfriendly effects often gets lost amidst the jumble of ideas. Though Net Loss makes for a nice counterweight to the vast body of post-bubble fluff, it's far too ambitious for its own good.

The book's barest stretch is its first third, a blow-by-blow retelling of the government's tole in creating the Internet. There are few surprises here, as this ground's been covered countless times before. Only the greenest of newbies will be surprised to learn of the Pentagon's involvement in funding ARPANET, the Internet's precursor. Newman is an academic, not a journalist; Net Loss is actually a slightly tweaked...