I think the reason for this penomenon is simple. Up until about two years ago, the Net still constituted an alternative to the world outside the net. That is to say, it offered things you couldn't find anywhere else: a flourishing of individual opinion, experience and eccentricity that no one had seen before.

With time, however, the Net was colonized by everything it used to exclude. The Net is now basically a place to buy things or to read the newspaper you used to subscribe to. It's your radio station and your Tower Records. It's your porn theater and your bank, your stock broker and your phone sex line. Etc.

You can chart this change fairly accurately by charting the prevalence of Flash-enabled sites, since Flash is used by almost every commerce site I run across. Flash is also significant in that it signalled the replacement of text as the medium of communication with the Net equivalent of television commercials. This is why I consider Flash the single most malignant influence on the Net. Now before the thousands of Flash developers out there start flaming me, let me say I've seen some cool implementations of Flash, but 90% of the implementations really are just animated frou frou that get in the way of accessing content and information.

Indeed, one can say that what happened to the Net is that it was transformed from the Net into just another TV commercial taking place on your computer.

Of course the old Net