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This chapter deals with the cultural discourses surrounding the so-called Information Superhighway, a vast engineering project conceived on a par with the Fordist construction of the literal superhighway system in the 1950s. The Information Superhighway would realize the fantasy of a totally “wired life” that had circulated in postindustrial discourse in the 1970s. Don Tapscott's indictment of Generation X as a cohort of grumbling slackers cynically complicit with boomer technologies emerges as quite suggestive, since GenXers' transitional status makes them an especially contradictory social formation. A GenX effort to grapple allegorically with the cultural promises and perils of the Infobahn is presented. Ernest Hebert's Mad Boys struggle to find some way out of an invidious double bind, in which every prosthetic enhancement of them as consuming subjects bears with it an inescapable exploitation, a vampiric shadow that leeches their youthful substance and energy.

This chapter examines the emergence of the “World Wide Web”—the Internet's best-known hypertext system—when the global nature of the Internet became an animating idea in news media and popular culture as well as for policymakers and academics. It explores how, despite being understood as global, the Internet is nonetheless identified as a distinctly American space, or an “American virtual nation.” This Americanness was visible in the organization of the Internet, including the ways the U.S. government retained control over Internet addresses and domains. The American virtual nation was also visible, however, in news media and policy language describing the Internet as a “new democratic frontier” and an “information superhighway.” These terms were enabled by hopeful U.S. policymakers, who aimed to colonize the Internet before competitors arrived. Major Internet corporations also capitalized on this presumptive Americanness of the Internet in their efforts to become “American corpoNations.”

In a discursive essay on the impact of computer technology on libraries and learning, Wolfe opens by arguing that contemporary America is adapting to ignorance and illiteracy and characterises American youth as disinterested in learning. He considers the ’information superhighway’ as inherently discriminatory and likely to provoke resentment towards the educated class. Anticipating, correctly, that much of the information on this superhighway will be fake, bypass peer review, and be the product of pranksters, he adopts an antagonistic stance towards computers in the first half of his article. In the second, he recognises the interlinking of library computers will provide an opportunity for those educationally and economically marginalised. He concludes by seeing librarians as instrumental in safeguarding the education and development of the disenfranchised.

This chapter looks at the structure of feeling created in the early 1990s as knowledge workers began to discover the pleasures of online communication and elites groped for an organizational framework under the umbrella of the “information superhighway.” Web browsing articulated itself with a structure of desire centered around an endless “what's next?” and spread in a context in which middle ranks knew things that their superiors did not, adding to that articulation a romantic sense of rebellion; one could in theory rebel, express oneself, and get rich all at once. Taken together, this fusion of romantic subjectivity and market enthusiasms, exemplified and enabled in the early Wired magazine, created the conditions that fueled both the rapid triumph of the internet as the network of networks and the dotcom stock bubble.