It then posits either that we will all effectively move into cyberspace in the years to come, or that cyberspace will reconstruct the rest of the world in its image. This, after all, is very much the rhetoric, even if the rhetoric is sometimes as much wishful as real. Wired, for example, tells its advertisers that its readers are about twenty years old than you'd think they'd be from reading the magazine. Another analogy would be the elaborate ideology of engineers circa 1900, although this newer ideology does not share the technocratic rationalism of the older one. I'm an optimist, but I'm the kind of optimist that's opposed to the cargo cult.
Technology has little or no essence.
The question is not whether we should support technology but what values we want technology to embody. This negotiation of intimacy and distance, community and individuality, will only intensify as the technology develops. Hope may be good religion, but it is bad engineering.