The Internet changes everything. "E-tailing." "Stock options-not salary!" "Dot-com billionaire." "Cyberspace." "Internet time." "B2C." "Free Agent Nation." "New Economy." Like the language of some Stone Age culture unearthed by an enterprising anthropologist after a five-day canoe trip upriver into the jungle, the vernacular of Internet hysteria is a whisper from another era, a language with a thousand words for Web and not a single word for profit.

Of all the drivel that passed for visionary wisdom during the recent Internet psychosis, perhaps the sorriest was the idea of a "New Economy," based on the Web, that was going to colonize, dominate and finally dispatch an "Old Economy" rooted in antiquities such as cars, chemicals, copper wire-and clothing. That's the problem: this concept had no clothes. It was the Emperor's New Economy the whole time. But in the frenzy of the moment, few had the courage to say so.