It's like a re-run of Little House on E-prairie: Somebody builds a better search engine and, before you know it, all of the wild meat is either trapped or on display at America Online's city zoo. The end result is a medium that's increasingly safe, sanitized and navigable. But it's also as mundane as the rest of Mall America on every bleak, bland, pointless day of week.

Code-slinging hackers raiding settlements on the frontier, robbing you of your copyrighted materials. Free and easy red light districts to make the country preachers rail. Hear the calls for the U.S. cyber-stazi cavalry to protect the great migration moving to the Web. See the last few remaining resistant Native Netizens howl, or, even take counter-measures to make doomed Geronimo proud. They seem to be getting their last laugh. Look at all of the Gold Rushers now, the accumulators of IPO updates and stock options in lieu of pay, their pockets full of iron pyrite -- Fool's Gold.

In William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984), published just as the personal PC was breaking into the mainstream, he called his hacker jockeys "cowboys" just as the word "cyberspace," coined in that book, anticipated the virtual world that's still taking form. Since arising from the Big Bang of academia in the early 1990s, the World Wide Web has served as a virtual Wild, Wild West for ideas, for information, images and sounds, for terms such as "surfing," that cliché describing the practice of spontaneous, free-flowing exploration, from link to link, that's as Left Coast -- as in Californian -- as any single meme an illuminated anarchist could possibly devise. A frontiersman's paradise, fer sure, dude.

Or, maybe it was a few years ago. Now the old-timers, the Geeks, the Native Netizens mourn the loss of the good 'ol days, indicating a dramatic cultural rift, a veritable shoot-out at the O.K. Corral of the counter-culture and over-the-dot-counter commerce. The corporate "suits" have Balkanized the remaining elements of the counter-culture techno-tribe. Now these code-slinging hippies seem to be heading out to pasture, after laying the groundwork for the Web and helping to popularize this paradise to begin with. The mélange of geek speak and romantic hype that hadn't been heard since Horace Greeley proclaimed, "Go West, Young Man."

One of the first to note this relationship between America's mythic past, Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis, and the taming of the Web was John Perry Barlow, one of the best-known (perhaps even overexposed) members of the digerati and one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundationin 1990. For this former Wyoming rancher, the Wild, Wild West has served as useful metaphor about a cultural cycle of discovery, development and Spenglerian decay that implied both the glory and demise of original ideals behind the first-generation Web.

"Everything is being very tightly compressed, but the comparison works," he says. "That's why I coined the term 'Electronic Frontier Foundation'. It seemed self-evident that this was a frontier environment."

Look at how the comparison works: You can just see the new towns on the digital Mississippi. Yahoo.com as the new Independence, Missouri, as all links lead out, ever outward; eBay.com as the cattle-trading K.C., great e-commerce centers like Amazon.com raised on natural harbors of consumerism, as the once wide-open digital plains seems to need a soundtrack anthem by, say, the Pretenders, singing, "the farms of Ohio have been replaced by shopping malls." One big stampede fills a volatile space as capable as expanding or contracting, since the economic laws of boom and bust are just as applicable as in the real world.

After all, that's what humankind does with space, be it cyber-digital or dirt-real. First she explores the new terrain, maps it out, duly records property rights, determines the best spaces to sow corn, and then moves on to plunder more. As the fences are posted, the most libertine keep moving West, collecting in like-minded communities of dot-commie cells and electronic salons, such as the Well, which started in the 1980s, with Barlow helping to blaze the trail.

There was still unlimited space back then, after all, to pursue your own dreams, declare your own private country club or hey, even start a religion. Call it the Zion of techno-evangelism. Then, somebody builds a bigger, faster search engine. Then comes the Gold Rush. The techno temple becomes a marketplace for ideas, and then only a marketplace. Rapid expansion pushes into cyberspace. More rail lines, more order, more calls for public safety, more vivisection, more shopping malls, and, of course, lots and lots of lawsuits and dislocation. Especially when things get tight and the lay-offs begin.

And so the season of contention -- the range war -- begins. The most rebellious hack through firewalls, create subversive, fly-by-night URLs such as Fuckedcompany.com and NetSlaves, which ends up as another metaphor for Boom Town. They see red and read information on Internet like the shadows of the Beast feeling no more need to hide anymore.

They scan privacy watchdog sites that offer alarmist, almost apocalyptic rhetoric: "Government of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of the Mind," wrote Barlow in 1996 with his "Declaration of Independence in Cyberspace," an audacious canary in the coal mine for things to come. "On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather."

John Perry Barlow is the living essence of the digital environmentalist -- you know, that imaginative warrior harboring that hobgoblin of liberal anxiety: development driven by an unregulated capitalistic drive that feeds upon itself and fouls everything it touches. We used to call this sort of person a Luddite. In Barlow's case, since he's long been a techno-evangelist, the term would be misplaced. But if King Lud is a disenfranchised philosopher king among many who rule their collectivist tribes, parts of the interconnected whole for the disembodied digital landscape, there sure are a lot of similar people out on the seas of change with him, swimming against the tide with the rest of the well-tethered fleet of the damned.

Unlike the hyper-romantic Don Quixote and his nemesis, the windmill, the foe is real and the odds of success in an assault threatening to devour everything----both the Web and the entire planet -- are daunting. They are the discontents in the transition zones: Urban sprawl, inefficient industrial paradigms and outright evil, pure and simple, of technology for the mere sake of marketplace.