Just what is the social and political meaning of the Internet: the new democratic town hall or an elite tool for the wealthy? Both and neither, says Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, a historian of technology at UC Davis and deputy editor of the electronic database for Encyclopedia Britannica. The mistake many cyber-prophets make is believing that the desires, dreams and politics they have projected onto the technologies are intrinsic and immutable, he says. Pang relates an earlier lesson in the curious transient politics of technology in the latest issue of the quarterly magazine American Heritage of Invention and Technology. Geodesic domes -- now usually associated with hippies, communes and anti-establishment values of the late 1960s -- actually stood as emblems of U.S. military power and capitalism in the 1950s, when their designer, Buckminster Fuller, was known as a hardheaded Cold War intellectual, Pang says. Likewise, "it's important to remember that the Internet is a network of people," Pang says. "Whatever nature or character the Internet has is social not technological."