Leaving Reality Behind: the battle for the soul of the internet Adam Wishart and Regula Bochsler Fourth Estate, 359pp, £16.99 ISBN 1841155934

Ever since the 1970s, when Californian academics took over the development of the internet from the Pentagon, the emerging global network has had an anarchic, anti-authoritarian edge. Lack of overall control was written into the very technology by campus pioneers who ensured that the system was decentralised and minimally regulated.

At the same time, the culture of the internet in its early days revolved around the druglike promise of computerised transcendence. In 1984, the sci-fi writer William Gibson coined the term "cyberspace", which he defined as "a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions". Not long after, Timothy Leary declared that "the PC is the LSD of the Nineties", and West Coast cyberpunk magazines such as Mondo 2000 began to promote acid-trip-style dreams of virtual reality experiences.

In Leaving Reality Behind, the BBC documentary-maker Adam Wishart and the Swiss broadcaster Regula Bochsler explore how far that early utopianism has survived the frenzied commercialisation of the past decade. Written recently, at the time of the dotcom collapse, but focused on the internet boom, the book is a sober yet engaging account of the forces that meshed in those crazy times.

The authors discuss a lawsuit brought three years ago by an American online retailer of children's goods, eToys.com, against a European group of net-based artists, etoy.com, over the domain name and content of their website. What seemed unfair competition to those pursuing profit on the net was free expression to the hundreds of net radicals whom the etoy artists managed to mobilise against the American company. Many of the principal players in the "Toywar" are interviewed here; their stories are cleverly woven into a main narrative concentrating on the chaotic growth of the internet itself.

Etoy emerged from the Zurich squat scene in the mid-Nineties, a group of musos and hackers intent on ditching conventional leftism in favour of a more hip, anti-consumerist pose. Their big idea was to satirise corporate culture by styling etoy as an online company selling a version of their own maverick lifestyle. Their art - elaborate hijackings of search engines, issuing simulated share certificates, and creating installations in cargo containers - earned them a certain kudos among those Californians happy to be described as the wired elite.

Calling themselves "the first street gang of the information superhighway", as it was still known, etoy postured rather earnestly against political and corporate attempts to tame the net. The group's philosophy - summed up in the logo that gives this book its title - was inspired by the former Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow, an internet free speech campaigner who, in his declaration of the independence of cyberspace in 1996, insisted that "our world is different". Toby Lenk, the founder of eToys, had a similar philosophy: dotcoms, he said, "created their own reality". Very briefly, as investors rushed to invest in any number of start-ups, he was right: eToys was a profitless company worth billions of dollars.

In early 2000, eToys faced an onslaught of bad publicity and sustained "electronic civil disobedience" - attempts were made to jam its website. The company's share price tumbled, and eToys eventually dropped its case against etoy, much to the annoyance of the cyber-radicals who wanted to carry on the battle as an art project. In March 2001, eToys went bankrupt; the core business now has a new owner.

So did the Toywar strike a decisive blow against the corporate land-grab of cyberspace? For Wishart and Bochsler, eToys was swept away in the wider dotcom bust, along with much of the revolutionary euphoria of the 1980s and 1990s. But business, they say, continues to dominate the net. Even Barlow recently raised fears that "the net is closing", as companies such as Microsoft increasingly begin to control its architecture. Meanwhile, the etoy website (www.etoy.com) sinks into obscurity. The dotcom parody continues, but nowadays the suits are no longer crazy enough even to care.

Tristan Quinn is a producer of BBC2's Newsnight

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