These are my rights, legally guaranteed to me as a resident of the European Union. Those rights, which are due to be further solidified in a pending European Data Directive on October 25, are based on “a philosophical view that privacy is a fundamental human right,” according to Fergus Glavey, the Data Protection Commissioner for Ireland. (Each European country appoints its own data watchdogs charged with protecting its citizens’ privacy rights.)

In the meantime, tension is increasing daily in Washington over online data privacy, following a flurry of condemning reports pointing up the laxness of basic privacy protections in the U.S. As government-supported advocates of corporate self-regulation square off against those who say privacy legislation is a must, Europeans are watching the battle with some bemusement.

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Europeans can’t understand why Americans would want to rely on the promises of self-regulation by market-driven companies, instead of having legislation in place that compels, rather than requests, compliance from data-gathering organizations. Laws, they believe, provide better protections for human rights than corporate benevolence. In opposition, the U.S. contingent, led by President Clinton’s senior advisor Ira Magaziner, thinks a European propensity to overregulate could stifle the nascent online economy.

Magaziner’s stance is that there’s no point in promising protections that the American government can’t provide. While visiting Dublin two weeks ago, he asked: With 10,000 new Web sites created daily, how can privacy rules be enforced? “We believe privacy should be private-sector led,” he said. “There’s a risk in being overregulated and not having the mechanism in place to do anything about it.”

But Europeans don’t agree, and that’s clearly worrying Magaziner, who indicated in a London talk at the start of that week that the U.S. eventually may need to find points of compromise with the E.U. stance.

The current European approach, which will be more explicitly defined in the new directive, has three basic tenets: Individuals have the right to access any data relating to them and have it kept accurate and up-to-date; data cannot be retained for longer than the purposes for which it was obtained nor used or disclosed “in a matter incompatible with that purpose” and must be kept only for “lawful purposes”; those who control data have “a special duty of care” in relation to the individuals whose data they keep. Data commissioners oversee these rights in each European country and require most “data controllers” — people who handle data — to register with them to track what information is being collected and where. They are charged also with investigating all complaints from citizens.

Glavey’s perspective on his role is clear: “There is an imbalance between the consideration given to what can be done through the application of the latest technology and what should be done, having regard to the cultural, ethical and legal assumptions which underpin our society,” wrote Glavey in last year’s annual report for his department. “In short, we must decide whether [information technology] will be our master or our servant, and what role privacy protection laws have to play in this matter.”

The Irish data-protection office receives about 1700 inquiries per year from a population of 3.5 million. Most are from people seeking further information about privacy regulations; less than 100 are actual complaints. (With only seven staff members, the office would be hard pressed to investigate many more, admits assistant commissioner Michael O’Donovan.) The office is also charged only with asserting privacy rights relating to data kept on computers, not general privacy rights — and those rights were formulated during the stone age of electronic networks, back in 1981. That’s why there is much interest in the E.U.’s forthcoming directive, which more comprehensively fleshes out privacy rights in the digital age.

On the other side of the Atlantic, the new European rules are not bringing joy to the U.S. government or the corporate world. Gradually, people are realizing it’s actually a significant threat to business as usual — and likely to have an impact not just on Net-related transactions but on the routine transfer of data between companies in Europe and the U.S. The directive prohibits the data of Europeans’ being used in any way incompatible with the protections afforded those citizens under the directive. In other words, a multinational company in Dubuque that processes insurance information in Dubuque for its customers in France can handle that data only in ways compliant with the directive.

A London-based privacy advocacy group, Privacy International Ltd., has already threatened legal action if American companies don’t comply. “No privacy, no trade. It’s that simple,” stated Privacy International’s director, Simon Davies, in a May Wired article explaining the directive.

However, “someone in Brussels isn’t going to go down in the basement and throw a switch, and the data stops flowing to the U.S.,” notes Marc Rotenberg, director of the Washington, D.C.-based Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), an advocacy group affiliated with Privacy International. Instead, 200 of the companies that send significant amounts of data between Europe and the U.S. will be monitored for their use of data, he says.

Rotenberg points out that the U.S. position is inconsistent: On one hand, in its stand on encryption, the Clinton administration insists that regulatory legislation is necessary. It also supports regulation to control copyright in the administration-backed World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) bill currently making its way through Congress. And it supported attempts to legislate online content, in the ill-fated Communications Decency Act.

Deirdre Mulligan, senior counsel for the Center for Democracy and Technology in Washington, insists that self-regulation cannot work without at least some basic legal guidelines; the organization is arguing for the government “to proactively set baselines for industry.” To make matters worse, she adds, flimsy existing legislation keeps organizations from effective self-regulation. “There’s a disincentive to actually make a privacy statement,” she says, because organizations can then be liable for prosecution for deception under a federal act enforced by the Federal Trade Commission. “In the ’70s, the U.S. was out in the front on privacy,” she says. “We dropped the ball and other people” — the Europeans — “picked it up.”

“Europe is doing a better job at protecting privacy that the U.S.,” agrees Rotenberg, but emphasizes that he thinks the E.U. setup is “preferable, not perfect.” He’d like to see Americans have a legal right to access all data held about themselves, a legal framework for enforcement and redress of privacy-rights infringements and a privacy agency within the federal government. But he argues that the U.S. shouldn’t mold a policy simply out of a need to keep business channels open once the E.U. directive takes effect. “Ultimately, I do not believe the U.S. should base its privacy policy on the needs of the E.U. directive,” he says. “It should be based on the needs of the citizens of the United States.”

Now, pressure is increasing to find U.S. and European points of reconciliation before the enactment of the October directive. According to Magaziner, the government is pursuing the idea of privacy-guaranteeing contracts between organizations. Rotenberg views this approach as an increasingly anxious attempt to save the self-regulation model through negotiation; it might indeed work for companies, he says, but still does nothing for individuals.

“We think the government’s been pursuing the wrong goal,” he says. “They want to make self-regulation work. We want to make privacy work.”

James Joyce, patron saint of interactivity: He knew us, the Net-besotted, before we knew ourselves. The ideal reader suffering from the ideal insomnia. Omniscient mind of the omniscient narrator, paring his fingernails while the professors are kept busy for centuries hunting down the endless layered references to cinema, music, theology, philosophy, literature, history, science, newspapers, the liturgy, sex, women’s magazines, women’s underwear and the smoky, mannish interiors of Dublin’s innumerable pubs. The Joycean canon: those protean, nonlinear, interlinked, self-referential, open-ended works.

Thus did Joyce beget hypertext, argue the trendier academics and theorists of the ’90s. Joyce — not those earnest, pocket-protected men who grappled with computer code in the ’60s and ’70s — was the true father of the Internet. If Joyce were writing today, he would have chosen hypertext. And not only was “Ulysses” before its time in literary terms; it is also, extravagantly, the |ber-hypertext.

In the early to mid-’90s — when the Internet and its most visual element, the Web, began their phenomenal growth — the always well-populated world of Joycean criticism saw a spike of papers and presentations eagerly arguing the Joyce-hypertext link. They had technohip titles ripe for parody: “The Cybernetic Plot of Ulysses,” “Beyond the Orality/Literacy Dichotomy: James Joyce and the Pre-History of Cyberspace,” “Phoenix Ex Machina: Joyce’s Solicitation of Hypertext.” A journal called Hypermedia Joyce Studies appeared in 1995 — though it lasted only one issue.

The footnotes featured the usual postmodern suspects: Baudrillard, Deleuze, Derrida, Lacan. But they also repeatedly referenced the digerati, the new elite of techno-intellectuals, like Marshall McLuhan, the grand old man of media and communications theory; Stewart Brand, the founder of the Well and chronicler of MIT’s Media Lab; and author William Gibson, who coined the word “cyberspace.”

McLuhan in particular, the most academically weighty of the cybercrowd, is invoked as a legitimizing touchstone for Joyce’s born-again techno-knowingness. “Marshall McLuhan described Joyce as a clairvoyant in terms of communication and technology,” notes Darren Tofts, senior lecturer in literature at Swinburne University of Technology in Australia, in one paper.

“The figure who perhaps looms largest in current thinking about our new information technologies, Marshall McLuhan, made clear the great degree to which his insights were inspired by Joyce, and by ['Finnegans Wake'] in particular,” agrees Rob Callahan, a Joycean doctoral candidate at Temple University who has a masters from University College, Dublin (Joyce’s alma mater). He co-edited the solitary issue of the Joyce journal (about to be resurrected) and maintains Work in Progress, an exhaustive Joycean resource Web site.

Certainly, nearly everyone who works seriously with hypertext and loves Joyce agrees that there are overwhelmingly hypertextual, mixed-media qualities to Joyce’s writing. “Is there a more multimedia work than ‘Ulysses’?” asks Michael Joyce, who lectures in literature at Vassar College in upstate New York and is also a preeminent author of literary hypertext (his electronic novella, “afternoon, a story,” is one of the genre’s standards). “Think of the men with the placards, the phantasm of Nighttown, the Strand.”

In “Ulysses,” Joyce perfectly captured “the polyvocality of our experience” in the 20th century, he says. “The work as it stands — the linguistic, the temporal, the syntactic, the semiotic elements — were the warp upon which Joyce wove what was understandably the original hypertext.”

Would Joyce have embraced hypertext as a literary format, were he writing today? “I think Joyce would have welcomed the ability to play language upon language, not only to evoke it but to literally represent it, to allow language to drift and fragment,” says Michael Joyce.

“He would have both been drawn to the ways in which technology reshapes our use of language, and he would have hated them, too,” believes Callahan. “The Web’s polyphonic qualities — its boisterous babel of voices — these Joyce would have found tremendously appealing.”

Yet some academics seem laughably anxious to ascribe levels of ’90s knowingness to the writer that Joyce hardly could have had. One writer, in the kind of prose that would have surely unleashed Joyce’s satirical razor, suggests that Joyce was even busy envisioning virtual reality: “Joyce … recognizes that a trend towards virtual reality is characteristic of the electro-mechanically or technologically mediated modes of communication.” Does he, indeed?

In contrast, Michael Joyce believes that James Joyce so sweepingly and profoundly altered the way in which we see and understand the world around us that we could eventually create hypertext, a way of thinking and associating in nonlinear fashion. “Hypertext doesn’t spring out of nowhere,” he says. “Hypertext is a convergence of things.” Certainly, what Michael Joyce says he values most about hypertext as a literary form — “its depth, its sense of space, its ability to express the richness and multiplicity of our lives” — sounds like a mini-summary of “Ulysses.”

Callahan sees a similar relationship: “Hypertext is simply the technological means by which we have come to be able to inscribe and read texts such as Joyce’s,” he says. “Like hypertext, Joyce’s great works eschew linear progression, are densely allusive and intricately self-referential, and invite readers to wander, to play, to explore.”

Each of these scholars is wary of attempts to take the father of hypertext and force hypertext upon his pre-hypertext — in other words, to create interactive versions of “Ulysses” and “Finnegans Wake.” Michael Joyce believes this would force the text to be what it is not — that despite the nonlinear structure of “Ulysses,” the fact that it is written as a sequence of pages, in print, is essential to it as a work of art.

Callahan acknowledges the way in which the interactive element of hypertext can be distracting: “What it means to translate Joyce’s work into electronic hypertext is another matter, of course, because one of the concerns is that such a translation might actually flatten the texts, once a reader is faced with a screen-full of bright hyperlinks, whereas she previously had to intuit and construct her own connections.”

Nonetheless, several hypertextual versions of “Ulysses” and “Finnegans Wake” reside on the Web (“A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” either isn’t as hypertextually inviting or doesn’t intrigue the professors to the same extent). Indeed, whatever the formal relationship between Joyce and hypertext, he is certainly the most omnipresent of Irish writers — and of writers in general — out on the Net. That old Internet metric of popularity, a search engine scan for Joyce on the Net (using HotBot), throws up more than 15,000 references. Samuel Beckett is well behind with 6,000, while Seamus Heaney draws 3,200. (Still, U2 elicits nearly 98,000 pages.)

So, James Joyce, “Ulysses” and hypertext: Is there a cybernetic plot? Is he the penman of the pre-history of cyberspace? “We’re taught to see what we think we see,” says Michael Joyce. “Right now we’re in the thrall of technological determinism.”

Hmmmm. Time then, perhaps, to hit the computer’s “off” button, pull “Ulysses” down from the shelf and, during today’s annual celebration of Bloomsday, in honor of the father of hypertext, get reading what the hypertextual crowd these days would call the “fibre” version of the work. and yes I said yes I will Yes.

In the eye of the cyclone was Professor Roger Needham, the Cambridge academic and vice-chancellor appointed to head the lab, who calmly dispensed interviews to publications from London to San Jose. Needham was an astute choice as mouthpiece for the lab — he’s an unswayable, adept media handler used to the ferocious British press pack. He’s also a geek’s geek who has worked in the Silicon Valley labs that bring distant longing to the eyes of computer devotees, like Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center.

Apparently, Needham is viewed as a bit of a loose cannon by Microsoft, which likes its spin as precisely modulated as possible. Accustomed to the far less constrained approach to public relations followed by Europeans (excluding, of course, the slick PR factory of Blair’s Labour Party), Needham simply says what he thinks. And, interestingly, what he thinks right now is that last summer’s media love-in with Microsoft was a catastrophe.

“The announcement in London last June was, from a PR point of view, a disaster,” he says. Certainly an odd sentiment given the story’s wall-to-wall coverage and his own sudden popularity explaining odd details of computer theory to gushing television reporters. But he worries that the scale of the project and investment was blown out of proportion: “It gave people the idea that a very much bigger thing was being done.”

Certainly, 50 million pounds over five years is not a monumental gesture for a company that coughed up $8 million to use the Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up” as a Windows 95 jingle. Also lost in the jumble of Microsoft publicity was the fact that the Microsoft laboratory is hardly unique in Cambridge, which already hosts three other research labs set up by technology companies. Microsoft’s is not even the largest, as Needham is quick to point out — that honor goes to the joint Olivetti-Oracle lab.

The agreeably disheveled and tweedy Needham, who likes to stand and pace as he talks in measured sentences, can unnerve journalists accustomed to the hypefest that normally accompanies major Microsoft projects. Nonetheless, there’s a breathtaking luxury to Needham’s acknowledgment that the 50 million pounds is actually “a metaphorical statement that there’s enough money.” Microsoft apparently just needed to come up with an attractively fat and round base figure to shape the deal. The originally stated budget, he says, “is a work of imaginative fiction” erring on the conservative side.

Basically, there’s plenty of cash to lure the deep thinkers of the theoretical computing world, the ones who can visualize today how the power of the microchip might be harnessed tomorrow. According to Needham, Microsoft’s chief technology officer Nathan Myhrvold told him, “Go and get the best people there are.” As Needham says, “Who could resist that proposition?”

Whatever the real budget — and Needham implies it has an elasticity that would make university research departments green — it includes a minimum yearly $500,000 “external research” fund that Needham started dispensing a few weeks ago. In a gesture immediately noted by Europe’s weakly funded research institutes, Microsoft Research Ltd. — the formal name for the Cambridge Lab — announced it would sponsor a 50,000-pound, two-year postdoctoral fellowship in association with the tiny School of Theoretical Physics at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies in Ireland. (Curiously, DIAS was set up in 1939 as a pet project of the first Irish prime minister, Eamonn de Valera, a mathematics teacher; when de Valera couldn’t get Albert Einstein as its first director, he settled on famed physicist Erwin Schrodinger instead, and arranged to get him out of Nazi Germany.)

The fellowship is evidence that the Cambridge lab is finding its feet after being launched without guidelines: “About the only thing that emerged in conversation [with Microsoft] was, obviously, not to duplicate anything that’s done in Redmond,” says Needham. “We didn’t have a clear agenda and it’s only at the moment clarifying.”

Along with sidekick professor Derek McAuley, the Scottish assistant director of the Cambridge lab, Needham has determined five areas of research emphasis for the facility: security, networking, information retrieval, programming-language theory and decision theory. “Some areas we knew we’d be working in because they’re our research areas,” says McAuley. “The others evolved.” That evolution in some cases depends on just whom they’ve been able to lure to the lab (so far, 13 researchers of an eventual 40 or 50).

A top research lab develops by attracting the best people in their field, not the best available people, says Needham. Those researchers’ interests then shape the lab’s reach. For example, he says the lab’s leaders hadn’t originally planned research in programming-language theory. But one morning as they stood around drinking coffee in Cambridge University’s computer laboratory kitchen, a visiting Italian researcher, one of the world’s leading lights in that area, strolled past. “We looked at each other and said, ‘I wonder …,’” says McAuley. They got him.

Salaries at the lab are “internationally competitive,” Needham coyly acknowledges, unwilling to offer a figure. But we are, after all, talking Microsoft here. “We can’t quite get anyone we want,” he insists. “Our offers aren’t invariably accepted.” For some, he says, this is because they aren’t interested in working in England; for others, it might be what he calls the “two body problem” — a spouse who can’t find work in the region. Then there are those who have, he says, negative “delusions” about working for Microsoft.

The stuff of those delusions was almost uniformly ignored in the breathless reportage which followed the lab’s announcement in June. One of the few British journalists to express any cynicism about the deal was Bill O’Neill, an editor at the British daily newspaper The Guardian, who wrote a strongly worded op-ed piece asking, “Is this the sort of partner that Cambridge wants, let alone that its world-ranking scientists and technologists deserve? Cambridge needs investment to exploit its intellectual talent … But forging a deal with Microsoft looks more likely to shackle Cambridge staff to the ideals of a ruthless organization.”

Predictably, Needham says: “I think this is actually a misplaced view.” He stresses that the lab is a European lab with its own set of international researchers, not a British institution employing only Cambridge University scientists. He and McAuley insist they find the Microsoft work environment exhilaratingly pro-research, with a satisfying connection between research and its practical application to products. But still, isn’t British — or European — brainpower being channeled to benefit an American multinational?

Almost no European companies or institutions are funding significant research, Needham counters: “If you look at the worthwhile computing research places in the U.K. they’re all American-owned,” excepting British Telecom’s lab. “Now this is extremely sad. But the fact of the matter is that the U.K. and European software and computing industries are not that strong.”

Now, he says, Europeans have the option of staying in Europe and still “doing world-class computing.” He adds that the Microsoft lab has been careful not to poach researchers from competing facilities with the offer of Microsoft salaries and stock options: “We’re quite anxious to be recognized as good citizens and not as going out with a financial vacuum cleaner.”

Their greater concern is to maintain a profile within the distant company. “The big challenge is how to influence the company, because they’re eight time zones away. There’s a real problem with ‘out of sight, out of mind,’” says Needham. But he hopes that success in Cambridge might result in further Microsoft rewards for Europe: “If we can prove you can run a distant research lab and the company can gain from it, they might consider establishing other similar facilities.”

In the end, the availability of top facilities matters more to the research brother- and sisterhood than who runs them. Ultimately, though, the company footing the bills calls the shots. No one can really predict whether the relationship between Europe-based theoretical research and Redmond-based practical implementation will remain cozy or turn uncomfortable. But the high profiles of both Cambridge and Microsoft guarantee that we’ll quickly learn about either outcome.

The break-up — amicable, according to all parties, unlike the fraternal division that lay at the heart of “Myst” itself — comes as the Miller brothers dominate the game charts with both the 5-year-old “Myst” and its long-awaited sequel, “Riven.” “Myst” has sold more than 4 million copies since the adventure/exploration game was first released on CD-ROM in 1993. In a feat yet to be matched in the fast and furious games market, “Myst” reached a mass audience (a third of them women) rather than a niche enclave of teen gamers. The Millers became digital celebrities and earned that early-’90s badge of hipness, an appearance in a Gap ad.

In the five years since its release, “Myst” has never fallen off the lists of the 10 top-selling CD-ROM games — and once again led in sales last week, according to PC Data. And despite its late-in-the-year October release, “Riven” was the top-selling game for 1997; it has now sold close to 1.5 million copies.

So it’s not just the fans who will be disappointed by the news of the Millers’ split. Brvderbund, which published both of their games, has relied heavily on the Miller brothers’ oeuvre to pump up sliding profits.

In London to promote the release of “Riven” for the Sony PlayStation, Rand Miller emphasized that the brothers’ dissolution of their partnership was a friendly affair. “There’ve been crazy rumors that have gone around, that Robyn and Rand have fallen out,” he sighs. In fact, he says, Robyn has left to work on plans for a film: “He’s the visionary, he’s dying to get on to the next thing.” Rand, on the other hand, will at least initially concentrate on refocusing Cyan as the headquarters for a “Myst”/”Riven” product franchise: “Somebody’s got to mind the store, for lack of a better term, or do a more contained next thing.”

Robyn Miller confirmed the news in an e-mail: “I am, indeed, ‘off making worlds.’ Really, though, the worlds are just a vehicle for something I’m far more interested in: stories. Having never really taken an opportunity to test myself (and express myself) in a more linear medium, I’m anxious to finally go that route and see what happens. Rand and I agreed that this would not be best achieved within the walls of Cyan, which is, at its core, an interactive company. So, because of that, and because of some of the obvious risk associated with what I’m doing, we agreed that my work should be a bit more independent.”

Robyn says he is actively developing two movies. Are they related to the “Myst” and “Riven” universes? Nope. According to Robyn, “The only thing these projects may have in common with ‘Myst’ or ‘Riven’ is that at their core will be completely developed worlds, with histories, cultures, geologies, societies and on and on.”

Rand’s amiability toward his brother comes across clearly, but it’s nonetheless plainly tempered by the experience of working for many years with a strong creative personality. “I don’t want to give the impression that there’s this huge split — there’s still some tie to Cyan. I work with him, he works with me and we chat on a regular basis,” says Rand. “But we wanted to make it separate enough where we each kind of have our own vision … If there’s too many people in charge either the stew gets ugly or the people get ugly. So we just as soon’d keep it on good terms.”

“Riven,” which took four years to complete, was overseen by three minds — Rand, Richard and Robyn — which seems to have stretched the relationship thin at times. Now, Rand repeatedly mentions the need to have a solo vision on projects, especially if they decide to work again on future ventures: “It was a wonderful working relationship and I wouldn’t hesitate to get involved in it again. I think if we did again it would be with one driver on a project.”

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What’s in store for Rand Miller’s Cyan? More “Myst” or “Riven” products, for one thing. Virgin will release the soundtracks to the two games in mid-March, but Rand is thinking more ambitiously about new, related games: “We’ve always said there’s no sequel to ['Riven'] — there will never be another product like this that you explore in the same way — but there’s other entertainment products that can be related to ‘Myst’ and ‘Riven,’ maybe not on the same scale, but done in a different way.”

In addition, Cyan may be involved in pushing forward the long-rumored “Myst” — or perhaps, now, “Riven” — film (a separate and distinct project from Robyn Miller’s new movie plans). “We have more story, we have lots of information that nobody knows about, that would be nice to take advantage of somewhere — we’ll see if anybody wants pieces of that,” Rand says. Is he actively talking to anyone about a film? “We’re not right now, because we’ve just been in shutdown mode, trying to really take it easy … We’re not in a hurry.”

Rand says a film project could possibly reunite the team of Rand, Robyn and Richard (who has a background in film animation), but not for a film based on either “Myst” or “Riven”: “For ‘Myst’ and ‘Riven’ I don’t think it would happen. Only because ‘Myst’ and ‘Riven’ are done, in Richard and Robyn’s minds in particular. They really are motivated by new, fresh things. In their minds they’re on to other worlds. So maybe later on, when they’ve developed the worlds and movies that they want to do, we’ll get together.”

In his e-mail, Robyn Miller suggested that he might work again with Cyan if any of his current film projects spun off an interactive product or game: “Actually, I can’t imagine us not continually associating and consulting with each other. I kind of cringe at the ugly rumors that I know are going to be spread about the ‘split’ or the ‘divorce.’ In reality, we still get along great and have a tremendous respect for one another from a professional point of view; most importantly we are good friends and close brothers.”

According to Rand, the creative partnership between the brothers worked so well because their personalities were complementary. Rand, 40-ish, is tall, broad and bearded; he’s voluble, quick to laugh and fills the room he’s in. Robyn, in his early 30s, is tall and slender, quiet and contemplative. “It’s easier when you have different personalities, because you can kind of fill each other’s faults or plug the holes a little bit better,” Rand says.

However, as children, they weren’t exactly inseparable, he says. “We weren’t close brothers, really. There was a brother between us who was probably much closer to Robyn than I was and beat up on him and made him eat grass and that kind of thing,” he laughs.

So, no sequel to “Riven,” no brotherly partnership to produce another blockbuster game?

Rand grins impishly. “Ahhhh, but you never know. That became our motto at Cyan: You never know.”

However, there’s one key difference between the two industries. While the movie business produces an endless variety of films that appeal to paying customers, the new media crowd is still hunting for its audience. It keeps cranking out the equivalent of small art-house films that few want to see.

As a result, Milia continues to slide away from its original raison d’jtre — a meeting place for buyers, sellers and creators of “content” — into an unfocused hodgepodge that reflects the fretfulness and stagnation of the entire interactive media business (excepting games and porn, those booming industries for boys and bigger boys). Two years ago, the exhibition halls seethed with publishers trawling for hot new developer talent. Now, even the biggest publishers mostly hang out in the hotel bars and slink around talking to contacts without bothering to rent a booth at the show.

The content-buyer casualty list for this year included Time Warner, America Online and Microsoft (which last year made developers’ mouths water with the promise of a $10 million honeypot for content development for the now retrenching Microsoft Network). And so more and more developers are bypassing the show, realizing there’s hardly anyone to sell to — especially if you have an intelligent, visually lush art project to pitch.

Nonetheless, there are worse places to watch your business hopes crumble. The Palais nestles against Cannes’ serene yacht harbor on one side and marks the start of the Croisette, the long, arching promenade lined with couture boutiques, smugly elegant elderly hotels like the Majestic and newer graceless monstrosities like the Nago Hilton. Moments of exasperation can be relieved instantly by a stroll along the waterfront — where you can gape at the civil servant whose luckless job it is to ride an exquisitely polished motorcycle specially equipped to vacuum up the deposits left by Cannes’ resident army of poodles.

DVD-ROM was supposed to be this year’s Big Thing at Milia, but the new high-capacity format created little buzz either during sessions or in late-night barside conversations in the prime beachfront hotels. Developers said they are exasperated by the bickering over standards, and there’s no strong evidence that the users who rejected CD-ROMs will embrace the far more expensive DVD (except, again, for games). As veteran British games designer and keynote speaker Peter Molyneux said, “It’s just another storage medium.”

Instead, it’s the potential of the Internet that got him and many others
excited. That’s in contrast to last year, when discussions of the probable
importance of online content and the weakness in the CD-ROM market had
delegates anxiously attending sessions with titles like “The Winter of our
Disc-content.” This year, the word “online” was ubiquitous in the sessions
– but it still had hardly found its way down to the exhibitors’ products
in the vast halls beneath the Palais.

Despite multimedia’s current becalmed state and a drop in attendees,
Milia has increasingly become the domain of suits, ties and furiously
chirping mobile phones. This year the best-attended sessions were the ones
that talked about business models rather than the nature of interactive art.

The optimistic view, chanted like a soothing mantra at Milia, is that
“content is king.” But of the few products that are being received royally
in the marketplace, most are increasingly vicious action and strategy
games. Much to the surprise of many delegates, Milia’s organizers this year
aggressively wooed the games industry, no doubt hoping they would be
flattered into taking pricey booths in the halls of the Palais (and indeed,
Sony, Eidos and others took the bait).

But the gaming world is alien to many of Milia’s tonier multimedia
developers — as became especially clear at Milia’s final awards ceremony.
Previews of the mostly violent games evoked a bemused silence, and the
jury’s decision to give the overall grand prize to “F-22 Air Dominance
Fighter” was not popular, garnering only scattered applause. Last year’s
choice, Peter Gabriel’s “Eve,” delighted the Milia crowd; this year, most had expected Bröderbund’s href="http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/feature/1997/11/cov_06riven.html">“Riven” to take top honors.

A glance around the halls confirmed that Milia is risking losing its
international focus as it becomes more dominated by French exhibitors and
attendees. Most ominously, many of the American companies that are driving
much of the technical innovation in interactive media didn’t show.
(Arguably, the most thrilling technological developments this year were in
the Palais restrooms, where a nation famed for squat-and-go facilities had
installed toilets requiring a bizarre jumble of button-pressing to get the
seat, draped in a hygienic paper liner, to lower.)

Instead, Milia’s hall was crowded with developers showing depressingly
similar products. Even the porn kings who used to dot the exhibition no
longer feel the need to attend — their numbers were reduced to a single
publisher called MacDaddy, which set up house across from a French
educational house. All day, men surreptitiously looked sideways at
MacDaddy’s lingeried nymphettes while pretending to learn about everyday
life in ancient Egypt.

Some hope for the beleaguered publishers came from speaker Esther Dyson, who opined that there’s no single catch-all blueprint for a
successful new-media business model. Dyson proposed an analogy to the
restaurant world — where “the question is not what business model you
choose but whether you do what you do well,” and the success of McDonald’s
does not threaten the table d’hôte establishment.
Of course, at the moment nearly all the online restaurants — haute cuisine
and fast food alike — are giving away meals for free.

Bruised by a punishing marketplace, Milia’s melancholy attendees may
find no more refuge in Internet publishing than in discs. But as long as
the conference makes its home at Cannes, at least they’ll always have a
luxurious place to nurse their wounds.