For those who remember that technology was more fun before it got dumbed down by dot-com mania, last week was both bracing and wistful, as the Transmeta crew finally sashayed down the catwalk with their sassy new chipsets. When was the last time anyone got this excited about hardware? Sex it up with stock-market chatter all you like, but the fact remains: We’re talking instruction sets and power management and architecture here. Ooh, baby!

And we looked back, too, to the invention of the spread-spectrum technology that underlies many of the best geek toys (including cell phones). That technology was invented by Hedy Lamarr, the beautiful and brilliant actress whose work aided the Allied war effort during WWII. Miss Lamarr passed on last week and I’m sad about that—because she was quite something, and because I like people who take action for worthy causes.

Usually.

You may have heard of etoy.com, that excellent and venerable art project—online since 1995 and embroiled now in a domain-name scuffle with nouveau e-tailer etoys.com. In fact, you may have heard about them from me. I summarized the dispute and discussed it in two separate columns last month.(12/9 and 1/5)

To recap, toy-shop etoys (with an s) offered art-collective etoy (no s) $500,000 to abandon their domain, which etoy acquired two years before the retailer got etoys. Rebuffed, etoys took their case to a Los Angeles Superior Court judge, who required etoy representatives to fly in from Europe to receive a prewritten injunction forcing that site offline until further notice. Hilarity ensued, until just this week (1/25) both sides agreed to drop the whole thing, with eToys picking up the tab.

But that’s not why etoy is on my mind. I’m writing this because after two months of spam overload from etoy’s alleged friends, I’m loath to cheer the win, even though etoy was clearly in the right. It’s hard to remember the last time a cause so good was supported by methods so obnoxious—and the last time that so-called champions of the Net abused said Net so thoroughly.

As the etoy/etoys saga wore on, supporters of the art site took to mocking the toy site’s e-commerce aspirations by setting up “mutual funds” and other deliberately confusing projects to make points about the nature of the lawsuit and what it means for the Net’s future. See for yourself at toywar.com and rtmark.com; it’s incisive parody and very smart. However, you’d never know how Net-savvy it was based on the mail-blasting campaign rtmark has set up to disseminate information, mainly because it’s hard to believe anybody who claims to care about the Net and yet can’t seem to resist abusing it to make their point.

Complaining doesn’t help; asking to be let off the mailing list doesn’t help. If rtmark wants you to see their message in your inbox or on threaded discussions, see it you shall. (And it’s not just my luck to be thus inundated; other Weekly recipients include news staffers, copy editors, and ads salespeople.) The rtmark site tells activists that “if your audience complains about your postings, tell them to complain instead to eToys, because neither you nor others like you will relent from expressions of outrage, nor from pursuit of justice, until eToys backs down.”

Here’s the problem with that: The Net isn’t about forcing me to watch your performance. I may be tracked, hacked, and god knows what else online, but if I say scram and you don’t scram, you’re no better than any other bulk-mail baboon.

etoy is a brilliant project, and its supporters were right to call this a showdown between the people who regard the Internet as a cash cow and those who believe it capable of better things. Many of the latter group are old-school Netheads, keeping the dream alive in the face of corporate blather, arrogant multinationals, and pervasive cultural cancers, like spam. Forcing people to pay attention to their broadcast message doesn’t make rtmark first-rate culture jammers; it makes them third-rate TV programmers.

And the worst part, or the best thing -or both- is that it worked. etoy won. Score one for the good guys, if you can still say who they are.

I’m not sure when or why the forces of good turned to the tools of evil to get their message across, but in doing so they make me think there’s no point in pressing the issue—one side’s as anti-Net as the other. etoy won the battle, but their tactics tip me off that etoys and its ilk may well win the war.