Since 11 September world interest rates have dropped. Even now, when US capital investment has collapsed, 2001 is certain to be the third highest year for venture capital investment.

Just as in the dotcom boom, there seems no limit to financial liquidity. US consumer debt has soared. British government borrowing is set to rise as the public sector takes the lead in spending and in reinforcing protection systems against international terrorism. But although there seems no limit to credit, reactions to 11 September have intensified a sense of the limits of IT.

Today, after all those dotcom re-intermediators sprayed their new-found cash away in branding and advertising, the old Cold War infrastructure of the internet has been improved with fibre and with storage, but with little else.

The financial speculation was there, the real investment was not, and the result was that expectations about IT were dashed. Yet although 'infrastructure solutions' is the hard-headed phrase on the lips of all big IT suppliers nowadays, they find client caution magnified by the fallout from 11 September.

Clients don't want to be hijacked. More than ever, their watchwords are corporate governance, risk management and shareholder value. They won't get fooled again. Convincing themselves that a two-quarters-of-negative-GDP recession is inevitable for objective economic reasons (it isn't), they cut back on IT spending and so turn groundless fears into a palpable downturn.

Fear drives every aspect of management today. So not just security, but an obsessive drive for protection against external threats will become the main event in IT. The issue is not just about terrorism.

Now that Procter & Gamble has agreed to pay Unilever millions of dollars for using a Vietnam veteran to go 'dumpster diving' in Unilever's rubbish for secrets to help Wash & Go, protection against rivals - and against rogue employees as much as rogue states - will be the priority.

Like George Bush's uniquely long-term war against terrorism, however, much of the new IT will be the equivalent of a 'Did you pack these bags yourself?' question at the airport. It will be a sop to management apprehensions, but will provide as much real benefit and will gain as much popular support as America's war on drugs.

Ironically IT, America's major positive, contemporary contribution to the world, has never been more popular. But if Italian president Silvio Berlusconi had upheld IT as part of his typically ignorant defence of western civilisation, we can be sure that it too would earn the newly unconfident self-criticism of the western elite. Already the internet has been castigated as a medium for terrorists.

The perception that the IT world, like America, has brought the current crisis on itself has little to do with the facts. It is more to do with a contemporary loss of long-term purpose in IT. When all sneer at broadband and third-generation, who would now boldly take a 30-year perspective on IT and decide on a distinct course of research and action, as Victorian engineers once did?

The fear that we have gone 'too far' in IT amounts only to fear of ourselves. The current but prolonged crisis in IT will sharpen the wills of those who value progress over superstition.