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In the future, computers will mutate
beyond recognition. Computers won't be intimidating,
wire-festooned, high-rise bit-factories swallowing your
entire desk. They will tuck under your arm, into your
valise, into your kid's backpack. After that,
they'll fit onto your face, plug into your ear. And
after that - they'll simply melt. They'll become
fabric. What does a computer really need? Not glass boxes
- it needs thread - power wiring, glass fiber-optic,
cellular antennas, microcircuitry. These are woven
things. Fabric and air and electrons and light. Magic
handkerchiefs with instant global access. You'll wear
them around your neck. You'll make tents from them if
you want. They will be everywhere, throwaway. Like denim.
Like paper. Like a child's kite. This is coming a lot
faster than anyone realizes. - 1993
~~~I believe that the national
adventure you now propose is of quite extraordinary
importance. Historians of the future - provided good
dreams prevail - will view this as having been far more
crucial to the survival of democracy in the United States
than rural electrification or the space program. -
1993
~~~Every machine you see here will be
trucked out and buried in a landfill, and never spoken of
again, within a dozen years ... The values are what
matters. The values are the only things that last, the
only things that *can* last. Hack the hardware, not the
Constitution. Hold on tight to what matters, and just
hack the rest. I used to think that cyberspace was 50
years away. What I thought was 50 years away, was only 10
years away. And what I thought was 10 years away - it was
already here. I just wasn't aware of it yet. -
1993
~~~We have an opportunity to create
media that would match the splendid ambitions of Franklin
with his public libraries and his mail system, and
Jefferson and Madison with their determination to arm
democracy with the power knowledge gives. We could offer
children, yes even poor children in poor districts, a
real opportunity to control the screen, for once. -
1993
~~~In my own best-case scenario, every
elementary and high school teacher in the United States
of America will have unlimited and absolutely cost-free
professional access to long-distance telephone service.
The provision of this service could be made, by law, a
basic operation requirement for all telephone companies.
Of course, this would also apply to cable television. By
the same token, every teacher in every American public
school will be provided, by the manufacturer, on demand,
and at no cost, with copies of any piece of software. -
1993
~~~In the future I expect the
commercial sector to target little children with their
full enormous range of online demographic databases and
privacy-shattering customer-service profiles. These
people will be armed and ready and lavishly financed and
there every day, peering at our children through a
cyberspace one-way mirror ... We need to make some
conscious decisions to reinvent our information
technology as if the future mattered. As if our children
were human beings, human citizens, not raw blobs of
potential revenue-generating machinery. - 1993
~~~One could imagine a very ascetic
sort of life growing out of this, where the body is
ignored. - 1995
~~~Really what they're offering you
is a mall. They want to give you an infomall where you
pay for every bit of information you download, and
you'll download from a menu that some corporation has
assembled ... I have great hopes for the Internet, very
little hope for commercial versions, and I profoundly
hope that the Internet will continue to be the basis of
this sort of growth. - 1995
~~~Cash is a dubious thing ...
Cyberspace is where the bank keeps your money and to a
real extent it's where the stock market happens.
I'm waiting for the Three Mile Island of computer
banking - some unspeakable meltdown, although I'm
hoping it really doesn't come along. That will be
when we discover the extent of our reliance on
computation. - 1995
~~~We're seeing something in the
Internet as significant as the birth of cities. It's
something that profound and with that sort of infinite
possibilities. It's really something new, it's a
new kind of civilization. - 1995
~~~We are being shoved up against
futurity with such violence that science fiction may
become a historical term ... The Internet may be
important because we are seeing something akin to what we
did when we invented cities. - 1995
~~~The present is more frightening than
any imaginable future I might dream up ... If Marshall
McLuhan were alive today, he'd have a nervous
breakdown. - 1995 |
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