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More from Bruce Sterling
Extending the public right-to-know into cyberspace
will be a mighty battle. It’s an old war, a war librarians are used
to, and I honor you for the free-expression battles you have won
in the past. But the terrain of cyberspace is new terrain. I think
that ground will have to be won all over again, megabyte by megabyte.
- 1992
~~~ Computer networks worldwide will feature 3-D animated graphics,
radio and cellular phone-links to portable computers, as well as
fax, voice, and high-definition television. A multimedia global
circus! Or so it's hoped - and planned. The real Internet of the
future may bear very little resemblance to today's plans. Planning
has never seemed to have much to do with the seething, fungal development
of the Internet. After all, today's Internet bears little resemblance
to those original grim plans for RAND's post-holocaust command grid.
It's a fine and happy irony. - 1993
~~~The whole massive, lethal superpower
infrastructure comes unfolding out of 21st-century cyberspace like
some impossible fluid origami trick. The Reserve guys from the bowling
leagues suddenly reveal themselves to be digitally assisted Top
Gun veterans from a hundred weekend cyberspace campaigns. And they
go to some godforsaken place that doesn't possess Virtual Reality
As A Strategic Asset, and they bracket that army in their rangefinder
screens, and then they cut it off, and then they kill it. Blood
and burning flesh splashes the far side of the glass. But it can't
get through the screen. - 1993
~~~ "Simulate before you build." They
want to make that a basic military principle. Not just simulated
weapons. Entire simulated defense plants. Factories that exist only
in digital form, designed and prepared to build weapons that don't
even exist yet either, and have never existed, and may become obsolete
and be replaced by better ones, before a nail is ever hammered.
Nevertheless, these nonexistent weapons will have entire battalions
of real people who are expert in their use, people who helped design
them and improve them hands-on, in the fields of virtual war. -
1993
~~~ Can governments really exercise national military power - kick
ass, kill people - merely by using some big amps and some color
monitors and some keyboards, and a bunch of other namby-pamby sci-fi
"holodeck" stuff? The answer is yes. Yes, this technology is lethal.
Yes, it is a real strategic asset. - 1993
~~~The rise of computer networking,
of the Information Society, is doing strange and disruptive things
to the processes by which power and knowledge are currently distributed.
Knowledge and information, supplied through these new conduits,
are highly corrosive to the status quo. People living in the midst
of technological revolution are living outside the law: not necessarily
because they mean to break laws, but because the laws are vague,
obsolete, overbroad, draconian, or unenforceable. - 1994
~~~ There's
something direly mean spirited and ungenerous about inventing a
language and then renting it out to other people to speak. There's
something unprecedented and sinister in this process of creeping
commodification of data and knowledge. A computer is something too
close to the human brain for me to rest entirely content with someone
patenting or copyrighting the process of its thought ... I don't
think democracy will thrive in a milieu where vast empires of data
are encrypted, restricted, proprietary, confidential, top-secret,
and sensitive. I fear for the stability of a society that builds
sand castles out of databits and tries to stop a real-world tide
with royal commands. - 1994
~~~ FBI people ... your idea of Digital
Telephony is a scarcely mitigated disaster ... you're going to be
filling out your paperwork in quintuplicate to get a tap, just like
you always do ... In the meantime, you will have armed the enemies
of the United States around the world with a terrible weapon ...
raw and tyrannical Digital Telephony. You're gonna be using it to
round up wise guys in street gangs, and people like Saddam Hussein
are gonna be using it to round up democratic activists ...You're
going to strengthen the hand of despotism around the world, and
then you're going to have to deal with the hordes of state-supported
truck bombers these rogue governments are sending our way after
annihilating their own internal opposition by using your tools.
- 1994
~~~ Encrypted networks worry the hell out of me ... The effects
are scary and unpredictable and could be very destabilizing. But
even the Four Horsemen of Kidporn, Dope Dealers, Mafia, and Terrorists
don't worry me as much as totalitarian governments ... Our battle
this century against totalitarianism has left terrible scars all
over our body politic, and the threat these people pose to us is
entirely and utterly predictable. You can say that the devil we
know is better than the devil we don't, but the devils we knew were
ready to commit genocide, litter the earth with dead, and blow up
the world. How much worse can that get? Let's not build chips and
wiring for our police and spies when only their police and spies
can reap the full benefit of them. - 1994
~~~You want an example of
a communication system that doesn't charge for transport? The English
language. Think of the Internet as a language rather than a machine,
and most of your questions [about charging people to use it] become
irrelevant. I think the Internet is tougher than you give it credit
for. From now on, the struggle will not be over mechanical control
of the means of information, but over spin- control of the zeitgeist.
- 1994
~~~ Computers don't make any ... old free-expression problems
go away; on the contrary, they intensify them, and they introduce
a bunch of new problems ... They're out there. They're out there
now. In the future, they're only going to get worse. And there's
going to be a bunch of new problems that nobody's even imagined.
- 1995
~~~Countries that have offshore money laundries are gonna have
offshore data laundries. Countries that now have lousy oppressive
governments and smart, determined terrorist revolutionaries are
gonna have lousy oppressive governments and smart determined terrorist
revolutionaries with computers. Not too long after that, they're
going to have tyrannical revolutionary governments run by zealots
with computers; then we're likely to see just how close to Big Brother
a government can really get. Dealing with these people is going
to be a big problem for us. - 1995
~~~ Current trends in communications
are leading toward a head-on collision between global networking
and national governmental authority. At the moment a "twilight of
sovereignty" scenario looks plausible and the situation definitely
does not favor governments. Given current political instability
worldwide, it's going to be a lot easier to make governments look
like computer networks than it is to make the computer revolution
the handmaiden of traditional governments. I make no judgment as
to whether this is good or bad. After the revolution things will
be different - not better, just different. - 1995
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