New Scapegoat: The Internet

In the wake of Oklahoma City, anti-/violence/pornography/bomb downloading rhetoric is becoming the stock-in-trade of pandering politicians who wouldn’t know a modem if it hit them in the head … The ignorant posturings of these and other politicians and Congresscritters would be ludicrous if they weren’t so dangerous. Waiting in the wings, ready to eviscerate civil rights in cyberspace, are the FBI and NSA, with their agenda to tap every phone in America and make effective cryptography illegal.

Jacked on the Wire

Some joker somewhere is going to build a virus to waylay your agent, beat the hell out of it, and take your money. Maybe the police will maintain a slew of copbots designed to patrol the Net for these kinds of viruses. Maybe, just maybe, you will get your money back. But knowing the way digital cash works, you probably won’t.

In Search of the Grail

The Net is one source of the mutuality, feedback, and accountability that we need to counteract the rigidity and isolation of modern life. We will need that feedback and mutuality even more as our planet continues to evolve. Our galaxy contains countless civilizations that will one day make the racial diversity on Earth look like bland homogeneity. The Net is a step in the right direction; it’s one way to learn how to live in relationship to the unthinkable complexity and diversity that will characterize future communities.

Singular Visionary: Sci-fi Master/Math Nerd Vernor Vinge Believes that Machines are About to Rule the Human Race as Humans Have Ruled the Animal Kingdom

Technology is close enough to being out of control that human intervention has become a weaker and weaker constraint. Also, it’s important to regard technology in the long sweep of history as being one with history. In fact, it’s one with biology, one with the rise of multicellular life forms, and it’s headed someplace – probably. But it’s not alien to the sweep of development and beauty and order in the universe.

Singular Visionary: Sci-fi Master/Math Nerd Vernor Vinge Believes that Machines are About to Rule the Human Race as Humans Have Ruled the Animal Kingdom

If we ever succeed in making machines as smart as humans, then it’s only a small leap to imagine that we would soon thereafter make – or cause to be made – machines that are even smarter than any human. And that’s it. That’s the end of the human era – the closest analogy would be the rise of the human race within the animal kingdom. The reason for calling this a “singularity” is that things are completely unknowable beyond that point.

Return of the Luddites: A Group of Second-Wave Intellectuals Has Rejected Digital Technology and Declared a Counterrevolution

This time around the technology is even more complex and extensive, and its impact even more pervasive and dislocating, touching greater populations with greater speed and at greater scales. [If what’s in store for us] is an “information age” with “information highways” and “information supermarkets,” then it is the computer and those who feed and handle it who reign supreme: in the country of the sighted, the all-seeing one is king. Control of information is control of power.