Shock Wave (Anti) Warrior

[We are] rapidly developing a chain of info-intensive countries whose economics depend not on the hoe or the assembly-line but on brainpower … All the social institutions designed for the second wave – for a mass production, mass media, mass society – are in crisis. The health system, the family system, the education system, the transportation system, various ecological systems – along with our value and epistemological systems. All of them … The emerging third-wave civilization is going to collide head-on with the old first and second civilizations … The master conflict of the 21st century will not be between cultures but between the three supercivilizations – between agrarianism and industrialism and post-industrialism.

Shock Wave (Anti) Warrior

For 300 years we have had a scientific ethos that says “information is good” – and the more we know the better. I believe we’re heading into an era when there’s going to be enormous pressure to block out, to prevent further development of certain kinds of knowledge.

Shock Wave (Anti) Warrior

Our existing political and moral structures are going to explode. There’s nothing that remotely prepares us to cope with say, armies equipped with genetically engineered, race-specific weapons or, for that matter, governments capable of practical eugenics. It’s going to be a strange world.

Nowhere to Hide

I look forward to a time when no one will be exempt from surveillance. So long as corporations, governments, and citizens are equally vulnerable, lack of privacy will be the ultimate equalizer. It will also drastically reduce crime – especially street crime – when there’s a constant possibility of electronic evidence turning up in court. On a domestic level, I doubt that this will affect us much, one way or the other. If my neighbors don’t bother to bug my phone right now, why should they bother to video my apartment in the future? On a macro level, the impact will be significant; and I believe most of it will be positive.

Chaos is the Form

Wireless will yank the cords of an awful lot of companies who think they have it with LANS, TCP/IP, fiber, and cable. And who knows what is “beyond wireless?”

Chaos is the Form

A lot of smug businesses, organizations, and implementations built around technology are going to be bypassed in the next few years – so fast it won’t even be funny. I’ll bet the Internet as we know it will be passe in five years – just as the largest number of people are waking up to it and making investment decisions about it. They will soon look foolish.

New Mediaeval Aesthetic

Medieval Christians thought of themselves as connected to a greater consciousness, a community of souls, which was as real and powerful to them as cyberspace is to its denizens today … The vast numbers of the illiterate had to learn their information, if at all, from painted or stained-glass pictures in churches, without access to the textual basis of the images. Today we call this television, tomorrow virtual reality. The sense of community and common goals among the “wired” was defined in opposition to a Great Unwired. The power of information technology is obvious; let us see that it does not, by excluding some from its communion, invent serfdom anew.

James Bond R Us!

Circumstances are conspiring to create a world in which we are all espionage agents, whether we want to be or not. It is not widely recognized yet, but the much ballyhooed Information Economy is, in fact, an Intelligence Economy where we will all wake up one morning to find ourselves locked into the go-go lifestyle of Spy vs. Spy. Or hadn’t you noticed that “knowledge worker” is just another name for “intelligence analyst”? In our new Intelligence Economy, we’ll all be working for the jokers with the satellites.

The Merry Pranksters Go to Washington: They Helped Steve Jackson Games Hand the Feds a Stinging Defeat in Court. Their ‘Open Platform’ Proposal is the Heart of Gore’s Infobahn Policy. They Lead the Coalition Fighting the Clipper Chip. In Short, the Electronic Frontier Foundation is the Preeminent Defender of Our Civil Rights in Cyberspace. But Just Who Are These People?

The fundamental thing [the Net does] is to overcome the advantages of economies of scale … so the big guys don’t rule … [Organized political parties won’t be needed if open networks] enable people to organize ad hoc, rather than get stuck in some rigid group.