The fundamental security interests of the West lie in helping Russia to create a communications infrastructure … Without it, Russia and all the other republics will remain a powder keg where the three largest players still have thousands of nuclear weapons.
If the government allows unimpeded data access, the Singaporean way of life will be radically transformed. Perhaps a cosmopolitan, more robust Singapore will emerge, or maybe it will be consumed. What does seem clear is that the information technology bell cannot be unrung.
While the NII will cause some cognitive dissonance between freedom of information and social control [in Singapore], it will hasten the evolutionary incremental change toward greater freedom. The NII will merely hasten the debate about access to information, a debate that is already going on.’
The information is going to get in. Some bureaucrat gatekeeper isn’t going to be able to sit there like Maxwell’s demon and let only the “good stuff” in.
If Singapore chooses to stay with “business as usual,” it may never realize its goal of becoming an information technology superpower … If, however, Singapore chooses to have a truly open data highway, it will be in for a very bumpy ride indeed … With the NII looming on the horizon, the question becomes, how ya’ gonna keep ’em down on the farm, after they’ve seen Paree? And cyberspace has lots of provocative “Parees.”
The story paints a beautiful picture of a future dominated by giant, voice-controlled, wide-screen, high-definition wall TVs that serve as picture phones, interactive tutors, and electronic places of business. Instead of money, everyone carries “smart-cards” that also serve as identification and medical history databases. Portable cellular data screens are used to access street maps and up-to-the-minute transit information … It evokes all the innocent optimism of Walt Disney’s Tomorrowland. While the Tays may represent Singapore’s future mainstream NII users, the potential exists for a darker exploitation.
Of all the countries jumping on the information technology bandwagon, Singapore is the most vulnerable to the profound social changes that large-scale digital integration will bring. At worst, its brittle, authoritarian society will stagnate. At best, it will be drastically transformed; its people liberated.
Systems are getting so complicated that they’re out of control in a rational sense. The role model for the future of human interaction with machines, if we want to avoid our own destruction and regain control, is to start thinking of our interaction with technology in terms of the intuitive, the irrational.
It is too early to tell what the digital counterculture will call itself, but the history of the hippies offers a clue … the tekkies will arrive sometime in the mid-1990s, if not sooner. Watch the skies for a new comet – it will be digital, and its tail is likely to glow in Technicolor swirls. Its arrival will change our lives forever.
The digital counterculture will reject [the sci-fi film “Blade Runner’s”] bleak vision of a future in which technology enlarges the human spirit as a new tool for consciousness in much the same way that the hippies appropriated the psychoactive chemical spinoffs of the military-industrial complex. This new movement will be cyberpunk imbued with human warmth … the gospel of the post-cyberpunk movement will be one of machines in the service of enlarging our humanity.