The new urban design task is not one of configuring buildings, streets, and public spaces to meet the needs and aspirations of the civitas, but one of writing computer code and deploying software objects to create virtual places and electronic interconnections between them. Within these places, social contacts will be made, economic transactions will be carried out, cultural life will unfold, surveillance will be enacted, and power will be exerted.
Life in cyberspace generates electronic trails as inevitably as soft ground retains footprints; that, in itself, is not the worrisome thing. But where will digital information about your contacts and activities reside? Who will have access to it and under what circumstances? Will information of different kinds be kept separately, or will there be ways to assemble it electronically to create close and detailed pictures of your life? These are the questions that we will face with increasing urgency as we shift more and more of our daily activities into the digital, electronic sphere … Electronic data collection and digital collation techniques are so much more powerful than any that could be deployed in the past, they provide the means to create the ultimate Foucaultian dystopia.
As switched video networks become extensively used for everyday purposes – shopping, banking, selecting movies, social contact, political assembly – they potentially will grab and keep much more detailed portraits of private lives than have ever been made before. And wearable devices – ones that continuously monitor your medical condition, for example, or perhaps the cybersex suits that some journalists have avidly imagined – may construct the most up-close and intimate of records.
Grizzled old operators still like to assure us that “all politics is local.” But in the cyberspace era, things may be very different … cyberspace has the potential to change political institutions and mechanisms fundamentally; it opens up ways of assembling and communicating with dispersed political constituencies, new opportunities for instigating and formulating issues, and mechanisms for providing decisions and feedback at a much faster pace than in the past.
There are few Khyber Passes on the Internet … and there is no very effective way to grab control of it. Unlike banana republics, it does not have a clear center of authority to take over in a coup. It is a remarkable political invention – a very large-scale structure with significant built-in capacity to resist concentrations of power and authoritarian control … To protect themselves from the outlaws, interlopers, and subversives who may lurk on the wide-open Internet frontier, many commercial and governmental organizations have begun to create “firewalls” … The great power struggles of cyberspace will be over network topology, connectivity, and access – not the geographic borders and chunks of territory that have been fought over in the past.
Computer viruses and worms are maliciously constructed agents-fanning out, like Fagin’s boys, to cause trouble. Will there will be a criminal underclass? … Since agents are easy to reproduce, cyberspace may be flooded with billions of them; how will population be controlled? How will the law deal with agents that perform important tasks on behalf of distant, perhaps oblivious originators? Even if our agents turn out to be very smart, and always perform impeccably, will we ever fully trust them? And how will we deal with the old paradox of the slave? We will want our agents to be as smart as possible in order to do our bidding most effectively, but the more intelligent they are, the more we will have to worry about losing control and the agents taking over … The burgeoning, increasingly indispensable, programmed proletariats of cyberspace cities now live invisibly on disk drives.
The mobility of capital has been heightened. A world economy can now function in real time. Firms can maintain unity of management while decentralizing production and participating in markets worldwide. At the same time, there are some vigorous centralizing forces. Production processes remain ultimately dependent on appropriation and transformation of matter, so industrial locations are still largely determined by local availability of raw materials and access to labor markets. Furthermore, the initial development of an advanced telecommunications infrastructure is likely to favor existing urban centers … over small towns and remote areas. In the end, these opposing forces will have complex and socially differentiated effects on urban and regional development processes and on industrial, commercial, and residential locational patterns. There is no simple formula.
There is this nonexistent business called “information highway.” It’s got zero dollars in revenue and a lot of uncertainty of when it will emerge. I happen to be someone who believes very much in this business … The mania is in full force, and if you want to be way out in front on this thing you have to move full-speed.
An “information highway” will enable parents to communicate electronically with teachers, pick a lawyer or doctor more judiciously, learn instantly about a medical prescription, find out about travel opportunities, find people with similar interests.
There is going to be a need for extensions to HTML, and the real issue will be the degree to which those extensions are open versus proprietary. Whatever the ultimate shape of content on the Internet, I don’t think it will stop with HTML.