The computer is, in a sense, a magnificent toy that distracts us from facing what we most needed to confront – spiritual emptiness, knowledge of ourselves, usable conceptions of the past and future … Through the computer, the heralds say, we will make education better, religion better, politics better, our minds better – best of all, ourselves better. This is, of course, nonsense.
Direct democracy is wonderful if it means strengthening society so that we can discuss our common problems. It’s crossing that line from discussion to direct decision that should make us all nervous. Maybe it’s time to start thinking about how to build a few roadblocks to slow that part of the superhighway. This could easily be one of the major techno-political struggles of the early 21st century.
“The opportunities for rigging elections [are] child’s play for vendors and knowledgeable election officials.” Short-term technical problems … can be fixed. But the larger problem of essentially turning over vote-counting to unaccountable computer experts will be unresolved for years. At least when Boss Tweed stole votes, everyone knew it. Computer vote fraud can be extraodinarily difficult to trace.
We’re changing qualitatively from the microcosm to the telecosm … The Net is the new platform. It’s not PC or Unix, but software virtual machines. The new dominant platform is the Net plus software – not hardware.
The Internet can be seen as an emergent organism. It wasn’t engineered; it has grown … Communication is taking place outside of the human mind. There is positive feedback from within the network. The technology starts to change as a result of its own processes. Communication takes place between computers that is meaningful to them. Just think, you’ll be able to say to your grandchildren, “I was there when all computers couldn’t talk to each other.” But what is more likely: you’ll be explaining your time to an applet that your grandchildren created to deal with their grandparents.
MOO environments … stand as an answer to Socrates’ critique of writing, and to modern condemnations of electronic media … It is possible that MOO is the forerunner of technology that will provide the sort of structured environment needed for the “common place” of civilized society. If so, we would have a median between the oral and literate extremes.
Warfare in Cyberia is conducted on an entirely new battleground; it is a struggle not over territory or boundaries but over the very definitions of these terms. It’s like a conflict between cartographers, who understand the ocean as a grid of longitude and latitude lines, and surfers, who understand it as a dance of chaotic waves. The resistance to renaissance comes out of the refusal to cope with or even believe in the possibility of a world free of precyberian materialism and its systems of logic, linearity, and duality.
What is to be carried into homes to justify the new investment? (At $1,000 per household – some estimates are higher, some lower – wiring the nation’s 96 million households would cost almost $100 billion.) Families typically now pay about $55 a month for phone service and about $31 a month for cable, including extra services like HBO. Will they pay an extra $20, $30 or $50 for something else?
Resistance to the industrial system, based on some grasp of moral principles and rooted in some sense of moral revulsion, is not only possible but necessary … Is this invention nothing but, as Thoreau put it, an improved means to an unimproved end?
Interactive digital video technology will change how business people communicate electronically. Just think about the existing difficulties of imparting to a globally dispersed team the full implications of a new product. In the future, all participants will get access to programmable scenarios about the product launch.