Cyberspace 2020

A number of fundamental issues … may have significant ramifications on how the Information Age unfolds: surveillance and public safety vs. privacy through encryption and anonymity, censorship vs. free expression, more control vs. a decentralized anarchy of information. On the surface, some of these issues appear fairly clear-cut. Unauthorized access to computers is already covered by legislation. Cases of libel or copyright violations are easily settled by the courts under current laws, provided that one can find who is responsible for such transgressions. Yet even seemingly clear-cut issues can have mind-twisting digital implications.

Cyberspace 2020

Will the development of cyberspace precipitate a migration away from the crime-ridden big cities back to rural living, a trend which would greatly affect state and local planning? This is possible if people are able to send their children off each morning to a virtual school or university and then report to work in a virtual office where they interface with co-workers hundreds or even thousands of miles apart, then drop into a virtual shopping mall at lunchtime to handle their more elaborate shopping needs, get together with friends after work at a virtual cafe, and then download the news, book, television program or film of their choice to pass the evening hours.

Cyberspace 2020

Scientists and researchers on different continents will probably work jointly on projects with a degree of collaboration that is unrealistic today. Undoubtedly we will see the rise of the virtual salesperson who makes calls to businesses and homes in some fashion over the global Net. These things are predictable because new technologies tend first to be used to do familiar tasks more cheaply and easily.

Bring Back the Urban Visionaries: Why Have the Best Technology Brains Stopped Trying to Solve Urban Problems?

Intelligent highways are a great idea but don’t go far enough and avoid the hard questions. Imagine, to start, a fleet of jitneys – each is a van or airport limo – in constant motion around Manhattan. Prospective riders have little radios or cellular phones … these “jitney clickers” communicate with central computers, which in turn talk to the jitney drivers. When you are ready to go somewhere (ordinarily you’d still be inside when you make this decision), you press a button on your clicker.

Bring Back the Urban Visionaries: Why Have the Best Technology Brains Stopped Trying to Solve Urban Problems?

No cyber-fair could possibly compete with or be remembered alongside a real one. The greatness of the great world’s fairs was inseparable from their greatness as places where you saw daring architecture, heard music and fountains and the snap of flags, smelled the hot dogs, and above all joined the crowd. The actual crowd.

Bring Back the Urban Visionaries: Why Have the Best Technology Brains Stopped Trying to Solve Urban Problems?

We ought to get over our dazzlement with modern technology and address technologists differently. Fecund telecosms are all well and good, we ought to tell them, but while you’re up would you mind arranging for the trains to run on time? … Modern technology does not doom the city, because it does not change human nature.

Community Computer Networks: Building Electronic Greenbelts

Computers and community networks will change the way we do business, govern, and relate to one another. I support the idea that the computer systems we design are meant to facilitate and enhance the business or social relations we have with other people, not to supplant them.

Community Computer Networks: Building Electronic Greenbelts

Commercial enterprises have the resources for well-supported trials of systems that can provide a wide range of services … With interest by commercial firms in these networks, what effects will under-funded grass roots efforts have over the next 10 years? If Apple, or U S West, or Time-Warner, or America Online comes to your town, will there be a place for a strong voice and some control by local organizations rather than the ‘invisible hand’ of market forces? If no group has already started a community network, the commercial firms will be able to write more of the ground rules and grow a system designed primarily to achieve their business goals.

Community Computer Networks: Building Electronic Greenbelts

The origins of the data highway metaphor are not the speeches of Vice President Al Gore. It was used as early as 1971 when Ralph Smith, writing in The Nation, also coined the term “The Wired Nation” … His vision convinced people at the FCC to lower the regulatory barriers to the development of cable … Many communications companies … are adding value by adding intelligence to the network. Groups such as librarians and educators feel that the intelligence should be in the form of the users, moderators and other intermediaries who will populate the networks, alongside the software agents slowly emerging from labs and companies. These developments and the spread of the national infrastructure will heavily influence the choices cities and regions have as they establish community networks.