Cyberspace, with 20 million users worldwide, connecting 145 nations, is too rich and complex an environment for a law as general and misinformed as the Communications Decency Act … Cyberspace is a national resource too precious to submit to dangerously simplistic legislation. Congress should educate itself on this environment before considering Senator Exon’s indecent proposal.
Our new telegraph has just been invented but is not yet widely deployed. The big deployment, begun with tools like Mosaic in a Box, will become nearly universal … The Internet will be the mainstream interactive disseminator of information. At least until the equivalent of the telegraph’s replacement comes along … We’re only getting an inkling of what’s to come.
The number of kids in cyberspace will continue to grow, and with it, the sort of often-juvenile, boundary-testing communications once limited to notes passed between students in class.
Today we have the Net, the last accidentally uncensored mass medium in existence. Is it a toy of the rich and the ivory tower, or is it potent? … Will we allow ourselves to be possessed by the vision of a Net whose purpose is to help create and support HEROES? Or will we dismiss it all with a keystroke and get back to the REAL FUN STUFF on alt.flame.Joe.schmuck.the.world’s.greatest.poophead?
Interactive gambling will be one of multimedia’s most profitable applications – far more lucrative than sending video-on-demand along the information highway, for instance. After all, Americans spent some $340 billion on gambling in 1993. They spent a meager $5 billion at the cinema.
In the long term the most intriguing relationships may not be between agents and masters, but between agents and agents. The more agents there are, the more likely it is that they will deal with other agents. Although it is possible for all the agents to operate in isolation, it sounds wasteful. If thousands of agents are doing roughly the same sort of thing for their masters, why not pool resources?
The next great leap of the digital age is, quite literally, going to hit you in the wallet. Those dollar bills you fold up and stash away are headed, with inexorable certainty, toward cryptographically sealed digital streams, stored on a microchip-loaded “smart card” (a plastic card with a microchip), a palm-sized ‘electronic wallet’ (a calculator-sized reader and loader for those cards), or the hard disk of your computer, wired for buying sprees at the virtual mall.
There is no border control on the Internet. There is no Digital Department of Immigration and Naturalization to monitor the cultural temperature of the Net and limit the influx of aliens, whom [Steve] Crocker defines as “the bad guys, the Net-fascists, the conspiracy, the reactionaries, the FBI/CIA/NSA/IRS, the politically correct liberals, the corporate culture, the yuppies, the media elite, the entertainment industry, the mindless and anyone else who we can agree by consensus ought not to be allowed to dominate our consciousness, our culture or our Net.”
The correlation of knowledge with power may become even more misleading in the electronic age as we literally unplug the technologically underequipped from our information networks … While electronic networking does, indeed, enfranchise some individuals and groups who have not contributed yet to the creation of democratic societies, these people are already fairly privileged when considered in a global context.
Future research into the intellectual structure of computer work might help encourage these developments in a more conscious and systematic way, with the ultimate goal of formulating a democratic practice of technology – not just democratic practice of “choices” about technologies, but a democratic practice of the devices themselves and of the human activities in which they are embedded.