Newbie Bashing

We are vastly underrepresented in areas such as poor people, industrial workers, housewives, young children, policy makers and senior professionals. We need to find effective means to outreach to all these groups and more.

Augmented Reality and Augmented Fantasy

What the nearly-possible technology provides is a set of fantasies about how my wishes for information could be answered, as if by magic my mind could call out to the things of the world and have them answer back … In a thousand ways, applied computing is erasing the boundaries between the insides and the outsides of computers. Increasingly we encounter compound entities, consisting of a physical object or activity and the “shadow” it casts inside a computer.

Augmented Reality and Augmented Fantasy

Suppose my car had a GPS device that knew its current location and a wireless packet data system. Then it could download location-specific audio programming – such as an audio tour guide.

Augmented Reality and Augmented Fantasy

See a cop, enter a report into the system, and the system warns others who are plugged into it. Such a system, of course, would probably not work. The computer interface would eliminate all of the social glue that holds the truckers together. Reporting a cop isn’t just a database entry; it’s a tangible act of solidarity backed up with a voice and a way of speaking and rituals of appreciation that reproduce the sense of community while also decreasing the risks of driving the absurd schedules that the trucking companies claim to regard as practical.

Welcome to TNO 1 (7)

The Net itself does not dictate how it will be used. Such views are known as “technological determinism,” and they are tremendously common in discussions of the Net, which some people assume will bring a decentralized world of liberty and others assume will bring a centralized world of control. The answer is that neither outcome is necessary.

Communications Decency Act

The whole computer Internet system is the most important, the most revolutionary development since the printing press. Eventually, I predict, it will do as much good for circulation of information as the printing press. I support the development of this so very, very strongly. I simply cite that there are some dangerous places … on the information superhighway.

Communications Decency Act

Some basic rules of the road need to be established. As the information superhighway rolls up to the front door of every household and school and library in America, this bill will bring exciting, revolutionary, and new information technologies within the reach of every American. There has not been anything that I think is more exciting that has ever been developed than the information superhighway and what it is going to do to make more information and more education readily accessible to any who seek it.

A Cypherpunks Manifesto

Cryptography will ineluctably spread over the whole globe, and with it the anonymous transactions systems that it makes possible. For privacy to be widespread it must be part of a social contract. People must come and together deploy these systems for the common good. Privacy only extends so far as the cooperation of one’s fellows in society.

Senate Wants Cable to Clean Up Its Act

I do not want to be a censor, but I think that society may sometimes be sewing the seeds of its own destruction. [There are] lots of things wrong in our society today. I don’t believe that necessarily cleaning up obscenity on the Internet, or on cable television, or on television itself is going to solve all the problems, but this may be a little step in the right direction.

Will Censorship Muffle Internet?

Unless Congress reverses itself or President Clinton vetoes new legislation containing the Communications Decency Act, the Internet as a mass-communications medium different from TV and radio is dead.