The Couch Potato Vote: Soon You’ll Be Able to Vote From Home – But Should You? | Imagining the Internet

The Couch Potato Vote: Soon You’ll Be Able to Vote From Home – But Should You?

Polls show that significant majorities favor the idea of national referendums – higher taxes – yes or no? Like church dogma, our civic religion now dictates that even when the people seem wrong, they are – by definition – right. Popul infallibility. Soon this hyperdemocratic impulse will be harnessed to irresistable technologies … Interactive voting is closer than we know. With as many as 50 percent of American homes expected to have a modem within the next five years, the decline of the polling place may be at hand.

In 2004 We’ll All Live on the Internet with Silicon Valley Visionaries. Kevin Kelly Already Does.

I have extracted three clues as to what the I-way will really be like … The first clue is: Follow the free. In the three decades that digital technology has been around, many of the most profitable businesses got going by exploiting services or products originally given away free … The second clue is: Let the copies breed. Whatever it is that we are constructing by connecting everything to everything, we know the big thing will copy effortlessly. The I-way is a gigantic copy machine. It is a law of the digital realm: anything digital will be copied, and anything copied once will fill the universe. Further, every effort to restrict copying is doomed to failure … The third clue is that it’s a new literary space, man.

Info-Culture Technology: Savior or Destroyer of Society?

Technology will become more like nature – random, hive-like, chaotic … “There will be a point where we’ll find machines as beautiful, as interesting as a planet.”

Against Internet Ratings and PICS- Censorhip in Disguise?

There will be a trade association that will publish a ratings system that Prodigy, Apple, Microsoft, etc. all agree on. They will subscribe to it, all netwatch software comes with it by default, and, here’s the kicker, anyone who doesn’t support it runs the risk of being hauled into court.

http://web.lexis-nexis.com/universe/document?_m=d8e485b96f445636188bc671a9fafcff&_docnum=1&wchp=dGLbVzb-lSlAl&_md5=d8c255ea8bce5ec0fec2950b6e54f32f

We need a network architecture that supports high-performance distributed computing. Looking down the track, the merging of SynOptics’ switching expertise with Wellfleet’s high-speed routing capabilities will provide us with a truly first-class infrastructure that’s completely manageable from end-to-end.