Convergence is what I’m hearing from the information industries, but I’m a networking plumber, and when I look at the new technologies that will be employed in the future information infrastructure, I see divergence. As has happened in transportation over the centuries, there will be a proliferation of modes of information networking, and this is cool.
In the electronic age, the old notion of what is published will disappear. What is being written is going to be used in ways never imagined and writers and other creators are going to have to be aware of the dangers … We are going to have to create a cultural workers’ federation to marshall everyone’s collective powers in the electronic age.
Despite all of the excitement associated with the InfoBahn, one potential “oil slick” is the government’s encryption technology … While it has not been well publicized, a large number of system intrusions already involve cryptography. The intruders use it to cover their tracks. The encryption genie is already out of the bottle; a policy geared towards trying to control it appears to be unenforceable.
Users in homes and offices could get broadband digital access via smart hubs in the neighborhood connected to existing wires from the local cable television company. Or they could tap into digital infrastructure via an area radio transmitter.
The NII will provide all Americans with the information they need, when they need it and where they need it, at an affordable cost.
[The information infrastructure will be made up of] hundreds of different networks, run by different companies and using different technologies, all connected together in a giant “network of networks,” providing telephone and interactive digital video to almost every American.
We should not spend our time inventing 60 other technologies. We should work on ATM instead. It is clearly the technology for the next generation. The Internet is a community, and ATM is the technology that will support that community.
If the edifice of industrial civilization does not eventually crumble as a result of a determined resistance within its very walls, it seems certain to crumble of its own accumulated excesses and instabilities within not more than a few decades, perhaps sooner, after which there may be space for alternative societies to arise.
Less and less is human life connected to other species, to natural systems, to seasonal and regional patterns; more and more to the Technospere, to artificial and engineered constructs, to industrial patterns and procedures, even to man-made hormones, genes, cells, and life-forms.
If what is in store for us, as many say, is an “information age” with “information highways” and “information supermarkets” then it is the computer and those who feed and handle it who reign supreme: in the country of the sighted, the all-seeing one is king. Control of information is control of power.