In the early 21st Century, the electronic “information society” will be replaced by societies based on genetic and molecular engineering … This portends forms and processes of “participation” and “democracy” that are presently beyond my ability to imagine in sufficient detail.
Technologies can, presently most certainly are, and thus probably will be, used to decrease democracy, sometimes perhaps while actually increasing “participation.” While I have no doubt that these technologies will increase participation, without our active imagination, design, and effort, I am certain that they will not be used to make democracy possible but rather merely to concentate even more the power of the very few who control the present. Indeed, even with our active imagination, design, and effort, these communication technologies might be used to enhance the power of the already powerful … Should this be called “quantum fascism?”
One downside to the Internet’s growth will be a “substantial displacement of jobs,” as telephone companies lose business, Barker predicted. The result could also be a push by carriers for government regulation of the Internet.
Huge sums of money are about to be spent …There is no one overriding vision … There is a potential for enormous disasters … It’s going to pervade our lives.
The entertainment, telephone, cable-TV and computer companies will “stumble all over themselves to stake a claim in the Internet, a marketplace they do not really understand.”
Many of the commercial interests scrambling to mine gold in cyberspace will crash and burn, victims of their own inexperience in this unique world … A burgeoning Internet will also force society to confront traditional notions of free speech and intellectual property in new, sometimes uncomfortable ways. What happens to the idea of “community standards” when almost anyone with a computer and modem can become a self-publisher with global distribution? A flood of new users may spark an epidemic of busy signals, worries about data security and a potential boom in computer crime. As the Net throws open its cloistered universe, the real world – goblins and all – will come rushing in.
A television is a very dumb PC, but a PC is a very smart television set.
A hundred million people speaking to one another through computer text and getting their information from researchers, observers, archived material, and just plain other people are impossible to control. They have a reality test. They also have a countercultural weapon.
Both the conscious plans of its constructors and what can be considered deeply “natural causes” led to the formation of a new kind of wilderness – a network of roots and vines so vast that it has the potential to modify everything it contacts and utterly change the very landscape of the forest.
The same technology that we’re developing for the broadband public network will be applicable to the private networks of the future. The local-area network of the future is actually the same asynchronous transfer mode, packet-switched, two-way broadband network that’s being constructed to bring movies to your home, or provide video telephony.