Elon University

Topic: Community/Culture

Keynote Speech: Networked Communities and the Laws of Cyberspace

For all the glitter and gold out there on the frontier, there is, existing simultaneously, a sinister side to cyberspace. It is an aspect of life that every community, whether real or virtual, has to deal with. So even as we look to the network and to the first colonies on the electronic frontier to empower human beings with the tools of the Information Age, to improve people’s lives, and to provide entertainment and enjoyment, the potential for harm in the networked community may become more than a “virtual reality”; it may become a real reality.

‘This Is A Naked Lady’: Behind Every New Technology Is … Sex?

All media, if they are to get a jump-start in the market and become successful, must address themselves to mass drives – those things we hold in common as basic human needs … And now we have come to the “digital age” where all information and images can be digitized; where all bits are equal, but some are hotter than others … Progress marches on. In time, robotics will deliver household servants and sex slaves.

No Place for Kids? A Parents’ Guide to Sex on the Net

The bottom line when it comes to kids, sex and the Internet is that no matter what laws we pass and what high-tech solutions we devise, the three of them together will never be less volatile than the first two alone. We can mitigate but not eliminate the drawbacks of high tech; there’s no way to get its benefits without them.

Cyberpunk R.I.P.

It is too early to tell what the digital counterculture will call itself, but the history of the hippies offers a clue … the tekkies will arrive sometime in the mid-1990s, if not sooner. Watch the skies for a new comet – it will be digital, and its tail is likely to glow in Technicolor swirls. Its arrival will change our lives forever.

Cyberpunk R.I.P.

The digital counterculture will reject [the sci-fi film “Blade Runner’s”] bleak vision of a future in which technology enlarges the human spirit as a new tool for consciousness in much the same way that the hippies appropriated the psychoactive chemical spinoffs of the military-industrial complex. This new movement will be cyberpunk imbued with human warmth … the gospel of the post-cyberpunk movement will be one of machines in the service of enlarging our humanity.

Kay + Hillis: Wired Brings Together Two Legendary Minds: Alan Kay and Danny Hillis

I want to build a place that’s accessible from the network, and let the hackers homestead there. Let’s see what they create. I want to do this as a real-estate deal and get somebody to fund it on the grounds that they’ll just own a lot of the real estate there. And these hackers will make it valuable in exchange for getting some plots of land. I’m a believer that this ought to be done commercially. For a while you support the economy by hiring them to do useful things in the universe, like, touring people around, building the library, or some of the basic community facilities for accessing data and seeing what’s going on. But then you allow them to set up their own businesses of creating tools or creating personas, and so on.

The College Classroom of the Year 2010

Guaranteeing equal opportunity of access to the technology and software, and equal opportunity to add to and comment on the information in the network, should be items Number One and Two in the Virtual University Bill of Rights, I believe.