1.04: Life On the Net, 2015

Archive | 1.04 - Sep/Oct 1993 | Idees Fortes

Life On the Net, 2015

By Bruce Sterling

Earlier this year, Bruce Sterling testied before the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and Finance in Washington, DC. This is the transcript of his remarks.

Hello everyone and thanks for inviting me here. My name is Bruce Sterling and I'm a science-fiction writer and sometime science journalist. Since writing my nonction book Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier, I have returned to writing science ction. And I've returned to that with some relief, frankly, since the world of science ction is in most ways rather less strange and less bizarre than the contemporary world of telecommunications policy.

I hope therefore that you will forgive me if I testify today as a science- fiction writer. It's one of the perks of my profession to write about the future, or attempt to, and I thought you might like to meet someone from the telecommunications future that you are so busy creating.

With your kind indulgence for my novelist's whimsy then, the rest of my brief presentation today will be given by a Mr. Bob Smith, who is an NREN network administrator from the year 2015. I present Mr. Smith.

Thank you, Mr. Sterling. It's a remarkable privilege to talk to the legislators who historically created my working environment. As a laborer in the elds of 21st-century cyberspace, I of course would have no job without NREN. My wife and small son and I are all properly grateful for your foresight in establishing the information superhighway.
Your actions in this regard have affected American society every bit as strongly as did the telegraph, the railroads, the telephone, the highway system, and television. In fact, it's impossible for me to imagine contemporary life in 2015 without the global Net; living without the Net would be like trying to live without electricity.
However, it's a truism in technological development that no silver lining comes without its cloud. Today, I'd like to mention two or three trifling problems that were not entirely obvious from the perspective of the early 1990s.
First, a word about this "research and education" issue. Because communications is power in an information society, giving fantastically advanced communications to the research and education communities did in fact empower those communities quite drastically by comparison with interest groups lacking that advantage. Today, one of the most feared political organizations in the world is the multi-national anarchist libertarian group called the Students for an Utterly Free Society.
Of course, there have always been campus radicals, but thanks to their relative lack of nancial clout, and lack of even a steady home address, these young fanatics once found it very difcult to organize politically. Therefore, they were easy for the powers-that-be to ignore, except during occasional spasms of violent campus unrest.
Thanks to NREN, however, spasms of student unrest can now spread like lightning across entire continents. Advanced Articial Intelligence (AI) translation programs installed on the Net only made matters worse, because in 2015 the global leaders of the student movements are not only extremely radical, but French.
Attempts by campus authorities to control this unrest have failed miserably. In 2015, NREN sites are always the rst buildings occupied during a campus strike. Campus chancellors and faculty are themselves so utterly dependent on NREN that they become quite helpless offline.
A second major problem has been the growth of unlicensed encryption, which has proven quite unstoppable. Today, some 75 percent of NREN archives is material that no one in authority can read. Countries that attempted to control and monitor network trafc have lost market share and service revenue as data processing simply moves offshore.
The United States has profited by this phenomenon to a great extent as people worldwide have flocked to the relative liberty of our networks. Unfortunately, many of these electronic virtual immigrants are not simply dissidents looking for free expression, but in fact are organized criminals.
Take for instance a recent FBI raid on an enormous archive of encrypted Iranian files, illicitly stored in an obscure NREN node in North Dakota. Luckily, the FBI was able to decrypt these les thanks to an informant. Deciphering these archives revealed the following contraband:

80 percent graphic image files of attractive young women without veils or, in fact, much clothing of any kind.
15 percent digitally stored pirated copies of Western pop music and Western videos, still illegal to possess in Tehran.
And, 5 percent text files in the Farsi language describing how to build, deliver, and park truck-bombs in major urban areas.

I can't conclude my brief remarks today without a mention of a particularly odd development related to wireless computer telecommunications. Because it is now possible to carry out transactions entirely in cyberspace (including nancial transactions), many information entrepreneurs in 2015 have simply given up any physical home. Basically, they have become stateless people, 21st-century gypsies.
A recent tragic example of this occurred in the small town of North Zulch, Texas. There, some rural law enforcement ofcers apprehended a scruffy vagabond on a motorcycle after a high-speed chase. Unfortunately he was killed. A search of his backpack revealed a device the size of a cigarette pack. The police ofcers, who were not computer literate, accidentally broke the device. This tiny device was actually a privately owned computer bulletin board system with some 15,000 registered users.
Many of the users were wealthy celebrities, and the apparent outlaw biker was actually an extremely popular and nationally known system operator. These 15,000 users were enraged by what they considered the wanton destruction of their electronic community. They pooled their resources and took a terrible vengeance on the small town of North Zulch, which, by contrast, had only 2,000 residents, none of them wealthy or technologically sophisticated. Through a combination of harassing lawsuits and sharp real- estate deals, the vengeful board users bankrupted the town. Eventually the entire township was bulldozed flat and purchased for park land by the Nature Conservancy.
Thanks in part to the advances that you yourselves set in motion, violent conflicts between virtual and actual communities have become a permanent feature of the cultural landscape in 2015.

Bruce Sterling is author of four science ction novels, and co-author, with William Gibson, of The Difference Engine. Sterling edited Mirrorshades, the denitive document of the cyberpunk movement.