I received this on the Leri list and thought a little amusement might be
appreciated here given the current conversations.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sat, 01 May 1993 20:57:34
From: David L Racette
To: Leri
Subject: Interesting mail
Opening Statement to the House Subcommittee on
Telecommunications and Finance, Washington DC, April 29,
1993
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 nonfiction book
HACKER CRACKDOWN: LAW AND DISORDER ON THE ELECTRONIC
FRONTIER, I have returned to writing science fiction. And I've
returned to that with some relief, frankly, since the world of
science fiction 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
profesion 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, with 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 fields of 21st Century
cyberspace I of course would have no job without NREN and
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 have come up that
were not entirely obvious from the perspective of the early
1990s.
"First of all, this 'Research and Education' aspect. Since
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 financial clout, and lack of even
a steady home address, these young fanatics once found it very
difficult 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
AI translation programs installed on the Net only made matters
worse, since 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 first
buildings occupied during a campus strike. Campus chancellors
and faculty are themselves so utterly dependent on NREN that
they become quite helpless off-line.
"A second major problem has been the growth of
unlicenced encryption, which has proved quite unstoppable.
Today some seventy-five percent of NREN archives are
material that no one in authority can read. Countries that
attempted to control and monitor network traffic 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 files thanks to an inside informant. Deciphering
these archives revealed the following contraband:
"Eighty percent graphic image files of attractive young
women without veils on, or, in fact, much clothing of any kind.
"Fifteen percent digitally stored pirated copies of Western
pop music and Western videos, still illegal to possess in
Teheran.
"And, five percent text files in the Farsi language
describing how to guild, 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 having to do with
*wireless* computer telecommunications. Since it is now
possible to transact business entirely in cyberspace, including
financial 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
officers apprehended a scruffy vagabond on a motorcycle in a
high-speed chase. Unfortunately he was killed. A search of his
backpack revealed a device the size of a cigarette pack. In
searching the dead man's effects, the police officers, 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 parkland
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."
Thank you for your patience in entertaining my
speculations. I'll be happy to take any questions -- though
only in my real-life persona. Thank you very much.
