- Bruce Sterling:
-
Now I'm pulling down, I'm getting off my internet uplink--
alright, garbage characters, no carrier, OK!!!
- Elise Mathieson:
-
I usually log on and check my mail, so I am working in
Minesota and take my coffee breaks in California.
- Lead/Ken Wark:
-
Every morning I turn on my computer and log on to the
Internet, usually I just check my electronic mail but
sometimes if I feel like it I go surfing in all the weird
and wonderful data thats out there, being passed around
the thousands of computers that the Internet joins together
--- all around the world.
- Bruce Sterling:
-
It's very difficult to get your bearings in the world of
cyberspace it really is a place of fun house mirrors.
It was rough today (Elise) Your telling me (Ken)
- Ken Wark:/Script
-
The Internet is a way of getting information on just about
anything! If you wanna find out something on particle
physics or something about trout fishing---its out there--and with about half a days training you can go out there
and find it for yourself. Or you can just surf, you can
paddle about in pools of data looking for the next wave in
cool information.
- Bruce Sterling:
-
People are always asking me. Gee, Mr Sterling whats this
cyberpunk thing all about. Now I can tell them look get
on the gopher at pic.com ok, they got a mega byte of
stuff there, you read that, if you don't know what
cyberpunk is after that YOU'RE BRAIN DEAD OK.!! Tell them
to turn off the oxygen
- Ken Wark:/Script
-
Another neat thing about the Internet is that it connects
you with an amazing amount of cool people, whether your
interested in the temple dancing of Southern India, or
the science of super computing or S&M sex you can find
people on the Internet who are into such things too.
- Elise Mathieson:
-
There's so much information out there its like walking into
Ali Baba's treasure cave. You know there's treasure chests
of jewels and diamonds lying all over the floor, and you
don't even know which one to open first.
- Robert David Steele:
-
You know there's an information war going on in Asia, and
Japan is to the North, Australia is to the South and Lee
Kwan U (sp) is sitting in Sigapore laughing his head off.
- Ken Wark:/Script
-
Once you've been surfing for awhile, you meet the people
who's Silicon Beach it is. Here are some of the voices from
the endless wav in love over the Internet
without ever seeing anyone's faces.
- John Perry Barlow:
-
Cyberspace has really been with us ever since Alexander
Graham Bell and his assistant Watson had a meeting back
there in 1876.
- Ken Wark:Script/Intro
-
To begin with what does it feel like to be out there
surfing on the internet.
- Elise Mathieson:
-
Well one of the things that works well for me is specific
to my situation. I'm hearing impaired and its something
that's been happening to me as an adult, that seems to be
getting worse. I wear a hearing aid but when I'm on the
Internet everything is in print and I hear print just fine,
its not a problem. I've always been a big reader and I
really like having all the words on the screen, I don't
miss anything in the conversation, I can talk to anybody in
a conversation or 1 to 1 and I'm not disadvantaged---which
is a little different from daily life.
- Ken Wark:
-
Elise Mathieson likes to hang out in places called Muses.
- Elise Mathieson:
-
Well its really hard to explain, its like living in a story
book. You log on and your a character in a story, and you
walk around and talk to other people who are logged on from
other places, who are characters in a story, and one of the
neat things there was that I happened to run into a bunch
of other people who were deaf. One was a young woman from
England, about 14, who had just found a muse and it was
really neat cos we spent sometime chatting about what it
was like for us. I'm 33 and my hearing impairment has come
in my adult life and it was neat talking to somebody who
had a different experience in a different place. And yet we
met in this electronic fantasy world that comes out of a
machine at MIT in Boston....it's funny, there was a cartoon
over here in the New Yorker that has 2 dogs sitting at a
keyboard. 1 of the dogs says to the other, 'its great on
the Internet; nobody knows you're a dog'.
- Ken Wark:
-
With all these people and dogs hanging out on the Internet
board walk communicating for the most part in pure written
text do they ever come together as a community or is it
just a bunch of random atoms colliding with each other.
- John Perry Barlow:
-
Community really arises to a large extent in response to
shared adversity, you know. Unless you count unix as shared
adversity (laughs) which I certainly do but it ain't no
Amish barn raising in there, not yet. It seems like you
have a lot of the things that go in a small town, a lot of
those things are purely imaginery. So much depends on
inter- relatedness based on necessity in a small town--
you need each other. In Cybersapce you don't really need
each other, its not like a life or death matter, and there
aren't real good ways to communicate emotional information
or cultural information. There are just a lot of things
that are missing at the moment and its gunna take awhile
for them to emerge.
- Elise Mathieson:
-
I have a bunch of friends who call themselves netcruisers
they roam around and they find neat things and tell other
people about them.
- Ken Wark:/Script
-
You can dip into the Internet to play or some people go
there to work. Some people don't know there's much of a
difference between work and play on the Internet when what
you do with your life is live and breath information.
Here's Cyberpunk author Bruce Sterling...
- Bruce Sterling:
-
Most days I do very little. I get up and take my kid to the
local scholastic gulag, and I read the tonnage of
specialized magazines that show up in the house---security
management, interactive entertainment design, nature,
science, various other weird meterological stuff---maybe I
mosey down to the university and pick out a few odd 19th
century tomes, then I go hang out at the local cool
bookstore and see if any bizarre postmodernist tattoo mags
have arrived. Then I'll come home and log on to my Internet
account and deal with the megabyte of fan mail, various
electronic publications I get every week and if I see
something that's really interesting, I generally cut and
paste it out and fax/modem it to 20/30 other people---just
sort of keeping them up to date. Then I'll go in and hang
out with the usual magazine publishers on the WELL. The
boing-boing conference. The Whole Earth Review conference.
I'm pretty personally tied with these people now and it's
like a giant electronic Bay Area Coffee Shop, we're all
sitting there busily trading ideas and puffing one another
basically. Then I'll come and log off and try and save some
of my mail and deal with it and throw the rest in the trash
and try not to be crushed under my toppling heap of data
here. And then possibly I might write something.
- Ken Wark:/Script
-
Aust, author Dale Spender also finds she spends much of her
time on the Internet, and its changed the way she feels
about being a writer.
- Dale Spender:
-
Whereas I used to get into bed at night about eleven
o'clock and read books, what I tend to do now is about half
past ten-eleven o'clock I go turn on my computer and get on
the nets. I've got one particular friend with whom I'm
editing an International Data Base and because we send each
other E-mail messages, just about every night, I never feel
as though I have lost contact. And its this sort of fun
thing that replaces my reading books and browsing through
stacks in libraries, and its a real intellectual
smorgasboard. Particularly for people who have been about
information quests and information production, suddenly
seeing on the women's studies conference and women's
studies bulletin board that there are 46 new
messages/items.
And am I going to be let myself go into them and
find out whats there or am I going to be disciplined and
just do my 37 new E-mail messages, and go through some of
those. But its this sense that there---sitting there in my
study is access to the information of the world.
- Ken Wark:
-
But will the Internet ever become a mass medium or will it
remain the private beach of an expanding but elite
information class?
- Bruce Sterling:
-
I wanna be able to see things I have no business seeing and
sort of think about them. I don't want my life or thoughts
to be regimented. I'm a person with a very hungry
imagination and my imagination needs constant feeding, from
the least likely sources. And you find those sources on the
Internet and when I can help other people find them, its
not only in my personal interest but in a funny way my
class interest.There are lots of people like me actually,
if you go out and look around at the number of people who
are earning their livings in the U.S just by sitting in
front of their computer terminals all day. There's
something like 12 million of us, and we are self employed,.
we don't work for IBM or anything else.
These group of people as a group are not very group
aware but I think they are going to become that way.
Especially more so as the old industrial structures of life
time employment and so forth dies out.
- Dale Spender:
-
Information is the wealth generator of the future, its as
important to think about what we are setting up here as it
was to think about the factory system that was set up in
Britain last century---at the moment its very clear that we
are creating haves and have nots on a grand scale---and I
think we have to see its a form of insider trading that
people who know things are able to use it to gain wealth--
and people who don't are going to be completely locked out
of the discourse of our society. A lot of Americans have
said to me by the year 2000 everybody will be connected
anyway. And I say 14 million homeless, and they say oh no
not them!!
- Ken Wark:
-
One hears a lot perhaps too much about hackers who
illegally use computer networks including the Internet but
perhaps we have just as much to worry about from the
authorities who police it.
- Bruce Sterling:
-
The computer police up to now have been a bit quick
on the draw, at least in the U.S. But you have to draw the
line between what is possible and what has actually
occurred. Now if you think about what could be done by acts
of computer intrusion, yeah the potential is truly
frightening. There are possibilities for Digital Chernobyls
on a global scale.
- Ken Wark:
-
On the other hand the Internet has certain design features
that make it rather difficult to centrally control.
- John Perry Barlow:
-
In the case of the Internet, who is the service provider
who you can go to to tap an Internet connection, and the
answer is you can't because you know when I send a packet
out of my computer towards yours, it could go anyone of a
gizillion different ways to get there and it would probably
take a different route than the next packet out. I think
this technology definitely has politics and they are
anarchistic in nature. But, by the same token life in the
digital world makes it very easy for gov'ts to monitor you
because everytime you make any kind of financial
transaction you smear your finger prints all over
cyberspace and if you fling out a wide enough net (you
know) and just go through a very massive search of all
digital data thats flowing around in the data cloud you can
start to assemble simulacra of people---in their commercial
and personal dealings.
- Elise Mathieson:
-
It's great on the Internet. Nobody knows your a dog
- Amy Bruckman:
-
The Internet is growing at a tremendous rate and this
raises some interesting issues for how this space with so
many people in it is going to be managed. Is it simply the
person who controls the resources, controls the computer or
controls the transmission medium---controls the content---
or do people have certain rights and I think the kinds of
decisions we make now will have tremendous long term
implications for the future of a medium which is
increasingly going to become part of our daily lives.
- Ken Wark:/Script
-
The Internet is a wonderfully anarchic form of
communication where a lot of the rules are made by
consensus between parties who are there. But sometimes its
hard to agree on what are acceptable ways of being on the
Internet and what are not.
- Dale Spender:
-
I've heard the word Netiquette used again and again.
- Elise Mathieson:
-
Since it's a written communication it's simultaneously more
distant and more intimate then face to face.
- Anna Couey:
-
How you get to know somebody is by what they say and that
cuts across a lot of social and economic barriers.
- Libby Reid:
-
People who seem to be female on things like IRC and other
network programs are often given a lof of attention, and
that can be quite enjoyable for some people, for others it
can create quite a problem. That comes into the realms of
sexual harrassment; the other thing is for a lot of people
to get attention or sometimes to just find out what its
like to be on the other side, pretend to be a gender that
they are not.
- Anna Couey:
-
One of the things with harassment on-line is that I think
its exacerbated in an on-line environment, than it is in
the physical environment and I'm not sure part of that has
to do with the ratio of men to women on-line, but also
again I think it gets back to that disembodiment---because
in a way your freer to interact with people than you would
on the street. People are not likely to walk up to you on
the street and say do you wanna talk dirty?? When they are
on-line, the preliminaries are kinda cut out.
- Ken Wark:
-
So who gets access to this imperfect but functional
communications anarchy?
- Geoff Huston:
-
Our future right now is that of a public information
utility, that increasingly the asset of the network is the
information resources that populate it, so in some ways
what we are is a massive computerized information resource
for this country. As well as that I suppose there is a
valuable role within the research domain itself these days
--research is a collaborative effort---and increasingly big
business. Particularly when you look at the hard sciences
these days, a large amount of experimentation is never
performed physically, we try to model reality as closely
as possible on super computing resources, and ship the
results of that model or that experiment back to the
researcher involved.
So communications networks allows a researcher in
say Adelaide to utilize computing and communications
facilties in Sydney, Melbourne, Los Angeles, Boston, Paris
and in London.
- Dale Spender:
-
And there certainly were haves and have nots when it came
to print which is one of the reasons we got State
Libraries. When it was recognised that not everybody could
purchase books---the State had an obligation to provide
people with that sort of information. And maybe thats a
role that State libraries should take on in the electronic
era, that they have to provide 500 public computer
terminals. We can talk about the issue of the fact that we
are going to become consumers of white male californian
culture in a very short space of time.
- Ken Wark:/Script
-
But can the Internet ever be a mass medium? How many
surfers really wanna paddle into the digital sunset? Is it
all California Dreamin'?
- Bruce Sterling:
-
I think its absurd to think that everybody on the planet is
going to want to do the sort of things that are done on the
Internet. I mean everybody on the planet probably does want
to watch TV. Even people in Tibet like to watch Madonna, I
don't understand why that is---but its true. So I don't
think your average Yak herder with a satellite dish is
really gonna wanna sit down and punch their deck all day. I
think that there will likely be entertainment media that
uses some of the same packet switching technology---but I
think there is also likely to be a kind of International
research and eductaional network that's used basically for
scholastic activity and I think that's gonna be the
Internet. And I don't think thats going to be owned by Ted
Turner, or have a board of directors or president. I
think the Internet will remain as a common good.
- Dale Spender:
-
With print there was a creation of a mass reading public
and some people have referred to it as the democratization
of reading, that up until books, we had only a few people
in society who could read. They generally did so from the
pulpit and it was called reading the lesson for the week.
Then suddenly there's print, there are books, and everybody
gets to learn to read---what we have to realize is that
everybody is going to get the chance to become an author in
a way the computer heralds the deomcratization of
authorship and once everybody can do it, once there's no
distinct individual effort what does copyright mean anyway?
- Ken Wark:
-
Or will the Internet perhaps have other uses?? Robert David
Steele is a civilian intelligence officer with the U.S
Marine Intelligence Service..
- Robert David Steele:
-
My Colonel, the Director of the Marine Corps Intelligence
Centre, and I the Senior Civilian, spent 10Mill$ on a
classified information handling system only to turn it on
and find out that the CIA databases on the 3rd world were
empty. And at that point I went looking for and discovered
open sources. What we are finding is that the various
pipelines---the secrecy compartments are counterproductive. The Internet is breaking down the barriers in
the information continuum in the U.S. I talk about how we
have an information continuum, that is a virtual
intelligence community; except that each sector K3.12, the
universities, libraries, business, media, the private
investigators and so on. There is an iron curtain between
each sector---there is a bamboo curtain between each
institution and each sector---and there is a plastic
curtain between each individual and each sector. And
what the Internet does is blows holes through those
curtains.
There are a number of people in universities,
researchers and think tanks, business and newspapers, etc.
who have absolutely 1st class information, and I include
foreign gov'ts. For instance the Australian gov't has
absolutely 1st class information about Papua New Guinea, a
place where marines might have to go one day.
It makes a lot of sense to me for us to xchange
information with Australia or indeed Papua New Guinea--
about what we call encyclopedic intelligence---the ports,
the air fields, just basic unclassified stuff. It's in the
strategic interest of every country to harness its
information contiuum, and the Internet is an absolutely
vital element of that National strategy.
- Bruce Sterling:
-
Computer communications has turned out to be a far more
social influential thing than the space program ever was.
- Ken Wark:
-
On a more mundane level are the polices we have in
Australia for the development of the Internet adequate? Are
we keeping up with our rivals for the Clever Country tag?
- Geoff Huston:
-
Back in around 1987/88 the need for a specialist data
communications network was evident to the sector. What we
were seeing is that our investment in computing was quite
extensive. But when we looked overseas what we saw was not
only were similar investments being made but they were
being productively linked together with data networks. At
that stage the U.S APAR/Internet was well under way,
providing amazing connectivity amongst the university and
research community in the U.S. When we look here in
Australia we spent some time trying to find if there was a
publically available facility that we could use that could
provide similar functionality both domestically within
Australia and also to link us with those computing and
communication projects going on overseas. What we found was
that plainly and simply there was nothing in the public
domain. So after some soul searching the only answer came
through, that if we really wanted this facility, then as
universities we had to work together and build it ourselves
from the bottom up.
- Dale Spender:
-
There's a slogan about us being a clever country and we'll
export intellectual resources but made by some people who
have absolutely no idea and knowledge of the way in which
the culture is changing, as we even speak.
- Geoff Huston:
-
Today AARNET connects together some 105,000 computers in
Australians. If you contrast that and include our
population of some 17.6 million people, if you compare that
to the U.K., the current academic and research network
there---Janet---links together about 106,000 comps and
Germany 110,000 comps, Japan 47,000...so in some respects
we have been far more successful than other countries in
terms of hooking vast numbers of individuals together---so
from that metric over the last 3yrs we have done
astonishingly well. The other kind of metric is how well
do we service this community, what kind of bandwidth can
we provide them that actually ships volumes of data around
quickly and efficiently and in that metric I don't think we
are doingas well.
- Robert David Steele:
-
Part of the problem and I had a long talk with Vince Surf
about this, President of the Internet Society when we were
out at a Internet Conference in San Fransisco, a few months
back. Vince is a man that I greatly admire, he and Bob
Kahn(sp??) are in many ways fathers of the Internet
throught the Arpanet. And unfortuanely they are so beholden
to their original concept of their baby they are not
willing to consider applications or content as new
directions, for Internet management. And so right now the
whole focus of the Internet society and its magnificant
working group is on increasing the size of the
pipe.
Unfortunately, all that really does is contribute
to the amountof noise that can flow. One of the things I've
been working on in support of the Vice Presidents NII is to
put a content element into Al Gore's connectivity program.
I mean right now God Bless him, Al Gore is all connectivity
and no content.
There is no National knowledge strategy in the U.S.
- Bruce Sterling:
-
Al Gore the American Vice President is a cyberpunk---I
found that truly hilarious!!
- Ken Wark:
-
For some people the Internet is as much about spirit as it
is politics.
- John Perry Barlow:
-
The EFF was started because Mitch Kapor (who wrote Lotus
1.2.3) and I realized that people were moving into this
environment at a very rapid rate. Like all new frontier
areas the prevailing codes of ethics and law and social
interaction and property management were not worked out--
and the gov't was behaving as though all the rules that had
worked perfectly well for the physical world were going to
work for the virtual world.
We wanted to see the gov't stay the hell out til
something like a social contract had been developed. Most
of the current inhabitants of the net are people who have
very little awareness or interest in the type of hippy
mysticism I bring to bear---its mostly computer jocks at
this point. Its seems kinda obvious to me that if you're in
a place where there's no physical substance, where its all
immateriality---that you can't miss the relationship to
that place that people have always been trying to go---
which is composed entirely of spirit and mind. Cos thats
what its all about---now is the flesh become word..
- Ken Wark:
-
WE NO LONGER HAVE ORIGINS WE HAVE TERMINALS.
end