The following is the revised text of a reading given at the Marsh Theatre in San Francisco on the evening of March 29, 1994. The event was sponsored as part of the Wildcat Words series organized by the National Writer's Union.
This happened, because in the beginning the emphasis was on communications, getting it to work, and not on security. This has left a hole that we are still trying to fill. In the online world, trust, and privacy are as important as oxygen, and after all is said and done, it remains to be seen whether we will have much of either. We may not have trust because in the online world, people are not always who they seem, and privacy online is, as in real life, becoming an endangered commodity.
I am continually amused by those who hold up the forums of Cyberspace as the last bastion of free speech. This in spite of the fact that a shocking percentage of traffic, one out of twenty messages on some days, now passes through anonymous remailers. These are not merely messages from whistleblowers or posters to controversial groups; they include messages as innocuous as movie, or book reviews. The posters are obviously afraid of something, and in a world where twenty year old incidents are routinely dredged up in political campaigns, where multinational corporations launch multi-billion dollar lawsuits over news reports, and where Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPP suits) are routine, it is not hard to see why. These forums are mediums of record - with their own built-in recording devices set to memorialize until the end of time words said in haste. In such a medium, if we are to be spontaneous, we must wear an electronic bag over our heads while doing it.
There are those who feel that the creatures of the Cyberjungle must be preserved as we preserve endangered species. And there are those who would like to set fire to the forest, bring out the bulldozers, and build neat subdivisions. What strikes me most about these arguments, is that they are fundamentally about squatter's rights to a place in which hardly anyone has yet to live comfortably.
In many ways our preoccupation with the Electronic Frontier - with staking claims, building railroads, and most of all, piling words upon words, has left us in real danger of obliterating the object of our fascination. The Cyberjungle is on the verge of becoming something akin to Yosemite National Park in the summer time - awe inspiring, to be sure, but under continual assault from a crushing load of visitors. And all this before we have even learned how to make it work.
However, the national park analogy only goes so far. Cyberspace has no intrinsic limits, other than those imposed by an inadequate imagination. And so in the process of facing the chaos that our own fascination with the Information Highway has wrought, we face a fundamental decision: to rearchitect the network so as to make it more scalable and amenable to privacy concerns, or to witness a decay in the quality of online life, which will encourage regulation and the rise of the net vigilante.
One of the major problems of the Internet is that it does not compensate operators of resources, whether they be servers, communications links or routers, for the use of their equipment. By directing a suitable stream of traffic to a site in Australia, I might severly degrade the communications capability of an entire nation, without any economic penalty to myself.
This makes it easy for one group of users to impose large costs on another group, either intentionally or unintentionally. The Internet has attempted to control these costs through a system of peer pressure known as "netiquette." Within this system of social control, netiquette violators can expect penalties as mild as an e-mail rebuke, or as serious as an e-mail or fax bombing or even a death threat, depending on the severity and frequency of the infractions. This form of electronic frontier justice, enforced by net vigilantes, is somewhat analagous to the frontier justice practiced by settlers of the old west.
Just as frontier justice eventually gave way to courts and formal trials, some more formal means of regulating behavior on the electronic frontier is probably inevitable. Yet such regulation is at least as dangerous as the decrease in the quality of online life, I think. Surely if the networks are to continue to function, we must strive to put back into them what we take out. And in the end, we will probably end up passing some laws to reign in info-terrorists and strip miners. But let us be very careful in the process of doing that, so we do not restrict our own freedom.
However, once those thoughts begin to leak out, whether it be through electronic communications, or through the movements of a joystick, or even through the use of a biofeedback device, you lose some of that protection. And when you cross the line between speech and action, you lose it entirely. Now that line has never been as clear cut as some would like to imagine, and with the advent of virtual communities, and virtual reality, and virtual money it is possible that the distinctions between speech, thought and action may vanish entirely.
Consider someone sitting at a desk, talking into a voice recognizing computer. In this circumstance there is no dividing line between speech and action; whatever is spoken will be acted upon, to the extent that the computer can understand it. I recently saw a demonstration of a biofeedback device, hooked to a computer. With such a device, it is possible to control the actions of a machine merely by thinking. At that point, the distinction between thought and action disappears. These vanishing distinctions, when combined with a trend towards decreasing tolerance, should give us reason for pause.
Let us consider a less than rosy scenario.
Back in the 60s, kids were turning on, and parents were worrying about the decline of moral values. By the 80s, those same kids were parents and they launched the war on drugs. In the 90s, kids are watching Beavis and Butthead, and parents are worrying about the decline of moral values. From this I conclude two things: firstly, that parents like to worry about the decline of moral values, and secondly, that by the year 2010 the kids of today will have launched a war on inappropriate speech.
But what crime will the Beavis and Buttheads of 2010 be charged with? InfoPollution, or violation of the Clean Information Act. If this seems absurd to you, if information seems to you fundamentally different from water or air, consider this:
1. As with water, information is only valuable when it is pure, and it does not take much pollution to render a source unfit for consumption. The purity of an information stream is much easier to destroy than it is to create; one bad fact, one mislaid data point, and credibility is lost.
Just as we humans cannot drink directly from the Ocean, so too are we not made to ingest the runoff from the InfoBahn without first passing those murky waters through a filter, or better yet, a large sewage treatment plant.
2. As information grows more essential compared with realstuff, as bits flowing through the data stream grow in importance relative to trains of grain rumbling into the distance, our notion of criminality is increasingly focussing on the inappropriate use of information. In thirty or forty years, we may have added "three InfoCrimes and you're out" to "three strikes and you're out."
