ftp.ee.pdx.edu/2014.02.ftp.ee.pdx.edu.tar/ftp.ee.pdx.edu/pub/books/BruceSterling/nas_speech

Text File | 1994-01-25 | 12KB | 213 lines

Bruce Sterling
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Literary Freeware -- Not for Commercial Use

Speeches by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling
National Academy of Sciences
Convocation on Technology and Education
Washington D. C.,  May 10, 1993

BRUCE STERLING:

    Hello ladies and gentlemen.  Thank you for having the two of us here
and giving us a license to dream in public.

    The future is unwritten.  There are best-case scenarios.  There are worst-
case scenarios.  Both of them are great fun to write about if you're a science
fiction novelist, but neither of them ever happen in the real world.  What
happens in the real world is always a sideways-case scenario.

    World-changing marvels to us, are only wallpaper to our children.

    Cyberspace is the funhouse mirror of our own society.   Cyberspace
reflects our values and our faults, sometimes in terrifying exaggeration.
Cyberspace is a mirror you can edit.  It's a mirror you can fold into packets and
send across continents  at the speed of light.   It's a mirror you can share with
other people, a place where you can discover community.   But it's also a mirror
in the classic sense of smoke-and-mirrors, a place where you might be robbed
or cheated or deceived, a place where you can be promised a rainbow but given
a mouthful of ashes.

    I know something important about cyberspace.  It doesn't matter who
you are today -- if you don't show up in that mirror in the next century, you're
just not going to matter very much.  Our kids matter.  They matter a lot.  Our kids
have to show up in the mirror.

    Today, we have certain primitive media for kids.   Movies, television,
videos.  In terms of their sensory intensity, these are like roller-coaster rides.
Kids love roller coasters, for natural reasons.  But roller coasters only go around
and around in circles.  Kids need media that they can go places with.  They need
the virtual equivalent of a kid's bicycle.  Training wheels for cyberspace.
Simple, easy machines.  Self-propelled.  And free.   Kids need places where they
can talk to each other, talk back and forth naturally.  They need media that they
can fingerpaint with, where they can jump up and down and breathe hard,
where they don't have to worry about Mr. Science showing up in his mandarin
white labcoat to scold them for doing things not in the rulebook.  Kids need  a
medium of their own.  A medium that does not involve a determined attempt by
cynical adult merchandisers to wrench the last nickel and quarter from their
small vulnerable hands.

    That would be a lovely scenario.   I don't really expect that, though.   On
the contrary, in the future I expect the commercial sector to target little
children with their full enormous range of on-line demographic databases and
privacy-shattering customer-service profiles.  These people will be armed and
ready and lavishly financed and there every day, peering at our children
through a cyberspace one-way mirror.    Am I naive to expect better from the
networks in our schools?  I hope not.  I trust not.  Because schools are supposed
to be educating our children, civilizing our children, not auctioning them off to
the highest bidder.

    We need to make some conscious decisions to  reinvent our information
technology as if the future mattered.  As if our children were human beings,
human citizens, not raw blobs of potential revenue-generating machinery.   We
have an opportunity to create media that would match the splendid ambitions of
Franklin with his public libraries and his mail system, and Jefferson  and
Madison with their determination to arm democracy with the power knowledge
gives.  We could offer children, yes even poor children in poor districts, a real
opportunity to control the screen, for once.

    You don't have to worry much about the hardware.  The hardware is
ephemeral.  The glass boxes should no longer impress you.  We've shipped our
images inside glass boxes for fifty years, but that's a historical accident, a relic.
The glass boxes that we recognize as computers won't last much longer.   Already
the boxes are becoming flat screens.  In the future, computers will mutate
beyond recognition.   Computers won't be intimidating, wire-festooned, high-
rise bit-factories swallowing your entire desk.  They will tuck under your arm,
into your valise, into your kid's backpack.   After that, they'll fit onto your face,
plug into your ear.  And after that --  they'll simply melt.  They'll become fabric.
What does a computer really need?  Not glass boxes -- it needs thread -- power
wiring, glass fiber-optic, cellular antennas, microcircuitry.  These are woven
things.   Fabric and air and electrons and light.   Magic handkerchiefs with
instant global access.   You'll wear them around your neck.  You'll make tents
from them if you want.   They will be everywhere, throwaway.  Like denim.
Like paper.  Like a child's kite.

    This is coming a lot faster than anyone realizes.  There's a revolution in
global telephony coming that will have such brutal, industry-crushing speed
and power that it will make even the computer industry blanch.  Analog is
dying everywhere. Everyone with wire and antenna is going into the business
of moving bits.

    You are the schools.  You too need to move bits, but you need to move
them to your own purposes.  You need to look deep into the mirror of
cyberspace, and you need to recognize your own face there.   Not the face you're
told that you need.   Your own face.  Your undistorted face.  You can't out-tech
the techies.  You can't  out-glamorize Hollywood.  That's not your life, that's not
your values, that's not your purpose.  You're not supposed to pump colored
images against the eyeballs of our children, or download data into their skulls.
You are supposed to pass the torch of culture to the coming generation.   If you
don't do that, who will?  If you don't prevail for the sake of our children, who
will?

     It can be done!   It can be done if you keep your wits about you and
you're not hypnotized by smoke and mirrors.  The computer revolution, the
media revolution, is not going to stop during the lifetime of anyone in this
room.   There are innovations coming, and coming *fast,* that will make the
hottest tech exposition you see here seem as quaint as gaslamps and Victorian
magic-lanterns.   Every machine you see here will be trucked out and buried in
a landfill, and never spoken of again, within a dozen years.  That so-called
cutting-edge hardware here will crumble just the way old fax-paper crumbles.
The values are what matters.  The values are the only things that last, the only
things that *can* last.  Hack the hardware, not the Constitution.   Hold on tight
to what matters, and just hack the rest.

    I used to think that cyberspace was fifty years away.  What I thought was
fifty years away, was only ten years away.  And what I thought was ten years
away -- it was already here.  I just wasn't aware of it yet.

     Let me give you a truly lovely, joyful example of the sideways-case
scenario.

    The Internet.  The Internet we make so much of today -- the global
Internet which has helped scholars so much, where free speech is flourishing
as never before in history -- the Internet was a Cold War military project.  It
was designed for purposes of military communication in a United States
devastated by a Soviet nuclear strike.  Originally, the Internet was a post-
apocalypse command grid.

    And look at it now.  No one really planned it this way.  Its users made the
Internet that way, because they had the courage to use the network to support
their own values, to bend the technology to their own purposes.  To serve their
own liberty.  Their own convenience, their own amusement, even their own
idle pleasure.  When I look at the Internet -- that paragon of cyberspace today --
I see something astounding and delightful.  It's as if some grim fallout shelter
had burst open and a full-scale Mardi Gras parade had come out.   Ladies and
gentlemen, I take such enormous pleasure in this that it's hard to remain
properly skeptical.  I hope that in some small way I can help you to share my
deep joy and pleasure in the potential of networks, my  joy and pleasure in the
fact that the future is unwritten.

WILLIAM GIBSON:

    Mr. Sterling and I have been invited here to dream in public.  Dreaming
in public is an important part of our job description, as science writers, but
there are bad dreams as well as good dreams.  We're dreamers, you see, but we're
also realists, of a sort.

    Realistically speaking, I look at the proposals being made here and I
marvel.  A system that in some cases isn't able to teach basic evolution, a system
bedevilled by the religious agendas of textbook censors, now proposes to throw
itself open to a barrage of ultrahighbandwidth information from a world of
Serbian race-hatred, Moslem fundamentalism, and Chinese Mao Zedong thought.
A system that has managed to remain largely unchanged since the 19th Century
now proposes to jack in, bravely bringing itself on-line in an attempt to meet
the challenges of the 21st.  I applaud your courage in this.   I see green shoots
attempting to break through the sterilized earth.

    I believe that the national adventure you now propose is of quite
extraordinary importance.  Historians of the future -- provided good dreams
prevail -- will view this as having been far more crucial to the survival of
democracy in the United States than rural electrification or the space program.

    But many of America's bad dreams, our sorriest future scenarios, stem
from a single and terrible fact:  there currently exists in this nation a vast and
disenfranchised underclass, drawn, most shamefully, along racial lines, and
whose plight we are dangerously close to accepting as a simple fact of life, a
permanent feature of the American landscape.

    What you propose here, ladies and gentlemen, may well represent
nothing less than this nation's last and best  hope of providing something like a
level socio-economic playing field for a true majority of its citizens.

    In that light, let me make three modest proposals.

    In my own best-case scenario, every elementary and high school
teacher in the United States of America will have unlimited and absolutely cost-
free professional access to long-distance telephone service.  The provision of
this service could be made, by law, a basic operation requirement for all
telephone companies.  Of course, this would also apply to cable television.

    By the same token, every teacher in every American public school will
be provided, by the manufacturer, on demand, and at no cost, with copies of any
piece of software whatever -- assuming that said software's manufacturer would
wish their product to be commercially available in the United States.

    What would this really cost us, as a society?  Nothing.  It would only mean
a so-called loss of potential revenue for some of the planet's fattest and best-fed
corporations.  In bringing computer and network literacy to the teachers of our
children, it would pay for itself in wonderful and wonderfully unimaginable
ways.  Where is the R&D support for teaching?  Where is the tech support for
our children's teachers?  Why shouldn't we give our teachers a license to obtain
software, all software, any software, for nothing?

    Does anyone demand a licensing fee, each time a child is taught the
alphabet?

    Any corporation that genuinely wishes to invest in this country's future
should step forward now and offer services and software.  Having thrived under
democracy, in a free market, the time has come for these corporations to
demonstrate an enlightened self-interest, by acting to assure the survival of
democracy and the free market -- and incidentally, by assuring that virtually
the entire populace of the United States will become computer-literate potential
consumers within a single generation.

    Stop devouring your children's future in order to meet your next
quarterly report.

    My third and final proposal has to do more directly with the levelling of
that playing field.  I propose that neither of my two previous proposals should
apply in any way to private education.

    Thank you.