The Hacker's Encyclopedia 1998

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Here is Bruce Sterling's address to the Library Information Technology Association at this year's ALA meeting in San Francisco. He followed Hans Moravec, who made a mind-boggling speech about the future of robots, etc.--when I described it to Robert Silverberg later, he said, "Now *that* is science fiction"--I mention this because Bruce refers to Moravec's speech. ************************************************************************* Hi everybody. Well, this is the Library Information Technology Association, so I guess I ought to be talking about libraries, or information, or technology, or at least association. And to be fair, I really ought to address the stated panel topic of personal information machines. I'm gonna give it a shot, but I want to try this from an unusual perspective. I want to talk about money. You wouldn't guess it sometimes to hear some people talk, but we don't live in a technocratic society. We live in an advanced capitalist society. People talk a lot about the power and glory of specialized knowledge and technical expertise. And it's true there's a Library OF Congress. But how many librarians are there IN Congress? The nature of our society affects the nature of our technology. It doesn't DETERMINE it; a lot of our technology is sheer accident, serendipity, the way the cards happened to fall, who got the lucky breaks. But as a society we don't develop technologies to their ultimate ends. Only engineers are interested in that kind of technical sweetness, and engineers generally have their paychecks signed by CEOs and stockholders. We don't pursue ultimate technologies. Our technologies are actually produced to optimize financial return on investment. There's a big difference. Of course there are many elements of our lives that exist outside the money economy. There's a lot that can't be denominated in dollars. The best things in life are free, the old saying goes. Nice old saying. Gets a little older-sounding every day. Sounds about as old and mossy as the wedding vow "for richer for poorer," which in a modern environment is pretty likely to be for-richer-or poorer modulo our prenuptial agreement. Commercialization. Commodification. It's a very powerful phenomenon. It's getting more powerful. Academia, libraries, cultural institutions are already under seige. Welcome to our museum exhibition, brought to you by Procter and Gamble. This is MacNeill Lehrer News Hour, brought to you by publicly supported television and, incidentally, AT&T. Welcome students to Large Northeastern University, brought to you by Pepsi-Cola, official drink of Large Northeastern. Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make ye employable. Hi, I'm the head of the microbiology department here at Large Northeastern. I'm also on the board of directors of TransGenic Corporation. The Chancellor says it's okay because a cut of the patent money goes to Large Northeastern. Welcome to the Library of Congress. Jolt Cola is the official drink of the Library of Congress. This is our distributed electronic data network, brought to you by Prodigy Services, a joint venture of IBM and Sears. You'll notice the banner of bright-red ads that runs by your eyeballs while you're trying to access the electronic full-text of William Wordsworth. Try to pay no attention to that. Incidentally there's a Hypertext link here where you can order our Wordsworth T-shirt and have it billed to your creditcard. Did I mention that the Library of Congress is now also a bank? Hey, data is data; every pixel in cyberspace is a sales opportunity. Be sure to visit our coffee- bar, too. You can rent videos here if you want. We do souvenir umbrellas, ashtrays, earrings, the works. We librarians are doing what we can to survive this economically difficult period. After all, the library is a regrettably old-fashioned institution which has not been honed into fighting trim by exposure to healthy market competition. Until now, that is. Imagine the library had never been invented. You're Benjamin Franklin, a printer and your average universal genius, only it's not 1731, it's 1991. You have this debating club called the Junto, and you decide you're going to pool your information and charge everybody a very small fee to join in and read it. You're gonna keep it all in one place. There's about fifty of you. You're not big people, in the Junto. You're not aristocrats or well-born people or even philanthropists. You're mostly apprentices and young people who work with their hands. If you were rich you wouldn't be so anxious to pool your information in the first place. So you put all your leatherbound books into the clubhouse and you charge people forty shillings to join and ten shillings dues per annum.... Oh sorry, I forgot I said it was 1991, didn't I? You start swopping floppy disks and using a bulletin board system. Public spirited? A benefit to society? Democratic institution, knowledge is power, power to the people? In 1991? You must be nuts, Mr. Franklin. Not only that, but you're menacing our commercial interests. What about our trade secrets Mr Franklin. Our trademarks, copyrights, and patents. Our intellectual property rights. Our look-and-feel. Our patented algorithms. Our national security clearances. Don't copy that floppy Mr. Franklin. And you're telling me you want us to pay TAXES to support your suspicious activities? Hey, if there's a real need here, the market will meet it, Mr Franklin. I really think this is something better left to the private sector, Mr Franklin. No author could possibly want his books read for free, sir. Are you trying to starve the creative artist? Let's get real Mr Franklin. You know what's real, Mr Franklin? Money is real. You seem to be under the misapprehension that information wants to be free and that enabling people to learn and follow their own interests will benefit society as a whole. Well, we don't believe in society as a whole. We believe in the ECONOMY as a whole -- a black hole. Why should you be able to think things and even learn things without paying somebody for that privilege? Let's get to brass tacks, the bottom line. Money. Money is reality. You see this printed dollar bill? It's far more real than topsoil or oxygen or the ozone layer or sunlight. You may say that this is just a piece of paper with some symbols on it, but that's sacrilege. It's the Almighty Dollar. Most of them are actually stored in cyberspace -- dollars are just ones and zeros in a computer, but that doesn't mean they're only virtual, and basically one big fantasy. No, dollars are utterly and entirely real, far more real than anything as vague as the public interest. Don't try to talk to us in a language that doesn't involve monetary transactions. You have to talk in real language, the language that automatically makes you and everything you do and everything you believe into a marketable commodity. You're a commodity or you don't exist. Can you believe that Melville Dewey once said, "free as air, free as water, free as knowledge?" Free as knowledge. Let's get real, this is the modern world -- air and water don't come cheap! Hey, you want breathable air, you better pay your power-bill, pal. Free as water -- man, if you've got sense you buy the bottled variety or pay for an ionic filter on your tap. And free as knowledge -- well, we don't know what "knowledge" is, but we can get you plenty of DATA, and as soon as we figure out how to download it straight into student skulls we can put all the teachers and librarians into the breadline. Ladies and gentlemen there's a problem with showing Mr Franklin the door. The problem is that Mr Franklin is right. Information is not something you can peddle like Coca-Cola. If it were, then information would cost nothing when you had a glut of it. With other commodities, if you make too much the cost drops. Money just does not map onto information at all well. How much is the Bible worth? You can get a Bible in any hotel room. They're worthless, but not valueless. What's information really about? It's about attention. You're never gonna read the Library of Congress. You'll die long before you access one tenth of one percent of it. What's important is the process by which you figure out what to look at. This is the real and true economics of information. Power is departing its base in possession of information -- who owns the books, who prints the books, who has the holdings. The crux here is access, not holdings. And not even ACCESS, but the signposts that tell you WHAT to access -- what to pay attention to. That's why the spin-doctor is the creature who increasingly rules the universe. Never mind that man behind the curtain -- no no, look at my hand, I can make a candidate disappear. Watch me pull a President out of a hat. Look, I can make these starving people disappear in a haze of media noise. Nothing up my sleeve, presto. Librarians used to be book-pullers. Book-pullers, I like the way that sounds. I like it kind of better than I like the sound of "information retrieval expert," though that's clearly where librarians are headed. Might be the right way to head. Though I wonder exactly what will be retrieved and what will be allowed to rot in the deepest darkest swamps of the dustiest hard-disks. I like librarians, I owe my career to librarians. I hate being turned into a commodity and seeing things turned into commodities. I like bookstores too, but I don't like chainstores and I don't like distributors. We already have twelve people in the US who buy all the books for the twelve major distributors. They're the information filters and their criterion is the bottom line and the bottom line is a fraud. I don't like megapublishers either. Publishing is owned by far too few people. They're the people who own the means of production and worse yet they own the means of attention. They determine what we get to pay attention to. Of course there are other ways of delimiting people's attention. Like aesthetic and cultural means of limiting attention. Librarians used to be very big on this. Conceivably they could get this way again. Librarians could get very correct. Try reading what librarians used to say in the Victorian age. They were really upset about popular novels. They carred on about it in a way which would sound very familiar to Dan Quayle. Here's a guy named Dr Isaac Ray in the 1870s. Quote: "The specific doctrine I would inculcate is, that the excessive indulgence in novel-reading, which is a characteristic of our times, is chargeable with many of the mental irregularities that prevail upon us to a degree unknown at any former period." Unquote. Here's the superintendent of the State of Michigan in 1869. "The state swarmed with peddlers of the sensational novels of all ages, tales of piracy, murders, and love intrigues -- the yellow-covered literature of the world." James Angell in 1904. "I think it must be confessed that a great deal of the fiction which is deluging the market is the veriest trash, or worse than trash. Much of it is positively bad in its influence. It awakens morbid passions. It deals in the most exaggerated representations of life. It is vicious in style." These worthies are talking about authors who corrupt the values of youth, authors who write about crime and lowlife, authors who drive people nuts, authors who themselves are degraded and untrustworthy and quite possibly insane. I think I know who they're talking about. Basically they're talking about me. Here's the President of the United States speaking at a library in 1890. "The boy who greedily devours the vicious tales of imaginary daring and blood-curdling adventure which in these days are far too accessible will have his brain filled with notions of life and standards of manliness which, if they do not make him a menace to peace and good order, will certainly not make him a useful member of society." Grover Cleveland hit the nail on the head. I'm the nail. Not only did I start out in libraries as the greedy devouring boy, but thanks to mindwarping science fictional yellow-covered literature, I have become a menace to peace and good order. Far too accessible, eh Mr President? Too much access. By all means let's not provide our electronic networks with TOO MUCH ACCESS. that might get dangerous to the status quo. The networks might rot people's minds and corrupt their values. They might create bad taste. Think this electrical network thing is a new problem? Think again. Listen to James Russell Lowell speaking in 1885. "We diligently inform ourselves and cover the continent with speaking wires.... we are getting buried alive under this avalanche of earthly impertinences... we... are willing to become mere sponges saturated from the stagnant goosepond of village gossip." The stagnant goosepond of the GLOBAL village. Marshall MacLuhan's stagnant goosepond. Who are the geese in the stagnant pond? Whoever they are, I'm one of them. You'll find me with the pulp magazines and the comics and the yellow-covered trash. In the future you'll find me in the electronic pulp, stuff so cheap that it's copied and given away. In the hacker zines, in the fanzines, in the underground. In whatever stuff it is that really bugs Grover Cleveland. He can't make up his mind whether I'm the scum from the gutter or the "cultural elite" -- but in either case he doesn't like me. He doesn't like cyberpunks. And he's not going to like cyberpunk librarians either. Don't deceive yourselves on that score. Weird ideas are okay as long as they remain weird ideas. Once they start changing the world, there's smoke in the air and blood on the floor. You guys are marching toward blood on the floor. It's cultural struggle, political struggle, legal struggle. You've heard some weird ideas today. I like reading Hans Moravec. I respect him and I pay close attention to what he says. He's a true fount of weird ideas. He's a credit to the American republic. I think he even makes a certain amount of sense, technically and rationally if not politically and socially. But then again, I don't think the Ayatollahs have read MIND CHILDREN yet. If they had, they would recognize it as complete and utter blasphemy, far worse than Salman Rushdie's SATANIC VERSES. If Hans actually got around to creating a digital afterlife right here on Earth, I'm pretty sure the Moslem fundamentalists would try to have him killed. They'd surely consider this their moral duty. And they probably wouldn't be first in line, either. A lot of people have seen TERMINATOR TWO. They might figure our friend Hans here as the future Architect of Skynet. He wants to make the human race obsolete. Doesn't that mean it'd be a lot more convenient to kill him right now? Of course we're not going to kill Hans now. I mean, not till he gets his own satellite channel and starts his own religious movement and asks for love-offerings. Not till he starts building a posthuman brain in a box. When his technology moves from the rhetorical to the commercial. When MIND CHILDREN become MIND CHILDREN (TM) and they're manufactured by Apple and Toshiba and retailed to adventurous aging yuppies. Thirty years to the Singularity? Thirty years to the complete transformation of the human condition? Maybe. Maybe it's just ten years till the day the Secret Service raids the basements of MIT and removes all his equipment. As for criminal charges, well, we'll think of something. Maybe we can nail him on an FDA rap. I do kind of believe in the singularity though. I think some kind of genuine deep transformation in the human condition is in the works. I have no idea what that will be, but I can smell it in the wind. That's why I want to bring up one last topic today. One last weird idea. I call it Deep Archiving. It's possibly the most uncommercial act possible for the institutions we call libraries. I'd like to see stuff archived for the long te rm. The VERY long term. For the successors of our civilization. Possibly for the successors of the human race. We're already leaving some impressive gifts for the remote future of this planet. Namely nuclear wastes. We're going to be neatly archiving this repulsive trash in concrete and salt mines and fused glass canisters, for tens of thousands of years. Imagine the pleasure of discovering one of these nice radioactive time-bombs six thousand years from now. Imagine the joy of dedicated archeologists burrowing into one of these twentieth-century pharoah's tombs and dropping dead, swiftly and painfully. Gosh, thanks, ancestors. Thanks, twentieth century. Thanks for thinking of us. Isn't it a moral obligation to explain ourselves to these unknown people we've offended? Shouldn't we give some thought to leaving them a legacy a little less lethal and offensive than our giant fossilized landfills and the cesium-90 fallout layer in the polar snows? If we're going to put the Library of Congress in our hip pocket, I'd like to see us put the Library of Congress in every canister of nuclear waste. Let's airmail the Library of Congress to the year 20,000 AD. There's absolutely no benefit for us in this action. That's why I like the idea. That's why I find it appealing. I hope you'll think about it. As weird ideas go it's one of the less hazardous and more workable. If you remember one idea from my visit here I hope you'll remember that idea. That's all I have to say, thanks a lot for listening. ************************************************************************** -- Tom Maddox tmaddox@netcom.com "I swear I never heard the first shot" Wm. Gibson, "Agrippa: a book of the dead" ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ A couple extra notes: I'd like to thank Tom for getting this speech onto alt.cp to begin with and add that it is now available in book form with the rest of the papers and speeches from the meeting: _Thinking Robots: An Aware Internet and Cyberpunk Librarians_ Miller, R. Bruce & Wolf, Milton T eds. LITA Publications ISBN 0-8389-7625-5 200 pages, tp Available from Order Department, American Library Assn, 50 East Huron St, Chicago, IL, 60611.