Conference Center

Topic 3 of 43: Bruce Sterling

Sat, Feb 21, 1998 (14:28) | Paul Terry Walhus (terry)
Bruce Sterling is an Austin treasure, a legend. And he gave a rousing,
great speech to cap off CFP98 and a hellluva party at his house
afterwards. What a guy!

23 responses total.


 Topic 3 of 43 [cfp]: Bruce Sterling
 Response 1 of 23: Paul Terry Walhus (terry) * Sat, Feb 21, 1998 (14:29) * 523 lines

CFP Closing Speech, Austin, Feb 20, 1998

Literary Freeware -- Not for Commercial Use

Hi, my name's Bruce Sterling, I'm a local writer
and a CFP veteran. I'm grateful for this chance to once
again bring you the fabulous benefits of my freelance
pontifications.

When I first got involved in the computer civil
liberties scene, it was 1990. We'd just had a Secret
Service raid here in Austin that had shut down a science
fiction publisher. This was a strange and rude intrusion
in my daily life, this was an advent calculated to waken
me from my dogmatic slumbers. The more I learned about
this computer crime raid, the more peculiar and
significant it seemed. I ended up writing an entire book
about it. I was hoping the book would encourage some
informed debate, and maybe the deeper political issues
behind the computer revolution could somehow all be put
straight.

Now, eight years later, almost to the day, we have
these four hundred interested and relevant parties all
meeting here in Austin to get together face to face and
thrash some of these things out. And you can even earn
legal credit for it. This gives me a warm sense of
closure, a very fulfilled feeling.

There's plenty of thrash at CFP. There's always a
lot of thrash. Very interesting thrash.

Not a lot of permanent legal results, though. If you
glance back over the past eight years and examine the
whole enterprise to date, what you see is very remarkable.
In the world of computers, privacy, and freedom, crises go
in and out of vogue, but they are very rarely settled in
any permanent legislative way. The only real permanence
is the thrash itself. I'd go so far as to call this a new
status quo. Permanent technological revolution.
Permanent thrash.

I was very intrigued by the remarkable presentation of
our first keynote speaker, Mr. Kahin. It was a very
congenial and gentle speech: "modest" was a word he used
a lot. I don't think I've ever, ever heard an
Administration science and technology expert describe the
aims of American government as "modest." This was a
remarkable confession this gentleman was making. In so
many words, he said that policy development is cyberspace
is just plain too hard to do. There are too many
competing values to achieve a workable political balance.
The Administration is simply too overwhelmed by all this
random electronic thrashing, all this buzzing and
bleeping. So they'll simply modestly step back and let
the mighty forces of technology and private enterprise
thrash the situation out on their own. And maybe twenty
years from now, when things calm down and get safer for
elected American politicians, we may see some actual laws
passed.

Well, of course this statement is very good news for
the techno-libertarian post-industrial contingent.
Really, there ought to be corks popping in the offices of
WIRED magazine over this keynote speech. The Bay Area
WIRED folks are very into all this: emergence, and market
power, and bottom-up entrepreneurism, and the sublime
beauty of nonlinear network economics that are profoundly
Out of Control. And let's face it, after that stinking
Decency Act debacle, a hands-off policy smells terrific.

I think you can make some good arguments that there
are aspects of reality that governments should be very
modest about. Our keynote speaker pointed out that the
real nodes in the World Wide Web are words. Hotlinked key
words. So this isn't merely chips and wires that we are
talking about. This is language. When government tries
to regulate and police the structure of language, this is
generally considered to be double-plus ungood. There's a
long tradition of restraint and modesty here. The First
Amendment may be a local ordinance, but it's clearly
served us rather well, and the First Amendment says, "make
no law." Be modest. Make no law.

But point of view is worth eighty IQ points. From
another point of view, to say that American government
should be modest in a flagship technology is a very weird
thing to say. I have never before heard a federal
official confess that some aspect of industrial
development is simply beyond the mental grasp of
government. That it just plain moves too fast to figure
out, so we might as well throw up our hands and step back
out of its way.

This is a radical admission to make. It's very out
of the ordinary. Rocket scientists are said to be pretty
smart people, but that didn't lead the federal government
to declare that NASA is impossible to manage politically,
so that rockets should be best left to Westinghouse and
General Dynamics. I don't think there are many
Congressmen who fully grasp quantum chromodynamics,
either. But you would never see the Administration say
that quarks are too complex for government, and that
relativity and subatomic physics should be left to the
greater wisdom of the private sector.

But that's the Internet policy. No actual
government. Some form of emergent self-regulating
governance. To me, that was the core message of CFP 98.
They really are just plain giving up. That was the
mellow, birdlike sound of the twilight of sovereignty.
The era of big government is over; the era of puzzled,
shrunken, benignly indifferent government is at hand.

It's the giant sucking sound of abdicated
responsibility. So what fills the power vacuum? I
would argue that it is already being filled by a different
and more modern political arrangement: not bureaucracy,
but ad-hocracy.

I believe that the best known ad-hocracy, the
classic version, and certainly the one that gets the most
admiring press, is the internet engineering task force.
These guys get plenty of ink for their wonderful,
cooperative, networking, non-governmental, emergent, non-
hierarchical way of organizing their enterprise. They're
a role model, a paradigm even. And that management model
seems to work pretty well on the Internet.

What do ad-hocracies look like in other contexts?
Say, a business context. I would argue that Silicon
Valley is a giant ad-hocracy. You see a particularly
virulent aspect of this, in weird, market-bubble, casino-
economy, Silicon Valley IPOs. Esther Dyson wrote a quite
good article about this in the New York Times recently, in
which she pointed out that many Silicon Valley companies
are basically digital paper-tigers. They don't actually
develop and sell products. Not even software, not even
ones and zeros. They simply pitch high-concepts, sell
stock in the vaporware, cash out for the venture
capitalists behind the curtain, and then they are
acquired by larger firms. If you look for an actual
industrial enterprise, something with deliverables and a
cash flow, there's simply no there there.

Hollywood film production companies are long-
established ad-hocracies. Show business has always been
good at this. The entertainment industry. The military-
entertainment complex. You're pitchforking a bunch of
freelancers together, exposing some film, using the movie
as the billboard to sell the ancillary rights, and after
the thing gets slotted to video, everybody just vanishes.

But in the political realm, I would argue that
America's most famous and powerful ad-hocracy is that
nebulous entity that our First Lady refers to as "the
massive right-wing conspiracy." And here we find our
flagship industry giving an odd little lurch. That's the
grating sound of a postindustrial iceberg hitting us below
the waterline. It's not pleasant to have the established
order seriously menaced and frightened by their sense of
a covert conspiracy.

I don't believe in conspiracy in the grand Joseph
McCarthy paranoiac tradition, but I do believe in a real
and powerful right-wing ad-hocracy of Clinton's political
enemies. I think it's self-evident, it doesn't challenge
my credulity. I think these right-wing activist people
are basically very much like CFP. They're all on each
other's Rolodexes, they're all on each other's mailing
lists, they all know each others' funding agencies, think
tanks and industrial backers. And when anything, no
matter how far-fetched or bizarre, comes up that might
conceivably harm the President, that information is
disseminated around the country and around the world at
lightning speed. It's data-mined, and catalogued, and
embroidered, and re-cycled, and re-circulated endlessly,
and spun and spun and spun.

The "massive right-wing conspiracy" is what our
friends at the infowar contingent at RAND corporation like
to call a "segmented, polycephalous influence network."
It's a loosely linked, leaderless enterprise which is
constructed rather like an art movement, or a literary
movement. It doesn't have elections, laws, bylaws, a code
of ethics, a code of morals, or any kind of brakes. It
can't be defeated militarily any more than Russians could
defeat Afghan guerrillas or Americans defeat the Viet
Cong. And this isn't merely a theoretical exercise. The
thing is as real as dirt. It has real power.

You don't have to stretch too far to perceive this as
a menace to democracy. It's certainly a real and visible
menace to the established order, because it can throw sand
in the works at any of a hundred different points, and
there's no headquarters where the established order can
hit back. When the established order hits back, it hits
back with another, rival ad-hocracy.

You may have seen James Carville -- a very interesting
and significant postmodern figure -- appearing on
television to publicly declare war on the Ken Starr
investigation. I noticed some pundits scoffing at this
declaration -- "Carville thinks he's in the bunker!
Carville thinks he's an army! The Cajun's off his
rocker!" This scoffing has a very hollow sound to me.
It reminds me of Stalin asking how many divisions the Pope
has. The Pope doesn't use divisions, Comrade Stalin. But
the Pope knows the ground in Poland, and he can put a
stake through your undead heart with no problem.

James Carville has never been elected to any office.
As far as I can see, James Carville has no legitimate or
constitutional role in our society whatsoever. All James
Carville possesses is a deep knowledge of the media, a
gift for spin, a big Rolodex, and a lot of people who owe
him favors. Oh, and a law degree, too, somewhere at the
bottom of the list. But when the Clinton Administration
goes to the mattresses, this guy is the *first* guy they
call.

You're not going to see James Carville declaring
large areas of American reality off limits because they
are beyond his mental grasp. You're not going to see
James Carville declaring that he ought to be modest, and
let the info-pundits and the venture capitalists decide
what to do with digital media. The guy will do with
digital media what he does with *all* media, bend it to
his own uses.

This is what ad-hocratic political power looks like in
a heavily mediated and thoroughly networked society. I
don't know what you call that form of power, but it sure
doesn't look like anything I recognize from a high-school
civics text.

And it's not unique to the United States. Prime
Minister Blair has proved that it works great in Britain.
If you want to see how it develops in another social
context -- a deeply non-American context -- take a good
look at postmodern Russia. Yeltsin's campaign manager is
a man named Anatoly Chubais, the Carville of Russia. This
man is basically running the entire Russian government off
of his laptop.

I happen to have a very warm and kindly feeling about
literary movements. I'd hate for the government to think
that my cyberpunk literary ad-hocracy was some kind of
organized menace against civil order, and that we should
all be grilled in Congress by an unAmerican activities
committee. It might be kind of an honor -- for a Texan
writer it would be quite an honorable thing to walk down
the trail of tears with John Henry Faulk and J. Frank
Dobie -- but I don't think this would be a political plus
for the American Republic.

But I think it can be demonstrated that ad-hocracy
can be a living menace to civil order. Let's take the
Lewinsky wiretapping business. For eight years I've been
to CFP, and for eight years I've heard the law and order
contingent tell us that wiretapping is the only sure
weapon against mafias, dope runners, terrorists and child
pornographers. I don't remember Presidential sex partners
being on that list, but it's getting pretty clear to rest
of us that they are way, way up there as targets of
opportunity.

Here we've got a wiretapping development that may
bring down an Administration, annul two elections, and
plunge our country into years of debilitating public shame
and trauma. You know, if terrorists or dope dealers did
us a grievous harm like that, we'd pursue those evil sons
of bitches to the ends of the earth. But instead it's our
Justice Department, in league with a networked rabble of
oppo research freaks with a sick need to monitor and
surveill people's sex lives.

Hey, thanks a lot, Mr. Law-and-Order Body-Wire. I'm
sure my two innocent daughters will sleep a lot safer in
their beds after you've ritually sacrificed the nation's
chief executive in a neurotic orgy of national sex panic.
After this gratifying experience, I'm anxious to see your
wiretapping powers expanded radically, so that more
American women, and their mothers, can be turned into
felons for lying about their sex lives. You guys need
more plug-in jacks and headphones, it's important for our
nation's safety and stability. So after you clean that
prurient filth off your tape heads, tell me just one more
time why you're so eager to have Digital Telephony.

It's very much a pattern. National moral sex
panics have definite political advantages. Ad-hocracies
specialize in this sort of agitation. The Christian right
specializes in provoking reflexive loathing for
homosexuality. For years we've seen law enforcement
trumpet the terrifying menace of child pornography on
computer networks. If a rightist adhocracy can checkmate
the king through a mini-Profumo scandal, it's going to be
open season on politician's sex lives for as far as the
eye can see.

What is all this about, what's the commonality
here? It's a profoundly undemocratic process of shutting
down informed debate by cynically exploiting sexual hot-
button issues. We're supposed to be so panicked and
stampeded by the specter of kidporn that we somehow miss
the fact that the FBI is installing a Walkman jack in our
phones. You see, it's just plain too complicated and
technical for us to make up our minds about! So let's
just panic! At least we can provoke some vigorous action
that way.

There's a flipside to the government's public
abdication of competence to regulate and judge. It's the
unspeakable, invisible, national-security underworld.
Wired Power without the inconvenience of democracy. The
taps, the tapes, the dossiers, ECHELON, the secret war
against crypto -- none of this is remotely democratic.
This is a frozen Cold War underworld accountable to none.
If we can't regulate ourselves in an open, above-board
fashion, spooks traditionally expand to fill the power
vacuum. I would argue that in a true information society,
private spookdom is bound to flourish. We all take on a
mild flavor of spy. The walls between spy, journalist,
pundit, spin-doctor, guru, opinion leader, and political
operative become ever more vaporous. Don't believe me?
Look around yourself.

The day may come when powerful ad-hocracies abandon
the pretence of legality, and simply crush public figures
to death with the raw pressure of surveillance. In much
the same way that Princess Di and her scandalous boy-toy
were bloodily crushed to death by the sheer pressure of
tabloid harassment.

Or it may be that ad-hocracies will display some real
benefits for real-world public order. We might see ad-
hocracies for sewage lines, or ad-hocracies for railroads
and highways and electrical power. People have been
talking electronic democracy for quite a while now. It
looks good on paper, or maybe it would be more accurate to
say that it looks good glowing on a screen.

But where's the demo? I've yet to see even the
smallest American town, or the smallest unit of actual
functional government, becoming fully electronic.
Virtual communities -- they don't seem to be living up to
their hype. They seem to work just about as well as
other traditional American intentional communities.
Pilgrim pioneers, hippie communes, Amish barn-raisings...
these things are hard work. Most Americans prefer TVs to
quilting bees. Most Americans want to kick back in the
suburbs and have entertainment piped in.

And virtual communities have never worked out their
bad apple problem, their free rider problem. Spam has
damaged USENET in ways that malicious hackers could only
dream about. Network ad-hocracies are very good at
forming a hostile overlay over the deeper infrastructure.
They don't seem to be much good at all at forming
structures themselves. Because ladies and gentlemen, real
political structures have *structure!* They have laws,
regulations, rights, grants of citizenship, constitutions,
true faith and allegiance. It's hard to fake all those
things with a Rolodex, an email list, and a starry-eyed
sense of techno-optimistic benevolence.

You know, the computer revolution really loves itself.
It's all about publicity really, it's about moving data
fast and cheap, so maybe it's only natural that it gets
entranced by its own hype. But you know, this isn't the
last technological revolution that you and I are going to
witness. When I turn my eyes to the future, I really have
to wonder what kind of precedent we're setting here.
What kind of precedent are we bequeathing to the
organizers and attendees of "Biotech Freedom and Privacy?"

Because you can smell that one on the wind. You
got the medical priesthood under seige by eager
entrepreneurs, tremendous market demand, bathtub genetic
sequencers, cheaper and cheaper equipment, cloned sheep on
the front page, activists like Kevorkian and Richard Seed
all ready to jump out of their basements and carry out a
propaganda of the deed.... And we already know what
outlaw pharmaceuticals look like. These cats aren't like
computer outlaws, guys who are nine-tenths teenage
ideologue. These dope people have revenue streams bigger
than countries and they play for keeps.

I would also point out that this very week the FBI
did us the favor of busting a couple of biowar militia
freaks. There's often some kind of loudly trumpeted FBI
action during Computers Freedom and Privacy. Usually it's
a computer bust. This time it's anthrax. You can take
that little chunk of data and make of it what you may.

But maybe the next techno-revolution won't play out
like this one. It may be that there is something unique
and special about the world of computation. We can't seem
to build permanent structures; so maybe we're not a
permanent problem. Come the year 2000, we may well find
that some large percentage of the planet's installed
computers simply cease to work.

Computation may be America's flagship industry, but
when you see how people live in computation, they're not
like the settled aristocrats on the first class deck of
the Titanic. They're a lot like the post-iceberg Titanic.
They have a raft called the IBM mainframe, and then
another raft called Apple II, and then a raft called
Macintosh, and then they make a frantic leap sideways to
Windows 95, dropping heaven only knows how much precious
data in the transfer. And those who somehow fall
overboard, end up stiff and pale and bobbing in the chill
dark waters of technical obsolescence. Maybe that's what
we have to offer to the future here at CFP. Pundits
destined to sink without a trace, our solemn
pontifications reduced to the weightless state of so much
long-forgotten newsgroup chatter. No monument, just the
churn. Floppies change shape and won't fit the new
machines, CD-ROMs flake apart and delaminate. And
government was wisest just to step back and let us be.
We're glad they didn't have to warp the Constitution to
fit our peculiar needs, because when it was all summed up
in retrospect, we were gone like the 17-year cicada.

But you know -- I can live with that. I prefer
evanescence to catastrophe. When I think about all the
scaremongering, and alarm stories, and gloomy predictions
about computer crime that I've had to absorb over the past
eight years, I feel very proud of the American republic.
I think we've done an incredible job of assimilating this
technology. When I went to CFP One, that event was a
total freak scene. There were convicted criminals and
their arresting officers buying each other drinks in the
bar. In newpaper stories of 1990 you had to define the
word "modem." But here we are eight years later and
websurfing is a genuinely popular enterprise, it's like
Monday Night Football or country line-dancing.

I can live with hype, as long as we have a chance to
keep making new mistakes. Sure, we've got ad-hocracies
scurrying around in the woodwork destabilizing the
American democratic process, but let's get real. This is
America we're talking about. It's seen hard times and
hard, hard tests. Slavery, civil war. Machine
politics, the Tweed Ring, Tammany Hall, Chicago in the
20s. Jim Crow. Watergate. Texas state politics.
Louisiana politics, for heaven's sake. The railroads, the
steel mills, the robber barons. The military industrial
complex. We survived all that. We look good now. We
have resilience. We toughed it out. We have hope as a
culture, we're not afraid to reinvent ourselves. We make
ludicrous spectacles of ourselves that cause civilized
people to wonder if we've lost our minds, but there's
nothing new about that. It's what Americans always do.

Let's look at the general situation here, the big
picture. Stock market at an all time high. Balanced
federal budget, practically kind of. We even have patches
of deflation. Deflation! I'm a middle-aged man and I
never in my life saw deflation, I thought it was a
mythical beast. And there's jobs, even! They may be
burn-out jobs in the high-end sector, with burger-flipping
service jobs at the low end, but hey, at least there's
work around. The computer industry is a very strange
flagship industry to have, but Dell is headquartered in
Austin, and Dell just set a bunch of new sales records.
It's an industry! The Texas oil industry smells really
bad. The Texas cattle industry has screwflies,
brucellosis and droughts. I'm down with this Texas chip
and computer thing. It's working out down here.

In fact, I really suspect that this historical moment
may be a little Golden Age for our community. Compared to
what else has been going on, and compared to what else may
be coming, this seems like a little Belle Epoque. We're
no longer so eccentric that we seem freakish, and yet we
have not yet settled down quite so much that we've become
wallpaper. The electronic frontier is no longer a howling
wilderness, and it hasn't yet matured into a decaying
rust-belt slum. We've really got it good!

When it's all said and done, my primary concern in the
year 1998 is that we ought to be enjoying this more. I
think the computer community just plain works too hard.
We're all wrapped up in the eighty-hour weeks, and the
piles of mounting email, and the constantly bleeping
cellphones. We need to learn to kick back. We need to
live less like galley slaves and more like human beings.
We may never have it this good again.

That's why I've made it my personal goal at this CFP
to try and buy everybody a beer. The con's over now, our
beloved CFP ad-hocracy is shutting down for another twelve
months. There's one important thing about ad-hocracies, a
charming quality they have. If you just get them outside
of the video surveillance, and away from their podiums and
microphones, and add a little social lubricant in the form
of a couple of beers, they spontaneously disintegrate into
parties. And I don't mean grim, committed, political
parties. I mean good old-fashioned yahoo-style parties.

When you come right down to it, virtual communities
are a pretty thin and cerebral parody of actual
communities. But I can slap a patch on that problem right
now. You're in my home town. This is Austin.
Slackerville. Berkeley on the Colorado. Come on out of
the public spotlight, let's mosey on over to my house and
let our hair down. It's not a black-tie do, it's very
laid back and Texan. You're gonna have to twist off your
own beer caps and nibble your own chips and sandwiches,
but at least you can wear whatever the hell you want.
Expectations are low, and the entry barriers are
nonexistent. Nancy and I will be glad to have you.
Let's get actually communal, let's have a little life-
affirming celebration. Let's tie one on.

So I dunno about you, but I'm outta here. Last guy
out of the building has to log off and shut down!


 Topic 3 of 43 [cfp]: Bruce Sterling
 Response 2 of 23: Paul Terry Walhus (terry) * Sun, Feb 22, 1998 (06:50) * 20 lines

My friend and spring system ad noted (re: Bruces party):

It was definetly the best party I've been to in the past year. Chatting
with UCLA Sociology students, munching on carrots with Wired News guys, and
shooting the bull with reporters for the New York Times really blows the
hell out of the usual San Marcos nightlife. Great house, too. Somebody
should put that place up as a QTVR.

Oh, and I met Lisa Jordan, the girl who did the cfp98 design work, and she's
very nice. :)

I was trying to think of a proper concept to describe the party, as I was
standing in Bruce's office thinking 'LambdaMOO... no, that's not it. Maybe
a baby LambdaMOO', but I think that I've got it. It was very much like the
party described in Douglas Adam's books, the perpetual party that never
ended. It was alot like that, except it ended.

Yes, that's definitely it.


 Topic 3 of 43 [cfp]: Bruce Sterling
 Response 3 of 23: Paul Terry Walhus (terry) * Sun, Feb 22, 1998 (07:05) * 15 lines

A phone phreak immobilized Bruce's phone, but it was only one of his four
phone lines, a young punk couple passed out in the Sterling budoir and
left the next morning, and empty 400 beer bottles were left over (one of
them mine), and Bruce says "it was the best party Nancy and I ever threw."

My favorite quote and rallying cry from Bruce's CFP windup speech:

"We're all wrapped up in the eighty-hour weeks, and the
piles of mounting email, and the constantly bleeping
cellphones. We need to learn to kick back. We need to
live less like galley slaves and more like human beings.
We may never have it this good again."

YES!


 Topic 3 of 43 [cfp]: Bruce Sterling
 Response 4 of 23: Paul Terry Walhus (terry) * Sun, Feb 22, 1998 (08:12) * 19 lines

What struck me about Bruce's house, apart from the fact that it was a
stunning re-creation of a 40 year old house, were those round rock columns
supporting the front porch. I had been down that block before (unaware that
this was Bruce's house) and had stopped to marvel at this place. It's
definitely a "stopper" as you drive through the nighborhood.

I also marveled at the book collection which included no less than four
or five shelves full of only books by, about, or contributed to by Bruce.
Very few magazines about except for Wired (of which there were boxes and
boxes being freely distributed).

My date, Therese, and I spent ten minutes discussing the novel toilet
on the second floor, no rolls of toilet paper to be seen anywhere. I
assume this is what we learned in French class was a "bidet"?

And we spent quite a while pondering the significance of all the little
statues and action figures at the "altar", mostly death related. The
"altar" was another one of those details to marvel at.


 Topic 3 of 43 [cfp]: Bruce Sterling
 Response 5 of 23: Nikola Olic  (olic) * Sun, Feb 22, 1998 (21:47) * 5 lines

Greetings!
Bruce's party had free beer and Wired, great minds, lots of food, a snake and an
agressive cat. The fact that the house was actualy a castle also added to the
feeling that this was quite possibly the most relaxed 5 hours I can remember
(and I dont even claim to remember all 5 hours of it..hehe)


 Topic 3 of 43 [cfp]: Bruce Sterling
 Response 6 of 23: wer  (KitchenManager) * Mon, Feb 23, 1998 (00:00) * 1 lines

I want to cry now, thank you very much...


 Topic 3 of 43 [cfp]: Bruce Sterling
 Response 7 of 23: Dr. Uzkuzz K'Bugg-E'Bukk  (CotC) * Mon, Feb 23, 1998 (12:09) * 7 lines

Terry said: Bruce Sterling said: That's why I've made it my personal goal at this CFP to try and buy everybody a beer.

And then assorted others of you said: It was definetly the best party I've been to in the past year. Bruce's party had free beer and Wired, great minds, lots of food, a snake and an agressive cat. The fact that the house was actualy a castle also added to
the feeling that this was quite possibly the most relaxed 5 hours I can remember (and I dont even claim to remember all 5 hours of it..hehe)

And now I say: But WER had to work and I was bedridden with the flu... dammit, dammit, dammit, waaaahahaaaaaaaaa!!!...


 Topic 3 of 43 [cfp]: Bruce Sterling
 Response 8 of 23: Dr. Uzkuzz K'Bugg-E'Bukk  (CotC) * Mon, Feb 23, 1998 (12:12) * 14 lines

But now, re: "So they'll simply modestly step back and let the mighty forces of technology and private enterprise thrash the situation out on their own. And maybe twenty years from now, when things calm down and get safer for elected American politicians,
we may see some actual laws passed."

- and -

"That it just plain moves too fast to figure out, so we might as well throw up our hands and step back out of its way."

-and-

"No actual government. Some form of emergent self-regulating governance."

Ya mean they're actually beginning to figure out that there's no way to regulate something with no actual physical existence or national boundaries? Nope, they're the government. There's no way they could've acquired that kind of insight/wisdom that quick
ly. There's gotta be a hidden agenda of some sort. Ain't there always?


 Topic 3 of 43 [cfp]: Bruce Sterling
 Response 9 of 23: Paul Terry Walhus (terry) * Mon, Feb 23, 1998 (12:15) * 10 lines

Bruce showed the CFP98 folks how to party Austin style, with chips and
beer and trays of shrimp and cheese. What an awesome group of great
minds assembled together in one place. JeffK quoting Jon Lebkowsky, if a
bomb had hit Bruce's house that night it would have wiped out the free
speech movment.

As I write this, the sights and sounds of Bruce speaking are streaming
out of http://www.spring.com.


 Topic 3 of 43 [cfp]: Bruce Sterling
 Response 10 of 23: wer  (KitchenManager) * Tue, Feb 24, 1998 (13:37) * 1 lines

it's...it's...just not the same!


 Topic 3 of 43 [cfp]: Bruce Sterling
 Response 11 of 23: Paul Terry Walhus (terry) * Tue, Feb 24, 1998 (14:07) * 3 lines

I wonder if Bruce will do another bash this year for SXSW? He did last year.
But it would be hard on the heels of this monster bash.


 Topic 3 of 43 [cfp]: Bruce Sterling
 Response 12 of 23: wer  (KitchenManager) * Tue, Feb 24, 1998 (22:20) * 1 lines

*crossing fingers*


 Topic 3 of 43 [cfp]: Bruce Sterling
 Response 13 of 23: Paul Terry Walhus (terry) * Wed, Mar  4, 1998 (07:20) * 8 lines

Danielle Gallo:

Bruce Sterling's "Thoughts on the Future" was an entertaining speech
that contained a great deal of ranting. The part I found interesting
was when Sterling addressed the Monica Lewinsky scandal. He stated
that she poses no real threat to the country, is not a terrorist, and
there is no need to observe her. Following the speech, Sterling hosted
a party at his house for CFP attendees.


 Topic 3 of 43 [cfp]: Bruce Sterling
 Response 14 of 23: Paul Terry Walhus (terry) * Mon, Mar  9, 1998 (12:15) * 102 lines

Oh Boy! Softball Coverage in the LA Times *8-/ - Bruce Sterling quote

Digital Nation
March 9, 1998
Ad-Hocracies Fill Void Left by Government
By Gary Chapman

Copyright 1998, The Los Angeles Times

AUSTIN, Texas -- The highlight of every Computers, Freedom and Privacy
conference is the closing speech of novelist Bruce Sterling, and this
year's was no exception. Sterling, a respected science fiction writer who
lives in Austin (and who is a friend of mine), is becoming the Jonathan
Swift of the digital era. The speech he delivered at the conference here
two weeks ago was simultaneously hilarious and thought-provoking.

He started by scoring off the earlier keynote speech by Brian Kahin, a
former Harvard University () researcher who now heads the information
technology program of the White House Office of Science and Technology
Policy. Kahin delivered the administration's viewpoint on the role of
government in shaping the Internet.

Kahin said, "The private sector should take the lead, and the government
should play a modest, minimalist role." This has become the mantra of the
Clinton White House whenever the Internet is the subject. "I have
confidence in self-regulation," Kahin said.

Sterling called the presentation "a very congenial and gentle speech:
'Modest' was a word he used a lot. I don't think I've ever, ever heard an
administration science and technology expert describe the aims of American
government as 'modest.' This was a remarkable confession this gentleman was
making. In so many words, he said that policy development is cyberspace is
just plain too hard to do. . . . So they'll simply, modestly step back and
let the mighty forces of technology and private enterprise thrash the
situation out on their own."

This, Sterling said provocatively, is "the giant sucking sound of
abdicated responsibility. So what fills the power vacuum? I would argue
that it is already being filled by a different and more modern political
arrangement: not bureaucracy, but ad-hocracy."

He called the audience's attention to the way Silicon Valley technology
companies are starting to take on the form -- or rather, formlessness -- of
Hollywood production teams.

Instead of the conventional model of a corporation that plots its longevity
into eternity, the new model of high-tech business is a collection of
talented people who come together for the ephemeral goal of modeling a
"concept," and then selling it off. The team then evaporates, leaving no
trace, like quarks in a linear accelerator.

The only persistent quality is the "talent" of individuals -- a model
Hollywood has pioneered and refined to an art.

This phenomenon has developed in part because of the omnipresent shadow of
Microsoft. Smart people try to create and then cash in on ideas before
Microsoft appropriates them for the next release of Windows and puts them
out of business.

Sterling believes that this model, which has overtaken the mind-set of
entrepreneurs in high tech, is now creeping into politics -- particularly
as we think about the future of the Internet or new media in general.

Deregulation, the buzz word of the past decade, is giving way to no
regulation (or self-regulation, which amounts to the same thing).

"You don't have to stretch too far to perceive this as a menace to
democracy," Sterling said. Ad-hocracy is "certainly a real and visible
menace to the established order, because it can throw sand in the works at
any of a hundred different points. When the established order hits back, it
hits back with another, rival ad-hocracy."

"Ad-hocracy" is becoming gospel in high-tech centers around the country and
in Washington. The problem, however, is not simply that this idea produces
friction with democracy. The new high-tech ideologists don't really believe
in democracy or in "public values."

They are bent on convincing the public that interest group politics,
"ad-hocratic" atomization, and a kind of digital update of Social Darwinism
are equivalent to democracy.

Thus the public is presented with a false choice about the future of the
Internet: a choice between either ham-handed bureaucratic regulation or a
Hobbesian world of raw market power. The alternative of a truly democratic
communications sphere dominated neither by government nor commerce does not
seem to be on the table or part of the debate.

After his discouraging description of our predicament, Sterling rallied
everyone at the conference with a call to party: "There's one important
thing about ad-hocracies, a charming quality they have. If you just get
them outside of the video surveillance, and away from their podiums and
microphones, and add a little social lubricant in the form of a couple of
beers, they spontaneously disintegrate into parties."

So party we did, at Sterling's house in Austin, setting aside for a brief
time the troubling thoughts he had lodged in our minds.

Gary Chapman is director of the 21st Century Project at the University of
Texas at Austin. He can be reached at gary.chapman@mail.utexas.edu.


 Topic 3 of 43 [cfp]: Bruce Sterling
 Response 15 of 23: orange  (orange) * Mon, Mar  9, 1998 (19:43) * 1 lines

thanks for putting that up


 Topic 3 of 43 [cfp]: Bruce Sterling
 Response 16 of 23: Paul Terry Walhus (terry) * Tue, Mar 10, 1998 (10:48) * 165 lines

From Richard Thieme.

Islands in the Clickstream:
Computers, Freedom, and Privacy

A conference on computers, freedom, and privacy might be the last
place one expects to find the deepest expressions of the quest
for meaning in our lives, yet there it was, all over the place.
So was evidence of new possibilities for what I call the human-
computer symbiot, that new kind of community generated by our
symbiotic relationship to our electronic sensory extensions and
intelligent networks.

The choices we make now as we take the reins of our own evolution
more securely in our hands -- with fear and trembling at the
perilous task before us -- will determine the kind of world we
bequeath to our children.

The quest for meaning would not be an issue if our lives were
obviously meaningful. Every foreground is defined by a
background. The threat of meaninglessness posed by an entropic
universe headed toward heat death makes us ask if the evolution
of complexity of form and consciousness is evidence of
consciousness that is the source as well as the goal of evolution
-- or merely something that happened to happen. Either way, the
existential choices are the same, and the fact that they exist is
the definition of freedom.

The battle for freedom is not being fought in wars far from home
but in the policies and decisions we make personally and
professionally about how we will live in a wired world. If those
decisions are conscious, deliberate, and grounded in our real
values and commitments, we will build communities on-line and off
that are open, evolving, and free. If we are manipulated into
fearing fear more than the loss of our own power and
possibilities, then our communities will be constricted, rigidly
controlled, over-determined.

Privacy is key to these choices.

There is no such thing as a guaranteed private conversation any
more. We used to be able to walk out behind a tree and know we
could not be overheard. Now the information that is broadcast by
everything we say and do is universally available for cross-
referencing and mining for hidden patterns. Those patterns, as
Solveig Singleton of the Cato Institute observed, are in the eye
of the beholder, determined by their needs and ultimate
intentions -- an eye that half-creates and half-perceives, as
Wordsworth said, constructing reality in accordance with its
wishes and deepest beliefs.

What we deeply believe, and how we allow others and our
intentional communities to reinforce our beliefs and values,
determines our actions and commitments. The choices we make
downstream will emerge upstream when the river widens.

In a conversation with a career intelligence officer about the
actions of various US agencies, I made this appeal: "There is a
cry for justice in a child's heart," I suggested, "that is eroded
over time by the way we sometimes have to live. Yet the day comes
when we look at what we have done with our lives and its
relationship to that cry for compassion."

He disagreed. "I long ago set aside the sentiments of my
childhood religion," he said....

In order to do the things he had to do.

And the growing sophistication of technologies of torture, that
enable governments to leave fewer marks, fewer clear memories in
the minds of victims?

"A sign of growing sensitivity to world opinion," he said. "At
least they're moving in the right direction."

How we do hear that cry for compassion, when the foggy weather in
our own minds works to obscure it? Would it help, I asked Patrick
Ball of the American Association for the Advancement of Science,
to have audio clips on the web of what happens in those
interrogation rooms?

"No," he said with conviction. "The descriptions I've read are
sufficiently graphic."

What I cannot represent in words is the look in his eyes as his
brain did a quick sort of the hundreds of detailed torture
scenarios he had studied. Nor can I say how the face of that
intelligence professional went suddenly wooden and his eyes
looked away as he remembered what he had done as part of his job.

How wide do we draw the circle? A Department of Justice attorney
arguing for weak encryption stopped at the border. Catching
criminals inside America is his sole priority, so he wants a back
door into every electronic conversation in the world. Ball draws
a wider circle, including those in Guatemala, Ethiopia, or Turkey
who might be alive if they had had a possibility of engaging in a
private conversation. Ball favors strong encryption as a way to
support human rights worldwide.

Our knowledge of "how things really work" pushes the conversation
further. Seldom have intelligence agents told me they worry about
abuse of the information they gather. They trust the system.

"We abide by the law," said a CIA professional. He added that
even the NSA can not intercept conversations inside our borders.

They don't have to, said another. Our special friends in New
Zealand or Canada listen to American traffic as we listen to
theirs. Good friends, he added, help one another.

So ... granted that we live in a real world in which data
gathered for one purpose finds its way into other nets, in which
anything that has value will be bought and sold ... what are the
limits we can place on the inordinate desires in the human heart
to be in control, to know more than we have a right to know? How
can technology serve the need for secure boundaries that
guarantee citizens of a civil society the freedom they need?
Knowing what human beings do to one another, how can we constrain
our baser desires and make it less likely that they will
determine policy and behavior?

Conferences like CFP generate more questions than answers. But as
long as the questions are raised, we maintain the margin between
necessity and possibility that defines human freedom.

That margin may be narrowing, but so long as it exists, our
passion for freedom, justice, and compassion can still manifest
itself in action as well as words.

**********************************************************************

Islands in the Clickstream is a weekly column written by
Richard Thieme exploring social and cultural dimensions
of computer technology. Comments are welcome.

Feel free to pass along columns for personal use, retaining this
signature file. If interested in (1) publishing columns
online or in print, (2) giving a free subscription as a gift, or
(3) distributing Islands to employees or over a network,
email for details.

To subscribe to Islands in the Clickstream, send email to
rthieme@thiemeworks.com with the words "subscribe islands" in the
body of the message. To unsubscribe, email with "unsubscribe
islands" in the body of the message.

Richard Thieme is a professional speaker, consultant, and writer
focused on the impact of computer technology on individuals and
organizations.

Islands in the Clickstream (c) Richard Thieme, 1998. All rights reserved.

ThiemeWorks on the Web: http://www.thiemeworks.com

ThiemeWorks P. O. Box 17737 Milwaukee WI 53217-0737 414.351.2321


 Topic 3 of 43 [cfp]: Bruce Sterling
 Response 17 of 23: Paul Terry Walhus (terry) * Tue, Mar 10, 1998 (10:49) * 4 lines

I included the above here because there is a relevant and related
conversation between Sterling and Thieme on the realaudio playing at
www.spring.com.


 Topic 3 of 43 [cfp]: Bruce Sterling
 Response 18 of 23: orange  (orange) * Thu, Mar 12, 1998 (15:53) * 3 lines

thanks terry for the cite, i subscribed to the thieme newsletter as a result--
is the discussion between sterling and thieme
the one about the future/present/past of the cyberpunk movement?


 Topic 3 of 43 [cfp]: Bruce Sterling
 Response 19 of 23: Paul Terry Walhus (terry) * Thu, Mar 12, 1998 (17:36) * 3 lines

It is in fact, the pictures got out of synch today but now they should be
matching up to the audio.


 Topic 3 of 43 [cfp]: Bruce Sterling
 Response 20 of 23: Dr. Uzkuzz K'Bugg-E'Bukk  (CotC) * Tue, Mar 17, 1998 (15:34) * 1 lines

I hope I'm wrong, but I seem to recall reading a few years back in one of the mainstream news magazines (Time/Newsweek) a puff piece on Thieme being the "spiritual advisor/mentor" of Dan and Mrs. (sorry, I don't remember her name) Quayle (!) I just took a quick browse through the Thiemeworks (*gak*, what a lamely New-Agey title!) and my confirmations were neither suspicioned nor denied. :)


 Topic 3 of 43 [cfp]: Bruce Sterling
 Response 21 of 23: Dr. Uzkuzz K'Bugg-E'Bukk  (CotC) * Tue, Mar 17, 1998 (16:05) * 33 lines

OK. Here it is (in its entirety): See paragraph 4.

THE MILLENNIAL CHURCH

By: Bobby Lilly

Mil-len-ni-um - a: a period of 1000 years b: a 1000th anniversary or its celebration 2a: the thousand years mentioned in Revelation 20 during which holiness is to prevail and Christ is to reign on earth b: a period of great happiness or human perfection.

Ar-ma-ged-don - [scene of the battle foretold in Rev 16:14-16] a final and conclusive battle between the forces of good and evil b: the site or time of Armageddon 2: a vast decisive conflict (Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary).

As we enter the last decade of the 20th Century, these words will gain new meaning for all of us. Christian mythology calls for a "Kingdom" on Earth after the Battle of Armageddon rains down fire and destroys all civilization only "saved" Christians will be left to enjoy this paradise on earth. Everyone else will have perished in the death and destruction of those last days. For fundamentalists, it is impossible to believe in a future of happiness or human perfection until after the final confrontation be
ween good and evil. They believe they are living in the "last days" and look forward to the conflagration with eager joy.

"So what," you say, "if people want to believe that the end of the world is near, why not let them? Why should it be a problem for the rest of us? Surely these beliefs can't hurt anyone else but themselves?" Maybe not, but Bush calls himself a "born-again" Christian, what if his belief in the inevitability of Armageddon pushed him to posture in a more threatening manner than he should and he ends up egging Saddam Hussein on. Bush could be playing with the lives of a half million soldiers and we'd never kn
w. Vice-president Quayle's wife is a follower of Colonel Robert Thieme, one of the more extreme fundamentalist preachers. What does Quayle think about Armageddon? Could that explain why he takes such a strong negative position to recent changes in the Soviet Union?

According to "Under God," an article by Garry Wills in December's Playboy magazine, religion has always been strong in this country and cyclically the Fundamentalist strain becomes more virulent. He quotes Gallop poll statistics like: "Nine Americans in ten say they have never doubted the existence of God. Eight Americans in ten say they believe they will be called before God on judgment day to answer for their sins. Eight Americans in ten believe God still works miracles. Seven Americans in ten believe i
life after death. 37% of Americans believe in the Devil. 50% believe in angels--as opposed to the 15% who believe in astrology. About 40% attend church in a typical week. In 1989, 40% of the population called itself born again in response to a poll. Wills quotes George Gallop, Jr. as claiming that "Religious affiliation remains one of the most accurate and least appreciated political indicators available."

Wills, a Christian himself, argues that "commentators continue to neglect the elements of the American religious experience: revivalism, Biblical literalism, millennial hope (for the Second Coming of Christ). Yet these have profoundly influenced our politics. Wills warns that "the century's end may be more marked by domestic than by international conflict. The makings of a cultural war are present in religious attacks on pornography, homosexuality, abortion and the eroticism of rock music and television."
He says that, while the Bible will not be at the center of these developments, "we neglect it at our own peril."

November's Spin magazine give us KulturKampf, a German term meaning "the struggle for culture" in an article titled "The War Is On Us" by Jefferson Moreley who argues that the national mood is war-like not just against Saddam Hussein. "Americans are divided about the First Amendment and abortion. They are divided along racial lines and about drugs. They are divided to an unprecedented extent by class and income. President Bush says "Our way of life is at stake" in the Middle East, but no randomly selected
groups of Americans would be able to agree upon what that way of life is." He continues, "In America's Kulturkampf, state-sponsored morality is pitted not against organized religion but against the community and culture that emerged from the '60's counterculture...With old values failing, the struggle for culture intensifies.

And, in November's "Mother Jones" magazine, a one page article "Wildmon Kingdom?" by Fred Clarkson should scare the pants off you. According to Clarkson, Rev. Donald Wildmon, and many of his associates are part of the Coalition on Revival (COR), a theopolitical movement that seeks to make a fundamentalist Christian nation out of the United States. This past year the National Coordinating Council the defacto political arm of COR developed a 24-point program. Clarkson advises that, among other things, the p
ogram calls for the abolition of public schools, the IRS, and the Federal Reserve systems by the year 2000. He says that, while they have a national agenda, COR has a grass-roots strategy and are targeting 60 cities in the next five years. According to Clarkson's article, the group places a special emphasis on county government--sheriffs and boards of supervisors--and, once in power, the creation of county "militias."

Reconstructionism is a strong faction within COR which seeks to impose its version of "Biblical Law" on society and call it the Kingdom of God. Some Reconstructionists explicitly oppose democracy, notable R.J. Rushdonny, Reconstructionism's acknowledged leader who also believes "homosexuals, adulterers, blasphemers, astrologers, and incorrigible children should be executed preferably by "stoning." He is on COR's steering committee and is slated to become a faculty member at their planned Kingdom College i
San Jose. In a recruitment letter for the college. COR recently wrote that they want "young warriors who will be thrilled and challenged to go through a Christian 'green beret' boot camp training school for radical world changers.

BOBBY LILLY is a co-founder of the CALIFORNIANS ACT AGAINST CENSORSHIP TOGETHER and the editor of their great newsletter. See the KNOW YOUR FRIENDS database to contact CAL-ACT.


 Topic 3 of 43 [cfp]: Bruce Sterling
 Response 22 of 23: Paul Terry Walhus (terry) * Wed, Mar 18, 1998 (09:53) * 5 lines

New Bruce Sterling stuff will be playing on our realaudio player. The
pushy girls interview him at South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive.

If you haven't heard of the Pushy Girls, you will.


 Topic 3 of 43 [cfp]: Bruce Sterling
 Response 23 of 23: freeandprivate (cfadm) * Fri, Dec 24, 2010 (09:28) * 171 lines

The Blast Shack
22 December 2010

We asked Bruce Sterling (who spoke at Webstock �09) for his take on Wikileaks.

The Wikileaks Cablegate scandal is the most exciting and interesting hacker scandal ever. I rather commonly write about such things, and I�m surrounded by online acquaintances who take a burning interest in every little jot and tittle of this ongoing saga. So it�s going to take me a while to explain why this highly newsworthy event fills me with such a chilly, deadening sense of Edgar Allen Poe melancholia.

But it sure does.

Part of this dull, icy feeling, I think, must be the agonizing slowness with which this has happened. At last � at long last � the homemade nitroglycerin in the old cypherpunks blast shack has gone off. Those �cypherpunks,� of all people.

Way back in 1992, a brainy American hacker called Timothy C. May made up a sci-fi tinged idea that he called �The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto.� This exciting screed � I read it at the time, and boy was it ever cool � was all about anonymity, and encryption, and the Internet, and all about how wacky data-obsessed subversives could get up to all kinds of globalized mischief without any fear of repercussion from the blinkered authorities. If you were of a certain technoculture bent in the early 1990s, you had to love a thing like that.

As Tim blithely remarked to his fellow encryption enthusiasts, �The State will of course try to slow or halt the spread of this technology, citing national security concerns, use of the technology by drug dealers and tax evaders, and fears of societal disintegration. Many of these concerns will be valid; crypto anarchy will allow national secrets to be traded freely,� and then Tim started getting really interesting. Later, May described an institution called �BlackNet� which might conceivably carry out these aims.

Nothing much ever happened with Tim May�s imaginary BlackNet. It was the kind of out-there concept that science fiction writers like to put in novels. Because BlackNet was clever, and fun to think about, and it made impossible things seem plausible, and it was fantastic and also quite titillating. So it was the kind of farfetched but provocative issue that ought to be properly raised within a sci-fi public discourse. Because, you know, that would allow plenty of time to contemplate the approaching trainwreck and perhaps do something practical about it.

Nobody did much of anything practical. For nigh on twenty long years, nothing happened with the BlackNet notion, for good or ill. Why? Because thinking hard and eagerly about encryption involves a certain mental composition which is alien to normal public life. Crypto guys � (and the cypherpunks were all crypto guys, mostly well-educated, mathematically gifted middle-aged guys in Silicon Valley careers) � are geeks. They�re harmless geeks, they�re not radical politicians or dashing international crime figures.

Cypherpunks were visionary Californians from the WIRED magazine circle. In their personal lives, they were as meek and low-key as any average code-cracking spook who works for the National Security Agency. These American spooks from Fort Meade are shy and retiring people, by their nature. In theory, the NSA could create every kind of flaming scandalous mayhem with their giant Echelon spy system � but in practice, they would much rather sit there gently reading other people�s email.

One minute�s thought would reveal that a vast, opaque electronic spy outfit like the National Security Agency is exceedingly dangerous to democracy. Really, it is. The NSA clearly violates all kinds of elementary principles of constitutional design. The NSA is the very antithesis of transparency, and accountability, and free elections, and free expression, and separation of powers � in other words, the NSA is a kind of giant, grown-up, anti-Wikileaks. And it always has been. And we�re used to that. We pay no mind.

The NSA, this crypto empire, is a long-lasting fact on the ground that we�ve all informally agreed not to get too concerned about. Even foreign victims of the NSA�s machinations can�t seem to get properly worked-up about its capacities and intrigues. The NSA has been around since 1947. It�s a little younger than the A-Bomb, and we don�t fuss much about that now, either.

The geeks who man the NSA don�t look much like Julian Assange, because they have college degrees, shorter haircuts, better health insurance and far fewer stamps in their passports. But the sources of their power are pretty much identical to his. They use computers and they get their mitts on info that doesn�t much wanna be free.

Every rare once in a while, the secretive and discreet NSA surfaces in public life and does something reprehensible, such as defeating American federal computer-security initiatives so that they can continue to eavesdrop at will. But the NSA never becomes any big flaming Wikileaks scandal. Why? Because, unlike their wannabe colleagues at Wikileaks, the apparatchiks of the NSA are not in the scandal business. They just placidly sit at the console, reading everybody�s diplomatic cables.

This is their function. The NSA is an eavesdropping outfit. Cracking the communications of other governments is its reason for being. The NSA are not unique entities in the shadows of our planet�s political landscape. Every organized government gives that a try. It�s a geopolitical fact, although it�s not too discreet to dwell on it.

You can walk to most any major embassy in any major city in the world, and you can see that it is festooned with wiry heaps of electronic spying equipment. Don�t take any pictures of the roofs of embassies, as they grace our public skylines. Guards will emerge to repress you.

Now, Tim May and his imaginary BlackNet were the sci-fi extrapolation version of the NSA. A sort of inside-out, hippiefied NSA. Crypto people were always keenly aware of the NSA, for the NSA were the people who harassed them for munitions violations and struggled to suppress their academic publications. Creating a BlackNet is like having a pet, desktop NSA. Except, that instead of being a vast, federally-supported nest of supercomputers under a hill in Maryland, it�s a creaky, homemade, zero-budget social-network site for disaffected geeks.

But who cared about that wild notion? Why would that amateurish effort ever matter to real-life people? It�s like comparing a mighty IBM mainframe to some cranky Apple computer made inside a California garage. Yes, it�s almost that hard to imagine.

So Wikileaks is a manifestation of something that has been growing all around us, for decades, with volcanic inexorability. The NSA is the world�s most public unknown secret agency. And for four years now, its twisted sister Wikileaks has been the world�s most blatant, most publicly praised, encrypted underground site.

Wikileaks is �underground� in the way that the NSA is �covert�; not because it�s inherently obscure, but because it�s discreetly not spoken about.

The NSA is �discreet,� so, somehow, people tolerate it. Wikileaks is �transparent,� like a cardboard blast shack full of kitchen-sink nitroglycerine in a vacant lot.

That is how we come to the dismal saga of Wikileaks and its ongoing Cablegate affair, which is a melancholy business, all in all. The scale of it is so big that every weirdo involved immediately becomes a larger-than-life figure. But they�re not innately heroic. They�re just living, mortal human beings, the kind of geeky, quirky, cyberculture loons that I run into every day. And man, are they ever going to pay.

Now we must contemplate Bradley Manning, because he was the first to immolate himself. Private Manning was a young American, a hacker-in-uniform, bored silly while doing scarcely necessary scutwork on a military computer system in Iraq. Private Manning had dozens of reasons for becoming what computer-security professionals call the �internal threat.�

His war made no sense on its face, because it was carried out in a headlong pursuit of imaginary engines of mass destruction. The military occupation of Iraq was endless. Manning, a tender-hearted geek, was overlooked and put-upon by his superiors. Although he worked around the clock, he had nothing of any particular military consequence to do.

It did not occur to his superiors that a bored soldier in a poorly secured computer system would download hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables. Because, well, why? They�re very boring. Soldiers never read them. The malefactor has no use for them. They�re not particularly secret. They�ve got nothing much to do with his war. He knows his way around the machinery, but Bradley Manning is not any kind of blackhat programming genius.

Instead, he�s very like Jerome Kerviel, that obscure French stock trader who stole 5 billion euros without making one dime for himself. Jerome Kerviel, just like Bradley Manning, was a bored, resentful, lower-echelon guy in a dead end, who discovered some awesome capacities in his system that his bosses never knew it had. It makes so little sense to behave like Kerviel and Manning that their threat can�t be imagined. A weird hack like that is self-defeating, and it�s sure to bring terrible repercussions to the transgressor. But then the sad and sordid days grind on and on; and that blindly potent machinery is just sitting there. Sitting there, tempting the user.

Bradley Manning believes the sci-fi legendry of the underground. He thinks that he can leak a quarter of a million secret cables, protect himself with neat-o cryptography, and, magically, never be found out. So Manning does this, and at first he gets away with it, but, still possessed by the malaise that haunts his soul, he has to brag about his misdeed, and confess himself to a hacker confidante who immediately ships him to the authorities.

No hacker story is more common than this. The ingenuity poured into the machinery is meaningless. The personal connections are treacherous. Welcome to the real world.

So Private Manning, cypherpunk, is immediately toast.

No army can permit this kind of behavior and remain a functional army; so Manning is in solitary confinement and he is going to be court-martialled. With more political awareness, he might have made himself a public martyr to his conscience; but he lacks political awareness. He has only his black-hat hacker awareness, which is all about committing awesome voyeuristic acts of computer intrusion and imagining you can get away with that when it really matters to people.

The guy preferred his hacker identity to his sworn fidelity to the uniform of a superpower. The shear-forces there are beyond his comprehension.

The reason this upsets me is that I know so many people just like Bradley Manning. Because I used to meet and write about hackers, �crackers,� �darkside hackers,� �computer underground� types. They are a subculture, but once you get used to their many eccentricities, there is nothing particularly remote or mysterious or romantic about them. They are banal. Bradley Manning is a young, mildly brainy, unworldly American guy who probably would have been pretty much okay if he�d been left alone to skateboard, read comic books and listen to techno music.

Instead, Bradley had to leak all over the third rail. Through historical circumstance, he�s become a miserable symbolic point-man for a global war on terror. He doesn�t much deserve that role. He�s got about as much to do with the political aspects of his war as Monica Lewinsky did with the lasting sexual mania that afflicts the American Republic.

That is so dispiriting and ugly. As a novelist, I never think of Monica Lewinsky, that once-everyday young woman, without a sense of dread at the freakish, occult fate that overtook her. Imagine what it must be like, to wake up being her, to face the inevitability of being That Woman. Monica, too, transgressed in apparent safety and then she had the utter foolishness to brag to a lethal enemy, a trusted confidante who ran a tape machine and who brought her a mediated circus of hells. The titillation of that massive, shattering scandal has faded now. But think of the quotidian daily horror of being Monica Lewinsky, and that should take a bite from the soul.

Bradley Manning now shares that exciting, oh my God, Monica Lewinsky, tortured media-freak condition. This mild little nobody has become super-famous, and in his lonely military brig, screenless and without a computer, he�s strictly confined and, no doubt, he�s horribly bored. I don�t want to condone or condemn the acts of Bradley Manning. Because legions of people are gonna do that for me, until we�re all good and sick of it, and then some. I don�t have the heart to make this transgressor into some hockey-puck for an ideological struggle. I sit here and I gloomily contemplate his all-too-modern situation with a sense of Sartrean nausea.

Commonly, the authorities don�t much like to crush apple-cheeked white-guy hackers like Bradley Manning. It�s hard to charge hackers with crimes, even when they gleefully commit them, because it�s hard to find prosecutors and judges willing to bone up on the drudgery of understanding what they did. But they�ve pretty much got to make a pur�e out of this guy, because of massive pressure from the gravely embarrassed authorities. Even though Bradley lacks the look and feel of any conventional criminal; wrong race, wrong zipcode, wrong set of motives.

Bradley�s gonna become a �spy� whose �espionage� consisted of making the activities of a democratic government visible to its voting population. With the New York Times publishing the fruits of his misdeeds. Some set of American prosecutorial lawyers is confronting this crooked legal hairpin right now. I feel sorry for them.

Then there is Julian Assange, who is a pure-dye underground computer hacker. Julian doesn�t break into systems at the moment, but he�s not an �ex-hacker,� he�s the silver-plated real deal, the true avant-garde. Julian is a child of the underground hacker milieu, the digital-native as twenty-first century cypherpunk. As far as I can figure, Julian has never found any other line of work that bore any interest for him.

Through dint of years of cunning effort, Assange has worked himself into a position where his �computer crimes� are mainly political. They�re probably not even crimes. They are �leaks.� Leaks are nothing special. They are tidbits from the powerful that every journalist gets on occasion, like crumbs of fishfood on the top of the media tank.

Only, this time, thanks to Manning, Assange has brought in a massive truckload of media fishfood. It�s not just some titillating, scandalous, floating crumbs. There�s a quarter of a million of them. He�s become the one-man global McDonald�s of leaks.

Ever the detail-freak, Assange in fact hasn�t shipped all the cables he received from Manning. Instead, he cunningly encrypted the cables and distributed them worldwide to thousands of fellow-travellers. This stunt sounds technically impressive, although it isn�t. It�s pretty easy to do, and nobody but a cypherpunk would think that it made any big difference to anybody. It�s part and parcel of Assange�s other characteristic activities, such as his inability to pack books inside a box while leaving any empty space.

While others stare in awe at Assange�s many otherworldly aspects � his hairstyle, his neatness, his too-precise speech, his post-national life out of a laptop bag � I can recognize him as pure triple-A outsider geek. Man, I know a thousand modern weirdos like that, and every single one of them seems to be on my Twitter stream screaming support for Assange because they can recognize him as a brother and a class ally. They are in holy awe of him because, for the first time, their mostly-imaginary and lastingly resentful underclass has landed a serious blow in a public arena. Julian Assange has hacked a superpower.

He didn�t just insult the captain of the global football team; he put spycams in the locker room. He showed the striped-pants set without their pants. This a massively embarrassing act of technical voyeurism. It�s like Monica and her stains and kneepads, only even more so.

Now, I wish I could say that I feel some human pity for Julian Assange, in the way I do for the hapless, one-shot Bradley Manning, but I can�t possibly say that. Pity is not the right response, because Assange has carefully built this role for himself. He did it with all the minute concentration of some geek assembling a Rubik�s Cube.

In that regard, one�s hat should be off to him. He�s had forty years to learn what he was doing. He�s not some miserabilist semi-captive like the uniformed Bradley Manning. He�s a darkside player out to stick it to the Man. The guy has surrounded himself with the cream of the computer underground, wily old rascals like Rop Gonggrijp and the fearsome Teutonic minions of the Chaos Computer Club.

Assange has had many long, and no doubt insanely detailed, policy discussions with all his closest allies, about every aspect of his means, motives and opportunities. And he did what he did with fierce resolve.

Furthermore, and not as any accident, Assange has managed to alienate everyone who knew him best. All his friends think he�s nuts. I�m not too thrilled to see that happen. That�s not a great sign in a consciousness-raising, power-to-the-people, radical political-leader type. Most successful dissidents have serious people skills and are way into revolutionary camaraderie and a charismatic sense of righteousness. They�re into kissing babies, waving bloody shirts, and keeping hope alive. Not this chilly, eldritch guy. He�s a bright, good-looking man who � let�s face it � can�t get next to women without provoking clumsy havoc and a bitter and lasting resentment. That�s half the human race that�s beyond his comprehension there, and I rather surmise that, from his stern point of view, it was sure to be all their fault.

Assange was in prison for a while lately, and his best friend in the prison was his Mom. That seems rather typical of him. Obviously Julian knew he was going to prison; a child would know it. He�s been putting on his Solzhenitsyn clothes and combing his forelock for that role for ages now. I�m a little surprised that he didn�t have a more organized prison-support committee, because he�s a convicted computer criminal who�s been through this wringer before. Maybe he figures he�ll reap more glory if he�s martyred all alone.

I rather doubt the authorities are any happier to have him in prison. They pretty much gotta feed him into their legal wringer somehow, but a botched Assange show-trial could do colossal damage. There�s every likelihood that the guy could get off. He could walk into an American court and come out smelling of roses. It�s the kind of show-trial judo every repressive government fears.

It�s not just about him and the burning urge to punish him; it�s about the public risks to the reputation of the USA. The superpower hypocrisy here is gonna be hard to bear. The USA loves to read other people�s diplomatic cables. They dote on doing it. If Assange had happened to out the cable-library of some outlaw pariah state, say, Paraguay or North Korea, the US State Department would be heaping lilies at his feet. They�d be a little upset about his violation of the strict proprieties, but they�d also take keen satisfaction in the hilarious comeuppance of minor powers that shouldn�t be messing with computers, unlike the grandiose, high-tech USA.

Unfortunately for the US State Department, they clearly shouldn�t have been messing with computers, either. In setting up their SIPRnet, they were trying to grab the advantages of rapid, silo-free, networked communication while preserving the hierarchical proprieties of official confidentiality. That�s the real issue, that�s the big modern problem; national governments and global computer networks don�t mix any more. It�s like trying to eat a very private birthday cake while also distributing it. That scheme is just not working. And that failure has a face now, and that�s Julian Assange.

Assange didn�t liberate the dreadful secrets of North Korea, not because the North Koreans lack computers, but because that isn�t a cheap and easy thing that half-a-dozen zealots can do. But the principle of it, the logic of doing it, is the same. Everybody wants everybody else�s national government to leak. Every state wants to see the diplomatic cables of every other state. It will bend heaven and earth to get them. It�s just, that sacred activity is not supposed to be privatized, or, worse yet, made into the no-profit, shareable, have-at-it fodder for a network society, as if global diplomacy were so many mp3s. Now the US State Department has walked down the thorny road to hell that was first paved by the music industry. Rock and roll, baby.

Now, in strict point of fact, Assange didn�t blandly pirate the massive hoard of cables from the US State Department. Instead, he was busily �redacting� and minutely obeying the proprieties of his political cover in the major surviving paper dailies. Kind of a nifty feat of social-engineering there; but he�s like a poacher who machine-gunned a herd of wise old elephants and then went to the temple to assume the robes of a kosher butcher. That is a world-class hoax.

Assange is no more a �journalist� than he is a crypto mathematician. He�s a darkside hacker who is a self-appointed, self-anointed, self-educated global dissident. He�s a one-man Polish Solidarity, waiting for the population to accrete around his stirring propaganda of the deed. And they are accreting; not all of �em, but, well, it doesn�t take all of them.

Julian Assange doesn�t want to be in power; he has no people skills at all, and nobody�s ever gonna make him President Vaclav Havel. He�s certainly not in it for the money, because he wouldn�t know what to do with the cash; he lives out of a backpack, and his daily routine is probably sixteen hours online. He�s not gonna get better Google searches by spending more on his banned MasterCard. I don�t even think Assange is all that big on ego; I know authors and architects, so I�ve seen much worse than Julian in that regard. He�s just what he is; he�s something we don�t yet have words for.

He�s a different, modern type of serious troublemaker. He�s certainly not a �terrorist,� because nobody is scared and no one got injured. He�s not a �spy,� because nobody spies by revealing the doings of a government to its own civil population. He is orthogonal. He�s asymmetrical. He panics people in power and he makes them look stupid. And I feel sorry for them. But sorrier for the rest of us.

Julian Assange�s extremely weird version of dissident �living in truth� doesn�t bear much relationship to the way that public life has ever been arranged. It does, however, align very closely to what we�ve done to ourselves by inventing and spreading the Internet. If the Internet was walking around in public, it would look and act a lot like Julian Assange. The Internet is about his age, and it doesn�t have any more care for the delicacies of profit, propriety and hierarchy than he does.

So Julian is heading for a modern legal netherworld, the slammer, the electronic parole cuff, whatever; you can bet there will be surveillance of some kind wherever he goes, to go along with the FREE ASSANGE stencils and xeroxed flyers that are gonna spring up in every coffee-bar, favela and university on the planet. A guy as personally hampered and sociopathic as Julian may in fact thrive in an inhuman situation like this. Unlike a lot of keyboard-hammering geeks, he�s a serious reader and a pretty good writer, with a jailhouse-lawyer facility for pointing out weaknesses in the logic of his opponents, and boy are they ever. Weak, that is. They are pathetically weak.

Diplomats have become weak in the way that musicians are weak. Musicians naturally want people to pay real money for music, but if you press them on it, they�ll sadly admit that they don�t buy any music themselves. Because, well, they�re in the business, so why should they? And the same goes for diplomats and discreet secrets.

The one grand certainty about the consumers of Cablegate is that diplomats are gonna be reading those stolen cables. Not hackers: diplomats. Hackers bore easily, and they won�t be able to stand the discourse of intelligent trained professionals discussing real-life foreign affairs.

American diplomats are gonna read those stolen cables, though, because they were supposed to read them anyway, even though they didn�t. Now, they�ve got to read them, with great care, because they might get blindsided otherwise by some wisecrack that they typed up years ago.

And, of course, every intelligence agency and every diplomat from every non-American agency on Earth is gonna fire up computers and pore over those things. To see what American diplomacy really thought about them, or to see if they were ignored (which is worse), and to see how the grownups ran what was basically a foreign-service news agency that the rest of us were always forbidden to see.

This stark fact makes them all into hackers. Yes, just like Julian. They�re all indebted to Julian for this grim thing that he did, and as they sit there hunched over their keyboards, drooling over their stolen goodies, they�re all, without exception, implicated in his doings. Assange is never gonna become a diplomat, but he�s arranged it so that diplomats henceforth are gonna be a whole lot more like Assange. They�ll behave just like him. They receive the goods just like he did, semi-surreptitiously. They may be wearing an ascot and striped pants, but they�ve got that hacker hunch in their necks and they�re staring into the glowing screen.

And I don�t much like that situation. It doesn�t make me feel better. I feel sorry for them and what it does to their values, to their self-esteem. If there�s one single watchword, one central virtue, of the diplomatic life, it�s �discretion.� Not �transparency.� Diplomatic discretion. Discretion is why diplomats do not say transparent things to foreigners. When diplomats tell foreigners what they really think, war results.

Diplomats are people who speak from nation to nation. They personify nations, and nations are brutal, savage, feral entities. Diplomats used to have something in the way of an international community, until the Americans decided to unilaterally abandon that in pursuit of Bradley Manning�s oil war. Now nations are so badly off that they can�t even get it together to coherently tackle heroin, hydrogen bombs, global warming and financial collapse. Not to mention the Internet.

The world has lousy diplomacy now. It�s dysfunctional. The world corps diplomatique are weak, really weak, and the US diplomatic corps, which used to be the senior and best-engineered outfit there, is rattling around bottled-up in blast-proofed bunkers. It�s scary how weak and useless they are.

US diplomats used to know what to do with dissidents in other nations. If they were communists they got briskly repressed, but if they had anything like a free-market outlook, then US diplomats had a whole arsenal of gentle and supportive measures; Radio Free Europe, publication in the West, awards, foreign travel, flattery, moral support; discreet things, in a word, but exceedingly useful things. Now they�re harassing Julian by turning those tools backwards.

For a US diplomat, Assange is like some digitized nightmare-reversal of a kindly Cold War analog dissident. He read the dissident playbook and he downloaded it as a textfile; but, in fact, Julian doesn�t care about the USA. It�s just another obnoxious national entity. He happens to be more or less Australian, and he�s no great enemy of America. If he�d had the chance to leak Australian cables he would have leapt on that with the alacrity he did on Kenya. Of course, when Assange did it to that meager little Kenya, all the grown-ups thought that was groovy; he had to hack a superpower in order to touch the third rail.

But the American diplomatic corps, and all it thinks it represents, is just collateral damage between Assange and his goal. He aspires to his transparent crypto-utopia in the way George Bush aspired to imaginary weapons of mass destruction. And the American diplomatic corps are so many Iraqis in that crusade. They�re the civilian casualties.

As a novelist, you gotta like the deep and dark irony here. As somebody attempting to live on a troubled world� I dunno. It makes one want to call up the Red Cross and volunteer to fund planetary tranquilizers.

I�ve met some American diplomats; not as many as I�ve met hackers, but a few. Like hackers, diplomats are very intelligent people; unlike hackers, they are not naturally sociopathic. Instead, they have to be trained that way in the national interest. I feel sorry for their plight. I can enter into the shame and bitterness that afflicts them now.

The cables that Assange leaked have, to date, generally revealed rather eloquent, linguistically gifted American functionaries with a keen sensitivity to the feelings of aliens. So it�s no wonder they were of dwindling relevance and their political masters paid no attention to their counsels. You don�t have to be a citizen of this wracked and threadbare superpower � (you might, for instance, be from New Zealand) � in order to sense the pervasive melancholy of an empire in decline. There�s a House of Usher feeling there. Too many prematurely buried bodies.

For diplomats, a massive computer leak is not the kind of sunlight that chases away corrupt misbehavior; it�s more like some dreadful shift in the planetary atmosphere that causes ultraviolet light to peel their skin away. They�re not gonna die from being sunburned in public without their pants on; Bill Clinton survived that ordeal, Silvio Berlusconi just survived it (again). No scandal lasts forever; people do get bored. Generally, you can just brazen it out and wait for the public to find a fresher outrage. Except.

It�s the damage to the institutions that is spooky and disheartening; after the Lewinsky eruption, every American politician lives in permanent terror of a sex-outing. That�s �transparency,� too; it�s the kind of ghastly sex-transparency that Julian himself is stuck crotch-deep in. The politics of personal destruction hasn�t made the Americans into a frank and erotically cheerful people. On the contrary, the US today is like some creepy house of incest divided against itself in a civil cold war. �Transparency� can have nasty aspects; obvious, yet denied; spoken, but spoken in whispers. Very Edgar Allen Poe.

That�s our condition. It�s a comedy to those who think and a tragedy to those who feel, but it�s not a comedy that the planet�s general cultural situation is so clearly getting worse. As I sit here moping over Julian Assange, I�d love to pretend that this is just me in a personal bad mood; in the way that befuddled American pundits like to pretend that Julian is some kind of unique, demonic figure. He isn�t. If he ever was, he sure as hell isn�t now, as �Indoleaks,� �Balkanleaks� and �Brusselsleaks� spring up like so many filesharing whackamoles. Of course the Internet bedroom legions see him, admire him, and aspire to be like him � and they will. How could they not?

Even though, as major political players go, Julian Assange seems remarkably deprived of sympathetic qualities. Most saintly leaders of the oppressed masses, most wannabe martyrs, are all keen to kiss-up to the public. But not our Julian; clearly, he doesn�t lack for lust and burning resentment, but that kind of gregarious, sweaty political tactility is beneath his dignity. He�s extremely intelligent, but, as a political, social and moral actor, he�s the kind of guy who gets depressed by the happiness of the stupid.

I don�t say these cruel things about Julian Assange because I feel distant from him, but, on the contrary, because I feel close to him. I don�t doubt the two of us would have a lot to talk about. I know hordes of men like him; it�s just that they are programmers, mathematicians, potheads and science fiction fans instead of fiercely committed guys who aspire to topple the international order and replace it with subversive wikipedians.

The chances of that ending well are about ten thousand to one. And I don�t doubt Assange knows that. This is the kind of guy who once wrote an encryption program called �Rubberhose,� because he had it figured that the cops would beat his password out of him, and he needed some code-based way to finesse his own human frailty. Hey, neat hack there, pal.

So, well, that�s the general situation with this particular scandal. I could go on about it, but I�m trying to pace myself. This knotty situation is not gonna �blow over,� because it�s been building since 1993 and maybe even 1947. �Transparency� and �discretion� are virtues, but they are virtues that clash. The international order and the global Internet are not best pals. They never were, and now that�s obvious.

The data held by states is gonna get easier to steal, not harder to steal; the Chinese are all over Indian computers, the Indians are all over Pakistani computers, and the Russian cybermafia is brazenly hosting wikileaks.info because that�s where the underground goes to the mattresses. It is a godawful mess. This is gonna get worse before it gets better, and it�s gonna get worse for a long time. Like leaks in a house where the pipes froze.

Well� every once in a while, a situation that�s one-in-a-thousand is met by a guy who is one in a million. It may be that Assange is, somehow, up to this situation. Maybe he�s gonna grow in stature by the massive trouble he has caused. Saints, martyrs, dissidents and freaks are always wild-cards, but sometimes they�re the only ones who can clear the general air. Sometimes they become the catalyst for historical events that somehow had to happen. They don�t have to be nice guys; that�s not the point. Julian Assange did this; he direly wanted it to happen. He planned it in nitpicky, obsessive detail. Here it is; a planetary hack.

I don�t have a lot of cheery hope to offer about his all-too-compelling gesture, but I dare to hope he�s everything he thinks he is, and much, much, more.

Bruce Sterling

from

http://www.webstock.org.nz/blog/2010/the-blast-shack/

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