Science fiction, Technology, Opinion

This book is, in a sense, two different things.

One is the 1981 story by Vernor Vinge. It is a little fantabulous, taking place partly in "cyberspace"--but a cyberspace that, despite its level of detail, acknowledges its dependence on the imagination of a community of users. The story revolves around one individual, a successful writer who is also a successful protester within cyberspace, who must deal with the myriad threats to the safety of this cyberspace, including both the government and "rogue" threats.

The rest--the bulk--of the volume is a number of essays written throughout the 1990's that respond to, critique, or extend the story from a socio-technological viewpoint. Reading this for the first time in 2008, I was amazed at the prescience of these essays and their importance for our time.

Danny Hillis takes a quick stab at a coming technological symbiosis, something that is coming true as certain white-collar groups are now always on, all the time, via cell phones, blackberries, Twitter linkages, etc. Timothy May describes several different applications of strong cryptography, and rants a bit. John M. Ford muses on what the computers of the future will think of us. Alan Wexelblat compares the datamining techniques of government and industry to a panopticon prison, where we do not own our own identity profiles. Pattie Maes mentions software agents.

The next few pieces are, to my mind, essential. RMS writes a beautiful parable on "the right to read," i.e. a right to be able to own anything that contains intellectual property--a right that has been limited in a post DMCA age where people no longer have physical books and the like but can only license individual access for a short time. Leonard Foner describes the history of cryptography policy and its pitfalls. Morningstar & Farmer give an account of the late-80's Habitat community, sharing the technological (separate content and presentation!) and social lessons (don't break the conventions) they learned.

Mark Pesce wraps up the essay section with a meditation on symbol, mearnings, and animism. Then the Vinge story is reprinted (with only typographical corrections made), followed by the 1983 afterword by Marvin Minsky, which tackles consciousness, language, and the human mind as computer. This is a whole topic of its own, but his piece was not a bad entrée into this area.

A couple of different essays point out that during and after crises, citizens usually lose rights, being watched more closely for tinier infringements (such as wrong-thinking) by more powerful governments. They further suggest that there are two attractor basins: one towards a free, possibly slightly anarchist, society where people have speech and privacy rights supported by high technology, the other towards a totalitarian society run by individuals who are terrified by high technology and strictly regulate its use. Optimists believed that we were heading towards the former; in the wake of the September 11, 2001 killings, it is not so clear. How can we preserve the rights of man in a post-human world?

Highly recommended. ( )

http://www.amazon.com/review/R33... ( )

http://www.leftfield.org/~rawdon/book... ( )