Computer underground Digest Sun 11 Apr, 1999 Volume 11 : Issue 23
ISSN 1004-042X
Editor: Jim Thomas (cudigest@sun.soci.niu.edu)
News Editor: Gordon Meyer (gmeyer@sun.soci.niu.edu)
Archivist: Brendan Kehoe
Cop y Editor: Etaion Shrdlu, III
Shadow-Archivists: Dan Carosone / Paul Southworth
Ralph Sims / Jyrki Kuoppala
Ian Dickinson
Cu Digest Homepage: http://www.soci.niu.edu/~cudigest
CONTENTS, #11.23 (Sun, 11 Apr, 1999)
File 1--EFF Announces Cooperative Computing Awards
File 2--GILC member statement about Australian censorship
File 3--Why Johnny is a Cynic (NetFuture Reprint)
File 4--Magazine Sued for Publishing "Illegal" Information
File 5--Islands in the Clickstream. Generations. April 10, 1999
File 6--Cu Digest Header Info (unchanged since 10 Jan, 1999)
CuD ADMINISTRATIVE, EDITORIAL, AND SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATION APPEARS IN
THE CONCLUDING FILE AT THE END OF EACH ISSUE.
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---------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Wed, 31 Mar 1999 12:07:24 -0800
From: Alex Fowler
Subject: File 1--EFF Announces Cooperative Computing Awards
Complete information on the awards is available on our Web site (see
http://www.eff.org/coop-awards).
Alex
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
March 31, 1999
EFF Offers Cooperative Computing Prizes
Netizens Encouraged to Enlist Idle Computers in the Name of Science
CONTACTS
Tara Lemmey, EFF Executive Director, +1 415 436 9333, x102,
E-mail tara@eff.org
John Gilmore, EFF Co-Founder and project leader, +1 415 221 6524,
E-mail gnu@toad.com
Landon Curt Noll, Cooperative Computing Awards advisor, +1 650 933 4168,
E-mail chongo@sgi.com
SAN FRANCISCO -- The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is sponsoring
cooperative computing awards, with over half a million dollars in prize
money, to encourage ordinary Internet users to contribute to solving huge
scientific problems.
"We're providing incentives to stretch the computational capabilities of
the Internet," said Tara Lemmey, EFF's Executive Director. "We hope to
spur the technology of cooperative networking and encourage Internet users
worldwide to join together in solving scientific problems involving massive
computation. EFF is uniquely situated to sponsor these awards, since part
of our mission is to encourage the harmonious integration of Internet
innovations into the whole of society," she added.
The prizes will be awarded for finding huge prime numbers, that is, numbers
that can only be divided by 1 and themselves. The first million-digit
prime found will be worth $50,000; a ten-million-digit prime will claim
$100,000; a hundred-million-digit prime garners $150,000; and the finder of
the first billion-digit prime will receive $250,000. The largest known
prime number, discovered by the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search
(GIMPS), has 909,526 digits.
"The EFF awards are about cooperation," said John Gilmore, EFF co-founder
and project leader for the awards. "Prime numbers are important in
mathematics and encryption, but the real message is that many other
problems can be solved by similar methods."
Finding these prime numbers will be no simple task, given today's
computational power. It has taken mathematicians years to uncover and
confirm new largest known primes. However, the computer industry produces
millions of new computers each year, which sit idle much of the time,
running screen savers or waiting for the user to do something. EFF is
encouraging people to pool their computing power over the Internet, to work
together to share this massive resource. In the process, EFF hopes to
inspire experts to apply collaborative computing to large problems, and
thereby foster new technologies and opportunities for everyone.
Prizes and cooperative projects to find prime numbers or demonstrate
weaknesses in encryption systems have existed for some years, although they
have not yet found mass market appeal. "The approach that we're taking
with prime numbers could be used for other scientific problems, such as
analyzing the human genome, weather prediction, or searching for signs of
life in space," said Gilmore.
"In the long run, we hope to move beyond prizes," he said, "catalyzing a
market where ordinary people can sell the spare time on their computers to
others who need to compute something overnight on thousands or millions of
machines. This would reduce the net cost of owning a personal computer,
and open new opportunities in animation, product design, economics,
cryptanalysis, science, and business."
According to Landon Curt Noll, chair of the award advisory panel and
discoverer of many large primes, the prizes are spaced so that winning each
successive award would require over 100 times more effort. "While one
could wait for computers to get 100 times faster, it would be much smarter
to attract 100 times the number of people to cooperate on the problem, or
to invent a more efficient prime searching procedure. Both methods offer
benefits to society."
"Given current technology, I would estimate that GIMPS could discover a
million digit prime within a year," said Simon Cooper, a member of the
award advisory panel. "Discovering a ten million digit prime may take
several more years." One of the easiest ways for people to join the effort
is via the GIMPS project (see http://www.mersenne.org/prime.htm).
A prize claim must provide the date and time of discovery, and fully
disclose all hardware and software used. Each claim must be verified by an
independent party knowledgeable in the field of computation, and must be
published in a refereed academic journal.
Complete information about the EFF Cooperative Computing Awards is
available at the http://www.eff.org/coop-awards web page.
--
The Electronic Frontier Foundation is one of the leading civil liberties
organizations devoted to preserving civil rights and promoting civil
responsibility on the Internet. We work to ensure that the Internet
remains a global vehicle for free speech, and that
the privacy and security of on-line communication is preserved. Founded in
1990 as a nonprofit, public interest organization, EFF is based in San
Francisco, California. EFF maintains an extensive archive on civil rights
and responsibilities, privacy, and free speech at http://www.eff.org.
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 1 Apr 1999 13:25:17 +1000
From: felipe rodriquez
Subject: File 2--GILC member statement about Australian censorship
Global Internet Liberty Campaign Member Statement
AUSTRALIAN GOVERNMENT INTERNET CENSORSHIP PROPOSALS CRITICISED
Sydney 31st march 1999
INTRODUCTION
The Australian ministry for Communications, Information
Technology and the Arts has announced a proposal to introduce
draconian measures to block information on the internet that is
rated RC, X or R according to Australian film and video
classification standards. The Australian Broadcasting Authority
(ABA) will administer this regime.
The Australian Government requires that online service providers
take responsibility to remove RC and X-rated material from the
Internet once they have been notified of its existence. The
regime also provides for self-regulatory codes of practice for
the online service provider industry, to be overseen by the ABA.
These codes of practice must include a commitment by an online
service provider to take all reasonable steps to block access to
such content hosted overseas, once the service provider has been
notified of the existence of the material by the ABA. Many
millions of websites are likely to be blocked if the proposals
are effectively implemented.
RC rated content, to be completely censored from the Internet
under this regime, includes, but is not limited to, the following
types of content: Information that depicts, expresses or
otherwise deals with matters of sex, drug misuse or addiction,
crime, cruelty, violence or revolting or abhorrent phenomena in
such a way that they offend against the standards of morality,
decency and propriety generally accepted by reasonable adults,
depicts it in a way that is likely to cause offence to a
reasonable adult. Or if the content promotes, incites or
instructs in matters of crime or violence, the use of proscribed
drugs, depictions of practices such as bestiality. Or if it
appears to purposefully debase or abuse for the enjoyment of
viewers, and which lack moral, artistic or other values, to the
extent that they offend against generally accepted standards of
morality, decency and propriety. And also includes gratuitous,
exploitative or offensive depictions of violence with a very high
degree of impact or which are excessively frequent, prolonged or
detailed, cruelty or real violence which are very detailed or
which have a high impact, sexual violence, sexual activity
accompanied by fetishes or practices which are offensive or
abhorrent, incest fantasies or other fantasies which are
offensive or abhorrent.
X-rated content, to be completely censored from the Internet
under this regime, is material which contains real depictions of
actual sexual intercourse and other sexual activity between
consenting adults, including mild fetishes.
R-rated content, to be subjected to a mandatory adult
verification scheme, includes information about, or containing,
drug use, nudity, sexual references, adult themes, horror themes,
martial arts instruction, graphic images of injuries, medium or
high level coarse language, sex education, health education and
drug education.
GILC MEMBER STATEMENT
We, the undersigned members of the Global Internet Liberty
Campaign, consider that the following issues are important with
respect to these proposals of the Australian government:
The filtering and blocking regime that has been announced by the
Australian government will restrict freedom of expression and
limit access to information. Government-mandated use of blocking
and filtering systems violates basic international human rights
protections.
These measures will prevent individuals from using the Internet
to exchange information on topics that may be controversial or
unpopular. They may enable the development of country profiles to
facilitate a global/universal rating system desired by
governments, block access to content on entire domains, block
access to Internet content available at any domain or page which
contains a specific key-word or character string in the URL, and
over-ride self-rating labels provided by content creators and
providers.
Government mandated blocking and filtering of content is
unreasonable because it does not consider the dynamic nature of
the Internet. A website on the Internet that is deemed offensive
or illegal today may contain harmless content tomorrow, but is
likely to remain blocked in the future by the proposed blacklist
model.
The effectiveness of the proposed regime will be minimal. It is
unlikely that the government blacklist will cover a substantial
percentage of adult or offensive content, as there are millions
of such locations on the Internet. Tunneling and other
technologies that are available make it relatively easy
for informed users to access any website they wish despite the
existence of a filter.
The proposals will not protect minors on the Internet, as they
intend to, but will prevent lawful access to information by
adults. Additionally the introduction of mandatory adult
verification mechanisms poses a threat to privacy of the adult,
as these mechanisms are likely to store information about the
behavior of adults on the Internet.
We believe the great appeal of the Internet is its openness.
Efforts to restrict the free flow of information on the Internet,
like efforts to restrict what may be said on a telephone, would
place unreasonable burdens on well established principles of
privacy and free speech.
We encourage the Australian government to further take the lead
in creatingan environment that will help local communities find
the best answers to providing greater access to the Internet. We
observe that blocking and filtering software programs cannot
possibly filter out all bjectionable material and instead may
provide communities with a false sense of security about
providing access. We believe that filters cannot offer the
protections provided by education and training. If protection of
minors is the intention of the Australian government then minors
should be taught the critical skills that are needed as citizens
of the information society.
SIGNATURES
American Civil Liberties Union
http://www.aclu.org
ALCEI, Electronic Frontiers Italy
http://www.alcei.it
Campaign Against Censorship of the Internet in Britain
http://www.liberty.org.uk/cacib/
Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility
http://www.cpsr.org
Cyber-Rights & Cyber-Liberties (UK)
http://www.cyber-rights.org
Dutch Citizens Foundation Netherlands (db-nl)
http://www.db.nl
Electonic Frontiers Australia
http://www.efa.org.au
Electronic Frontier Foundation
http://www.eff.org
Electronic Privacy Information Center
http://www.epic.org
Feminists Against Censorship
http://www.fiawol.demon.co.uk/FAC/
rderverein Informationstechnik und Gesellschaft
http://www.fitug.de/
Fronteras Electronicas EspaF1a (FrEE)
http://www.arnal.es/free
Human Rights Network
http://www.hro.org
IRIS (Imaginons un reseau Internet Solidaire - France)
http://www.iris.sgdg.org
Internet Society
http://www.isoc.org/
Peacefire
http://www.peacefire.org
Quintessenz user group
http://www.quintessenz.at/
ADDITIONAL LINKS, REPORTS AND STATEMENTS
http://www.gilc.org
The Global Internet Liberty Campaign
http://www.dcita.gov.au/nsapi-graphics/?MIval3Ddca_dispdoc&ID3D3648
Media release by the minister of IT, arts and communications.
http://www.aba.gov.au/
Australian Broadcasting Authority
http://www.oflc.gov.au/
Australian Office of Film & Literature Classification
http://www.epic.org/free_speech/intl/hrw_report_5_96.html
HRW report, SILENCING THE NET: The Threat to Freedom of Expression On-line.
http://www.glaad.org/glaad/access_denied/index.html
GLAAD report, Access Denied: The Impact of Internet Filtering Software on t
he
Lesbian and Gay Community.
http://www.aclu.org/issues/cyber/burning.html
ACLU report, Fahrenheit 451.2: Is Cyberspace Burning? How Rating and Blocking
Proposals May Torch Free Speech on the Internet.
http://www.cyber-rights.org/watchmen.htm
Cyber-Rights & Cyber-Liberties (UK) Report, 'Who Watches the Watchmen: Inte=
rnet
Content Rating Systems, and Privatised Censorship,'
http://www.cyber-rights.org/watchmen-ii.htm
Cyber-Rights & Cyber-Liberties (UK) Report: "Who Watches the Watchmen: Part
II - Accountability & Effective Self-Regulation in the Information Age,"
http://www.ifea.net
Internet Free Expression Alliance
http://www.nclis.gov/info/kid_inter.pdf
National Commission on Library and Information Science, "Kids and the Inter=
net:
Promise and the Perils, Practical Guidelines for Librarians and Library
Trustees" (US)
http://www2.epic.org/reports/filter-report.html
Electronic Privacy Information Center, "Faulty Filters: How Content Filters
Block Access to Kid-Friendly Information on the Internet" (US)
http://www.aclu.org/issues/cyber/box.html
Censorship in a Box: Why Blocking Software is Wrong for Public Libraries
http://www.cpsr.org/filters/faq.html
Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility Filtering FAQ
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1999 10:28:38 -0500
From: Stephen Talbott
Subject: File 3--Why Johnny is a Cynic (NetFuture Reprint)
NETFUTURE
Technology and Human Responsibility
Issue #86 A Publication of The Nature Institute March 11, 1999
On the Web: http://www.oreilly.com/~stevet/netfuture/
You may redistribute this newsletter for noncommercial purposes.
NETFUTURE is a reader-supported publication.
Why Johnny is a Cynic
---------------------
In a posting to the "mediaecology" list, John Maguire, an occasional media
critic for the *Boston Herald* and a writing teacher at various Boston
Colleges, recently offered a concise and penetrating summary of the
burdens we have placed on young people today:
I think many kids (speaking of freshmen I have taught) today
"understand" that the world is an untrustworthy place, that their own
minds are untrustworthy, that they must rely on others to explain
things to them and the explanations are wormy with self-interest, and
that someone else is in charge of everything that matters, and that the
truth is not inside them but "out there" and endlessly evasive.
It seems as clear as day to me that a good part of the problem lies in the
way we push children into a premature, sophisticated cosmopolitanism. The
extremely unchildlike world in which they find themselves can breed only
cynicism in young spirits who were never allowed the securely enclosed
experience of *home*.
The abandonment of children to television, of course, is a big part of the
problem. But now many parents and teachers exult in the power of the Net
to make little sophisticates of their children -- children who
increasingly enter the abstract, no-man's-land behind the computer screen
before they have had any full benefit of a child's world.
In his powerful little booklet, *Beyond Ecophobia* (see NF #33 for some
excerpts) David Sobel passes on some stories that every parent and teacher
should read. They have to do with the critical balance, changing year by
year, between the child's experience of a richly tactile, highly
personalized, and secure home base and his exploration of the "wild
beyond". An excerpt from Annie Dillard's *An American Childhood* catches
the essence of the matter. Relating her experience in Pittsburgh at
around the age of ten, she writes:
I pushed at my map's edges. Alone at night I added newly memorized
streets and blocks to old streets and blocks, and imagined connecting
them on foot .... On darkening evenings I came home exultant,
secretive, often from some exotic leafy curb a mile beyond what I had
known at lunch, where I had peered up at the street sign, hugging the
cold pole, and fixed the intersection in my mind. What joy, what
relief, eased me as I pushed open the heavy front door! -- joy and
relief because, from the trackless waste, I had located home, family
and the dinner table once again.
The boundaries of private discovery push outward inexorably, from the tent
formed by a tablecloth over a kitchen chair to Dillard's neighborhood
travels to the adult adventures that bring new realities into view for all
mankind. It doesn't take a lot of imagination to realize that all true
adventures are first of all adventures of spirit, and that their
prerequisite is a strong sense of home. The small child may glory in
being the master of his own tent, but let him believe that his mother and
father have suddenly left and no sign of his mastery will remain. Annie
Dillard's trekking was predicated upon the solid reassurance of that
dinner table.
Clearly, making bold explorers of children is at least as much a matter of
making a home for them as of getting them out into the world. (You may be
reminded here of the polar relation between globalization and localization
mentioned in NF #84.) Unfortunately, cyberspace does not offer much of
either home or world, and those who are most eager to get kids online seem
least concerned about holding any sort of balance.
Sobel points out that, beginning in middle school, young people need
outlets for their developing impulses toward community service, and that
local communities provide an ideal context for these impulses -- a context
youths can begin to understand and affect with their own activities. They
can see themselves making a difference. It is exactly this sort of
concrete context that the online world desperately lacks.
Take these youths and make rootless cosmopolitan sophisticates out of them
before their time, and you will reap a bunch of swaggering cynics,
covering for their lostness and insecurity as best they can.
==========================================================================
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------------------------------
Date: Sun, 4 Apr 1999 03:15:49 -0400 (EDT)
From: Charles Platt
Subject: File 4--Magazine Sued for Publishing "Illegal" Information
First Amendment Case Could Legalize Signal "Theft" ?
A little monthly zine named SATELLITE WATCH NEWS, published
by a midwesterner named Dan Morgan, has been hit with a claim
for damages and injunctive relief filed on behalf of DirecTV,
News Datacom, and NDS. The alleged crime: Publishing
information that can be used to decode satellite TV
transmissions, and publishing advertisements that offer
products for this purpose. (Morgan has also been accused of
possessing the products, because he has reviewed them in his
magazine. Possession is not a free-speech issue, so I will
not deal with this aspect of the case.)
I wonder if any attorneys reading this list would find the
free-speech angle interesting, bearing in mind that a
possible defense is that satellite TV feeds have become a
form of broadcasting which is protected under the 1934
Broadcasting Act, which specifically prohibits any kind of
encryption.
The 1984 Cable Communications Policy Act which criminalized
the interception and decoding of satellite TV feeds may be
invalid when applied to new satellite systems. This would
affect many hackers who have been imprisoned previously for
violating that law. (More on this below.)
--------------------------------------------------------
Historical Background
Dan Morgan has been publishing SATELLITE WATCH NEWS for more
than 10 years. Initially, when big-dish owners started
tapping TV feeds from satellites, there was no law against
it, and all transmissions were "in the clear," just like
regular TV.
Satellite TV feeds were intended, originally, as a
distribution system purely intended for big dishes at the
"head ends" of cable TV networks all over America. This is
how your local cable TV company obtains its content: by
satellite reception.
When HBO realized that individual dish owners (most of them
in Heartland America, where they couldn't get cable) were
tapping satellite feeds, the company lobbied Congress for
(guess what) a law to criminalize this activity. HBO argued
that the uplink/downlink from TV source to cable head-end is
a "private transmission," like a phone call. Hence it is not
"broadcasting," and is unprotected by the Broadcasting Act.
Congress obligingly enacted the 1984 Cable Communications
Policy Act, specifying huge penalties for anyone who dares to
decode encrypted TV transmissions: up to $500,000 or 5 years
in jail. I believe this act criminalizes the mere possession
of equipment that can be used for signal interception.
Around the same time, a lovely little monopoly named Digital
Instrument started marketing "official" descramblers to the
home audience--for an extortionate price. Since Digital
Instrument had the sole license to decode the encryption
scheme, no competition from other manufacturers was possible.
Naturally a bunch of hackers figured out how to do their own
descrambling, which they offered to dish owners. About 1
million people accepted the deal, even though they and the
suppliers of illicit hardware were all risking the 5
years/$500,000 penalty. This is one of the great untold
stories of massive rebellion by normally law-abiding
Americans. (Actually I told the story several years ago in a
long Wired article, but no one else ever picked it up.)
SATELLITE WATCH NEWS was always the primary source of
instruction and ads for anyone who wanted to build or buy
decoding devices. Years passed; the magazine published its
schematics and advertisements without any challenge.
--------------------------------------------------------
The Case Against SATELLITE WATCH NEWS
When the new small-dish direct broadcast satellite systems
appeared, these companies (such as DirecTV) were not so
tolerant. As SATELLITE WATCH NEWS started discussing ways to
decrypt their systems, a suit was filed. I have the document;
it states at one point, "defendants ... accepted for
publication and published advertisements ... for the sale of
counterfeit DSS access cards and other signal theft
devices...." It accuses the defendants also of "Publishing
detailed information as to the operation, use and maintenance
of counterfeit DSS access cards...." and "Publishing the
Internet domain names, URLs and e-mail addresses of
individuals and companies engaged in the unlawful business of
selling counterfeit DSS access cards...."
Thus, we are being told that it is a crime even to publish an
email address, if that address belongs to a known source of
illegal equipment. Also, it is a crime to advertise a device
that can be used for an illegal purpose. Needless to say, the
free-speech consequences would be far reaching.
The plaintiffs' attorneys are seeking damages that could
easily total more than $1 million. Dan Morgan is not a rich
man, and I don't know how he intends to defend himself.
Plaintiffs' attorney is listed as Norman C. Ankers of
Honigman Miller Schwartz and Cohn, in Detroit. The suit has
been filed in Detroit.
--------------------------------------------------------
The Signal-Theft Issue
The 1984 Cable Communications Policy Act addressed itself
narrowly to "satellite cable programming" which it then
defined as "video programming which is transmitted via
satellite and which is primarily intended for the direct
receipt by cable operators for their retransmission to cable
subscribers."
The word "primarily" enabled broadcasters to claim that
private dish owners were NOT the primary audience; hence, the
transmissions were not broadcasts.
This is no longer true. Direct Broadcasting from Satellite
(DBS) clearly is broadcasting, as its own name implies. It
ONLY goes to private dish owners and cannot possibly meet the
criteria of the Cable Communications Policy Act.
Threfore, I assume it should be covered by the 1934
Broadcasting Act, which prohibits encryption of broadcast
signals and guarantees free access to the airwaves.
Of course, I am not an attorney, and my opinion may be
invalid. I sympathize however with anyone who wishes to
publish information on any topic, and I'd like to see Dan
Morgan get some help. His inevitable URL:
http://www.oscoda.net/dmorgand
--Charles Platt
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 12 Apr 1999 14:51:34 -0500
From: Richard Thieme
Subject: File 5--Islands in the Clickstream. Generations. April 10, 1999
Islands in the Clickstream:
Generations
Back in the old days, it was exciting when new software came out. Every
day, we hurried to Computerland, hoping it was there. I remember a new
version of WordStar with a million control-everything commands. I remember
new interactive fiction games like Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy from
Infocom.
I don't remember the first time I skipped an upgrade on a software
application, but now I skip them all the time. I seldom need the
less-than-essential new features that require close perusal of an eight
hundred page manual to master.
Same with life. Living life at different speeds, we inhabit different
temporal niches. Generations no longer last a generation.
I wrote an article - "In Search of the Grail" - in 1993, describing the
impact which playing that Infocom game with my oldest son on an Apple II
had on my understanding of what would happen to the world as the world
played games with distributed networks.
I believed that interacting with the different world of symbol-manipulation
in a context of distributed computing would change how we thought in
fundamental ways. In retrospect, my intuition was correct. But six years
later, it is also dated, at least three (digital) generations removed from
the present.
A generation now in its teens or twenties has been so thoroughly socialized
by interaction with the digital world that it doesn't see the lenses
through which it sees. What was revolutionary a few years ago is ho-hum,
the stuff of wild-eyed speculation now the platform on which that
generation stands.
Last week I delivered a keynote speech for a web-based training conference.
I said that the symbiotic relationship between networked computers and
networked humans had spawned a large number of people who think they're
working for the human side but in fact are working for the electronic
network. "You're working for HAL," I said, "teaching people how to speak
HAL's language."
A woman approached me after the speech.
"Many people in the audience," she said, "don't know what you mean by HAL."
Or what I mean by an Apple II. Or interactive fiction. Or Infocom.
No narrative chronicles the social history of popular computing. The way it
came to us like an unexpected birthday present. And nobody seems to want one.
My wife came upon an "ice box" yesterday as we toured a Victorian house.
She told a guard that she remembered a real "ice man," how she waited as a
child until he had hacked ice into blocks for delivery, then picked up the
shattered splinters to eat as a treat.
The guard listened politely and looked away, checking his watch for closing
time.
They said it would happen, but they didn't say it would happen again and
again, faster and faster. But it does. The points of reference that define
the shared experience of a generation are changing more rapidly than ever.
"The Big Picture changes," a mentor once said, "about every ten years." I
discovered that, indeed, every decade or so, I transitioned into a new
developmental stage which re-contextualized everything that had come before.
Now, I am finding that I must reinvent myself, that is, revise the points
of reference of how I think, every eighteen months to two years. The
leisurely pace of an evolutionary life cycle that changes by the decade is
a vanished luxury.
The fact of history itself as a shared point of reference has morphed into
an indifference to the historical perspective entirely. History as a
discipline, threaded through textual narratives and how text defines time
and causality, has morphed into a world of hyper-textual images, in which
our personal interests determine the path we travel through images of
meaningful events. The patterns of our explorations either connect at
intersections or they don't. A shared vision is less important than the
machinery which enables us to search in the first place.
I can hear a dissenting voice, pointing out that people ALWAYS did that. We
ALWAYS chose which books to read and created a unique pattern from our
study. But - and this is a huge "but" - readers in a universe of printed
text did not know that's what they did because they shared a vocabulary
with which to discuss their experience. That vocabulary imposed what felt
like a shared perspective. Only in retrospect - only after images and words
had been reorganized in digital space - did we see our former experience as
computers have taught us to see it.
The singular prism that bent all light in a print text world has been
shattered by a hyper-text world that perceives that prism as a prison.
The excitement of my vision in 1993 is gone. Merchants, circumspect and
wary, prowl the digital world. They have taken the gold from the pioneer
miners who had to use it to buy food, shovels, and hovels. Merchants are
always the pragmatic parents of the next generation, defining the real
possibilities of their offspring. They even sell their children uniforms
sewn with symbols of rebelliousness, the symbols each generation needs to
pretend to break new ground.
So what is the value of experience? A broader perspective? Patience, as
Yoda suggested ... what? Who, you ask, is Yoda?
Yoda is a puppet invented many years ago by a film-maker to represent
purveyors of ancient wisdom. Yoda articulates wisdom in sound bites that we
can snatch on the fly.
I remember diving on the reef, chasing the quick fish and never catching
any. One day I swam out over the reef and sank in thirty feet of water.
Then I just sat there, waiting, and all sorts of fish, wondrous and
strange, came to me.
The digital world can be exploited or pursued, dreams of stock options
feeding our greed. But it can also simply be observed. We can just sit
there, under the ascending bubbles of our deep breathing, listening to the
subterranean clicking. Not even learning the wisdom of not doing. No. Not
even that.
**********************************************************************
Islands in the Clickstream is a weekly column written by
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Date: Sun, 10 Jan 1999 22:51:01 CST
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