Sterling and Gibson speeches

[Dave Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>]

scifi.81: Bruce Sterling

scifi.81.106: Bruce Sterling (bruces)  Fri 14 May 93 10:57

 Literary Freeware -- Not for Commercial Use
 
 Speeches by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling
 National Academy of Sciences
 Convocation on Technology and Education
 Washington D. C.,  May 10, 1993
 
 BRUCE STERLING:
 
      Hello ladies and gentlemen.  Thank you for having the
 two of us here  and giving us a license to dream in public.
 
      The future is unwritten.  There are best-case
 scenarios.  There are worst-case scenarios.  Both of them
 are great fun to write about if you're a science fiction
 novelist, but neither of them ever happen in the real world.
 What happens in the real world is always a sideways-case
 scenario.
 
      World-changing marvels to us, are only wallpaper to our
 children.
 
      Cyberspace is the funhouse mirror of our own society.
 Cyberspace reflects our values and our faults, sometimes in
 terrifying exaggeration.  Cyberspace is a mirror you can
 edit.  It's a mirror you can fold into packets and send
 across continents  at the speed of light.   It's a mirror
 you can share with other people, a place where you can
 discover community.   But it's also a mirror in the classic sense
 of smoke-and-mirrors -- a place where you might be robbed
 or cheated or decieved, a place where you can be promised
 a rainbow but given a mouthful of ashes.
 
      I know something important about cyberspace.  It
 doesn't matter who you are today -- if you don't show up in
 that mirror in the next century, you're just not going to
 matter very much.  Our kids matter.  They matter a lot.  Our
 kids have to show up in the mirror.
 
      Today, we have certain primitive media for kids.
 Movies, television, videos.  In terms of their sensory
 intensity, these are like roller-coaster rides.  Kids love
 roller coasters, for natural reasons.  But roller coasters
 only go around and around in circles.  Kids need media that
 they can go places with.  They need the virtual equivalent
 of a kid's bicycle.  Training wheels for cyberspace.
 Simple, easy machines.  Self-propelled.  And free.   Kids
 need places where they can talk to each other, talk back and
 forth naturally.  They need media that they can fingerpaint
 with, where they can jump up and down and breathe hard,
 where they don't have to worry about Mr. Science showing up
 in his mandarin white labcoat to scold them for doing things
 not in the rulebook.  Kids need  a medium of their own.  A
 medium that does not involve a determined attempt by cynical
 adult merchandisers to wrench the last nickel and quarter
 from their small vulnerable hands.
 
 
      That would be a lovely scenario.   I don't really
 expect that, though.   On the contrary, in the future I
 expect the commercial sector to target little children with
 their full enormous range of on-line demographic databases
 and privacy-shattering customer-service profiles.  These
 people will be armed and ready and lavishly financed and
 there every day, peering at our children through a
 cyberspace one-way mirror.    Am I naive to expect better
 from the networks in our schools?  I hope not.  I trust not.
 Because schools are supposed to be educating our children,
 civilizing our children, not auctioning them off to the
 highest bidder.
 
      We need to make some conscious decisions to  reinvent
 our information technology as if the future mattered.  As if
 our children were human beings, human citizens, not raw
 blobs of potential revenue-generating machinery.   We have
 an opportunity to create media that would match the splendid
 ambitions of Franklin with his public libraries and his mail
 system, and Jefferson  and Madison with their determination
 to arm democracy with the power knowledge gives.  We could
 offer children, yes even poor children in poor districts, a
 real  opportunity to control the screen, for once.
 
      You don't have to worry much about the hardware.  The
 hardware is ephemeral.  The glass boxes should no longer
 impress you.  We've shipped our images inside glass boxes
 for fifty years, but that's a historical accident, a relic.
 The glass boxes that we recognize as computers won't last
 much longer.  Already the boxes are becoming flat screens.
 In the future, computers will mutate beyond recognition.
 Computers won't be intimidating, wire-festooned, high-rise
 bit-factories swallowing your entire desk.  They will tuck
 under your arm, into your valise, into your kid's backpack.
 After that, they'll fit onto your face, plug into your ear.
 And after that --  they'll simply melt.  They'll become
 fabric.  What does a computer really need?  Not glass boxes
 - -- it needs thread -- power wiring, glass fiber-optic,
 cellular antennas, microcircuitry.  These are woven things.
 Fabric and air and electrons and light.   Magic
 handkerchiefs with instant global access.   You'll wear them
 around your neck.  You'll make tents from them if you want.
 They will be everywhere, throwaway.  Like denim.  Like
 paper.  Like a child's kite.
 
      This is coming a lot faster than anyone realizes.
 There's a revolution in global telephony coming that will
 have such brutal, industry-crushing speed and power that it
 will make even the computer industry blanch.  Analog
 is dying everywhere. Everyone with wire and antenna is going
 into the business of moving bits.
 
 
      You are the schools.  You too need to move bits, but
 you need to move them to your own purposes.  You need to
 look deep into the mirror of cyberspace, and you need to
 recognize your own face there.   Not the face you're told
 that you need.   Your own face.  Your undistorted face.  You
 can't out-tech the techies.  You can't  out-glamorize
 Hollywood.  That's not your life, that's not
 your values, that's not your purpose.  You're not supposed
 to pump colored images against the eyeballs of our children,
 or download data into their skulls.  You are supposed to
 pass the torch of culture to the coming generation.   If you
 don't do that, who will?  If you don't prevail for the sake
 of our children, who will?
 
       It can be done!   It can be done if you keep your wits
 about you and you're not hypnotized by smoke and mirrors.
 The computer revolution, the media revolution, is not going
 to stop during the lifetime of anyone in this room.   There
 are innovations coming, and coming *fast,* that will make
 the hottest tech exposition you see here seem as quaint as
 gaslamps and Victorian magic-lanterns.   Every machine you
 see here will be trucked out and buried in a landfill, and
 never spoken of again, within a dozen years.  That so-called
 cutting-edge hardware here will crumble just the way old fax-
 paper crumbles.  The values are what matters.  The values
 are the only things that last, the only things that *can*
 last.  Hack the hardware, not the Constitution.   Hold on
 tight to what matters, and just hack the rest.
 
      I used to think that cyberspace was fifty years away.
 What I thought was fifty years away, was only ten years
 away.  And what I thought was ten years away -- it was
 already here.  I just wasn't aware of it yet.
 
      Let me give you a truly lovely, joyful example of the
 sideways-case scenario.
 
      The Internet.  The Internet we make so much of today --
 the global Internet which has helped scholars so much, where
 free speech is flourishing as never before in history -- the
 Internet was a Cold War military project.  It was designed
 for purposes of military communication in a United States
 devastated by a Soviet nuclear strike.  Originally, the
 Internet was a post-apocalypse command grid.
 
      And look at it now.  No one really planned it this way.
 Its users made the Internet that way, because they had the
 courage to use the network to support their own values, to
 bend the technology to their own purposes.  To serve their
 own liberty.  Their own convenience, their own amusement,
 even their own idle pleasure.  When I look at the Internet -
 - - that paragon of cyberspace today -- I see something
 astounding and delightful.  It's as if some grim fallout
 shelter had burst open and a full-scale Mardi Gras parade
 had come out.   Ladies and gentlemen, I take such enormous
 pleasure in this that it's hard to remain properly
 skeptical.  I hope that in some small way I can help you to
 share my deep joy and pleasure in the potential of networks,
 my  joy and pleasure in the fact that the future is
 unwritten.
 
 WILLIAM GIBSON:
 
      Mr. Sterling and I have been invited here to dream in
 public.  Dreaming in public is an important part of our job
 description, as science writers, but there are bad dreams as
 well as good dreams.  We're dreamers, you see, but we're
 also realists, of a sort.
 
      Realistically speaking, I look at the proposals being
 made here and I marvel.  A system that in some cases isn't
 able to teach basic evolution, a system bedevilled by the
 religious agendas of textbook censors, now proposes to throw
 itself open to a barrage of ultrahighbandwidth information
 from a world of Serbian race-hatred, Moslem fundamentalism,
 and Chinese Mao Zedong thought.  A system that has managed
 to remain largely unchanged since the 19th Century now
 proposes to jack in, bravely bringing itself on-line in an
 attempt to meet the challenges of the 21st.  I applaud your
 courage in this.   I see green shoots attempting to break
 through the sterilized earth.
 
      I believe that the national adventure you now propose
 is of quite extraordinary importance.  Historians of the
 future -- provided good dreams prevail -- will view this as
 having been far more crucial to the survival of democracy in
 the United States than rural electrification or the space
 program.
 
      But many of America's bad dreams, our sorriest future
 scenarios, stem from a single and terrible fact:  there
 currently exists in this nation a vast and disenfranchised
 underclass, drawn, most shamefully, along racial lines, and
 permanent feature of the American landscape.
 
      What you propose here, ladies and gentlemen, may well
 represent nothing less than this nation's last and best
 hope of providing something like a level socio-economic
 playing field for a true majority of its citizens.
 
      In that light, let me make three modest proposals.
 
      In my own best-case scenario, every elementary and high
 school teacher in the United States of America will have
 unlimited and absolutely cost-free professional access to
 long-distance telephone service.  The provision of this
 service could be made, by law, a basic operation requirement
 for all telephone companies.  Of course, this would also
 apply to cable television.
 
      By the same token, every teacher in everyy American
 public school will be provided, by the manufacturer, on
 demand, and at no cost, with copies of any piece of software
 whatever -- assuming that said software's manufacturer would
 wish their product to be commercially available in the
 United States.
 
      What would this really cost us, as a society?  Nothing.
 It would only mean a so-called loss of potential revenue for
 some of the planet's fattest and best-fed corporations.  In
 bringing computer and network literacy to the teachers of
 our children, it would pay for itself in wonderful and
 wonderfully unimaginable ways.  Where is the R&D support for
 teaching?  Where is the tech support for our children's
 teachers?  Why shouldn't we give our teachers a license to
 obtain software, all software, any software, for nothing?
 
      Does anyone demand a licensing fee, each time a child
 is taught the alphabet?
 
      Any corporation that genuinely wishes to invest in this
 country's future should step forward now and offer services
 and software.  Having thrived under democracy, in a free
 market, the time has come for these corporations to
 demonstrate an enlightened self-interest, by acting to
 assure the survival of democracy and the free market -- and
 incidentally, by assuring that virtually the entire populace
 of the United States will become computer-literate potential
 consumers within a single generation.
 
      Stop devouring your children's future in order to meet
 your next quarterly report.
 
      My third and final proposal has to do more directly
 with the levelling of that playing field.  I propose that
 neither of my two previous proposals should apply in any way
 to private education.
 
      Thank you.
 
 
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