Bruce Sterling

Unstable Networks

The commentary at cyberspace events often comes from a surprisingly wide area of

the political and social spectrum, especially considering that most of the

principals dress alike, look alike, and all use the same machinery. Still, the

widely various people who speak at events like this have a bedrock of agreement.

They will all declare that these are unprecedented and revolutionary times for

computer communications, and that the decisions we make right now are going to

drastically affect society for dozens, if not hundreds, of years to come.

And there's a lot of home truth in that assessment. We really have been involved

in a revolutionary epoch - during the past seven years the status quo has taken

a terrible battering, not just in the world of computation, but across the

board, economically, politically, socially. There is a level of instability

loose at the end of the 20th century that has not been around since at least

1945. Computer communications is one of most powerful, most influential, and

least stable areas in the new world disorder.

However, it seems to me that finally, now, in the summer of 1996, we may have

attained a comparative breathing-space. The flash-bulb of cyber-novelty has

begun to fade from the retina of the public eye.

The bloom of apparently unlimited possibility has receded a bit. We've begun to

get a grip on our dumbfounded wonder. This process may be disillusioning, but

one needn't feel cynical about it. It's not a cause for despair. That's the

lovely thing about unlimited possibility and its down-and-dirty interaction with

the human condition.

There you are, you see - facing the marvelous unknown - all those possibilities.

And, being human, you just have to make one little decision. Take one little

action - just to show that you can, really. And there's a reaction to that

action, and that's gratifying, so you take another step. Then another, and

another, and another, and pretty soon you've got kids and a mortgage. You're

committed. That's life.

We've managed to take some very important and very consequential actions in the

past seven years. They may not have been wise actions, but we're not wise; we're

just blundering about and doing the best we can. And what was the upshot?

Basically, we've bet the farm on the digital imperative.

In the year 1996, everything aspires to the condition of software. Art,

politics, music, money, words-in-a-row, even sex wants to be digital and on a

network. Everything aspires to the nebulous and liquid quality of moving digital

information. We're getting used to this prospect in 1996. We can spare ourselves

the exhilarating sense of hysteria that this new reality provokes. We should

seize this chance to get a little mental oxygen. We'll need it.

The year 1996 is nicely poised between the world-shattering events of 1989 and

the onrushing specter of the year 2000. The planet is still visibly recovering

from 1989, the year the cold war ended, and maybe the first year in which

computer networks came creeping out of technical obscurity to seriously menace

the status quo. Unless I miss my guess, the year 2000 will also be a truly

extraordinary historical moment. The year 2000 will be an excellent opportunity

to deny and dispose of the deeply repugnant twentieth century. In the year 2000

there will be a general erasing of the memory banks, a bitter scorn for the

hopelessly outdated, a firm and somewhat frantic rejection of a great deal of

cultural baggage. Like most New Year's Parties, it'll feel so good that none of

us will be able to resist. In the year 2000, we'll all be engaged in a general

frenzy of bright-eyed denial.

So there's not much point in raising the black flag and rushing the barricades

in 1996. That's always a natural temptation, but we might be better advised to

gather our wits and save some strength. Anything that we decide is electronic

gospel right now will simply be kicked out of court in 2001. So even though we

are all computer enthusiasts here, just for once let's try not to get completely

worked up. There's sure to be plenty of time and reason for panic later.

Because now, in 1996, we really have an Information Society. We used to talk

about having an information society, and dream ardently of living in one, and

now we've actually got one. In 1989 it was still theory and vaporware, but this

is 1996, and we're in bed with it. We have to watch it eat crackers, we have to

launder its sheets.

Now that we've got it, what can we say about it? The very first fact to bear in

mind about our Information Society is that this too shall pass.

We live in the Information Age now, but there are people walking around in this

city who have lived through the Aviation Age, the Radio Age, the Thousand-Year

Reich, the Atomic Age, the Space Age, the New Age, the Aquarian Age, not to

mention the sexual revolution and the epoch of New Soviet Man. And trust me, a

lot of these geezers and geezerettes are going to outlive the Information Age as

well. In the old days history used to leave people behind, but now the pace of

innovation is so savage that individual human beings can leave history behind.

This "age" stuff comes pretty cheap to us nowadays. We postmodern types can burn

out an age in ten years.

There's nothing more grotesquely temporary than a computer. I, personally, have

two perfectly functional Apples and an Atari in a storeroom. I have no idea what

to do with these computers. They cost me a great deal of money. Learning to use

them was very complex and tiresome. It seemed like a very hip and groovy idea at

the time, but now those high-tech gizmos are utterly obsolete and worthless. If

I leave them on the sidewalk outside my house, together with the software and

the manuals, nobody will bother to bend over and pick them up.

I moved house recently. This caused me to make a trip to the Austin city

landfill. Austin has a very nice landfill actually, it's manned by well-meaning

Green enthusiasts who are working hard to recycle anything usable. When I went

there last month I discovered a heap of junked computers that was two stories

high. Dead monitors, dead keyboards, dead CPUs, dead modems. The junk people in

my home town get a stack that size once a week.

I had to pay some close attention to that mighty heap of dead computers. It had

all the sinister lure of the elephants' graveyard. Most of those computers

looked like they were in perfect working order. The really ominous part of the

stack was the really quite large percentage of discarded junk that was still in

the shrinkwrap. Never been used, and already extinct.

Sometimes I talk to audiences who aren't computer enthusiasts like you, people

who are deeply and genuinely intimidated by computers. I urge them not to worry

too much. I urge them to think of a computer as something like a dragonfly. Yes,

a dragonfly can do many impressive things that no human being can do, such as

hover in midair and eat gnats. And yes, a dragonfly might even bite you. But you

see, a dragonfly is a very temporary thing. In the height of summer, there will

be whole clouds of them up there, sunlight glinting off their diaphanous wings,

just flitting by, eating those gnats.

But then the winter will come. And the snow will pile high. And every one of

those lovely dragonflies will be cold, and stiff, and dead. But you - you'll be

cozied up in your bathrobe and bunny slippers, sipping hot chocolate and reading

Danielle Steel novels.

Gordon Moore says that a computer generation lasts about eighteen months. He

says that computer chips double in power every eighteen months, roughly

speaking. That means that a computer in 2010 is about 150 times as powerful as a

computer in 1990. Roughly speaking. I had a computer in 1990. With any kind of

luck I'll probably be around in 2010, and I rather imagine I'll have a computer

then, too. So exactly how impressed am I supposed to get about a 1996 computer?

It's maybe five percent of the computer I'll eventually be using. That's like

comparing a matchbox car to a Rolls Royce.

Even paperback books have a far longer lifespan than computers. It's a humble

thing, a book, but the interface doesn't change and they don't need software

upgrades and new operating systems. A five dollar paperback book will dance on

the grave of a five thousand dollar computer.

Nothing that is real is absolute. In anything real there is good news and

there's bad news. The Information Society has become a reality. There's good

news, ladies and gentlemen, and there's bad news. The good news is, the digital

revolution is over. The digits won hands down. Casualties were low, considering.

We now live in the early days of the digital provisional government.

The bad news is that the provisional government is inherently unstable. Its

powerbase is a giant virtual castle made of bits. Bits of sand.

It's a very mixed bag, the information age. Don't get me wrong; I love living

here. Like a lot of my generation, I grew up more or less expecting nuclear

armageddon, and with that prospect off the front burner, life for me is a

carnival. In the Information Age, every day's an adventure. I'm never bored.

The Information Age has many stellar virtues. It is market driven and extremely

innovative. It's high-tech, hip and fast on its feet. People who work in this

field are deeply opportunistic and will seize on the slightest chance at

daylight.

The bad news is, if you survive every day by agile broken-field running it's

easy to lose sight of your goals. In fact, you can forget the very concept of

goals; you can run incredibly hard every day just to remain in the same place.

The Information Society has basically forfeited any democratic control over its

own destiny. No one's opinion is ever asked, nobody is ever polled. If we'd been

asked to vote in a digital revolution, it almost certainly would never have

happened. We were never offered that chance, it never occurred to us to ask for

it or take it. Our lives have been turned upside down by a series of obscure

technical events that transpired in a nearly perfect political vacuum. The moral

idea of informed consent was never raised. Weird homemade machinery that was

full of bugs and never worked very well burst out of garages in California and

destroyed the modern capitalist order. That's the story, basically. Like it or

lump it.

There are vast fortunes to be made overnight in the Information Society. It's

the hottest economic game on the planet. Vast fortunes can be lost just as

quickly. Worse yet, there's no good safe place to store your loot if you make a

pile and decide to jump off the jampacked no-brakes information bus. Thanks to

computers, the stock market and bond market and currency markets are aswarm with

sophisticated capital instruments that have created a seething global casino

economy. There's more money in the thrash of leverage, futures and derivatives

than there is in rational capitalist investment. In an Information Society, even

oil companies want to act like Hollywood.

Thanks to modems, cellphones, cell-faxes, laptops, beepers and satellite dishes,

we're never out of touch. I can read my email (which I happen to store in San

Francisco) whenever I'm in Vancouver. The bad news is that, yes, I can read my

email in Vancouver. I could be doing great British Columbia-type things instead:

having the BC sushi roll, shopping in Chinatown, spiking the old growth forest.

But I'll deny myself those harmless, life-enhancing amusements, because I feel

compelled to mind my business and read my email.

There might be some kind of urgent message from a publisher in Italy. I've had

publishers in Italy for years now, but they never, ever sent me urgent messages,

because they used to know full well that it was useless. Now they can reach me

fast and cheap and by golly, they expect to reach me and they expect a response.

Can't neglect that email. It's got global reach! I might get fanmail from some

cypherpunk in Finland. Some teenage hacker in Abu Dhabi wants me to tell him how

to break into Saudi mainframes, so he can get his hands chopped off by the

authorities. I'm never out of touch. I'm never allowed to be, because there's no

place left to hide.

When I'm not changing diapers, I fancy myself quite the hip globetrotter

Information Age kind of guy. That's because I have friends in Prague. People in

Prague are very friendly, they have a lovely town and a unique culture. They're

also very hospitable, and it's a good thing, because since 1990 or so they've

been getting about 80 million people a year through that city.

This influence of rampant globalization is hitting a little country which was

deepfrozen behind the Iron Curtain for forty years. The Web throws down its

virtual threading all over the world, and what does this do to indigenous

cultures? I don't think there's a lot of use in mincing words here. I think it's

pretty clear that the Information Society engulfs and devours the little unique

places.

It's wonderful to visit Prague, but if you're a citizen of the Information

Society, you can't touch that place without denting it. Every quiet and hidden

place in the world bears our fingerprints now. As the seasoned travel writer

Pico Iyer likes to put it, it's Video Night in Katmandu.

For me this situation is great. Basically, I live and breathe and thrive through

cultural imperialism. I have four books out in Denmark this year. You see, I got

interviewed by some stranger over the Internet, and it turned out he worked for

a major newspaper in Copenhagen. Suddenly and quite without my own intention, I

became rather well-known in Denmark. This October I'm flying to Copenhagen to do

my one-man corporate multinational thing.

I'll be an American science fiction writer living it up in Denmark. How many

Danish science fiction writers do I know? Zero. I know they must exist, so I

hope I'll meet some. For me to get published in their country - it's easy, it's

something I can do by accident. For a Danish science fiction writer to get

published in my country - they'd have better luck trying to ooze face-first

through a one-way mirror.

Is the Internet really a many-to-many, egalitarian network? Is a guy with a

modem in Copenhagen or Montreal really on the same level as a guy with a modem

in Austin or San Francisco? I'd like to think that is the case. Although it

clearly isn't.

Personally, I like to talk to remote strangers on the Internet. I always go out

of my way to reply politely to these odd characters around the planet with their

unlikely Internet addresses and their entertainingly broken English - English

which, by the way, is always a million times better than my French, my Russian,

my Czech, my Danish, or my Japanese.

The good news is that I can chat with distant strangers. The bad news is that

while I'm on the Internet, I'm not chatting to my next door neighbor. I'm not

going to any neighborhood rallies, I'm not throwing parties for local friends,

I'm not babysitting other people's kids. It may be that I'm not even talking to

my own children, who are off in the living room being raised by Nintendo. Sure,

I can trade digital video clips with hackers in Borneo over World Wide Web, but

for all I know my next-door neighbor is a serial killer with an icebox full of

his acquaintances.

Is this a pernicious aspect of the Information Society? Well, how will we know?

Who can tell? Who's keeping track? Suppose it were pernicious - how would they

stop me? Are the police supposed to unplug and confiscate my modem, tell me to

go to the local Rotary Club and stop typing messages to people in Djakarta and

Vladivostok? By what right?

There's always something new in cyberspace circles. It's unfailingly

entertaining, you've got to give it that. There's a scandal a week, sometimes

two. I wrote a nonfiction true-crime book about one of these cyberspace scandals

once - it took me a year and a half to do it. I could write a similar book once

every week if there were fifty-two of me.

Let's just dip our fingertips into this brimming cornucopia of digital bounty,

shall we? Government abuse of confidential files. Software piracy on pirate

bulletin boards. Canadian judicial gag rules on cases flouted by people on the

Internet. The CIA, the NSA trolling the Internet for anything they might find

useful. The French secret service bribing and supplying money to the Chaos

Computer Club. Cryptography scandals, just no end to those; crypto has more

scandals and screw-ups and bonehead moves than a 24 hour festival of the Three

Stooges.

Oceans of money sloshing around. Telephone companies buying cable companies,

software companies buying cellphone companies, computer companies buying parts

of the radio spectrum. Internet startups offering voice phone software,

telephone companies offering Internet hookups. Software patents, algorithm

patents. Computer search and seizure practice. Spamming scandals, virus

scandals. Poisoned JAVA applets - bad applets - rotten applets.

I've watched this stuff going on for years now. A pattern is emerging. It's

amazing how little is ever decided, how little there is to show at the end of

the day. Everything is temporary, all band-aids and toothpicks. Every once in a

while there's a solemn edict from on high, something like America's

Communications Decency Act, a ridiculous gesture with absolutely no connection

to reality. Quite often some small and innocent person is inconvenienced,

insulted or even crushed by the blind mechanisms of the powers-that-be, but that

changes nothing. Events that might become case law or policy are treated merely

as traffic accidents on the Internet. "What, they arrested him? Too bad! What,

they might arrest me too? Ha ha ha! Forget it!"

People who like computers are really smart. They're bright, imaginative and

inventive people. They also work hard, they are quick studies and they tend to

have quite a lot of money and to deploy it with gusto and relish. Despite these

manifest virtues, these bright, inventive computer people are some of the worst

organizers in the world. They can't organize a bridge party without wanting to

change the cards half-way for a colorful graphic-intensive Tarot deck. Everybody

wants to be the symbolic analyst, nobody wants to empty the ashtrays and make

the hors d'oeuvres. They're hungry all right, but they don't want to fill the

sink, roll up sleeves and do the dishes. Too slow, too dirty, too analog. Can't

we just order Chinese take-out and have it faxed in?

Instability is the congenital disorder of the lords of the Information Society.

It's their version of the mark of Cain. Even the pathetic brainwashed victims of

corrupt Christian televangelists can out-organize computer people. They don't

want to build their own system, fill the potholes and root out the sewers. They

want to hack the old system overnight and scamper off with unearned rewards.

That's why Ross Perot, a textbook case of a megalomaniacal computer tycoon,

thinks he can make himself President by skipping any actual political career and

making gestures on a TV talk show.

Computer activists react in deep existential horror at the thought of political

scutwork, patiently testifying to subcommitees, lobbying legislators. Actual

politics is beneath them. They want to sit down at the console, hit alt-control-

F2 and have a law come out. The price of liberty is said to be eternal vigilance

- but that's a pretty steep price, isn't it? Can't we just automate this eternal

vigilance thing? Maybe we can just install lots of 24-hour networked videocams.

The Information Society is not at all a friendly environment for the knight in

gray flannel armor, the loyal employee, Mr Cog, the Organization Man. This guy

is dwindling like the bison, because we can't be bothered to support him and yet

we still want his territory. We don't want to guarantee this guy anything,

because we probably won't be around ourselves when he needs us. We Information

Age types lack the patience for actual corporations, so we prefer nice, flimsy,

gilded-pasteboard virtual corporations. In virtual corporations, there are no

corporate power pyramids and no lines of accountability. That's exactly why

people like virtual corporations in the Information Society - amazing stuff

happens and huge sums change hands, and yet no one can be held responsible. Your

average high-tech start-up is one of those decentralized, empowered, Third Wave

organizations. Something like a mafia. Not the old-fashioned mafia where people

swore loyalty till death, though. No, it's new and postmodern, like the Russian

Mafia.

It's the Silicon Valley ethos. People in Silicon Valley prefer to work for a

company for two years and then bail. They don't want to creep up dull and

tiresome corporate ladders. I don't blame 'em, because I sure never did it, but

they have developed a hack for this. They place their bets on a bunch of

different start-ups, and then have one hit big and dump a load of cash in their

laps. The idea of being morally, fiscally and socially responsible for your

professional activities over a twenty or thirty year period is completely

anathema to Silicon Valley people, to electronic frontier people. They really do

have a frontier mentality - a brave, optimistic, can-do, strip-mining, clear-

cutting mentality. They don't eat what they kill.

People as bright as really bright computer people just can't stand to do boring

things for a long boring time. They fear and despise concepts like political

party discipline, institutions, armies.

That's why the Internet is not at all like an army. An army is a vast machine

for forcing somebody's unwilling flesh into the meatgrinder. It gets results by

forcing results with blood and discipline and bayonets. The internet is a vast

machine for finding somebody else to write your term paper for you. It gets

results by mechanically sifting through enormous heaps of useless gibberish. You

pay your money and you take your choice.

The Internet is out of control. No one is responsible for it. This is its most

charming aspect. It's that sense of wizardry, that dionysian quality, the

spontaneous way it accretes, the way it spreads on the wind all over the place,

much like bread mold. People really enjoying watching phenomena that are out of

control, especially when they're at a safe distance, like behind the glass of a

computer screen. It's a fine spectacle, a truly noble spectacle, a 105% genuine

vision thing, one of the very few aspects of contemporary society which isn't

transparently motivated by bald greed and ruthless opportunism. People lean on

the Net and believe in it with a conviction all the stronger because there is so

little else left for them to believe in. They don't mind that it's out of

control, when the things that are in control are commonly bent to such sordid

ends.

Of course, living in a way which is genuinely out of control is a rather

different business. People like to be out of control for, like, the space of a

Mardi Gras weekend. After that they want a back rub and some money. They start

looking around for their house shoes. If they can't find them they start getting

anxious. And justly so.

People in the Information Society are adaptable and fast on their feet. They're

all road warriors with laptops. They don't need a big clunky ranch house with a

white picket fence; they're living out of the back of a Ferrari. Which is very

cool. Unless your grandmother loses her ranch house because the entire economy

has downsized and devolved into a viral mess. Then your grandmother decides that

she has to move into the back seat of the Ferrari with you. Then you and your

fleet-footed highly wired lifestyle look a tad less cozy. It becomes a tad hard

to tell the jetsetters from the gypsies in that situation.

All this free-floating anxiety you've been feeling suddenly comes home to roost.

Who's logging those frequent-flyer miles, and who's merely homeless? It's great

to cut fine distinctions between the keyboard punching virtual class and the

rust-belt lumpenproletariat, but a real no-kidding aristocracy has a host of

ways to tell Us from Them. The Information Age doesn't have that, it moves too

fast for elegant manners. In the Information Age, you can be a physicist with

four post-docs and still drive a cab. It's market-driven this and market driven

that, market-driven dog and market-driven cat. In the Information Society, the

invisible hand of the market isn't a human hand. It never was, but now its

nature is obvious. It's some kind of spastically twitching titanium-coated

manipulator.

In the Information Society we like to believe that knowledge is power. Because

it is, sort of kind of. On alternate Tuesdays, maybe. People like to say that

the so-called knowledge found on the Internet is empowering to the individual.

Is it really?

Let's try a thought experiment. Let's imagine you have a brain tumor. You're in

big trouble, but luckily, you're on the Internet. You could try to find a brain

surgeon in your home town, but why risk this old-fashioned, limited, parochial

solution? Instead, you do an Alta Vista search for the term "brain surgeon."

Sure enough, you get an Internet entrepreneur. You go to an IRC channel to have

a chat with this guy.

"So, can you tell me a little about your qualifications?"

"Sure! I've memorized the Brain Surgery Frequently Asked Questions list. I

always read netnews from alt.brain.surgery. I've ftp'd and gophered hundreds of

files about human brains. Plus, I have fifteen CD-ROMS about brain surgery. In

fact, I've even put on a headset and goggles and performed virtual brain

surgery, rehearsing the procedures hundreds of times in computer simulations.

Plus, I work cheap! No union! When can you come on down to the lab?"

"So you're not an actual MD, then?"

"Sure I got a degree, I've got a nice printout diploma from Dr. Benway's Online

College of Virtual Medical Knowledge. It's based in a website in Grenada. I

downloaded and read every one of the lessons, so you don't need to worry.

Software engineers don't have licenses, politicians don't have licenses,

journalists don't have licenses either, and those are all important knowledge-

based professions, so I don't see why you need to get all fussy about cutting

people's heads open. This is the Information Age, and thanks to the Internet I

possess all the photos and words and documents that any doctor has. Why should I

go through a a lot of tiresome pro forma nonsense before I hang up my shingle?

Let's do business."

"How about the Hippocratic Oath?"

"Look, that documentation is over two thousand years old. Get up to date, pal.

Your pathetic nationalist government may not approve of our healthcare methods

up there in stuffy socialist Canada, but not everybody has your health system.

Here in the Turks and Caicos Islands everything we do is perfectly legal."

There's a word for people who can learn all the buzzwords of medicine without

getting a diploma, serving an internship, or joining a professional medical

association. We call these people "quacks." Quacks are a very interesting class

of people. They're inventive and clever and make a lot of money. They've always

made a lot of money, but with the free flow of specialized information on the

Internet, incredible new vistas open up for quacks. I haven't seen many of these

vistas fully exploited yet, but I rather expect to.

Information Society people may not be quacks exactly, but they sure do wear a

lot of hats. I know people personally who are CD-ROM designers and software

entrepreneurs and system administrators and security consultants and conference

organizers, and that's all in one week. They are clever, inventive people who

are quick studies and can brush up on the jargon of several widely different

occupations and convince their clients that they are genuinely skilled and

experienced.

If you do that in the world of computers it's called access to information and

self-guided education, but if you try it in law or medicine or civil engineering

you are best described as a "charlatan." The Information Age may be the golden

age of charlatanry.

This is the way that system-cracking hackers act, the way that hackers learn

things. When system cracker people use convincing language to get people to give

them access that they really shouldn't have, they call that practice "social

engineering." It's very powerful and very corrosive.

Hackers are very evangelical about liberating other people's secrets. It's a

core myth of the era. There have been several Hollywood movies that hinge on

gallant Robin Hood hackers breaking into a system and finding out some terrible

and important secret. The baddies try to grab them and shut them up, but in the

last reel the hackers always blow the hidden information all over the network

and it ends up in the New York Times or CNN. End of story.

It's a beautiful idea really, one of the central romantic myths of the

Information Age. No one can shut up the heroic hacker dissidents, and the bad

guys always crumble and scamper off like whipped dogs when the truth comes out.

A beautiful myth. I've been following the hack-phreak scene for years now,

hoping that someday, just once, something like that would actually happen. Some

hacker kid breaks into the sinister corporate mainframe and he finds and

distributes the secret and hideous data files that prove that rich guys in suits

are deliberately poisoning us with dioxin. Or maybe they've got the aliens from

the Roswell incident or just a few of the 47 guys who shot John Kennedy. If a

hacker really did something like that would make up for a lot of annoyances.

Never happens. Never ever. Actually, horrible secrets come up all the time, but

they're usually found out by journalists and cops. And even that finishes up

with a happy ending about one time in twenty. Does the free flow of information

on the Internet help? I wonder. I do know of one revelatory scandal that broke

on the Internet, the Pentium chip bug. I don't think I've ever seen an example

of people on the Internet unearthing and distributing a real-world non-computer-

based scandal.

Something really embarrassing. The truth comes in over the modems and

governments fall. Maybe that'll happen someday. I don't think it's happening

now.

Let me give you what seems to me to be a swell real-world example of this. I

think this story is the single weirdest story I've ever heard over the Internet.

This story has been happening in the country of Slovakia over the past year.

Slovakia used to be the right half of Czechoslovakia, but the Czech Republic

ended up in the hands of Vaclav Havel, and the Slovak Republic ended up in the

pockets of a gentleman named Vladimir Meciar. Meciar became Prime Minister of

his new little republic, but he got into a nasty power-struggle with Slovakia's

President, a guy named Michal Kovac. Kovac and Meciar were from different

parties and they just didn't get along.

Well, President Michal Kovac has a son named Michal Kovac Jr, and this younger

man was involved in some shady business deals in Austria. Meciar knew this, he

was making a big deal of it. Nothing much was happening there though, his son's

financial scandal wasn't destroying Kovac politically.

So last August eight guys jump Michal Kovac Jr in his Mercedes limo. First they

handcuff him, then they put a black hood on him, then they beat him up, then

they torture him with electric shocks, then they force him to guzzle half a

liter of whiskey so he gets completely plastered. Then they bundle the

president's son into his own Mercedes limo, and they drive him across the border

into Austria. Then they dump him and leave.

So the Austrian cops, all surprised, find the son of the President of Slovakia

dead drunk in his car. So they arrest him and take him to the hospital to patch

up his wounds.

So after a while the Austrian cops figure it's kind of embarrassing to have the

Slovak President's son in the slammer, especially under these circumstances with

the electric shocks and all. It's sort of as if Hillary Clinton had been beaten

up and dumped in Canada and accused of shady dealing in Arkansas real estate. I

mean, maybe you Canadians would have your suspicions about Hillary, but I figure

you would probably want to give her back pronto. So the Austrians let Kovak Jr

go back to Slovakia. He goes back plenty mad.

Well, the Slovaks get a cop to investigate this kidnapping, but the cop gets

fired right away. You see, the cop swiftly discovered that these kidnappers were

members of the Slovak Intelligence Service, which is a secret police agency in

the pocket of the Prime Minister. Another cop took the job, he found out the

same thing, and he got fired too. The head of the Slovak Intelligence Service

arranged both of these firings. He complained that the police were being too

rough on his secret police agents and endangering national security.

This is all a true story, ladies and gentlemen. I'm not embroidering this, in

fact I'm sparing you some of the real Prisoner of Zenda elements because they're

too melodramatic even for a science fiction writer. The scandal is looking

pretty bad for the Prime Minister at this point, so he gets some of his allies

in the Parliament to accuse the President of high treason.

That doesn't work out. The treason impeachment trial doesn't get off the ground,

because the Prime Minister hasn't figured out how to swing votes in his own

parliament. And also because the President himself has actually done anything.

At this point one of the original kidnappers becomes disgusted. He's a secret

policeman and a torturer, but he just can't take it any more. He goes to the

press and confesses everything. He testifies repeatedly, to the newspapers, to

the radio, to the cops, that the head of the secret service was on the radio

personally directing the whole affair.

Prime Minister Meciar and his secret police boss loudly deny this. They swiftly

come up with an alternate story. They declare that the President's son kidnapped

himself, tortured himself with electrodes, and dumped himself in Austria dead

drunk, just to make the Prime Minister look bad.

Secret police agents then find the family of this guy whose confessed to the

kidnapping, and they start beating them up. Later the guy's best friend is blown

up by a car bomb. When the autopsy is performed the coroner finds a bullet in

the dead man's stomach. The Prime Minister's stooges claim that the car blew up

by accident and the bullets was an accidental bullet in the stomach that came

from the victim's own gun when it accidentally went off in the terrific heat

from the car's accidentally blowing up, and that it's terribly shocking and even

libellous to allege that this was a political murder.

The President's out of patience now. The President openly accuses the secret

police of kidnapping his son, so the head of the secret police sues him for

libel. He also sues the local newspaper for saying the same thing, and then he

sues a priest who presided over the blown-up guy's funeral. The Prime Minister

puts yet another stooge on TV who claims that the President's son rigged the

whole thing.

Then the Slovak Parliament gets into the act. They've got an independent

commission which has been investigating. Got some results too - the committee

gives out the names of the eight kidnappers and the cars they were driving and

exactly how they went about kidnapping the President's son.

And I'm watching this whole thing take place, week by week, day by day, in

amazed fascination. Because I'm on a couple of central European Internet mailing

lists.

There's even a tasty phone phreak angle in this, because at one point somebody

taps the phone calls coming out of the limo of the chief of secret police, and

the chief spook is laughing evilly at the investigators and calling them a bunch

of idiots who'll never prove anything. They got the tape and they play it on the

radio. The secret policeman says the tape is forged. He refuses to resign. He's

still in power right now.

Now - if having the truth splashed across the Internet was enough to bring down

a government, wouldn't this do it? This looks like a pretty whacking good

scandal to me. It's quite a story, it's too weird even for Hollywood. It's got

kidnappers and electrodes and carbombs and secret policemen and embezzlement and

thugs and politicians. At the risk of being sued for libel by angry Slovak

authorities, I would have to conclude that the country's highest officials are -

well, let's just say they're strongly implicated. So is the Prime Minister going

to resign? Do the decent thing? Skulk off in shame? Bow to public opinion,

roused to righteous fury by these unsavory revelations?

Of course not! He's simply gonna brazen it out in the broad light of day. People

from outside Slovakia will simply be ignored, and troublesome people inside

Slovakia will be sued, pursued, beaten up, zapped with electrodes and dumped in

Austria if not blown sky high. The Prime Minister is like a wolverine with his

foot nailed to a board. Except that it's not his foot, and that's not a board,

and it's not a big bloody nail, and anybody who says different had better be

real careful around an ignition key.

You shall know the truth and the truth will make you free, right? Sunlight is

the best disinfectant. Well, maybe.

We might learn a lot of truth about a lot of things off the Internet, or at

least access a lot of data about a lot of weird junk, but does that mean that

evil vanishes? Is our technology really a panacea for our bad politics? I don't

see how. We can't wave a floppy disk like a bag of garlic and expect every

vampire in history to vanish.

Isn't it far more likely that we'll get the Internet that we deserve? Cyberspace

isn't a world all its own like Jupiter or Pluto, it's a funhouse mirror of the

society that breeds it. Like most mirrors it shows whatever it's given: on any

day, that's mostly human banality. Cyberspace is not a fairy realm of magical

transformations. It's a realm of transformations all right, but since human

beings aren't magical fairies you can pretty well scratch the magic and the

fairy parts.

Sometimes computers really are empowering. On the days when they're new, and the

days when they really work, which are pretty much contradictory times, actually.

When computers do work, it's the power to be your best. It's also the power to

be your worst, which doesn't get quite so much publicity in the ads. But you

know, a power that was only the power to do good would not be power at all. Real

power is a genuine trial. Real power is a grave responsibility and a grave

temptation which often causes people to go mad. Technical power is power. When

you deal with power you have to fear the consequence of a bad decision before

you can find any satisfaction in a good one. Real power means real decisions,

real action with real consequence. If that weren't true then we would be puppets

devoid of will, permanent children always spared temptation by machinery in the

role of the adults.

It saddens me to say these things, because it goes so much against my nature.

I'm a science fiction writer. People pay me to dream stuff up. People have to

have their dreams; without vision, the people perish.

It's not that fabulous possibilities aren't real. They are real. In the cold

objective eye of eternity, everyone who has ever flown across the Atlantic has

done something just as marvelous as Lindbergh did. Lucky Lindy was met by

cheering crowds who heralded the mighty dawn of the new age of flight. But if

you were met by cheering crowds on the far side of the Atlantic when you flew to

France in 1996, this would not be good. You would not be pleased to see that

their sense of wonder about the act of flight was still intact. You wouldn't

congratulate the French on their lack of disillusionment. On the contrary, you

would know full well that something had gone terribly wrong with the human

beings who were witnessing this event. It would be a sign of psychopathic

disruption, a society stuck in an infinite loop, jaws always agape, learning

nothing, experiencing nothing.

We shouldn't blame ourselves when the wonder fades, much less blame our

machinery. Instead, we should come to appreciate the way that human beings give

ideas their substance. We can take fantastic abstractions and personify them,

make them real. We're not disembodied intellects; that was a powerful dream of

the last millennium, but a new millennium is at hand now, and our machines can

play that dismal role for us. Infinity and eternity are not our problems.

Science fiction writers say a lot of silly things, but H.G. Wells once said a

very wise thing. "If anything is possible, then nothing is interesting." It's

not the center of ideas that are interesting, these bloodless Platonic concepts

of bogus purity and lifeless rigid order. It's the living, seething mess out

there, where actions have consequences, where the street finds its own uses for

things. That is our arena. And it's up to us, not just to imagine it, but to

inhabit it. Not just to admire it and make gestures, but to judge it and take

action.

The future is unwritten.