[wordup] Information wants to be worthless

[Adam Shand]

For a second there this quote made me think I was going to have to go
bury my head in the sand for every idolizing Bruce Sterling. 

  "If Napster and its P2P clones ever get loose, nobody in the music
  business will make any money ever again. And if 802.11b ever works,
  nobody will sell Internet access and AOL will go broke. And if Linux
  had a decent graphic user interface, Bill Gates would have no business
  model. Bill would have to spend all his time giving vaccinations to
  little kids. You tell me what we're supposed to do about this menace."

Fortunately I don't.  While I'm not sure I buy the idea of the net being
toxic to business, I certainly like the thought.  I'm still mulling over
the idea and ramifications as I send this off.

Adam.

From: http://www.austinchronicle.com/issues/dispatch/2002-03-01/screens_feature2.html

Information Wants to Be Worthless
BY BRUCE STERLING
March 1, 2002:

I can't wait for this next South by Southwest Interactive. I don't know
why they still call it that, though. They used to call it "Multimedia."
Now even "Interactive" sounds corny.

If I were them, I'd rename the event every year. This year in particular
demands a major image rethink. How about "SXSW Cyberspace Terrorist
Paranoia"? "SXSW Axis of Evil Global InfoWar"? Might we arrange
open-house tours of Enron and Global Crossing, perhaps using chartered
buses? Why, there's just so much to discuss!

SXSW Interactive has suffered surprisingly little from the collapse of
dot-communism. The core demographic at SXSW is the woolly-eyed digital
creative, a species of creature from way before the Boom. Those
characters were never anywhere near the big IPOs. They were all fueled
by sheer subcultural coolness.

Back in the Neolithic dawn of the Internet, you see, the academics who
built it used to beat the living crap out of a businessman the very
moment they saw him. One peep of commercial spam on their stainless
not-for-profit network, and the net-gods would reach right into your
router and just throttle you, like an egg-sucking dog. Businessmen would
take one look at that impossible Internet code, and they'd pick up their
gray flannels and flee headlong to CompuServe and Prodigy. You young
folks these days, you probably don't even remember "CompuServe." They
croaked from being way too compu-servile.

Graying cyberpunk that I am ... all carpal-tunnel and bifocals ... I can
well remember some weirdo pals in the Information-Wants-to-Be-Free
contingent, idly wondering what would happen if the business world ever
"discovered the Internet." Obviously they would buy up every machine in
sight and try to make a profit at it. That much was dead obvious, for
that was the period's Reagan-Thatcherite modus operandi. Clearly all us
artsy cybergoofballs would have to find some other place to chatter and
swap our lies, like, say, faxes or CB radio.

But one scenario was way too far-fetched and idealistic, even for the
likes of us. What if it turned out that the Net was just plain too much
for business to handle? That it was downright toxic to free enterprise?

But look what happened. When was the last time that you saw commerce,
global capitalism, competition, the profit motive, the real deal ...
choking on advanced technology as if they'd swallowed a jalapeño? What a
spectacle! It ranks with the beached gasping of Marxism-Leninism in
1989.

Unworkable business models, the squalid collapse of e-commerce plans and
b-to-b markets. Hundreds of dead corporations, with e-biz magazines gone
thinner than Kate Moss. And those overachievers from Enron, my God!
Thinking so far outside the box that they're in the witness box.

I could well go on, but you don't want to hear this story from me. You
want to hear this from Lawrence Lessig, noted author of Code and Other
Laws of Cyberspace and The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a
Connected World . Lawrence Lessig will be keynoting SXSW on the cogent
subject of "The Creative Commons." Lawrence Lessig is a Stanford law
professor and Lessig is one heavy cyber-dude, he is heavier than
depleted uranium. He despises copyright abuse, and he also knows who,
how, and why they stole our broadband. I love that Lessig guy. Just
knowing the truth is out there, it cheers me all up.

Okay, so the Net has proved toxic to business and nobody's making any
money there. That stopped the profiteering, except for the spammers of
course ... hucksters who are methodically bringing net.commerce into
such putrid disrepute that it may well never recover. Lack of money,
though, is not stopping the innovation. It never did. The Internet now
reaches half the population of the USA. It is starting big seismic
rumblings in China, Iran, and India, societies that lack their own AOL
Time Warner and therefore have some dead-serious uses for cheap global
network communication. Worldwide, people use the Net for e-mail. E-mail
never had a real business model, but it was one feature everybody always
wanted. The Net is becoming the planet's water cooler. It's all about
the schmoozing and the gossip.

If you think the business scene at this year's Austin 360 was morbid,
and demoralized, and pitiful, and I was there, and boy was it ever --
well, you should have seen the Davos World Economic Forum up in New York
City. Which I also witnessed, for reasons I don't much care to explain.
Okay, I'm topic-drifting here, but don't flame me just yet. You see,
everybody at Davos was scolding, not the computer-crazy Americans, but
the Japanese. They expect the Japanese banks to crater just any minute
now. And get this: The Japanese never swallowed any New Economy
Kool-Aid. The Japanese bend metal, they make Sony Walkmans and cars.
They're still royally screwed. Try explaining that. It's sure more than
Fortune or The Economist are able to manage.

Houston is supposed to be a solid, non-nonsense, oil-bidness town.
Houston doesn't have any SXSW. Poor Houston is the snakebitten home of
Enron, while Austin's feckless cyberslackers are still grinning and
hitting the Return key. Yeah, Dell fired some people here, so maybe
local rents will drop and all the potters and tapestry weavers will
return from Wimberley. Man, anything's possible these days.

The good folks of SXSW Interactive have a whole lotta blogging in the
schedule. You may have never heard of "weblogging," because it never yet
made anyone rich, but blogging is a way cool deal, man. Metafilter,
Memepool, Boingboing.net , I'm on those blogs all the time. Blogdex,
Daypop, those sites rock. SXSW Interactive is totally awash in the cream
of blogger royalty. They've got Meg of Megnut, and Derek of Powazek, and
Jason of Kottke, and Jeffrey of Alistapart, and a very Mongol host of
other bloggers. If this recital means nothing to you, you are probably
old and near death now.

Unlike those stellar bloggers, I was way too lazy to build any software,
but I myself have a blog these days. This is a sure symptom of a major
social contagion. It's much like my teenage daughter's AOL Instant
Message mania. Her Mom and I, we were kinda worried about her 90%
digital social life, until we realized that we don't have to buy her a
car or any gasoline.

Net types like to catfight about whether blogging is the Way Forward or
utter self-indulgence. Since it is almost certainly both at once,
blogging is quite the hot topic. So there will be some bloggery debate,
with scowling, and finger-wagging, and pepper-gassing. Yes, blogging has
its limitations. There isn't much in the way of original content, for
instance. Weblogging consists mostly of logging one's websurfing
activities, then making sardonic comments about whatever you see. An
activity one's admirers find hilarious. Yet admirers rarely pay for
this. Except in their admiration.

Fame, glamour, gold ... so funny how that works! Camgirls, for instance.
The trials and tribulations of girls with Web cameras, those are issues
one might well broach with a SXSW expert, like say, Amanda from
Amandacam.

Sometimes, as a camgirl ... no, I am not a camgirl myself, but I
maintain a chilly, detached, surgical interest in their doings. As a
camgirl, you might post some lovely and somewhat indiscreet pictures of
yourself on the Internet. Or a picture of your boyfriend. For instance,
your sweet, geeky boyfriend that you stole from some other camgirl, who
is somewhat less attractive than you, and therefore gets fewer expensive
toys from her admirers, purchased and shipped from her handy Amazon wish
list. Margaret Mead could get three or four hot anthropological
monographs out of this behavior, easily.

At least you'll be better off than poor Chu Mei Feng in Taiwan, who is a
female politician who got cammed against her will by a jealous woman.
Chu Mei Feng had a highly unprivate romp with a married Internet
entrepreneur. That footage got spread to every horny Chinese guy on the
Net. Today, all around the Pacific Rim, poor Chu Mei Feng is bigger than
Monica Lewinsky. Everybody's Googling for her downloads. Chu Mei Feng is
not attending SXSW, so presumably that means the rest of us get to
discuss her and her remarkable, uh, issues. Chu Mei Feng is one of those
entirely noncommercial, communitarian Net phenomena, of such intense
interest to activists, intellectuals, and academics. And to science
fiction novelists. Man, 21st-century life is rich and full!

Got some gamers showing up. Harvey Smith from ION Storm, for instance.
I'm glad to see gamers on the SXSW scene, as when it comes to commercial
Net entertainment, online gamers have the golden touch. Massive
multiplayer online games: They're ticking like clockwork. People are in
those game environments whacking at virtual dragons with imaginary
swords and man, do these game guys coin the cash. Players of Everquest
even sell their Everquest gear on eBay. To judge by the auction traffic,
Everquest players, who are not even human but virtual characters, have a
higher per capita income than Russians.

Meanwhile, Slate and Salon and Feed and Plastic , and all these supposed
professional communicators, man, do they ever suffer. I'd like to see
one political organizer, even Begala or Carville, who could put together
an online crowd that can match those clamoring masses of Ultima or
Everquest. When will the mainstream catch on to this? It's so baffling.

Lotta Web designers. They're always there. They travel in clumps.
Because they speak their own unique languages, these people.
Specifically, they speak ActiveX, ASP, CGI, HTML, Flash, and Java. It's
a wonderful thing to see a profession so young, yet already so arcane.
Furniture designers had to work for hundreds of years before they ever
used terms like "ischial tuberosity." Even magazine designers, the
closest relatives of Web designers, well, they still kinda speak
English, at least until you get them started on typography.

This would be a very good time to hang out with the Open Source people,
before they get formally reclassified as a national security threat.
Have you noticed that Microsoft is declaring that "security" is their
brand-new, No. 1 reason to live? And how about that alphabet soup of new
American cyber-security agencies? Like, for instance, the "Information
Awareness Office" at DARPA, which is being run by Admiral John
Poindexter, of Iran-Contra fame?

I'm not trying to wax all Noam Chomsky here, but those Open Source
people ... they are, like, a multinational, leaderless, heavily
networked outfit with little-known agents and sympathizers in dozens of
countries. Countries like Finland. And Norway . It's definitely the Axis
of something, I dunno what, but something Scandinavian and fishy. You
wouldn't believe how many active Linux zealots there are in India. India
is right next door to a place, which is right next door to a place, that
had some terrorists.

Sulekha.org is a Web site for Indian expatriates that is run out of
Austin. Sulekha is the most sophisticated ethnic community Web site I've
ever seen. I just webclicked a movie ticket for the Austin showing of
Haan Maine Bhi Pyaar Kiya, starring Karisma Kapoor. Somebody should pass
the word to the SXSW Film Festival that Bollywood is slithering into
town via the Internet.

If Napster and its P2P clones ever get loose, nobody in the music
business will make any money ever again. And if 802.11b ever works,
nobody will sell Internet access and AOL will go broke. And if Linux had
a decent graphic user interface, Bill Gates would have no business
model. Bill would have to spend all his time giving vaccinations to
little kids. You tell me what we're supposed to do about this menace.

There are a few highly interactive groups that I don't see at SXSW
Interactive. They would be cops, terrorists, and the military. It hasn't
escaped the notice of authorities that Shoe-Bombing Boy was very into
Yahoo and Hotmail. The hounds of infowar are poring over captured al
Qaeda hard disks as you read this. The computer cops have a new
top-level cybersecurity office. As for the military, they were Internet
from day one. If you websurf for the Pentagon's "Joint Vision 2020" on
"network-centric warfare," you'll see a digital cluetrain like you
wouldn't believe. We'll be seeing a lot more out of these people on the
Net, we're gonna get all cheek-by-jowl and cozy with 'em. And you know
what? They're so noncommercial, too! end story

--
Bruce Sterling, one of the premier names in near future fiction, is a
Hugo Award-winning writer, and the author of Heavy Weather, Holy Fire,
and Zeitgeist.