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.