Bruce Sterling

CFP Closing Speech, Austin, Feb 20, 1998 Literary Freeware -- Not for Commercial Use Hi, my name's Bruce Sterling, I'm a local writer and a CFP veteran. I'm grateful for this chance to once again bring you the fabulous benefits of my freelance pontifications. When I first got involved in the computer civil liberties scene, it was 1990. We'd just had a Secret Service raid here in Austin that had shut down a science fiction publisher. This was a strange and rude intrusion in my daily life, this was an advent calculated to waken me from my dogmatic slumbers. The more I learned about this computer crime raid, the more peculiar and significant it seemed. I ended up writing an entire book about it. I was hoping the book would encourage some informed debate, and maybe the deeper political issues behind the computer revolution could somehow all be put straight. Now, eight years later, almost to the day, we have these four hundred interested and relevant parties all meeting here in Austin to get together face to face and thrash some of these things out. And you can even earn legal credit for it. This gives me a warm sense of closure, a very fulfilled feeling. There's plenty of thrash at CFP. There's always a lot of thrash. Very interesting thrash. Not a lot of permanent legal results, though. If you glance back over the past eight years and examine the whole enterprise to date, what you see is very remarkable. In the world of computers, privacy, and freedom, crises go in and out of vogue, but they are very rarely settled in any permanent legislative way. The only real permanence is the thrash itself. I'd go so far as to call this a new status quo. Permanent technological revolution. Permanent thrash. I was very intrigued by the remarkable presentation of our first keynote speaker, Mr. Kahin. It was a very congenial and gentle speech: "modest" was a word he used a lot. I don't think I've ever, ever heard an Administration science and technology expert describe the aims of American government as "modest." This was a remarkable confession this gentleman was making. In so many words, he said that policy development is cyberspace is just plain too hard to do. There are too many competing values to achieve a workable political balance. The Administration is simply too overwhelmed by all this random electronic thrashing, all this buzzing and bleeping. So they'll simply modestly step back and let the mighty forces of technology and private enterprise thrash the situation out on their own. And maybe twenty years from now, when things calm down and get safer for elected American politicians, we may see some actual laws passed. Well, of course this statement is very good news for the techno-libertarian post-industrial contingent. Really, there ought to be corks popping in the offices of WIRED magazine over this keynote speech. The Bay Area WIRED folks are very into all this: emergence, and market power, and bottom-up entrepreneurism, and the sublime beauty of nonlinear network economics that are profoundly Out of Control. And let's face it, after that stinking Decency Act debacle, a hands-off policy smells terrific. I think you can make some good arguments that there are aspects of reality that governments should be very modest about. Our keynote speaker pointed out that the real nodes in the World Wide Web are words. Hotlinked key words. So this isn't merely chips and wires that we are talking about. This is language. When government tries to regulate and police the structure of language, this is generally considered to be double-plus ungood. There's a long tradition of restraint and modesty here. The First Amendment may be a local ordinance, but it's clearly served us rather well, and the First Amendment says, "make no law." Be modest. Make no law. But point of view is worth eighty IQ points. From another point of view, to say that American government should be modest in a flagship technology is a very weird thing to say. I have never before heard a federal official confess that some aspect of industrial development is simply beyond the mental grasp of government. That it just plain moves too fast to figure out, so we might as well throw up our hands and step back out of its way. This is a radical admission to make. It's very out of the ordinary. Rocket scientists are said to be pretty smart people, but that didn't lead the federal government to declare that NASA is impossible to manage politically, so that rockets should be best left to Westinghouse and General Dynamics. I don't think there are many Congressmen who fully grasp quantum chromodynamics, either. But you would never see the Administration say that quarks are too complex for government, and that relativity and subatomic physics should be left to the greater wisdom of the private sector. But that's the Internet policy. No actual government. Some form of emergent self-regulating governance. To me, that was the core message of CFP 98. They really are just plain giving up. That was the mellow, birdlike sound of the twilight of sovereignty. The era of big government is over; the era of puzzled, shrunken, benignly indifferent government is at hand. It's the giant sucking sound of abdicated responsibility. So what fills the power vacuum? I would argue that it is already being filled by a different and more modern political arrangement: not bureaucracy, but ad-hocracy. I believe that the best known ad-hocracy, the classic version, and certainly the one that gets the most admiring press, is the internet engineering task force. These guys get plenty of ink for their wonderful, cooperative, networking, non-governmental, emergent, non- hierarchical way of organizing their enterprise. They're a role model, a paradigm even. And that management model seems to work pretty well on the Internet. What do ad-hocracies look like in other contexts? Say, a business context. I would argue that Silicon Valley is a giant ad-hocracy. You see a particularly virulent aspect of this, in weird, market-bubble, casino- economy, Silicon Valley IPOs. Esther Dyson wrote a quite good article about this in the New York Times recently, in which she pointed out that many Silicon Valley companies are basically digital paper-tigers. They don't actually develop and sell products. Not even software, not even ones and zeros. They simply pitch high-concepts, sell stock in the vaporware, cash out for the venture capitalists behind the curtain, and then they are acquired by larger firms. If you look for an actual industrial enterprise, something with deliverables and a cash flow, there's simply no there there. Hollywood film production companies are long- established ad-hocracies. Show business has always been good at this. The entertainment industry. The military- entertainment complex. You're pitchforking a bunch of freelancers together, exposing some film, using the movie as the billboard to sell the ancillary rights, and after the thing gets slotted to video, everybody just vanishes. But in the political realm, I would argue that America's most famous and powerful ad-hocracy is that nebulous entity that our First Lady refers to as "the massive right-wing conspiracy." And here we find our flagship industry giving an odd little lurch. That's the grating sound of a postindustrial iceberg hitting us below the waterline. It's not pleasant to have the established order seriously menaced and frightened by their sense of a covert conspiracy. I don't believe in conspiracy in the grand Joseph McCarthy paranoiac tradition, but I do believe in a real and powerful right-wing ad-hocracy of Clinton's political enemies. I think it's self-evident, it doesn't challenge my credulity. I think these right-wing activist people are basically very much like CFP. They're all on each other's Rolodexes, they're all on each other's mailing lists, they all know each others' funding agencies, think tanks and industrial backers. And when anything, no matter how far-fetched or bizarre, comes up that might conceivably harm the President, that information is disseminated around the country and around the world at lightning speed. It's data-mined, and catalogued, and embroidered, and re-cycled, and re-circulated endlessly, and spun and spun and spun. The "massive right-wing conspiracy" is what our friends at the infowar contingent at RAND corporation like to call a "segmented, polycephalous influence network." It's a loosely linked, leaderless enterprise which is constructed rather like an art movement, or a literary movement. It doesn't have elections, laws, bylaws, a code of ethics, a code of morals, or any kind of brakes. It can't be defeated militarily any more than Russians could defeat Afghan guerrillas or Americans defeat the Viet Cong. And this isn't merely a theoretical exercise. The thing is as real as dirt. It has real power. You don't have to stretch too far to perceive this as a menace to democracy. It's certainly a real and visible menace to the established order, because it can throw sand in the works at any of a hundred different points, and there's no headquarters where the established order can hit back. When the established order hits back, it hits back with another, rival ad-hocracy. You may have seen James Carville -- a very interesting and significant postmodern figure -- appearing on television to publicly declare war on the Ken Starr investigation. I noticed some pundits scoffing at this declaration -- "Carville thinks he's in the bunker! Carville thinks he's an army! The Cajun's off his rocker!" This scoffing has a very hollow sound to me. It reminds me of Stalin asking how many divisions the Pope has. The Pope doesn't use divisions, Comrade Stalin. But the Pope knows the ground in Poland, and he can put a stake through your undead heart with no problem. James Carville has never been elected to any office. As far as I can see, James Carville has no legitimate or constitutional role in our society whatsoever. All James Carville possesses is a deep knowledge of the media, a gift for spin, a big Rolodex, and a lot of people who owe him favors. Oh, and a law degree, too, somewhere at the bottom of the list. But when the Clinton Administration goes to the mattresses, this guy is the *first* guy they call. You're not going to see James Carville declaring large areas of American reality off limits because they are beyond his mental grasp. You're not going to see James Carville declaring that he ought to be modest, and let the info-pundits and the venture capitalists decide what to do with digital media. The guy will do with digital media what he does with *all* media, bend it to his own uses. This is what ad-hocratic political power looks like in a heavily mediated and thoroughly networked society. I don't know what you call that form of power, but it sure doesn't look like anything I recognize from a high-school civics text. And it's not unique to the United States. Prime Minister Blair has proved that it works great in Britain. If you want to see how it develops in another social context -- a deeply non-American context -- take a good look at postmodern Russia. Yeltsin's campaign manager is a man named Anatoly Chubais, the Carville of Russia. This man is basically running the entire Russian government off of his laptop. I happen to have a very warm and kindly feeling about literary movements. I'd hate for the government to think that my cyberpunk literary ad-hocracy was some kind of organized menace against civil order, and that we should all be grilled in Congress by an unAmerican activities committee. It might be kind of an honor -- for a Texan writer it would be quite an honorable thing to walk down the trail of tears with John Henry Faulk and J. Frank Dobie -- but I don't think this would be a political plus for the American Republic. But I think it can be demonstrated that ad-hocracy can be a living menace to civil order. Let's take the Lewinsky wiretapping business. For eight years I've been to CFP, and for eight years I've heard the law and order contingent tell us that wiretapping is the only sure weapon against mafias, dope runners, terrorists and child pornographers. I don't remember Presidential sex partners being on that list, but it's getting pretty clear to rest of us that they are way, way up there as targets of opportunity. Here we've got a wiretapping development that may bring down an Administration, annul two elections, and plunge our country into years of debilitating public shame and trauma. You know, if terrorists or dope dealers did us a grievous harm like that, we'd pursue those evil sons of bitches to the ends of the earth. But instead it's our Justice Department, in league with a networked rabble of oppo research freaks with a sick need to monitor and surveill people's sex lives. Hey, thanks a lot, Mr. Law-and-Order Body-Wire. I'm sure my two innocent daughters will sleep a lot safer in their beds after you've ritually sacrificed the nation's chief executive in a neurotic orgy of national sex panic. After this gratifying experience, I'm anxious to see your wiretapping powers expanded radically, so that more American women, and their mothers, can be turned into felons for lying about their sex lives. You guys need more plug-in jacks and headphones, it's important for our nation's safety and stability. So after you clean that prurient filth off your tape heads, tell me just one more time why you're so eager to have Digital Telephony. It's very much a pattern. National moral sex panics have definite political advantages. Ad-hocracies specialize in this sort of agitation. The Christian right specializes in provoking reflexive loathing for homosexuality. For years we've seen law enforcement trumpet the terrifying menace of child pornography on computer networks. If a rightist adhocracy can checkmate the king through a mini-Profumo scandal, it's going to be open season on politician's sex lives for as far as the eye can see. What is all this about, what's the commonality here? It's a profoundly undemocratic process of shutting down informed debate by cynically exploiting sexual hot- button issues. We're supposed to be so panicked and stampeded by the specter of kidporn that we somehow miss the fact that the FBI is installing a Walkman jack in our phones. You see, it's just plain too complicated and technical for us to make up our minds about! So let's just panic! At least we can provoke some vigorous action that way. There's a flipside to the government's public abdication of competence to regulate and judge. It's the unspeakable, invisible, national-security underworld. Wired Power without the inconvenience of democracy. The taps, the tapes, the dossiers, ECHELON, the secret war against crypto -- none of this is remotely democratic. This is a frozen Cold War underworld accountable to none. If we can't regulate ourselves in an open, above-board fashion, spooks traditionally expand to fill the power vacuum. I would argue that in a true information society, private spookdom is bound to flourish. We all take on a mild flavor of spy. The walls between spy, journalist, pundit, spin-doctor, guru, opinion leader, and political operative become ever more vaporous. Don't believe me? Look around yourself. The day may come when powerful ad-hocracies abandon the pretence of legality, and simply crush public figures to death with the raw pressure of surveillance. In much the same way that Princess Di and her scandalous boy-toy were bloodily crushed to death by the sheer pressure of tabloid harassment. Or it may be that ad-hocracies will display some real benefits for real-world public order. We might see ad- hocracies for sewage lines, or ad-hocracies for railroads and highways and electrical power. People have been talking electronic democracy for quite a while now. It looks good on paper, or maybe it would be more accurate to say that it looks good glowing on a screen. But where's the demo? I've yet to see even the smallest American town, or the smallest unit of actual functional government, becoming fully electronic. Virtual communities -- they don't seem to be living up to their hype. They seem to work just about as well as other traditional American intentional communities. Pilgrim pioneers, hippie communes, Amish barn-raisings... these things are hard work. Most Americans prefer TVs to quilting bees. Most Americans want to kick back in the suburbs and have entertainment piped in. And virtual communities have never worked out their bad apple problem, their free rider problem. Spam has damaged USENET in ways that malicious hackers could only dream about. Network ad-hocracies are very good at forming a hostile overlay over the deeper infrastructure. They don't seem to be much good at all at forming structures themselves. Because ladies and gentlemen, real political structures have *structure!* They have laws, regulations, rights, grants of citizenship, constitutions, true faith and allegiance. It's hard to fake all those things with a Rolodex, an email list, and a starry-eyed sense of techno-optimistic benevolence. You know, the computer revolution really loves itself. It's all about publicity really, it's about moving data fast and cheap, so maybe it's only natural that it gets entranced by its own hype. But you know, this isn't the last technological revolution that you and I are going to witness. When I turn my eyes to the future, I really have to wonder what kind of precedent we're setting here. What kind of precedent are we bequeathing to the organizers and attendees of "Biotech Freedom and Privacy?" Because you can smell that one on the wind. You got the medical priesthood under seige by eager entrepreneurs, tremendous market demand, bathtub genetic sequencers, cheaper and cheaper equipment, cloned sheep on the front page, activists like Kevorkian and Richard Seed all ready to jump out of their basements and carry out a propaganda of the deed.... And we already know what outlaw pharmaceuticals look like. These cats aren't like computer outlaws, guys who are nine-tenths teenage ideologue. These dope people have revenue streams bigger than countries and they play for keeps. I would also point out that this very week the FBI did us the favor of busting a couple of biowar militia freaks. There's often some kind of loudly trumpeted FBI action during Computers Freedom and Privacy. Usually it's a computer bust. This time it's anthrax. You can take that little chunk of data and make of it what you may. But maybe the next techno-revolution won't play out like this one. It may be that there is something unique and special about the world of computation. We can't seem to build permanent structures; so maybe we're not a permanent problem. Come the year 2000, we may well find that some large percentage of the planet's installed computers simply cease to work. Computation may be America's flagship industry, but when you see how people live in computation, they're not like the settled aristocrats on the first class deck of the Titanic. They're a lot like the post-iceberg Titanic. They have a raft called the IBM mainframe, and then another raft called Apple II, and then a raft called Macintosh, and then they make a frantic leap sideways to Windows 95, dropping heaven only knows how much precious data in the transfer. And those who somehow fall overboard, end up stiff and pale and bobbing in the chill dark waters of technical obsolescence. Maybe that's what we have to offer to the future here at CFP. Pundits destined to sink without a trace, our solemn pontifications reduced to the weightless state of so much long-forgotten newsgroup chatter. No monument, just the churn. Floppies change shape and won't fit the new machines, CD-ROMs flake apart and delaminate. And government was wisest just to step back and let us be. We're glad they didn't have to warp the Constitution to fit our peculiar needs, because when it was all summed up in retrospect, we were gone like the 17-year cicada. But you know -- I can live with that. I prefer evanescence to catastrophe. When I think about all the scaremongering, and alarm stories, and gloomy predictions about computer crime that I've had to absorb over the past eight years, I feel very proud of the American republic. I think we've done an incredible job of assimilating this technology. When I went to CFP One, that event was a total freak scene. There were convicted criminals and their arresting officers buying each other drinks in the bar. In newpaper stories of 1990 you had to define the word "modem." But here we are eight years later and websurfing is a genuinely popular enterprise, it's like Monday Night Football or country line-dancing. I can live with hype, as long as we have a chance to keep making new mistakes. Sure, we've got ad-hocracies scurrying around in the woodwork destabilizing the American democratic process, but let's get real. This is America we're talking about. It's seen hard times and hard, hard tests. Slavery, civil war. Machine politics, the Tweed Ring, Tammany Hall, Chicago in the 20s. Jim Crow. Watergate. Texas state politics. Louisiana politics, for heaven's sake. The railroads, the steel mills, the robber barons. The military industrial complex. We survived all that. We look good now. We have resilience. We toughed it out. We have hope as a culture, we're not afraid to reinvent ourselves. We make ludicrous spectacles of ourselves that cause civilized people to wonder if we've lost our minds, but there's nothing new about that. It's what Americans always do. Let's look at the general situation here, the big picture. Stock market at an all time high. Balanced federal budget, practically kind of. We even have patches of deflation. Deflation! I'm a middle-aged man and I never in my life saw deflation, I thought it was a mythical beast. And there's jobs, even! They may be burn-out jobs in the high-end sector, with burger-flipping service jobs at the low end, but hey, at least there's work around. The computer industry is a very strange flagship industry to have, but Dell is headquartered in Austin, and Dell just set a bunch of new sales records. It's an industry! The Texas oil industry smells really bad. The Texas cattle industry has screwflies, brucellosis and droughts. I'm down with this Texas chip and computer thing. It's working out down here. In fact, I really suspect that this historical moment may be a little Golden Age for our community. Compared to what else has been going on, and compared to what else may be coming, this seems like a little Belle Epoque. We're no longer so eccentric that we seem freakish, and yet we have not yet settled down quite so much that we've become wallpaper. The electronic frontier is no longer a howling wilderness, and it hasn't yet matured into a decaying rust-belt slum. We've really got it good! When it's all said and done, my primary concern in the year 1998 is that we ought to be enjoying this more. I think the computer community just plain works too hard. We're all wrapped up in the eighty-hour weeks, and the piles of mounting email, and the constantly bleeping cellphones. We need to learn to kick back. We need to live less like galley slaves and more like human beings. We may never have it this good again. That's why I've made it my personal goal at this CFP to try and buy everybody a beer. The con's over now, our beloved CFP ad-hocracy is shutting down for another twelve months. There's one important thing about ad-hocracies, a charming quality they have. If you just get them outside of the video surveillance, and away from their podiums and microphones, and add a little social lubricant in the form of a couple of beers, they spontaneously disintegrate into parties. And I don't mean grim, committed, political parties. I mean good old-fashioned yahoo-style parties. When you come right down to it, virtual communities are a pretty thin and cerebral parody of actual communities. But I can slap a patch on that problem right now. You're in my home town. This is Austin. Slackerville. Berkeley on the Colorado. Come on out of the public spotlight, let's mosey on over to my house and let our hair down. It's not a black-tie do, it's very laid back and Texan. You're gonna have to twist off your own beer caps and nibble your own chips and sandwiches, but at least you can wear whatever the hell you want. Expectations are low, and the entry barriers are nonexistent. Nancy and I will be glad to have you. Let's get actually communal, let's have a little life- affirming celebration. Let's tie one on. So I dunno about you, but I'm outta here. Last guy out of the building has to log off and shut down!

My friend and spring system ad noted (re: Bruces party): It was definetly the best party I've been to in the past year. Chatting with UCLA Sociology students, munching on carrots with Wired News guys, and shooting the bull with reporters for the New York Times really blows the hell out of the usual San Marcos nightlife. Great house, too. Somebody should put that place up as a QTVR. Oh, and I met Lisa Jordan, the girl who did the cfp98 design work, and she's very nice. :) I was trying to think of a proper concept to describe the party, as I was standing in Bruce's office thinking 'LambdaMOO... no, that's not it. Maybe a baby LambdaMOO', but I think that I've got it. It was very much like the party described in Douglas Adam's books, the perpetual party that never ended. It was alot like that, except it ended. Yes, that's definitely it.

A phone phreak immobilized Bruce's phone, but it was only one of his four phone lines, a young punk couple passed out in the Sterling budoir and left the next morning, and empty 400 beer bottles were left over (one of them mine), and Bruce says "it was the best party Nancy and I ever threw." My favorite quote and rallying cry from Bruce's CFP windup speech: "We're all wrapped up in the eighty-hour weeks, and the piles of mounting email, and the constantly bleeping cellphones. We need to learn to kick back. We need to live less like galley slaves and more like human beings. We may never have it this good again." YES!

What struck me about Bruce's house, apart from the fact that it was a stunning re-creation of a 40 year old house, were those round rock columns supporting the front porch. I had been down that block before (unaware that this was Bruce's house) and had stopped to marvel at this place. It's definitely a "stopper" as you drive through the nighborhood. I also marveled at the book collection which included no less than four or five shelves full of only books by, about, or contributed to by Bruce. Very few magazines about except for Wired (of which there were boxes and boxes being freely distributed). My date, Therese, and I spent ten minutes discussing the novel toilet on the second floor, no rolls of toilet paper to be seen anywhere. I assume this is what we learned in French class was a "bidet"? And we spent quite a while pondering the significance of all the little statues and action figures at the "altar", mostly death related. The "altar" was another one of those details to marvel at.

Greetings! Bruce's party had free beer and Wired, great minds, lots of food, a snake and an agressive cat. The fact that the house was actualy a castle also added to the feeling that this was quite possibly the most relaxed 5 hours I can remember (and I dont even claim to remember all 5 hours of it..hehe)

I want to cry now, thank you very much...

Terry said: Bruce Sterling said: That's why I've made it my personal goal at this CFP to try and buy everybody a beer. And then assorted others of you said: It was definetly the best party I've been to in the past year. Bruce's party had free beer and Wired, great minds, lots of food, a snake and an agressive cat. The fact that the house was actualy a castle also added to the feeling that this was quite possibly the most relaxed 5 hours I can remember (and I dont even claim to remember all 5 hours of it..hehe) And now I say: But WER had to work and I was bedridden with the flu... dammit, dammit, dammit, waaaahahaaaaaaaaa!!!...

But now, re: "So they'll simply modestly step back and let the mighty forces of technology and private enterprise thrash the situation out on their own. And maybe twenty years from now, when things calm down and get safer for elected American politicians, we may see some actual laws passed." - and - "That it just plain moves too fast to figure out, so we might as well throw up our hands and step back out of its way." -and- "No actual government. Some form of emergent self-regulating governance." Ya mean they're actually beginning to figure out that there's no way to regulate something with no actual physical existence or national boundaries? Nope, they're the government. There's no way they could've acquired that kind of insight/wisdom that quick ly. There's gotta be a hidden agenda of some sort. Ain't there always?

Bruce showed the CFP98 folks how to party Austin style, with chips and beer and trays of shrimp and cheese. What an awesome group of great minds assembled together in one place. JeffK quoting Jon Lebkowsky, if a bomb had hit Bruce's house that night it would have wiped out the free speech movment. As I write this, the sights and sounds of Bruce speaking are streaming out of http://www.spring.com.

it's...it's...just not the same!

I wonder if Bruce will do another bash this year for SXSW? He did last year. But it would be hard on the heels of this monster bash.

*crossing fingers*

Danielle Gallo: Bruce Sterling's "Thoughts on the Future" was an entertaining speech that contained a great deal of ranting. The part I found interesting was when Sterling addressed the Monica Lewinsky scandal. He stated that she poses no real threat to the country, is not a terrorist, and there is no need to observe her. Following the speech, Sterling hosted a party at his house for CFP attendees.

Oh Boy! Softball Coverage in the LA Times *8-/ - Bruce Sterling quote Digital Nation March 9, 1998 Ad-Hocracies Fill Void Left by Government By Gary Chapman Copyright 1998, The Los Angeles Times AUSTIN, Texas -- The highlight of every Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference is the closing speech of novelist Bruce Sterling, and this year's was no exception. Sterling, a respected science fiction writer who lives in Austin (and who is a friend of mine), is becoming the Jonathan Swift of the digital era. The speech he delivered at the conference here two weeks ago was simultaneously hilarious and thought-provoking. He started by scoring off the earlier keynote speech by Brian Kahin, a former Harvard University () researcher who now heads the information technology program of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Kahin delivered the administration's viewpoint on the role of government in shaping the Internet. Kahin said, "The private sector should take the lead, and the government should play a modest, minimalist role." This has become the mantra of the Clinton White House whenever the Internet is the subject. "I have confidence in self-regulation," Kahin said. Sterling called the presentation "a very congenial and gentle speech: 'Modest' was a word he used a lot. I don't think I've ever, ever heard an administration science and technology expert describe the aims of American government as 'modest.' This was a remarkable confession this gentleman was making. In so many words, he said that policy development is cyberspace is just plain too hard to do. . . . So they'll simply, modestly step back and let the mighty forces of technology and private enterprise thrash the situation out on their own." This, Sterling said provocatively, is "the giant sucking sound of abdicated responsibility. So what fills the power vacuum? I would argue that it is already being filled by a different and more modern political arrangement: not bureaucracy, but ad-hocracy." He called the audience's attention to the way Silicon Valley technology companies are starting to take on the form -- or rather, formlessness -- of Hollywood production teams. Instead of the conventional model of a corporation that plots its longevity into eternity, the new model of high-tech business is a collection of talented people who come together for the ephemeral goal of modeling a "concept," and then selling it off. The team then evaporates, leaving no trace, like quarks in a linear accelerator. The only persistent quality is the "talent" of individuals -- a model Hollywood has pioneered and refined to an art. This phenomenon has developed in part because of the omnipresent shadow of Microsoft. Smart people try to create and then cash in on ideas before Microsoft appropriates them for the next release of Windows and puts them out of business. Sterling believes that this model, which has overtaken the mind-set of entrepreneurs in high tech, is now creeping into politics -- particularly as we think about the future of the Internet or new media in general. Deregulation, the buzz word of the past decade, is giving way to no regulation (or self-regulation, which amounts to the same thing). "You don't have to stretch too far to perceive this as a menace to democracy," Sterling said. Ad-hocracy is "certainly a real and visible menace to the established order, because it can throw sand in the works at any of a hundred different points. When the established order hits back, it hits back with another, rival ad-hocracy." "Ad-hocracy" is becoming gospel in high-tech centers around the country and in Washington. The problem, however, is not simply that this idea produces friction with democracy. The new high-tech ideologists don't really believe in democracy or in "public values." They are bent on convincing the public that interest group politics, "ad-hocratic" atomization, and a kind of digital update of Social Darwinism are equivalent to democracy. Thus the public is presented with a false choice about the future of the Internet: a choice between either ham-handed bureaucratic regulation or a Hobbesian world of raw market power. The alternative of a truly democratic communications sphere dominated neither by government nor commerce does not seem to be on the table or part of the debate. After his discouraging description of our predicament, Sterling rallied everyone at the conference with a call to party: "There's one important thing about ad-hocracies, a charming quality they have. If you just get them outside of the video surveillance, and away from their podiums and microphones, and add a little social lubricant in the form of a couple of beers, they spontaneously disintegrate into parties." So party we did, at Sterling's house in Austin, setting aside for a brief time the troubling thoughts he had lodged in our minds. Gary Chapman is director of the 21st Century Project at the University of Texas at Austin. He can be reached at gary.chapman@mail.utexas.edu.

thanks for putting that up

From Richard Thieme. Islands in the Clickstream: Computers, Freedom, and Privacy A conference on computers, freedom, and privacy might be the last place one expects to find the deepest expressions of the quest for meaning in our lives, yet there it was, all over the place. So was evidence of new possibilities for what I call the human- computer symbiot, that new kind of community generated by our symbiotic relationship to our electronic sensory extensions and intelligent networks. The choices we make now as we take the reins of our own evolution more securely in our hands -- with fear and trembling at the perilous task before us -- will determine the kind of world we bequeath to our children. The quest for meaning would not be an issue if our lives were obviously meaningful. Every foreground is defined by a background. The threat of meaninglessness posed by an entropic universe headed toward heat death makes us ask if the evolution of complexity of form and consciousness is evidence of consciousness that is the source as well as the goal of evolution -- or merely something that happened to happen. Either way, the existential choices are the same, and the fact that they exist is the definition of freedom. The battle for freedom is not being fought in wars far from home but in the policies and decisions we make personally and professionally about how we will live in a wired world. If those decisions are conscious, deliberate, and grounded in our real values and commitments, we will build communities on-line and off that are open, evolving, and free. If we are manipulated into fearing fear more than the loss of our own power and possibilities, then our communities will be constricted, rigidly controlled, over-determined. Privacy is key to these choices. There is no such thing as a guaranteed private conversation any more. We used to be able to walk out behind a tree and know we could not be overheard. Now the information that is broadcast by everything we say and do is universally available for cross- referencing and mining for hidden patterns. Those patterns, as Solveig Singleton of the Cato Institute observed, are in the eye of the beholder, determined by their needs and ultimate intentions -- an eye that half-creates and half-perceives, as Wordsworth said, constructing reality in accordance with its wishes and deepest beliefs. What we deeply believe, and how we allow others and our intentional communities to reinforce our beliefs and values, determines our actions and commitments. The choices we make downstream will emerge upstream when the river widens. In a conversation with a career intelligence officer about the actions of various US agencies, I made this appeal: "There is a cry for justice in a child's heart," I suggested, "that is eroded over time by the way we sometimes have to live. Yet the day comes when we look at what we have done with our lives and its relationship to that cry for compassion." He disagreed. "I long ago set aside the sentiments of my childhood religion," he said.... In order to do the things he had to do. And the growing sophistication of technologies of torture, that enable governments to leave fewer marks, fewer clear memories in the minds of victims? "A sign of growing sensitivity to world opinion," he said. "At least they're moving in the right direction." How we do hear that cry for compassion, when the foggy weather in our own minds works to obscure it? Would it help, I asked Patrick Ball of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, to have audio clips on the web of what happens in those interrogation rooms? "No," he said with conviction. "The descriptions I've read are sufficiently graphic." What I cannot represent in words is the look in his eyes as his brain did a quick sort of the hundreds of detailed torture scenarios he had studied. Nor can I say how the face of that intelligence professional went suddenly wooden and his eyes looked away as he remembered what he had done as part of his job. How wide do we draw the circle? A Department of Justice attorney arguing for weak encryption stopped at the border. Catching criminals inside America is his sole priority, so he wants a back door into every electronic conversation in the world. Ball draws a wider circle, including those in Guatemala, Ethiopia, or Turkey who might be alive if they had had a possibility of engaging in a private conversation. Ball favors strong encryption as a way to support human rights worldwide. Our knowledge of "how things really work" pushes the conversation further. Seldom have intelligence agents told me they worry about abuse of the information they gather. They trust the system. "We abide by the law," said a CIA professional. He added that even the NSA can not intercept conversations inside our borders. They don't have to, said another. Our special friends in New Zealand or Canada listen to American traffic as we listen to theirs. Good friends, he added, help one another. So ... granted that we live in a real world in which data gathered for one purpose finds its way into other nets, in which anything that has value will be bought and sold ... what are the limits we can place on the inordinate desires in the human heart to be in control, to know more than we have a right to know? How can technology serve the need for secure boundaries that guarantee citizens of a civil society the freedom they need? Knowing what human beings do to one another, how can we constrain our baser desires and make it less likely that they will determine policy and behavior? Conferences like CFP generate more questions than answers. But as long as the questions are raised, we maintain the margin between necessity and possibility that defines human freedom. That margin may be narrowing, but so long as it exists, our passion for freedom, justice, and compassion can still manifest itself in action as well as words. ********************************************************************** Islands in the Clickstream is a weekly column written by Richard Thieme exploring social and cultural dimensions of computer technology. Comments are welcome. Feel free to pass along columns for personal use, retaining this signature file. If interested in (1) publishing columns online or in print, (2) giving a free subscription as a gift, or (3) distributing Islands to employees or over a network, email for details. To subscribe to Islands in the Clickstream, send email to rthieme@thiemeworks.com with the words "subscribe islands" in the body of the message. To unsubscribe, email with "unsubscribe islands" in the body of the message. Richard Thieme is a professional speaker, consultant, and writer focused on the impact of computer technology on individuals and organizations. Islands in the Clickstream (c) Richard Thieme, 1998. All rights reserved. ThiemeWorks on the Web: http://www.thiemeworks.com ThiemeWorks P. O. Box 17737 Milwaukee WI 53217-0737 414.351.2321

I included the above here because there is a relevant and related conversation between Sterling and Thieme on the realaudio playing at www.spring.com.

thanks terry for the cite, i subscribed to the thieme newsletter as a result-- is the discussion between sterling and thieme the one about the future/present/past of the cyberpunk movement?

It is in fact, the pictures got out of synch today but now they should be matching up to the audio.

I hope I'm wrong, but I seem to recall reading a few years back in one of the mainstream news magazines (Time/Newsweek) a puff piece on Thieme being the "spiritual advisor/mentor" of Dan and Mrs. (sorry, I don't remember her name) Quayle (!) I just took a quick browse through the Thiemeworks (*gak*, what a lamely New-Agey title!) and my confirmations were neither suspicioned nor denied. :)

OK. Here it is (in its entirety): See paragraph 4. THE MILLENNIAL CHURCH By: Bobby Lilly Mil-len-ni-um - a: a period of 1000 years b: a 1000th anniversary or its celebration 2a: the thousand years mentioned in Revelation 20 during which holiness is to prevail and Christ is to reign on earth b: a period of great happiness or human perfection. Ar-ma-ged-don - [scene of the battle foretold in Rev 16:14-16] a final and conclusive battle between the forces of good and evil b: the site or time of Armageddon 2: a vast decisive conflict (Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary). As we enter the last decade of the 20th Century, these words will gain new meaning for all of us. Christian mythology calls for a "Kingdom" on Earth after the Battle of Armageddon rains down fire and destroys all civilization only "saved" Christians will be left to enjoy this paradise on earth. Everyone else will have perished in the death and destruction of those last days. For fundamentalists, it is impossible to believe in a future of happiness or human perfection until after the final confrontation be ween good and evil. They believe they are living in the "last days" and look forward to the conflagration with eager joy. "So what," you say, "if people want to believe that the end of the world is near, why not let them? Why should it be a problem for the rest of us? Surely these beliefs can't hurt anyone else but themselves?" Maybe not, but Bush calls himself a "born-again" Christian, what if his belief in the inevitability of Armageddon pushed him to posture in a more threatening manner than he should and he ends up egging Saddam Hussein on. Bush could be playing with the lives of a half million soldiers and we'd never kn w. Vice-president Quayle's wife is a follower of Colonel Robert Thieme, one of the more extreme fundamentalist preachers. What does Quayle think about Armageddon? Could that explain why he takes such a strong negative position to recent changes in the Soviet Union? According to "Under God," an article by Garry Wills in December's Playboy magazine, religion has always been strong in this country and cyclically the Fundamentalist strain becomes more virulent. He quotes Gallop poll statistics like: "Nine Americans in ten say they have never doubted the existence of God. Eight Americans in ten say they believe they will be called before God on judgment day to answer for their sins. Eight Americans in ten believe God still works miracles. Seven Americans in ten believe i life after death. 37% of Americans believe in the Devil. 50% believe in angels--as opposed to the 15% who believe in astrology. About 40% attend church in a typical week. In 1989, 40% of the population called itself born again in response to a poll. Wills quotes George Gallop, Jr. as claiming that "Religious affiliation remains one of the most accurate and least appreciated political indicators available." Wills, a Christian himself, argues that "commentators continue to neglect the elements of the American religious experience: revivalism, Biblical literalism, millennial hope (for the Second Coming of Christ). Yet these have profoundly influenced our politics. Wills warns that "the century's end may be more marked by domestic than by international conflict. The makings of a cultural war are present in religious attacks on pornography, homosexuality, abortion and the eroticism of rock music and television." He says that, while the Bible will not be at the center of these developments, "we neglect it at our own peril." November's Spin magazine give us KulturKampf, a German term meaning "the struggle for culture" in an article titled "The War Is On Us" by Jefferson Moreley who argues that the national mood is war-like not just against Saddam Hussein. "Americans are divided about the First Amendment and abortion. They are divided along racial lines and about drugs. They are divided to an unprecedented extent by class and income. President Bush says "Our way of life is at stake" in the Middle East, but no randomly selected groups of Americans would be able to agree upon what that way of life is." He continues, "In America's Kulturkampf, state-sponsored morality is pitted not against organized religion but against the community and culture that emerged from the '60's counterculture...With old values failing, the struggle for culture intensifies. And, in November's "Mother Jones" magazine, a one page article "Wildmon Kingdom?" by Fred Clarkson should scare the pants off you. According to Clarkson, Rev. Donald Wildmon, and many of his associates are part of the Coalition on Revival (COR), a theopolitical movement that seeks to make a fundamentalist Christian nation out of the United States. This past year the National Coordinating Council the defacto political arm of COR developed a 24-point program. Clarkson advises that, among other things, the p ogram calls for the abolition of public schools, the IRS, and the Federal Reserve systems by the year 2000. He says that, while they have a national agenda, COR has a grass-roots strategy and are targeting 60 cities in the next five years. According to Clarkson's article, the group places a special emphasis on county government--sheriffs and boards of supervisors--and, once in power, the creation of county "militias." Reconstructionism is a strong faction within COR which seeks to impose its version of "Biblical Law" on society and call it the Kingdom of God. Some Reconstructionists explicitly oppose democracy, notable R.J. Rushdonny, Reconstructionism's acknowledged leader who also believes "homosexuals, adulterers, blasphemers, astrologers, and incorrigible children should be executed preferably by "stoning." He is on COR's steering committee and is slated to become a faculty member at their planned Kingdom College i San Jose. In a recruitment letter for the college. COR recently wrote that they want "young warriors who will be thrilled and challenged to go through a Christian 'green beret' boot camp training school for radical world changers. BOBBY LILLY is a co-founder of the CALIFORNIANS ACT AGAINST CENSORSHIP TOGETHER and the editor of their great newsletter. See the KNOW YOUR FRIENDS database to contact CAL-ACT.

New Bruce Sterling stuff will be playing on our realaudio player. The pushy girls interview him at South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive. If you haven't heard of the Pushy Girls, you will.