Oh Boy! Softball Coverage in the LA Times *8-/ - Bruce Sterling 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.

hummmmm i thought i just posted here, oh well. glad you put up the chapman article. i agree, it isnt an entirely swell idea to leave this to the corporations.

I posted it twice because I realized that it fit better in the Bruce Sterling topic just as much as it deserved to be posted here.

any idea when the chapman audio will run on spring right now is more from the conference (which i always enjoy) i will just keep it on in the background as long as i can maybe you will be able to replay the chapman interview several times.

I'll have to transfer it from super 8 to vhs this afternoon, you'll see it as I do the transfer (which will be the best video and audio quality you'll ever see, because it will come straight from the source). Then I'll put it on replay. I'll try and and start this at noon CST.

darn, i could not manage to fit it in yesterday, i hope it will still be running now and then, i have been going over to the cfp98 site and clicking on the audio links over there to pick up specific seminars when i have an hour or so when i can stay and listen-- but i enjoy watching your video along with your audio much more. i think it is fantastic that you are putting this online terry, and very very unique the only outfits i know who are doing this are the major news servers and freespeech tv---which is often way too raunchy for me. btw, you know that idea that was discussed over at the Well about making posts to the server, able to be sent by email--i really like that-- i didnt realize how much i like it--until one of my main elist groups, decided to get on a permanent server and go to a threaded conference forum, and i dont have the time really to set aside to go over there and check the new stuff---i really miss when they were sending it to me by email would it be really hard and difficult to set that up here? i would want it for specific conferences/topics but i know how busy you are, and dont mean to bury you in extra projects.

That's a very good suggestion and I'll get a quote from Kaylene Thaler on doing this!

good!! i would enjoy participating in that--in specific areas of interest i think jeff over at acme has set up a version of it, but i havent seen it in operation, might be good to have your programmer open a discussion somewhere on the pring (and be sure to tell me where) about how it would work, and what features people would like to see, and what is possible to do)

What happened to orange?

Monday, January 4, 1999 The Los Angeles Times DIGITAL NATION The Future Lies Beyond the Box By Gary Chapman Copyright 1999, The Los Angeles Times, All Rights Reserved Reporters and columnists attempting to sum up developments in the high-tech field in 1998, or speculating on the big stories for this year, are all ticking off what one would expect: the boom in Internet commerce, the Microsoft antitrust trial, highflying Internet stocks, the resurgence of Apple Computer, the merger of America Online and Netscape Communications, the rise of open-source software such as the Linux operating system, and the year 2000 bug, among other notable subjects. The interesting developments I saw in 1998 were mostly in research laboratories, and they pointed to a profound rethinking of how networks operate and information is circulated. The buzzwords to watch this year and beyond are "embedded" or "ubiquitous" computing and "distributed" computing, terms now used by computer scientists to describe a reorienting of how we'll use networking and information technologies in the future. This new paradigm, whose building blocks only began to appear in 1998, will be the next big thing in computing. Embedded or ubiquitous computing refers first of all to the trend of putting computational and networking capabilities into devices and services other than the familiar "screen-keyboard-box" of the personal computer. We're seeing a huge shift among technology companies that are looking beyond the PC toward a proliferation of hand-held network devices such as 3Com's PalmPilot, a new networking cellular phone from Microsoft and Qualcomm, a promised palmtop system from Apple and electronic books from Rocketbook and Softbook, among other related products. Compaq's Western Research Laboratory in Palo Alto, which the company acquired when it bought Digital Equipment Corp., has even produced a working prototype of a hand-held computer that runs Linux. At the Internet Society convention in Geneva in July, I frequently heard the slogan, "IP on everything, everything on IP." IP stands for Internet Protocol, the basic data standard that allows information to be "seen" or passed around on the Internet. With everything on IP and IP on everything, nearly all our common, everyday devices will be "smart" and "on" the Internet: cars, refrigerators, household appliances and light switches, manufacturing tools, TVs, cameras, sensors and even smart cards in our wallets or purses. In order to get all these devices to talk to each other and to be identified on the network, we need a new standard of software that's small, platform-independent and ubiquitous itself. Sun Microsystems' solution is called Jini (http://java .sun.com/products/jini/), which was previewed for developers in 1998 and will be formally announced Jan. 25 in New York. Jini is based on Java, the programming language that runs on a "virtual machine" that can be included with any operating system. Jini-enabled devices contain "agents," small segments of software code that tell other Jini machines what they do, where they are and how they operate. A Jini-powered house, for example, would show up in a Web browser or on a PC desktop displaying its capabilities, such as the ability to turn lights on or off, inventory its refrigerator or cupboards, set the temperature, check phone messages, etc. This is how embedded computation and distributed computing intersect: Machine intelligence shifts from general-purpose computing, such as in a PC, to device-specific intelligence, and the network itself becomes smart as an aggregate of billions of devices performing specific tasks and sharing information. The network architecture may change too. Instead of the familiar client-server model we use today, distributed computing allows a peer-to-peer architecture, which means that there's no longer any need for large, centralized computers running huge operating systems such as Windows NT. Jini resources can "see" one another without having to be switched through a server, and Jini agent software can run in under a megabyte of memory space. Microsoft is aware of the threat this model poses to its core software products. It has its own version of the Jini approach, called the Millennium Project. Lucent Technologies has one called Inferno (http://www.lucent-inferno.com/), and General Magic, in Sunnyvale, Calif., has a product called Odyssey (http://www.generalmagic.com/technology/odyssey.html). This is where the money and research are headed these days. Another interesting and related development is under investigation at Caltech in Pasadena, a program called the Infospheres Project (http://www.infospheres.caltech.edu/), directed by Caltech computer science professor K. Mani Chandy. The Infospheres Project, funded by the U.S. Air Force and the National Science Foundation, grew out of the tragedy of TWA Flight 800 near Long Island, N.Y., in 1996, Chandy says. After the airliner blew up, a large array of institutions and people needed to talk to one another -- the FBI, hospitals, TWA, the Coast Guard, families of the victims, etc. The technological problem became how these people could communicate without knowing one another or knowing how to get in touch with one another in advance. The thrust of the Infospheres Project has been to develop a new mode of information distribution, which Chandy calls "content-based" addressing instead of "address-based" addressing. In other words, people who need to communicate would be able to pass information to one another based on the content of their messages rather than on knowing the precise address of their correspondents. To accomplish this task, the Infospheres Project also uses Java agents, software that organizes information into classes and then searches for matches on a network. A user who wants to buy a product online, for example, might use such an agent to search for sellers and have all potential sellers with a match for the product report back instead of requiring the user to search individual Web sites. Using the Infospheres Project software (a trial version will be available later this month), users will be able to find information not by using Internet addresses but by creating conditions, or parameters, for agents that will search the network for appropriate responses. In March, the project will launch an experimental model in the San Francisco Bay Area with both end users and vendors. "I think this is going to be the metaphor for the future," Chandy says. Most other computer scientists seem to agree -- the phrase "post-PC era" is heard often among researchers now. The challenge for this new approach will be how to make the ubiquitous and distributed models of computing reliable, safe, secure and transparent to users. Privacy will also be vastly more complicated -- the present model of online privacy, which is dependent on the "informed consent" of consumers, will get significantly more opaque if we have millions of devices constantly communicating all around us without our direct control or knowledge. There is also the interesting question of whether future software agents will bear any of the legal rights or responsibilities we attach to individuals. Right now, cyberspace is typically viewed by the public as something glimpsed through a screen, the "window" of a PC monitor. Even that level of abstraction, however, is about to expand beyond most people's imaginations as the ideas incubating in research labs begin to migrate into our daily lives. As we might expect, given the rapid technological change we've seen in the last five years, things are about to get very different from what we know now. Gary Chapman is director of the 21st Century Project at the University of Texas at Austin. 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