Association of Research Libraries (ARL®)

Bruce Sterling

Science Fiction Writer

Hello ladies and gentlemen, my name is Bruce Sterling and I'm a science fiction writer from Austin, Texas. I've been generously given a whopping half-hour today to discuss the fastest technological transformation in human history.

I've devoted a lot of thought and speculation to this topic lately, and that's why the last ten minutes of my speech today is going to seem completely insane. However, by the time we get to the really zany part, you should be so shellshocked that the truly science fictional element should begin to make a dreadful kind of sense.

Let me roll up my sleeves here, and let's take a breath, and let's begin by talking about how not to do electronic networking. We're gonna start slow, and by slow I mean, of course, Prodigy. Prodigy, the network where an electronic response on a topic can take three full days.

I wish I could honestly say that I hate to pick on Prodigy, because it hardly seems sporting to kick a service when they're so openly and publicly down, but these are people who spent over nine hundred million dollars on their dreadful, hateful idea of a network. When one thinks what the world would look like today if nine tenths of a billion had been dropped on gopher, wais, archie, mosaic, and veronica, it makes you want to weep aloud. So indulge me; join me in a sadistic chuckle as I give Prodigy some hell.

Because they deserve it! Their unspoken slogan was "We're IBM and Sears so we must know what we're doing." But they didn't know. And worse yet, they were slow to learn.

Prodigy was a network that wanted a vast population of users whose activity would also be devoid of serious controversy. This is humanly impossible. They also wanted to magisterially push their data through a wire to a population of millions of people equipped with machines that allowed them to speak back. This is an oxymoron.

Prodigy yearned to be the Disneyland of Cyberspace, yet failed to grasp the fact that even sweet old Walt Disney is controversial some times and in some places. In Europe, people openly despise Mickey Mouse as if he were some kind of bipedal plague-rat carrying the deadly virus of American popular culture, and as for dear old Walt himself, he informed on Commies for the FBI and is popularly supposed to be locked in a cryonic icebox somewhere. Prodigy was born with all the drawbacks of Disney -- the creepiness, the corporate hermeticism, the over-sanitized atmosphere -- and yet none of Walt Disney's original table-top imagination and vision. Everything in Prodigy was supposed to be redolent of glowing family values and shrink-wrapped Norman Rockwell normality, but adults don't like to live and play in a sandbox.

Seen in their entirety, the list of Prodigy scandals (to date) is truly dismal. There was STAGE.DAT. That was a piece of Prodigy software installed on the user's computer, that, incidentally, could access tiny little chunks of the user's hard-disk and send them back to Prodigy HQ. Prodigy got accused of using the STAGE-DAT software as an Orwellian monitoring device deliberately spying on the private contents of user's computers. Other publishers, other services, could have easily shrugged off this nonsense, but this terrible piece of utter urban-folklore was actually believed about Prodigy.

Then there were the flaming problems. Every network in existence has people who flame, but on Prodigy, flaming was considered a clear and present danger to peace and good order, so that when devout Mormons started crossing verbal swords with gay-lib activists, Prodigy napalmed the debating ground by eliminating the entire topic. This is creating a desert and calling it peace.

And there was, of course, the censorship. Not rigid censorship, not entirely unreasonable, but scary and irritating through its lack of consistency and its clear failing to sympathize with the social values of users. On Prodigy you couldn't use the word "bitch" Nor was it subject to debate; since Prodigy considered itself a "publisher" and its users as grateful peons, you couldn't even publicly bitch about using the word bitch. You couldn't post in German or French because you might be saying rude things the censors didn't understand.

Then there were the technical problems; not in the network itself, which worked okay though slowly, but in the growing primal struggle for control of the network itself between the company and the users. When Prodigy users found themselves forbidden to discuss certain topics publicly, some among them built software devices that created private email distribution lists. There was nothing new about email distribution lists. Email distribution lists were the lifeblood of Bitnet and Arpanet and they were common knowledge in networking circles, but on Prodigy this vital networking practice seriously interfered with the generation of revenue. So first Prodigy tried to ban distribution lists; but they did not have that power; the users had written the distribution software themselves, so Prodigy was trying to ban the contents of people's personal computers. But email was flooding the system, so Prodigy began charging for email, a direct violation of their original users' contract. For that action Prodigy got sued by state consumer protection agencies, and defeated, too!

There have been waves of mass defections from Prodigy as Prodigy convulsively changed their basic rate structure to accommodate the user-forced mutations of the system. People used the Prodigy system itself to urge one another to leave. Then there were the mass firings of staff... In the meantime the Internet, which has no promotional budget at all and an interface only a UNIX freak could love, has been growing at twelve percent a month. There's a good book in the destiny of the Prodigy network, but I feel it would take a very mordant soul to write it. What journalist would want to write such a thing, when the stuff going on outside the Chinese walls of Prodigy is so much more entertaining and fun?

Jack Rickard recently wrote a fine editorial in his bracingly iconoclastic magazine BOARDWATCH. Rickard argues that there is a fatal flaw in the very idea that you can segregate users inside a closed electronic network and force them to generate money for you through their existence as a captive audience. Email, Rickard says, wants to be free. You can't lock people inside your electronic company town, as Prodigy wanted to do, and therefore assure that they are physically incapable of ever looking elsewhere. What you must do is entice the free populace off the virtual streets and into your store through offering superior goods and services. We're all in this together. You cannot separate us one from another, and enslave us as captive consumers jailed inside a single system. That's been tried. It's the philosophy of the proprietary system, the closed shop, the Berlin Wall of software. It doesn't work. Today even Prodigy gets Internet email, but what will happen when its users learn of ftp and telnet and gopher?

A computer network is not a gumball machine where the owners put in a big bag of bytes once a month and the customers drop in nickels and hope they get a nice red one. To retail information in this mechanical fashion ignores the nature of the network phenomenon. A network is a living thing. A network is like a language.

To give people modems and PCs is to give them the power to speak as well as listen. And yet Prodigy was painfully determined to make every pixel in cyberspace into a potential sales opportunity. It's as if the English language were owned by totalitarian English teachers who charged you a royalty every time you conjugated a verb. Their control over the language of Prodigy was fatally pedantic, allowing no mutations, no modifications, no spontaneity. If Prodigy owned the English language, a taco would be officially known as a "cornmeal crispette."

That's why Prodigy could not come to life. Its language was as stiff and pure and dead as ecclesiastical Latin. Prodigy was like a cocktail party where a bunch of brownshoe IBM and Sears guys were standing in the corners with their arms crossed with signs over their necks that read "I'll say something really witty if you give me a dollar." And even if they do have something worthwhile to say, well, that's not a party.

You can make pretty good money out of being a witty guy in public. You can go to parties and be witty for no pay, just to enjoy yourself and give others pleasure and to feel like a human being. Or you can become a professional stand-up comedian. You can pick up the mike and talk, kind of like I'm talking now, and everybody will sit still and listen and laugh sometimes, and I walk off with a bunch of your money. But suppose I give everybody in this audience a microphone. How long do you think I'll get away with standing here talking and the rest of you sitting there in rows silently with adoring looks on your faces? Not very goddamned long, brother.

Not unless I send a bunch of censors out to enforce my idea of order and throw the more demonstrative audience members out the door. I can claim that I own this room, and I'm paying for these microphones, and I'm far more interesting than any other topic or any other person in the world, so shut up. But that won't stop you from talking, so I'm gonna have to shut some of you up, the hard way. And once that starts happening, I don't think you've gonna find my comedy routine very amusing any more. My comedy routine is gonna be about as bright and entertaining as compulsory company calisthenics.

Well, the Prodigy party ain't over yet; they're hiring new policy guys and they're looking for new advice; they're not looking among cybernetic librarians though, so hopefully they'll never hear my uncharitable comments. Anyway, I don't think the lesson is learned quite yet. Even if Prodigy expires on the barbed-wire in the no-man's-land of the electronic frontier, coming right behind them, with even more money and probably even less brains, are the Disney Bells. Heard about Disney Bells? That's the Silicon Valley street slang for the regional Bell telephone operating companies that are busy buying and merging with cable-TV companies so that they can get into the information superhighway entertainment business. It's getting a lot of press lately, even more press than the original launch of Prodigy, but I have my doubts. I mean, when was the last time a phone company did something you found really entertaining? Compared to cable TV and the phone company -- universally feared and despised monopoly enterprises -- even IBM and Sears seem kind of lovable and cuddly. Disney Bells indeed; why, I bet good money Walt Disney's spinning in his block of ice.

So if that's not the way to do networks, what is the way to do them? Well, my suspicion, growing year by year kind of like the Internet has been growing, is to treat networks like language. Give everybody the power to speak and listen. Distributed nodes, like the Internet, like Fidonet. Networks that grow organically like language-use, not ruled top-down by an army of occupation.

And let's keep the basic means of communication out in the open, shall we? Our language should have a legible alphabet of openly written and openly debated and openly testable interfaces and standards. We don't want a secret, proprietary alphabet as arcane as Egyptian hieroglyphics; not unless we prefer society with a priest class, a scribe class and a Pharaoh.

Sure, you may ask, but where's the money in a network like that? Well, I riposte, where's the money in English? Of course there's a lot of money in English. You can teach English, use it, codify it, assemble it and deliver it in public, even copyright certain assemblages of it and trademark the occasional little coinage. There's not a lot of direct money in trying to license grammar or manufacture new adverbs, but, by golly, English is a very useful and flexible and omnipresent system, and it has a hell of a lot of contented users.

You can, of course, try to restrict English and corral people with your own proprietary versions of English. This happens all the time, but the descriptions of this practice aren't very flattering. When people treat English the way Prodigy treated networking, it's known as jargon. Bureaucratic gobbledygook. The hard sell. Adspeak. Slang. Criminal argot. People feel instinctively that when it comes to the English language we are all in this together. We don't feel corralled inside English. It's not enforced on us -- or at least, not too ferociously enforced. We're just inside it.

Suppose networks really were like language and were recognized to be that way and treated that way. Who would run networks then? Retailers? Publishers? Well, no... that doesn't sound very plausible... how about lexicographers? Not too bad! Librarians! Excellent choice! Semanticists. Free speech advocates. Schools and academies and universities. Not private enterprise, because private enterprise doesn't own languages any more than it owns oxygen or the color red. The government subsidizes language -- it teaches English, it teaches literacy, with our tax dollars. This is universally recognized as a public good -- anyone who said that American children should be kept illiterate because it costs too much to teach them to read would be considered a complete Neanderthal. If we let the government subsidize language, what's so odd about letting the government subsidize networks? Not run them from some over-centralized bureau -- just subsidize them locally, as a public good. We can all agree that it's a good idea that our citizens be literate, so why shouldn't they also be network-literate?

Of course this means surrendering some control over the network. But if we think of the network as language, it suddenly seems wisest to let it go. People think networks will be put to evil uses if they are not closely monitored and tapped. This is true. But language is also put to evil uses, and we don't record all conversations or try to shape English so that conspiracy or evil expressions are impossible. It seems outrageous to police language, to put ourselves at the mercy of political lexicon police -- social engineers whipping society into the shape they desire by enforcing an Orwellian NewSpeak. People do try that -- they'll always try it, because censorship is a more powerful urge than sex. But it doesn't work.

I'm beginning to believe that this process of letting go of control over networks is not only possible but plausible, and maybe even actively desirable. It's what has already happened in the world of computation, after all. The empire of the mainframes is like a herd of slow-moving elephants eaten alive by an endless tide of desktop army ants. People used to sell computer time; now there's so much spare computer time that people sell screensavers. Screensavers are prettier and more clever and creative than a bill for computation cycles.

Computation doesn't belong by its nature behind glass walls tended by the labcoat priesthood; it's become gaseous. What was once a heathen idol on a pedestal is now like the tongues of fire from the Holy Ghost. There are computers in doorknobs now, on people's wrists, wrapped around their eyes and ears, responding to the human voice.

I'm speaking in visionary terms now, but it requires visionary terms to imagine what's really likely from computing. This is an industry where an individual with a single PC from 1993 has more computing power than NASA used to land men on the moon in 1969. Computational speed and power expands by orders of magnitude. Storage, too. If there's room for NASA's entire 1969 electronic brain in your 1993 desk, then your desk has the power to devour almost anything that can be made into ones and zeroes.

Desktop libraries, for instance. Huge libraries for the individual. Not farfetched at all. There's a case in the courts now of a software salesman in Oklahoma City arrested by city police for computer pornography. He was selling publicly available CD-ROM disks with risque images on them -- ten thousand or so images per disk. It's been calculated that if the Oklahoma pornography statutes were strictly enforced against this man, he could spend one million years in prison. One million years for a flat plate the size of your hand that is meant to be hooked to a bulletin board system. How on earth can we control this? It's hopeless, like trying to control every conversation in America to make sure no one ever says a dirty word. Can one stop CD-ROMs, these tiny items, from travelling wherever they please? After all, if you want to smuggle them over our national border, all you have to do is hide one inside a ton of cocaine.

This means that one's desk can gobble up fantastic amounts of information using methods impossible to police.

An institution such as AT&T or IBM or the National Security Agency looks desperately out of place in such a world, like a whale being ripped to shreds by hordes of invisible piranha. What kind of organized institutions could survive in such a world?

Well, if industrial-age giants totter, perhaps pre-industrial ones might prosper. The academy for instance; the Academy is a very old institution, and once it was just Plato's users'-group under some olive trees. The University is a very old institution; currently it's under ruthless and protracted siege from powerful commercial forces, but if the very nature of commercial forces change, then universities suddenly look considerably more vital and attractive. Academic life has a set of values: knowledge, meaning, civilization, philosophy -- that start to look very appealing in this deluge of information, this world of machines gone ultra-connected and gaseous. In an information deluge, meaning is an ultimate luxury and context a profound value.

And the ancient institution of the Library... Libraries .like Alexandria were powerful but vulnerable. However, with .infinite replicability, anonymous access and practically unlimited storage, libraries suddenly look very hard to kill. They're not the same libraries where bookpullers follow you nervously to make sure you don't damage the limited editions, but they do seem to have a solid potential role as noncommercial sites offering access to vast amounts of information. Libraries might not sell information per se, but in a world of instant global access and swift replication, libraries become great shadowy beasts in cyberspace, powerful allies and providers of highly useful services. After all, libraries too offer context; anybody may be able to get all the ones and zeros they want, but librarians know how to put things where they make sense. Getting data costs nothing; storing data costs nothing; but making sense of that titanic heap of data -- my God, that suddenly means everything! Who cares who published it? Who cares who wrote it, even? But the person who can tell you where to find what you need to know -- or the person who can successfully guide your attention to the thing you didn't know you needed to know, that needle of proper information in a Matterhorn of digital haystacks -- this person is suddenly inheritor of all the social power that the other people in the data stream have lost. There might be real power in this, maybe even more power than librarians have every had before. A shift in social power and authority, from publisher and author, to critic and archivist.

Before you get all exultant at the prospect, don't forget that power corrupts. One could even imagine evil libraries, criminal libraries stuffed with dangerous knowledge, offshore data-haven libraries where forbidden information is kept. Or entirely anonymous libraries of encrypted information of a Borgesian complexity, where the only way to kill the cloud of data is to change formats. Libraries in a million shapes, libraries split and skewered over entire continents. Great radiating species of libraries ecologically adapting to every niche in cyberspace. Libraries too small to see with the naked eye, bounded in a nutshell but full of infinite shelf-space. Libraries encoded on the thumbnail, libraries written into the genome, libraries disguised as noise and distributed hidden inside apparently innocuous digital tapes. Libraries as immaterial and ubiquitous as frost on the windowpane and cracks in the sidewalks. Libraries in satellites that rise like the morning star.

Yesterday I heard tell of a new concordance in ancient Greek; a CD-ROM disk with every known ancient Greek text on it. We would be fools to trust the archival permanence of that CD-ROM disk, because CD-ROM is a primitive technology, the functional equivalent of an Edison wax cylinder, with a lifetime maybe one thousandth that of a dead sea scroll in a jar in Galilee. But we can put every remaining word from ancient Greece, that great human civilization, into a device you can hold in your hand. If only Alexandria had done that -- cut copies of itself on diamond-hard sheets of CD-ROM and hidden itself in salt mines and in jars and in buried chests. The librarians of Alexandria couldn't do that Perhaps, given the nature of their society, they wouldn't have wanted to. In the end, their scrolls were fed to goats and burned to heat the water in the public baths.

We're mortal, too. Our civilization is also fragile. But with so little thought and effort, we could see to it that the human race never lost another word of the Greeks. What a fine thing that would be to do. What a credit to our civilization. It really seems to me that a civilization that could do that favor for humanity, for the unknown and unknowable generations to come, would truly deserve the name of greatness.

But on the other hand -- is that practical? Do we possess the vision to do such a thing? It wouldn't pay much, would it? Not like 500 channels of market-proven reruns and a whole bunch of home shopping networks. We could settle for that -- if we were stupid enough. "Never mind that visionary stuff -- step aside, I'm a retailer and I've got a business plan!"

To which the digital activist replies: "Step aside, eh? Well, I'll go, Mr. Business Plan -- but I won't go where you expect! And by the time you get to the places worth going, you'll find me already there and grinning!" That's all I've got to say today, thanks a lot for listening.