Unstable Networks

Even paperback books have a far longer lifespan than computers. It's a humble thing, a book, but the interface doesn't change and they don't need software upgrades and new operating systems. A five dollar paperback book will dance on the grave of a five thousand dollar computer.

Nothing that is real is absolute. In anything real there is good news and there's bad news. The Information Society has become a reality. There's good news, ladies and gentlemen, and there's bad news. The good news is, the digital revolution is over. The digits won hands down. Casualties were low, considering. We now live in the early days of the digital provisional government.

The bad news is that the provisional government is inherently unstable. Its powerbase is a giant virtual castle made of bits. Bits of sand.

It's a very mixed bag, the information age. Don't get me wrong; I love living here. Like a lot of my generation, I grew up more or less expecting nuclear armageddon, and with that prospect off the front burner, life for me is a carnival. In the Information Age, every day's an adventure. I'm never bored.

The Information Age has many stellar virtues. It is market driven and extremely i

The bad news is, if you survive every day by agile broken-field ru

The Information Society has basically forfeited any democratic control over its own destiny. No one's opinion is ever asked, nobody is ever polled. If we'd been asked to vote in a digital revolution, it almost certainly would never have happened. We were never offered that chance, it never occurred to us to ask for it or take it. Our lives have been turned upside down by a series of obscure technical events that transpired in a nearly perfect political vacuum. The moral idea of informed consent was never raised. Weird homemade machinery that was full of bugs and never worked very well burst out of garages in California and destroyed the modern capitalist order. That's the story, basically. Like it or lump it.

There are vast fortunes to be made overnight in the Information Society. It's the hottest economic game on the planet. Vast fortunes can be lost just as quickly. Worse yet, there's no good safe place to store your loot if you make a pile and decide to jump off the jampacked no-brakes information bus. Thanks to computers, the stock market and bond market and currency markets are aswarm with sophisticated capital instruments that have created a seething global casino economy. There's more money in the thrash of leverage, futures and derivatives than there is in rational capitalist investment. In an Information Society, even oil companies want to act like Hollywood.

Thanks to modems, cellphones, cell-faxes, laptops, beepers and satellite dishes, we're never out of touch. I can read my email (which I happen to store in San Francisco) whenever I'm in Vancouver. The bad news is that, yes, I can read my email in Vancouver. I could be doing great British Columbia-type things instead: having the BC sushi roll, shopping in Chinatown, spiking the old growth forest. But I'll deny myself those harmless, life-enhancing amusements, because I feel compelled to mind my business and read my email.

There might be some kind of urgent message from a publisher in Italy. I've had publishers in Italy for years now, but they never, ever sent me urgent messages, because they used to know full well that it was useless. Now they can reach me fast and cheap and by golly, they expect to reach me and they expect a response. Can't neglect that email. It's got global reach! I might get fanmail from some cypherpunk in Finland. Some teenage hacker in Abu Dhabi wants me to tell him how to break into Saudi mainframes, so he can get his hands chopped off by the authorities. I'm never out of touch. I'm never allowed to be, because there's no place left to hide.

When I'm not changing diapers, I fancy myself quite the hip globetrotter Information Age kind of guy. That's because I have friends in Prague. People in Prague are very friendly, they have a lovely town and a unique culture. They're also very hospitable, and it's a good thing, because since 1990 or so they've been getting about 80 million people a year through that city.

This influence of rampant globalization is hitting a little country which was deepfrozen behind the Iron Curtain for forty years. The Web throws down its virtual threading all over the world, and what does this do to indigenous cultures? I don't think there's a lot of use in mincing words here. I think it's pretty clear that the Information Society engulfs and devours the little unique places.

It's wonderful to visit Prague, but if you're a citizen of the Information Society, you can't touch that place without denting it. Every quiet and hidden place in the world bears our fingerprints now. As the seasoned travel writer Pico Iyer likes to put it, it's Video Night in Katmandu.

For me this situation is great. Basically, I live and breathe and thrive through cultural imperialism. I have four books out in Denmark this year. You see, I got interviewed by some stranger over the Internet, and it turned out he worked for a major newspaper in Copenhagen. Suddenly and quite without my own intention, I became rather well-known in Denmark. This October I'm flying to Copenhagen to do my one-man corporate multinational thing.

I'll be an American science fiction writer living it up in Denmark. How many Danish science fiction writers do I know? Zero. I know they must exist, so I hope I'll meet some. For me to get published in their country - it's easy, it's something I can do by accident. For a Danish science fiction writer to get published in my country - they'd have better luck trying to ooze face-first through a one-way mirror.

Is the Internet really a many-to-many, egalitarian network? Is a guy with a modem in Copenhagen or Montreal really on the same level as a guy with a modem in Austin or San Francisco? I'd like to think that is the case. Although it clearly isn't.

Personally, I like to talk to remote strangers on the Internet. I always go out of my way to reply politely to these odd characters around the planet with their unlikely Internet addresses and their entertainingly broken English - English which, by the way, is always a million times better than my French, my Russian, my Czech, my Danish, or my Japanese.

The good news is that I can chat with distant strangers. The bad news is that while I'm on the Internet, I'm not chatting to my next door neighbor. I'm not going to any neighborhood rallies, I'm not throwing parties for local friends, I'm not babysitting other people's kids. It may be that I'm not even talking to my own children, who are off in the living room being raised by Nintendo. Sure, I can trade digital video clips with hackers in Borneo over World Wide Web, but for all I know my next-door neighbor is a serial killer with an icebox full of his acquaintances.

Is this a pernicious aspect of the Information Society? Well, how will we know? Who can tell? Who's keeping track? Suppose it were pernicious - how would they stop me? Are the police supposed to unplug and confiscate my modem, tell me to go to the local Rotary Club and stop typing messages to people in Djakarta and Vladivostok? By what right?

There's always something new in cyberspace circles. It's unfailingly entertaining, you've got to give it that. There's a scandal a week, sometimes two. I wrote a nonfiction true-crime book about one of these cyberspace scandals once - it took me a year and a half to do it. I could write a similar book once every week if there were fifty-two of me.