From: jcarroll@ferris.cray.com (Jeff Carroll)
Subject: Re: Bruce Sterling & Cyberhemian Rhapsodies
Originator: jcarroll@ferris
Organization: Cray Research, Inc.
Date: 3 Oct 92 18:14:45 CDT


 ahawks@nyx.cs.du.edu (scooby dooby doo):
>  Bruce Sterling has been fairly outspoken on the question of information
>as commodity, and the idea of knowledge as power.  What we, the citizens
>of cyberspace, fail to realize is that we as a collective group have the
>means of storing, analyzing, regurgitating more information than ever
>before.  Thus, we should be the richest, most powerful community in the
>world.

ah, but all information is not equal. The information we have is not
nearly as valuable as the information we do not have. This is dictated
by the very fact that we have it.

Today money itself is nothing but information. A dollar is a message,
of which any person or entity (outside the Federal Reserve) has only a
finite number. This is information which of course will never be shared.

Another case of information more valuable than we have floating around
on the net is the information we would need to set off someone's nuclear
weapons.

This is what bothers me about Gibson's vision of cyberspace: there is no
practical reason whatsoever to make financial databases accessible on a
public network as a three-dimensional virtual object that can be attacked
at will by a Nintendo jockey.

I think it's more practical to talk about "cyberspaces" in the plural;
We will have cyberspaces in which we work, and in which we play. For
people like me, the "work" and "play" cyberspaces may coincide. For
people who work in the financial industry, or people who work with
classified information, or people whose business needs to be confidential,
they will not.

You probably already have access to multiple cyberspaces in your home. The telephone itself is a cyberspace port, and you can use it to access others
(usenet, fidonet, prodigy...). Your TV set is another interface to another 
cyberspace (whether broadcast or cable). A ham radio rig is yet another.

Just because the troposphere has an electromagnetic spectrum doesn't mean
that all our transmissions have to travel there. In fact, right now most
people have two spectra traveling into their homes that are (theoretically,
anyway) independent of the radio spectrum; the TV cable, and the telephone 
line.

Information will still be physically secured, and you'll still have to
physically break into the bank (or the bank's network, anyway) in order
to rob it.

I think that the cyberspace culture we're likely to wind up with is better
described by Hesse's _Glasperlenspiel_ than by Gibson's work. Sort of a
huge virtual hermitage/video-game arcade/MUD, in which the virtualization
of the space is completed by the virtualization of personality. Only the
unwise among us fail to consider the relationship that our usenet personalities
bear to our professional and real personalities, at present; someday our
virtual spaces may allow us the luxury of virtual personalities, but only
as a sort of game, only in realms that are incapable of penetrating the
spaces where the important info lives.

This is not to say that the tools of recreational cyberspace won't also
have their professional uses; only that we won't dare to put the really
important information where just anybody can get at it.

Jeff Carroll
carroll@lemon.cray.com
"The dice of God are always loaded." - Emerson
Newsgroups: alt.cyberspace