From: Robert Hettinga <rah@shipwright.com>
Date: Sun, 21 Dec 1997 00:23:44 +0800
To: cypherpunks@cyberpass.net
Subject: getting beyond cyberspace
Message-ID: <v04002715b0c19d259258@[139.167.130.248]>
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More proof that old Hegelians never die, they just synthesize themselves
into nonsense. Or, if you give a Hegelian enough time with no data, he'll
synthesize himself a rope and hang himself with. Or something.

Then there's the old logic joke: "There are two kinds of people, those who
use dichotomies and those who don't." :-).

Cheers,
Bob Hettinga

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From: Phil Agre <pagre@weber.ucsd.edu>
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Subject: getting beyond cyberspace
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[When important new technologies come along, they create an imaginative
vacuum, and that vacuum is often filled with millenarian ideologies such
as the one about cyberspace.  Once the millennialists start promising world
peace, however, we can be sure that their day has passed, and that it is
time for a new ideology that is grounded in concrete attempts to integrate
the emerging technology with the real institutional world.  The enclosed
column about the reality check that can be glimpsed beyond the ideology
of cyberspace appeared in the November/December 1997 issue of Technology
Review.  The TR people picked the title.  The column was invited as an
"audition" for a regular columnist's position in the radically overhauled
version of Technology Review that is due in the spring.  I didn't pass
the audition.  Which is how it goes, of course, although I and many others
are waiting with some concern to see whether the new magazine retains the
integrity of the classic version.]

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  The Next Internet Hero

  Phil Agre
  http://communication.ucsd.edu/pagre/

  Copyright 1997 by MIT's Technology Review.  You may forward this
  article to anyone for any noncommercial purpose, provided that
  you forward it in its entirety, including this copyright notice.


Every new technology is accompanied by a grand narrative.  The
Internet's grand narratives have focused on heroes: people who are
leading the transition to a more information-intensive society.  The
Internet has produced two generations of hero figures.  Now it's time
for a third.

The first hero was the good hacker.  The Internet originated in a
special setting -- the community funded by the Advanced Research
Projects Agency (ARPA).  These earliest hackers were establishment
revolutionaries.  Their guiding narrative was that information
technology and human beings are symbiotic elements of a larger system.
They owned the biggest computers and they defined the technologies
that became the Internet.

The next hero was the rebel hacker.  The second generation viewed
hacking as something that happens outside of established institutions.
Electronic mail, for example, symbolized and sometimes aided
resistance to hierarchy.  Rebel hackers include the "cypherpunks", who
resist authority by propagating robust encryption software.  But rebel
hackers can be found in practically any organization; they were the
folks who spent their evenings and weekends creating the first million
or so Web pages during the early-to-mid 1990s.  More social movement
than business practice, these Web projects were rarely integrated into
organizational procedures or strategies.

The rebel hacker is guided by the notion of cyberspace, a digital
ether that transcends the obsolete constraints of the physical
world.  This is a religious idea, and it inherits a long millenarian
tradition.  It promises to level hierarchies, erase borders, confound
the powers of the earth, and institute a perpetual utopia of peace
and plenty for all.  A belief in cyberspace is the twentieth century's
last revolutionary ideology.

The grand narrative of cyberspace, however, no longer tells us what we
need to know.  The rebel hackers derived their revolutionary edge from
the continuing rapid growth in microprocessor power, telecommunications
bandwidth, and data storage capacity.  Dramatic improvements in
information technology, they said, would surely turn society inside
out.  But this argument is misleading.  We can indeed be confident
that the basic building blocks of computers and networks will continue
to improve.  But we cannot predict what will be built from them -- the
architecture of the many-layered information infrastructure that is
rapidly emerging around the world.

The questions are endless: Will online commerce systems support
anonymous payment, or will they keep complete records of our
transactions?  Will our communications systems let users screen
out unwanted messages, or will we drown in mass mailings?  Will
educational systems support new kinds of learning, or merely introduce
new forms of rote drill?  Will the Internet continue to embody the
scientific community's values of open information, or will it converge
with the business models of broadcast media?  The answers to these
questions are not dictated by the basic workings of the machinery.
They are matters not for prediction but for choice.  The Internet
is becoming integrated with institutions, influencing them and
being influenced in turn.  Society needs institutions, after all,
and information technology provides us with a tremendous opportunity
to redesign our institutions in ways that express the values of a
democratic society.  This is not a job for the rebel hacker, who is
sworn simply to resist the bad institutions of yore.

That's why we need a new kind of Internet hero: the public hacker.
Whereas the good hacker and the rebel hacker changed the world by
changing technology, the public hacker builds bridges between the
esoteric world of technical work and the bigger, messier world in
which values are argued and chosen.  The public hacker is bilingual,
translating between technical issues and legal issues, between
the dynamics of systems and the dynamics of communities, between
technological visions and social visions.

The public hacker still invents technologies when they're necessary,
propagates them when they're useful, and defends them when they
deserve it.  But this new hero's imagination is not entirely driven
by the machinery.  Some examples: Mitchell Kapor, co-founder of
the Electronic Frontier Foundation, helped catalyze a remarkably
broad-based public discussion of the social values at stake as
we create the information infrastructure.  Peter Neumann edits an
Internet forum, the Risks Digest, that has sensitized innumerable
computer people to the things that go wrong with computer systems in
real institutional settings.  And Pamela Samuelson brings technical
and legal analysis together in the public sphere, helping policymakers
tackle the intellectual property issues that arise in digital media.

If these people don't seem like traditional heroes, perhaps we need
a new conception of heroism.  Revolutionary heroes changed the world
in a unilateral way.  Now we need heroes who can help us imagine our
options.

end

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-----------------
Robert Hettinga (rah@shipwright.com), Philodox
e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
The e$ Home Page: http://www.shipwright.com/
Ask me about FC98 in Anguilla!: <http://www.fc98.ai/>