The technologies are obvious; the businesses in which to use them are not. The real innovation won’t come from multimedia mastery or circuit sorcery. The engineer and the artist are both equally handicapped. The trick is to figure out what a new medium would really look like. The problem is to anticipate a future that is just beyond the obvious but not disconnected from the present. The challenge is to invent a new industry.
If past is prologue, the predominant uses will differ considerably from those being hyped today – the 500 channels of entertainment, virtual vacations and electronic newspapers.
The coming of a global, technologically-mediated culture means that the boundaries we have been using to define our allegiances – national, religious, cultural – will break down. The greatest enemy to any fundamentalist regime is media, because media acts like water, slowly eroding ideological barricades. Meanwhile, individualists fear the coming of a monoculture, as iconography from the West washes over the unique landscapes of particular regions, while integrationists fear that 500 separate channels of cable television and hundreds of thousands of Internet Newsgroups will break up our world into isolated segments of like-minded individuals … Neither nightmare need occur … I see human culture becoming like a biological culture … where many individuals link together for common purpose, and where this linking … augments each member’s ability to influence the organism.
Coping in Cyberia means using our currently limited human language, bodies, emotions, and social realities to usher in something that’s supposed to be free of those limitations … The next earth-shattering meme to hit the newsstands or computer nets may be the result of a failed relationship, a drug bust, an abortion on acid, or even a piss over the side of the porch. Cyberia is frightening to everyone. Not just to technophobes, rich businessmen, midwestern farmers, and suburban housewives, but, most of all, to the boys and girls hoping to ride the crest of the informational wave. Surf’s up.
Be it a symptom of social decay, cyberian genesis, or both, the growth of new colonialism around and within our old systems and structures brings a peculiar sort of darkness-before-dawnishness to the close of this millennium.
Maybe the cyberian technologies are not intrinsically liberating. While they do allow for cultural change through principles such as feedback and iteration, it appears that they can almost as quickly be subverted by those who are unready or unwilling to accept the liberation they could offer. But others present convincing arguments that the operating principles of Cyberia eventually will win out and create a more just Global Village.
The Internet tomorrow … is going to be a kind of seamless mesh of transport networks, telephone networks, mass-media networks with the Internet tying it together, and every conceivable kind of interface to those networks will likely be used for navigating.
I think the Internet will be the universal open interface amongst any kind of a device with a computer in it. I think things like the World Wide Web, browsers and Java will be the universal open navigation and application interface.
When the entire procession of historical, biological, and cosmological events is reanalyzed in the light of modern mathematical discoveries like the fractal and feedback loops, it points toward this era – the turn of the century – as man’s leap out of history altogether and into the timeless dimension of Cyberia.
We will eventually figure out how to allow groups of people to form, run and own new corporate entities by means of action taken entirely through the Net. These new electronic corporations will be allowed to own property and take action in the real world on behalf of their owner/managers. They will be legal persons. And they will change the very nature of human collaboration.