I have been thinking about new architectural features for the Internet that allow a kind of semipermeable membrane that lets the company put some of its assets in a private setting, so that they’re only accessible to other parts of the company or some discretionarily selected group. We still have to find ways of distinguishing between access points.
Computers and the Internet may force artists out of the increasingly esoteric discourse of the art world. A broader audience may demand that they reintegrate their work with larger issues related to science, technology, and humanism … Computers may also force radical artists to return to a notion of craft. In the contemporary art world, painstaking studio process often seems to matter less than an up-to-the-minute ironic pose. Artists of the past had to grapple with techniques ranging from draftsmanship to fresco painting if they wanted to achieve greatness. Their creative inheritors may have to master digital tools if they hope to reach beyond the restrictive walls of galleries and museums.
There’s a big cinder block stuck on the technology accelerator pedal, and we’re only gonna go faster and faster, never stopping. I think technology is good once again.
Content is the key to national security and national competitiveness … We must make available to each citizen the richest possible information commons. National intelligence is the empowerment of the individual citizen … In the Information Age, national intelligence will either be put in the service of the citizen and in the context of private-sector information capabilities that are unclassified, or it will be slowly and painfully eliminated from the budget of the nation.
A “Decentral” Intelligence Agency … provides a way to master the flood of multimedia, multilingual, multichannel information collected, analyzed, and disseminated by millions of autonomous sources each day … the federal government must empower all of its people to gain access to the kind of distributed intelligence that is impossible to create within a single “Central” Intelligence Agency. The supporting elements of this new vision include connectivity, content, and coordination, among others. Connectivity is well along, because it is a tangible “thing” that most bureaucrats and private-sector profiteers can understand … We citizens must instruct our government in the basic truths of the Age of Information.
One of the great ironies of information economics is that while information can be trivially copied and the information bandwidth continues to widen, the individual’s attention bandwidth is as narrow as ever. In information economics, post-scarcity reaches its reduction ad absurdum.
If anyone’s going to be the informational mogul of South China, it’s probably Cheung … Cheung wants to extend the Net into China, and a lot of Chinese badly want him to do it … because they want to network their offices together, in China and other parts of Asia, without having to lease lines … It’s going to be a long time before the Net reaches the Chinese masses. So Cheung doesn’t think that electronic communications will cause any political changes in China except insofar as the free flow of information tends, over a long period, to make the economy more productive and lead to the development of a middle class.
The Network is spreading across China … We’d like to think of it as the grassroots of democracy, but the Chinese are just as apt to think of it as a finely engineered snare for tying the whole country together even more firmly than its predecessor, the human Net of the Red Guards … Sometime within the next couple of decades, I’m expecting to turn on CNN (or BBC if I can get it) and see a jittery home videotape smuggled out of South China, showing a heap of smashed and burning cellphones, satellite dishes, and television sets piled up in a public square in Shenzhen, and, as backdrop, a giant mural portraying a vigorous new leader in Beijing.
“Let the plumbers build the pipes, and we will use them” – Sorry, but thatÕs not good enough. That retreating battle cry has only sustained a gigantic bandwidth, protocol, and network management quagmire. It will get worse, too. Think about all the video, audio, and other data that you will soon need to send across a WAN … Add to that the ongoing efforts to push more and more data out to branch offices to empower those staffs. Soon you can imagine the tremendous demands that business – your business – could place on the data highway. None of us has all the answers, but collectively we can offer some pretty sound advice on what a data highway ought to be.
In another three years, it will be common for people to make money. There’s a market for people who can sell information [subscriptions, access] at $35 to $50 a year.