The rise of client/server computing and groupware will further alter our way of working: Instead of using your own personal computer and then sharing data with other people, you will use the network for what Steve Jobs calls “interpersonal computing.” Both the location of the data and the means by which it is obtained are quickly becoming completely transparent.
For all the glitter and gold out there on the frontier, there is, existing simultaneously, a sinister side to cyberspace. It is an aspect of life that every community, whether real or virtual, has to deal with. So even as we look to the network and to the first colonies on the electronic frontier to empower human beings with the tools of the Information Age, to improve people’s lives, and to provide entertainment and enjoyment, the potential for harm in the networked community may become more than a “virtual reality”; it may become a real reality.
All media, if they are to get a jump-start in the market and become successful, must address themselves to mass drives – those things we hold in common as basic human needs … And now we have come to the “digital age” where all information and images can be digitized; where all bits are equal, but some are hotter than others … Progress marches on. In time, robotics will deliver household servants and sex slaves.
Interactivity is not about obscuring the game with layers of statistics or talking pictures of grandpa. Rather, it’s about pulling the audience out of the armchair and pushing them into the baseball park. It’s about flying around the stadium and becoming a player in the game. These more subtle forms of interaction-based on simulation and spatial metaphor – hold much greater promise … It is this vision of interactivity that will sell new media technology in the long run.
Diversity is valuable if something goes wrong. [With global communications like the Internet,] we’re taking down all the barriers, and I’m not sure that’s a good thing.
The fundamental security interests of the West lie in helping Russia to create a communications infrastructure … Without it, Russia and all the other republics will remain a powder keg where the three largest players still have thousands of nuclear weapons.
It is too early to tell what the digital counterculture will call itself, but the history of the hippies offers a clue … the tekkies will arrive sometime in the mid-1990s, if not sooner. Watch the skies for a new comet – it will be digital, and its tail is likely to glow in Technicolor swirls. Its arrival will change our lives forever.
The digital counterculture will reject [the sci-fi film “Blade Runner’s”] bleak vision of a future in which technology enlarges the human spirit as a new tool for consciousness in much the same way that the hippies appropriated the psychoactive chemical spinoffs of the military-industrial complex. This new movement will be cyberpunk imbued with human warmth … the gospel of the post-cyberpunk movement will be one of machines in the service of enlarging our humanity.
Bush did virtually everything that Clinton promises to do, and because Bush has done it already it doesn’t leave Clinton much room except to play cock-a-doodle-do. He’ll get up on the post and crow as the marvelous sunrise technologies come blindingly to the fore during his administration. They’re going to have 50,000 technology programs and lo and behold, a million technologies will bloom and they will take credit for it all.
There are going to be a lot of big fiber projects in the next decade. They’re already coming right now. I’m sort of worried that they’re going to think too small … The fibersphere is a big project, and it will take scores of thousands of small companies to do it.