Literary Freeware: Not for Commercial Use

Every machine you see here will be trucked out and buried in a landfill, and never spoken of again, within a dozen years … The values are what matters. The values are the only things that last, the only things that *can* last. Hack the hardware, not the Constitution. Hold on tight to what matters, and just hack the rest. I used to think that cyberspace was 50 years away. What I thought was 50 years away, was only 10 years away. And what I thought was 10 years away – it was already here. I just wasn’t aware of it yet.

Cyberspace 2020

Cyberspace is defined and delineated first and foremost by its content. And its future depends not on our ability to police it, but rather upon what we collectively build there that is of real public assistance and social value.

Cyberspace 2020

A number of fundamental issues … may have significant ramifications on how the Information Age unfolds: surveillance and public safety vs. privacy through encryption and anonymity, censorship vs. free expression, more control vs. a decentralized anarchy of information. On the surface, some of these issues appear fairly clear-cut. Unauthorized access to computers is already covered by legislation. Cases of libel or copyright violations are easily settled by the courts under current laws, provided that one can find who is responsible for such transgressions. Yet even seemingly clear-cut issues can have mind-twisting digital implications.

Cyberspace 2020

Scientists and researchers on different continents will probably work jointly on projects with a degree of collaboration that is unrealistic today. Undoubtedly we will see the rise of the virtual salesperson who makes calls to businesses and homes in some fashion over the global Net. These things are predictable because new technologies tend first to be used to do familiar tasks more cheaply and easily.

The Future is Already Here

A fleet of passenger vans, each equipped with a global-positioning system and cellular phone … all linked by computer to a central dispatching program, would provide total customized coverage of every street and every neighborhood in town, 25 hours a day. Through the computer and the cell phones, drivers would receive destination instructions; using GPS, dispatchers would keep tabs on the real-time progress of each vehicle. Passengers would call up the service, be met with minimum delay, transfer only if necessary and relax while professional drivers took them to their desired destination.