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Newsgroups: alt.society.civil-liberty From: aq817@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Steve Crocker) Subject: Political & Social Implications of the Net Date: 5 Jul 1994 09:14:07 GMT Organization: Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio (USA) Message-ID: <2vb88v@usenet.INS.CWRU.Edu> Lines: 850

The following is a little something I wrote up a couple of years back, with a few update notes attached to the end. I'm posting it here because I think it has relevance to the occasional voices on this thread who have suggested that the appropriate arena in which to conduct the fight for Constitutional freedom is in information space. I hope at least some here will find it of interest.

-Steve

This document is a heavily edited compilation of my writing on a variety of occasions on the implications of the Net for the questions of political freedom and democracy in the U.S. Because it is a compilation, different sections may vary in emphasis, style, language and clarity. I've tried to smooth out the rough spots and to the extent possible work this document into a coherent whole. If I wasn't entirely successful, feel free to concentrate on the sections that have something worthwhile to say to you, and ignore the rest.

-Steve Crocker 10/9/92 (Spell checked 10/29/92)

THE POLITICAL AND SOCIAL IMPLICATIONS OF THE NET

There have been increasing conversations lately about the importance of the Net as a vehicle for positive change in our society. I want to set down a few of my thoughts about why the Net is important, what forces might threaten its viability as a force for change, and some priority issues to be considered by those who have a commitment to maintaining and expanding the Net as an uncensored medium of widespread communication.

PROLOGUE - THE PROBLEM OF HUMAN BANDWIDTH

The word "bandwidth" is one of those unique terms which is almost universally socialized within the cultural environment of the net, but relatively little known off-line, except in highly technical contexts. On the Net it is understood by the technically literate as a fairly precise measure of information transmissible per unit time. To others, it has a more casually defined meaning, relating to the amount of information that can be comfortably dealt with in a given context. I will be using the term primarily in this more casual sense, but with the technical meaning consistently lurking in the background to more richly inform the metaphors.

So, let me begin with a few thoughts on limited bandwidth, and how the variety of responses to the bandwidth problem have helped both shape and pervert society. Limited bandwidth is the dilemma faced by the anarchist who advocates absolute political freedom, and the LSD enthusiast (being epistemologically anarchist), who advocates total PERCEPTUAL freedom.

ANARCHISM REFUTED - THE NEED FOR HIERARCHY

We cannot know everything, we cannot even pay attention effectively to everything in our immediate surroundings, and as social beings, we cannot pay attention to all possible inputs, or even all relevant inputs from those around us. So the solution is structured limitation of our attention. We pay attention within certain more or less rigidly defined patterns of time and space. In addition our attention is organized hierarchically. That is to say that our attention is focussed on certain trusted "gatekeeper" concepts or individuals or institutions which we permit to direct and structure our attention within their particular subordinate domains. For example we may trust a friend or a literary critic to recommend a good book or Time, CBS and the AP to define our news. Within individual perceptions, concepts play a similar role. Something that appears genuinely new we examine closely in all its uniqueness, while something that fits in one of our existing pigeonholes we will respond to automatically, based on its concept-label.

So if this is a perhaps regrettable but necessary function, where is the problem? Are not the conservative critics of LSD philosophy right all along? Do we not NEED perceptual and conceptual structures to make any sense out of the universe at all? Do we not dissolve them, even partially and temporarily at our peril? Is it not true that society could never truly live at the intense fever pitch of revolutionary change, in which all may be questioned, and the pillow you sleep on tonight may be washed away with the flood of the new dawn?

BUT ALL HIERARCHIES ARE NOT CREATED EQUALLY USEFUL

Welllll.... Yes and then again hmmmmm....

Some time ago I got hold of the book "Coup D'Etat - A Practical Handbook by Edward Luttwak. Although I did not read most of it, I could not help but be struck by his opening observation that in a coup d'etat, unlike a popular revolution, it is the security force of the State which is subverted and caused to strike against the State. The parallel here should escape no one. Our structures of percept, concept and individual and social attention are the security structures of our individual and social consciousness. They perform the necessary function of insulating us from the raw flood of pure information (pure chaos) which at absolute intensity would be survivable only by the Creator. But what happens when the gateways of our consciousness are manned by alien sentries? What happens when the security forces of our mind are subverted by those whose purpose is not to Create but to destroy?

We are in deeeeep shit!

The LSD revolution attempted to address this problem by breaking down partially and temporarily the structures of consciousness, in the hope that from the raw flood of information could be Created new conceptual systems which would be more appropriate to the latent structures present in the Chaos. The main reason it didn't work appears to have been signal to noise ratio. To descend from poetic metaphysics and speak plainly, LSD makes just too darn good a brainwashing tool (although perhaps brain-sculpting would be the truly appropriate phrase). It is just too easy for unscrupulous people to feed Acid to those too inexperienced to judge their trip environment, and subject them to the imprinting of proprietary control structures (and in the case of eg. Charlie Manson, extraordinarily destructive ones). Thus Acid, which once appeared to hold hope as a solution, now appears as part of the problem.

Well, obviously we have to address the bandwidth problem somehow. Equally obviously this is much too important to be left to the Usual Suspects.

THE LAST UNCENSORED MASS MEDIUM

WE LIVE IN A FREE COUNTRY (NOT!)

I have called the Net the last (accidentally) uncensored mass medium. It does not take a rocket scientist to realize that "they" decide what appears in newspapers, magazines, books, and on radio and TV, whereas WE decide what will appear on the Net. If anybody sincerely believes that the presently restricted level of access to the more conventional mass media is due to the completely accidental interplay of technical, economic and social forces, you may well not sympathize with the rest of this analysis. If you feel that access was restricted at least in part due to a deliberate effort to prevent the widespread dissemination of viewpoints that might threaten the "stability" of the status quo, then don't feel like the Lone Ranger. It should not have escaped anybody who has been paying attention that America is presently ruled by an oligarchical elite which is, if not yet outrightly fascist, certainly proto-fascist.

It is clear that such a group can only maintain its rule while preserving nominally democratic forms of government if it is able to establish limits on allowable large-scale public discourse. In other words the oligarchy needs a veto power on ideas that can be effectively expressed in mass forums. As long as the mass forums were limited to the 3 major networks and the 2 wire services and a handful of leading newspapers and magazines, it was fairly straightforward to accomplish this level of control behind the scenes through old boy networks, financial influence and the time honored principles of "follow the leader" and "monkey see, monkey do". As communication becomes less centrally controlled, it becomes increasingly possible that "rogue elements" from outside the oligarchical consensus might earn the attention of a significant number of people. To forestall this possibility the oligarchy needs a social consensus establishing mechanisms and conditions of censorship. This is one of the not so hidden agendas of the "PC" controversy - whether a category of "hate speech" can be created which can be suppressed either by law as the liberals would have it or by the voluntary exercise of property rights on the part of the privately owned mass media as would be preferred by the free enterprisers.

WHO CONTROLS SOCIALIZED IMAGES CONTROLS BEHAVIOR

Our behavior is largely controlled by the image bank we carry around in our brains. These images are our primary tools of conceptualization, which we use in understanding who we are, where we are situated in society and in history, and what actual or potential significance our activities have in life. To draw an extreme example, somebody who grew up reading biographies of Abraham Lincoln or Amelia Earheart will view their aspirations in life quite differently from someone who grew up watching Budwiser commercials. Our SOCIAL behavior is similarly directed by the images we have SOCIALIZED - images we collectively share with those around us. Nuclear power plant operator Homer Simpson is a socialized image. The "nuplex" concept of integrated nuclear-industrial complexes as described by nuclear engineer Jon Gilbertson, among others, is not. If I want to comment on some issue of the day to a cab driver, a co-worker, or somebody I see in the bar, it had better be an issue which has been "validated" by showing up on the evening news or in USA Today (or in other circles, The New York Times, the Washington Times-Post, the New Republic/National Review, etc.) Sure, if I know another person REALLY WELL, I can talk to them about something that I thought up myself, or read in a "fringe" publication. But to be able to talk to casual acquaintances about issues, it is necessary to repeat sound bites.

BUT TECHNOLOGY MARCHES ON

And then along comes the Net. Because of decentralized origination of messages, the inability of one poster to interrupt another, the lack of a mechanism to censor content, and the speedy but non-sychnronous mode of the conversation it is possible for "fringe" ideas to be heard and to rise or fall on their merits, alongside conventional ideas. Thus, we have a real possibility, for the first time in many years, to create communities of thought in which our socialized images are constructed in a participatory fashion, and can reflect reality as we actually experience it, rather than as some central authority has decided it is appropriate to appear. To most of the world off-line Danny Casolaro, the investigative reporter who died investigating the network of corrupt government officials and others he called "The Octopus", is still "Danny Who?". On the Net a small but active community exists that believes that knowing what happened to this inquiring mind will give us an important clue to what happened to our country.

And the Net is not just an information source. The Net is interactive. Increasing the aggregate bandwidth available to people concerned with stopping the New World (Fascist) Order will make possible new levels of conversation and consensus not possible under more limiting regimes. Ultimately, we may actually realize the ideal of the old New Left (and the Founding Fathers !), of democratic participation of the people in shaping political programs.

I keep coming back to the image of old Ben Franklin and his printing press. Franklin understood that the British Empire was a dinosaur. Its bandwidth was no longer sufficient to support the extent of its body. So he used the innovative medium of his time to CREATE bandwidth, thus setting into motion a form of social organization which could move faster and plan smarter than its obsolete competitor. So today we have the Net, the last accidentally uncensored mass medium in existence. Is it a toy of the rich and the ivory tower, or is it potent? Already, even in its adolescence, the stories are beginning to be told. Whispered through keyboards at midnight, downloaded around half a world through a web of invisible satellite links and gossamer fiber optic are the legends that tell of a time when brave men and women stood and fought and fell and died for a thing called freedom in a place called Tianemen Square, and the Net stood and fought beside them, and though it did not in the end defeat the Enemy, the Enemy was not able to kill it. So, will we allow such legends, such benign myths, to shape our sense of who we are? Will we allow ourself to be possessed by the vision of a Net whose purpose is to help create and support HEROES? Or will we dismiss it all with a keystroke, and get back to the REAL FUN STUFF on alt.flame.joe.schmuck.the.world's.greatest.poophead ?

Maybe Marshall McLuhan was right. Maybe the medium is the message. Maybe the Medium is the Movement. Maybe the only way to ultimately defeat an organism such as the Octopus is to create an organism of superior design which will be capable of outthinking, outorganizing and outmaneuvering it. Maybe the Net is already the existing nucleus of such an organism.

The thing which has permitted the Octopus and its masters to rule while maintaining outwardly democratic forms is the combination of an other-directed culture combined with the ability to shape the images portrayed in the national mass media, and thus shape our socialized perception of political and cultural reality as a set of programmed constructs. If the Net Culture already existing in usenet, Fidonet, and other anarcho-democratic forums can actually be ported to an expanded on-line mass community, then the Oligarchy would ultimately be faced with either relinquishing power, or abandoning the mask of democracy.

The Net presents the irony of a subversive institution originated and largely financed by the government. I like to think that some social genius in the long ago days of early ArpaNet and Usenet foresaw the spread of networking beyond the realms of .gov, .mil, .com, and .edu. I like to think that one of the reasons we are configured with decentralized routing, decentralized origination, and redundant links is that that same genius foresaw the need for a network that would exhibit "survivability" not only in the face of enemy attack, but in the face of an attack by our own rulers. But whether the architects of the Net wrought better than they knew, or exactly as they intended, the result is the same. We enjoy the last uncensored, and for the moment uncensorable mass medium in the U.S., and perhaps in the world. This has got to be making certain people rather unhappy. (Unless anybody thinks that George Bush and his ilk ENJOY having all the facts and all the plausible rumors of their crimes and treasons posted here for an ever growing number of the educated elite to read). So what is the solution?

TWO BASIC PRINCIPLES WORTH DEFENDING

A recommendation - maintain at all costs decentralized administration of Net related hardware and redundant links. NO SINGLE INSTITUTION, INDIVIDUAL OR ORGANIZED VIEWPOINT SHOULD BE IN A POSITION TO MAKE A CREDIBLE THREAT TO SUBSTANTIALLY DISRUPT TRAFFIC.

I think this is worth codifying as Crocker's first law of net.freedom. And the second is like unto it:

CONTINUE THE CUSTOM THAT MOST GROUPS ARE PUBLICALLY READABLE AND A SUBSTANTIAL NUMBER OF THESE ALLOW UNMODERATED POSTING.

BALANCING FREEDOM AND STRUCTURE - THE RIGHT QUESTIONS

The central operational problem for defining a Net which is simultaneously structured and free would appear to be the technical one of providing gatekeeping and attention structuring mechanisms which are firm and stable enough to perform their function but are sufficiently decentralized and flexible to prevent them being taken over by aliens [*]. If I had the answer to that one, I'd stop working for a living and run for God. I could probably manage a few provocative suggestions, though.

[*] By "aliens" I refer to the Bad Guys, The Net-Fascists, the Conspiracy, the Reactionaries, George Bush, the FBI/CIA/NSA/IRS/ETC, the Politically Correct Liberals, the Corporate Culture, the Yuppies, the Media Elite, the Entertainment Industry, the Mindless, and anyone else who we can agree by consensus ought not to be allowed to dominate our consciousness, our culture or our Net. (Obviously this is my intensely personal list of villains - your mileage may vary).

AS THE NET GROWS - ISSUES TO CONFRONT

In many ways, the Net is only an adolescent, with the incredible combination of brilliance and stupidity and of promise and rampant silliness which has probably characterized adolescence forever. To cause it to actually live up to its potential, there are things which need to happen and things which need to be avoided.

EXPANSION

I think we all have wished that the Net were more universal. We are vastly underrepresented in areas such as poor people, industrial workers, housewives, young children, policy makers, and senior professionals. We need to find effective means of outreach to all these groups, and more. And that's only in North America. The extension of the Net into the Third World is a problem, parallel in some ways to that of including the poor and under-educated of North America, but also complicated by unique problems of infrastructure and political economy.

The question of technical and educational barriers to access is relevant here. Many poor people also lack basic educational skills. Even many people who may be high school graduates who work and support a family may lack the familiarity with computers to feel comfortable with today's Net interfaces. To remedy this, we need not only conventional computer literacy, and more user-friendly interfaces, but also more hands-on access to the Net in schools, churches, union halls, libraries, and the like.

I believe that the Net can and should play an important role in making representative democracy work in the 21st century in the way it was envisioned in the 18th. I hope to be around when the time comes that open advisory groups of net.citizens routinely advise their representatives on the issues of the day, and when the net.community is strong enough at the polls to defeat any representative who routinely and casually disregards the net.consensus. And by that time, this had better be a Net of the people, by the people, and for the people, or else we will have wrought nothing better than an Athenian style "democracy" existing on the backs of a disenfranchised lower class.

Expansion is not an unmixed blessing, however. As we expand there is a danger of having the cultural traditions which have been developed by trial and error over the years overwhelmed. These customs, although not perfect, have by and large been successful in allowing the Net to WORK. A first approximation suggestion would be to attempt to manage Net expansion in such a way that at any given moment, the population of Net citizens online for less than (say) 6 months should constitute a minority of the total Net population. This will allow our culture to evolve in a somewhat orderly way, rather than simply being swept away by ignorance, well intentioned or otherwise.

ECONOMICS

This is a central issue related to the problem of expansion. To those of us with moderate or better incomes, computers and Net access appear to be cheap. But cheap is relative. To those for who a phone or an automobile is only a dream (and I count several such among my own acquaintance) Net access is an essentially meaningless luxury. However, it's not QUITE as bad as that sentence makes it sound. Most people who don't have cars still find somebody to give them rides. Most people who don't have phones have phones somewhere they can use, and, amazingly, even many of the very poor manage to have a TV and even have a friend or relative with Cable. So, I think if we can get the price of a net capable box down around that of a used TV, and a Net connection down around the price of a phone line, or of cable, we can probably provide at least sporadic Net access to all but the bottom 10% or so of the population. My recommendation here is to establish a means of cheap or free Net Access. Anybody who has a phone or a TV should find it economically feasible to access the Net. An absolute upper limit should be a cost comparable to getting cable, but I would prefer to see it substantially lower.

OVERLOAD

This problem exists on two distinct levels. The bandwidth of the available hardware does not YET appear to be seriously threatened by the growing volume of traffic, but to anybody who can recognize an exponential curve when they see one, it is surely only a matter of time. It appears that between the NREN initiative and the falling price of net capable boxes and mass storage stat particular saturation point is still comfortably far away. (Although NREN does raise questions of control - to be addressed further on).

The danger of HUMAN overload is more serious. Already, a limiting factor in the usefulness of the Net to individuals is the inability of a person to read more than a minute fraction of even the news they are actually interested in. This will never be completely solved, but there are both technical and organizational steps which can alleviate it.

At least one question is probably answerable and should be addressed as a preliminary to any such effort. That is "What, in practice, is the effective limit (actually a range) to the amount of News, Mail, etc which can be read per day or per week by the "average" Net dweller. This would serve to suggest an upper range to the size of an on-line community of posters (newsgroup in Usenet, Echo in Fidonet, etc.) It would also give some parameters as to how many online communities of varying size a Net being could effectively participate in. All this merely gives specific content to the bandwidth problem as it exists in our particular medium. By itself it could serve as the rationale for the most repressive forms of Net-Fascism. Further insight is still needed.

On the technical end we need better newsreaders. I normally post with a really primitive homebrew reader here on Cleveland FreeNet whose powers of selectivity are nearly non-existent. I have used rn and it is clearly better, but the interface is not very intuitive beyond the most simple functions. Rumor has it that trn offers more flexibility, but I haven't seen it and can't comment. We need simple and intuitive software to answer questions like "Which newsgroups, which threads, which articles, and material from which individuals contain the kind of content I've said I'm interested in. Show me enough of a brief summary so that I can decide what I want to read now, later, or not at all. I like the way this poster thinks, tell me about what else they have posted. I'm interested in what is new, particularly in the newsgroups I read most often. Let me see a summary of the new threads. This article is especially interesting. Are there other articles anywhere on the system with similar content?" In short the News Reader (both Software and Human) needs to have improved mechanisms for searching the News base. These need to be simultaneously more powerful and more user friendly. (Yes, I know that's normally a trade-off but maybe with a truly excellent design team...?) I guess I'm thinking of something like Hypertext indexing with tunable parameters, with the tunability transparent to those who aren't sophisticated enough to use it. That means some Real Good defaults, as well as a cottage industry to provide parameter packages for those who want Different or even Better defaults. Now none of this, as far as I can tell, is beyond the range of today's computing power or programming technique, but somebody needs to DO it.

The problem of noise is always going to be with us. I deal with it on alt.conspiracy by just not reading any discussions on Holocaust Revisionism or detailed physical evidence of the JFK case. With a newsreader based on my wish list above, I'd do the same, but a lot more elegantly.

On the organizational end, we have a lot of what we need already. There are mechanisms for starting new groups when old groups get too big, and mechanisms for creating alternative forums like mailing lists and moderated groups to meet special needs. We need to keep an eye on these as the Net grows, to be sure that it is always easy to "move west" when the local territory gets too crowded or too civilized. At the same time, we need a counterweight to the newsgroup splitting mechanisms to encourage overlapping membership so groups do not become too insular.

ACCESS CONTROL - MANAGED PARANOIA

On the Internet scene, the two major events catalyzing a "phase change" in network management attitudes toward security were unquestionably the publication of Cliff Stoll's "The Cuckoo's Egg" and the release of the notorious "Internet Worm" by Robert Morris Jr.

WHO STOLL OUR ACCESS?

Lest I be misunderstood, I certainly don't think Cliff Stoll is wittingly participating in a campaign against net.freedom. I think he believes he is sounding a warning against an evil which might have destroyed the Net had he not acted. Look at the results, however. One of the oldest regional networks is MERIT in Michigan, which interestingly enough administers the Internet backbone under contract with NSF. They have long maintained an anonymous dialin service from major Michigan cities which allowed users anywhere in Michigan to log on remotely to their home account. With the rise of the tcp/ip protocol they implemented a telnet client available again through anonymous dialin which allowed remote access to any host on the Internet. In the wake of the Cuckoo's Egg and rtm incidents, the NSF announced a policy of "no anonymous access to the backbone". Merit quickly complied by restricting the dialin telnet client to accessing the regional subnet only. From a naive perspective this sounds perfectly reasonable, as any good repressive policy should. The effect, however, is to erect an economic barrier to Net access from Michigan. Although MERIT has never charged a fee for dialin telnet, and still nominally does not do so, there is a fairly substantial fee for setting up a MERIT account which would comply with the "no anonymous use" rule. Alternatively, one may acquire an account at a MERIT member site which will be recognized by the MERIT authorization server. Policies on these are still in flux as of this writing, however I haven't heard of any of them that are going to be cheap. The debate over subsidy versus cost recovery for Net access is a legitimate one. However, I think it is only fair that it be conducted in the light of day with the issues being called by their correct names. To sneak a charge for Net access in the back door under the guise of a security issue as was done in this case is cowardly and shameful.

JUNIOR AND SENIOR

"No job's too big No job's too small We're Father and Son We do it all." -Construction company advertising jingle

Although I believe Cliff Stoll to be innocent of sinister intent in this affair, the case of the rtm worm is a little different. Maybe I've just been reading alt.conspiracy too long :), but I can't overlook the possibility of some sort of collusion between Robert Morris Jr. of the rtm worm and Robert Morris Sr. of the National Security Agency's National Computer Security Center. Robert Morris Sr. figures prominently in the Cuckoo's Egg as one of the few high level officials to show serious concern about hacker attacks. He introduces Stoll to the Assistant Director of NSA and arranges for him to tell his story to the National Telecommunications Security Committee. We are not told whether Morris also encouraged Stoll to publish his popular account of this affair, but it is certainly a plausible possibility. Then in 1988 we encounter the famous rtm worm which brings down a substantial fraction of the Internet. When the dust settles, the author of this worm emerges as Robert Morris Jr., the son of Robert Morris the famous security expert. Well, I suppose it could be some kind of innocent Oedipal thing, rebellion against the father figure and all that. Or it could have been that the famous claim of the hacker legions finally came true for once. "We did it as a service to alert you to the holes in your security". Whatever the reason, the rtm worm along with the Cuckoo's Egg forced an attitude shift among system administrators in which security began to take priority over service and helped create an attitude in which casual access to the Net by unauthorized people was ended almost before it began.

CENSORSHIP AND CONTROL

But all is still not well. Although the potential rush of great unwashed citizens into Internet access has been slowed, if not stopped, Usenet is still alive and growing and as uncensored as ever. I would not put it past the enemy for a minute to try to attack Usenet based on the existence of the sexually oriented newsgroups. This is, however, a blunt instrument that may not by itself have the intended effect. It's not like the oligarchy really CARES who reads alt.sex.bestiality.hamster.aluminum.baseball.bat. I think they probably do MUCH stranger things to their own hamsters in the privacy of their off-line existences. It could, however, be used as a precedent to encourage individual sites to drop "objectionable" newsgroups. And now we come to the curious case of the "Holocaust Revisionists", who have been known to post huge quantities of material to politically oriented newsgroups denying the existence of the Nazi extermination of the Jews. In light of the sensitive nature of the subject, and their complete lack of headway making converts to their views, I have began to wonder if there might not be a hidden agenda at work here. Perhaps the covert purpose of this mass of offensive material is to prove to any "reasonable" person that free and open net.discussion of controversial subjects does not work and ultimately cannot be permitted. Perhaps they are intended as the "horrible example" of what happens when people take freedom of speech seriously. Maybe they are here to show us all that the First Amendment wasn't really such a great idea after all.

Does the idea of Holocaust Revisionism make you sick and angry? Congratulations. You are reacting the way they want you to. Does it make you sick and angry enough to want to close the Net to these people? Hopefully not. But if not you, probably somebody a little quicker on the trigger and a little less attached to the ideals of freedom. For if the Net is closed to such as these, it can by that precedent be closed to anyone who is sufficiently offensive to the powers that be.

BANDWIDTH AGAIN

But we have an intriguing double-bind here. Gresham's Law in economics states that "bad money drives out good". I wonder if we don't have a similar problem with "noise driving out signal". When I show any of my friends alt.conspiracy I always feel I have to apologize for the mass of Holocaust posting. There are people I don't DARE show it to, because I don't expect them to have the patience to pick and choose among the many garbage posts to find the worthwhile ones. So is this how the Net ends? Do we either accept censorship, let ourselves be drowned under the onslaught of noise, or finally find the political newsgroups dropped from more and more sites as "objectionable"? Or is there another solution? Can the accumulated wisdom of the hyperconsciousness which IS the Net find an answer which compromises neither integrity or survival? (See the section on OVERLOAD above for some suggestions).

For in the end, it really doesn't matter whether the Holocausters are doing this on purpose or not. The threat is real either way. The Net, like any young growing organism, has reached a crisis point at which it must mature or die.

COMMERCIALIZATION - ONLINE MATERIAL AS PRODUCT

The question of commercialization of online activity comes into play here in a couple of forms.

SHOULD FREEDOM OF INFORMATION BE FREE ? (WOULD YOU BELIEVE CHEAP?)

Much of the relative power imbalance between citizens on the one hand and professional politicians or bureaucrats on the other stems from the latter's greater access to specialized information. Citizens cannot responsibly exercise their democratic responsibilities of oversight and advice to government if they are deprived of timely and complete information on government activities. The legal maxim "ignorance of the Law is no excuse" becomes a mockery when the "law" occupies an ever expanding stack of shelves at the local law school library and the only people NOT "ignorant of the law" are highly trained professionals who sell the fruits of this knowledge for a substantial price.

Much of the problem alluded to above (which is fundamentally a form of the Human Bandwidth problem) could be alleviated by a policy of easy online access to legal and bureaucratic databases. However, now come services such as Westlaw which offer to sell you such access for a substantial sum. Opposed to them are access proposals from groups like the Taxpayer Asset's project whose draft bill would mandate online access to Federal databases at only the cost of providing access. Even should such a proposal be implemented, however, it will be merely an important first step. A raw online data base merely transfers the Human Bandwidth dilemma into the online environment. The key issue is easy searchability. The user of a government document access service needs to be able to quickly find documents and passages relevant to their needs, without having to wade through a mass of noise. Any online access service put into place needs to have the search and interface technology in place to address that issue.

THE THREAT OF "QUALITY"

Should "quality" productions, including multimedia and the writing of high profile authorities become a dominant feature of Net traffic ? Should large commercial BBS systems become a major player in the online environment?

<sarcasm on> Can we look forward to a Brave New Cyberspace in which anyone can get Net access for $50 per month, read reports "cybercast"[*] by the most prestigious on-line journalists, post freely to newsgroups, all of which are moderated by only the most respected experts in their fields, and say absolutely anything, with the obvious exception of posts which are offensive, flaky, off the wall, or clearly a waste of limited bandwidth? Gee whiz! Doesn't the thought make you positively drool? <sarcasm off)

[*] "Cybercasting" is an existing concept being promoted by NPTN (National Public Telecommunication Network). Read all about it on Cleveland Free-Net.

The potential threat from developments like these comes in the possibility of an economic "crowding out" effect with respect to available bandwidth. In real estate economics it is easy to observe the tendency for land to be used for whatever provides the highest rate of return. If K-Marts are more profitable than farms on a particular piece of land, the tendency is to sell your farm to somebody who will build a K-Mart. In the BBS world, the ability to make MONEY running a BBS will ultimately encourage telephone service providers to charge BBS's enhanced rates. On the Net, providers of commercial quality traffic will need to charge fees to recover the costs of production. Noticing that these providers are making money from their product, there will be a tendency for Net access providers to charge what the traffic will bear. The long run effect of this would be for the commercial quality products to crowd out the efforts of unaffiliated individuals who merely want to be heard.

Fortunately, the analogy with real estate is weak. Unlike land, bandwidth is something we CAN make more of. Unlike physical location, which is relatively fixed and whose value changes according to the existence of relatively costly infrastructure projects (e.g. freeways), location in cyberspace is much more virtual, and the value of a given location is subject to change based on the real-time perceptions of the Net community.

To summarize, commercialization of online products is a trend which should be watched closely. It will probably not succeed in crowding out non-commercial traffic as long as the quantity of available bandwidth remains large. Should the quantity of bandwidth become scarce, however, whether through monopoly, government regulation, or market forces, there will emerge a tendency for non-commercial use of the online environment to suffer.

SOME RECOMMENDATIONS

(A) Support for the efforts to mandate free or cheap searchable access to legal and bureaucratic information at all levels of government.

(B) Continuation and expansion of the custom of talented amateurs giving time and resources to serve as Sysops, News Administrators, Newsgroup or Mailing list moderators, etc. Community recognition for their services.

(C) Encourage an on-line cultural ethic which would discourage the commercialization of net access or net news editing services. Certainly these can and should exist, but their flavor should not be allowed to dominate. Let us recognize that a unique value of the Net is the grassroots participation, which by its nature is not subject to being "marketed" (at least not without changing its character to the point where much of its value is lost).

NREN AND THE GOVERNMENT CONTROL PROBLEM

I have to admit here that I am not as familiar with NREN as I should be. Thus, this will be one of the weakest sections of this document, limited to suggesting some rather obvious things to watch out for. The first and most obvious is blatant government control. If the government owns NREN, will it have the right to regulate access and/or content? The FBI has already sought legislation which would permit them easy access to digital communications carried over conventional phone lines. Will NREN be designed along the same decentralized lines as the present Internet, or will there be capabilities for access control on a centralized basis, and perhaps even a "Panic Button" to bring down the Net in a state of "National Emergency". Overall, I have to favor building NREN. Bandwidth is good. But advocates of net.freedom who have the technical expertise needed to critique working papers and design proposals should stand watchdog over every step of the way, ready to blow the whistle in the event that an attempt is made to design away any of the freedoms we as net.citizens now enjoy.

The other possible problem with NREN is commercialization. This project is going to be expensive and there will undoubtedly be moves to make it pay off. Presently, we have a lot of free services on the Net, free in part because there is no effective way to charge for them. I would Hate to see the day come when everything on the Net costs money. The last thing we need is for the Internet to become another Compuserve.

CONCLUSION - TOWARD A CONCEPT OF VIRTUAL HIERARCHY

At the beginning of this document I argued the need for hierarchies, but balanced against this was the realization that our present social and communication hierarchies have been pre-empted by autocratic forces. I've talked about some of the ways in which I hope the Net can serve as an antidote to this problem. The concept I ended up groping toward, I've called "virtual hierarchy". It's vaguely related to Andy Warhol's "everybody is famous for 15 minutes" principle. The idea here is of hierarchies that can come and go, and be dynamically restructured as the need arises. The existence and operation of the Net suggests that from an information flow viewpoint, we now possess the technical basis to bypass static hierarchies in favor of flexible hierarchies in which attention patterns can be dynamically configured based on the information needs and resources of the people at any given moment.

I see the Net as a prototype and proof-of-principle experiment in such a system. Not that I would wish to radically abolish traditional static hierarchies. They are probably appropriate and necessary in many areas of human life. Not, I think, for the political decision-making processes of a free people. I see the virtual and static hierarchies potentially evolving into a kind of check and balance system. I believe it would be wise to embody the ultimate political authority in society in a flexible hierarchy, on a similar basis to the principle that our military is always under ultimate command of civilian authority. (The military here is analogous to static hierarchies).

When the U.S. Constitution had finally been ratified, someone is supposed to have asked Ben Franklin "And what kind of a government have you given us, Dr. Franklin?" to which he replied "A republic - if you can keep it". We have been given a free and decentralized Net, the last uncensored mass medium, and a possible means to make representative democracy work in America. If we can keep it.

-Steve Crocker East Lansing, Michigan 10/9/92 aq817@Cleveland.Freenet.edu ad626@yfn.ysu.edu

<postscript - 9/21/93>

And some late hot flashes. We all surely know by now that cyberpunk made the cover of Time a few months back. Oldsters and historians will recall this as the same scenario that launched the hippies. Time-Warner and other entertaiment firms have expressed their intention to move agressively into net.based delivery of their product (will they help put the "terminal" back into "terminally stupid"?) And just two weeks ago, Delphi, who had already recently purchased Bix, was bought out by Rupert Murdoch's "news" organization.

And now to mentionin one more point on the graph. I was for a short time a "member" of Prodigy. Yep. Prodigy. And yes, it's every bit as bad as people think, at least as far as the technical limitations of the software and the authoritarian attitudes of the management. But demographics, have they got demographics.

What I mean by that is that the human mix there is very different than here on usenet, and in some very exciting ways. The advertising campaign which was supposed to bring in computer-shy Yuppies and get them to buy plane tickets on line ended up recruiting a mix which included many older folks and women. These folks, though not techies are the kind of people who will be the first to try something new which will expand their horizons. The community was huge, easily rivaling usenet, and I saw only small parts of it. But it was exciting. I spent most of my time among a community of grass-roots populists organizing against the One World Government, Outcome Based education, etc. Plus there was another fairly separate group going after the JFK assasination. The folks there were more activist and less abstract than here. Many of them used Prodigy to compare notes and share support for their organizing efforts off-line (We here could take lessons...). Then the blow fell. Prodigy changed its flat rate policy to timed charges for access to the discussion forums (BB's). This was done in a way to cause maximum resentment. I mean they didn't even try to put up much of a front. Claims of financial necessity were made, but oddly enough, strategies which would have enhanced revenue while retaining the ability of affordable interpersonal communication were not considered.

For a couple of months, a mass migration to Genie appeared to be the way to go. There were many Prodigy refugees there already, from an earlier round of Prodigy repression dealing with email. Many still had dual membership and were helping those who wanted to make the move. This was beginning to gather steam when the other shoe dropped. Genie (General Electric) followed Prodigy (IBM/Sears) into the netherworld of timed charges for discussion groups. Last I heard, those who could make it into their lifeboats were heading for National Videotext Network which still offers flat rate. I haven't heard how this ended up.

<and the latest 10/11/93>

Just last night, I stumbled onto a monster thread over on misc.legal dealing with the problems of copyrighted material on the Net. Apparently many sysadmins already have dropped alt.binaries.pictures.erotica, due in part to concern over liability due to copyright violations (under recent law, apparently a Federal felony!) by people scanning in gifs from their favorite magazines.

One fellow emphasized his support for the freedom of speech for all sorts of controversial and obnoxious folks on his system, but was vehement in his zeal to "call the FBI" on copyright violators.

<Later still 7/94>

In the June 6 issue of the New Yorker is an interesting story by John Seabrook (who did the email interview with Bill Gates) about getting flamed and how violated and uspset it made him. Lots of not explicitly stated suggestion that maybe somebody will need to control all this, and some very confusing material suggesting to the non-technical that viruses or worms may be sent via email messages. "Is this free speech?". But the chilling passage in the article is on page 77 where the writer says

>Dr. Clinton C. Brooks, the N.S.A.'s lead scientist on the Clipper Chip >told me, "You won't have a Waco in Texas, you'll have a Waco in cyberspace. >You could have a cult, spaeking to each other through encyrption, that >suddenly erupts in society - well programmed, well organized - and then >suddenly disappears again."

Getting scared yet?

And now comes the June 13th issue of the Nation with an article called Static in Cyberspace. This is a critical look at the concept of fredom of speech on the Net, complete with Serdar Argic, Karla Homolka, gun control flames, and libel cases. The article never says "there oughta be a law". But then, it doesn't really need to, does it?

-Steve