Internet Futures (April 13, 2000) (This was written for a class I was teaching in 2000; I thought it might be of interest here as well.) Internet Futures (April 13, 2000) The following six descriptions briefly outline potential futures of the Internet. They include "living in cyberspace"; a corporate model with proprietary software allowing multiple open-tasking applications; the "dispersed Net" controlling home, office, entertainment, and personal environments; the hacked Net, requiring extensive firewalling and fast intranet development; the institutional Net, for scientific/governmental and other exchanges, including distance education; and the development of intensive Net communities. None of these signal _the_ future; all of them are in continuous interaction. Still, it's interesting to speculate on the feel and phenomenology of the Net a decade or two from now. I. Seamless Virtual Reality (I walk in real time in virtual space, interact with others in virtual space; I'm surrounded by it. This develops out of MOOs and GUI MOOs, as well as VRML, etc. End result? Living online in an unreal real. It's not clear what constitutes one or the other - or even what constitutes a single self in relation to multiple others.) Living on the holodeck - keywords for escape. Requirements: Enormous bandwidth, body-suiting, sensory expansions. Developments: Totalization, escape, perfection, digital repetition without loss, noiseless. II. Window and Multi-Threaded Accumulations (I'm a corporate middle-manager; my high-speed machine has an average of fifteen windows open at any one time. These include ongoing audio, video, and textual conferencing; stock quotations; current news; various other push technologies. Intelligent agents scan the Net for me; I'm a third player among agents and windows. Information is porous, through-put. It's not clear what constitutes a task, job, or conference, and it's even less clear what constitutes a human or other agent. Selves, real and virtual, extend throughout fragmented networks.) Numerous windows open simultaneously in the GUI. Requirements: Limited bandwidth, traditional inputs. Developments: Capital expansions and acquisitions, competitions, proprietary softwares, noisy. III. Real-World Dispersions of Digital Part-Objects (I wear and live among small computers that make life easier, enhance communications, and create socio-cultural prostheses. I can't tell my self from the machine at this point - but there's no reason to. My cyborgian body is continuously monitored; half the information that passes around me passes through me - and I'm none the wiser. It's no longer clear what constitutes "me," and the old dichotomies of flesh and machine, real and virtual, increasingly break down.) Micro-processing and full-processing in the lived and workday environment, dedicated micro-computers for specific tasks. Requirements: Limited bandwidth, local wireless telecommunications. Developments: Within and without the digital realm, parallel processings, local micro-usages, espionages, quiescent. IV. Porous Renegades and Defense Systems (I live in a world of small networks, defending themselves against digital wars and other attacks. My information is continually stolen and reproduced; I have no control over my finances, personal life, or public life. Decisions are made for me in my name; most of what comes through the Net is noise of one sort or another. The wealthy live behind extensive private networks and firewalls; subscription services with private channels are the order of the day. It's not clear what constitutes ownership of intellectual property or computer crimes.) Defense mechanisms for limited bandwidth in the midst of chaos, the hacked internet, local and global instabilities and seizures. Requirements: Programmming knowledge, available bandwith and technology. Developments: Breakdown of individuation, intellectual property, control, tendencies towards intranets and firewalls. V. Universal, Dispersed Governing / Science and Technology / Education (The nation-state and its institutions are dissipating, replaced by online institutions with radically different modes of being. Online is always high-speed; decisions are made and impelemented quickly. Education and social isolation play important roles in the fabric of the future. Enormous differences open up between the technological elite and the rest of us. Managing information flow is critical; it's not clear what constitutes knowledge or what knowledge "means" any more.) Shared active and potentially legislated knowledges, scientific results and searches on demand. Institutionalization. Dispersed learning. Requirements: Any; full bandwidth for large-scale parallel processing (science). Development: Information exchange, implementations of preferences, fast forward scientific development. VI. Communitas (Me and my friends and lovers are always online. We have flesh-meets, generated by online experiences. Our communities are formed from mutually-defined interests; they're self-governing for the most part, and possess their own servers. They're designed to be as redundant as the original Net, making it possible to firewall in case of emergency. Sexuality has become increasingly broadband, and all sorts of new relationships are tried - to the detriment of the older offline ones. Ethics becomes increasingly situation. It's not clear what constitutes a "reasonable" moral stance.) Shared spaces, knowledges, relationships, sexualities. Requirements: Any Development: Intensification of community and shared histories/symbolic formations, interpenetration of online and offline behaviors. _________________________________________________________________________ Internet Futures: Modes The six futures outlined may be considered _modes of access,_ rather than implications of specific content. There are qualitative differences among subjects and subjectivities using seamless virtual reality or multiple windowing, for example; the same holds true for all six scenarios. I consider communitas a mode as well, since it plays into the distribution of selves - which is also the case for the holodeck of course. Think of these modes as _local environments_ playing havoc with local and global transnational selves and corporations. Economic, libidinal, and 'psychological' flows cross traditional borders (effaced), participate in borderline symptomologies (weakened), or reify oppositional practices (strengthened, firewalling). One might speak of the emissions (communi- cations generalized and dispersed) or spews (hacked communications, par- asitologies generalized and dispersed) among these selves. If dispersions are selves (or corporations or or or), then emissions are nodal, apparently emanating from one or another node; spews seems sourceless, traceless. The real, the physical local environment, is dispersed as well; here, too, corporate and personal phenomenologies intermingle. The point, however, is to examine the _specifics_ of such environments - using perhaps the techniques developed by and others, reworking and reshaping from routings and trivial evidence through the skein of individual extensions among constantly mobile and transforming networks. Abstraction (such as this) tends only to more abstraction; the scenarios (modes) lead, on the other hand, to specific points of entry. ____________ Internet Pasts The following apply the categories of Internet Futures to Pasts. These pasts, in detail, are already described /contested in numerous books and articles and email lists (discussions, for example, center around military or civilian models, corporate or individual contributions, the 1940s-1960s as origins or the telegraph and earlier, the 1970s-1980s as the original dispersed community or the socius of the eighteenth-century coffeehouse, etc.). Further, the categories are rear-projections, from the present to the future, mirrored to the past. What I'm getting at, again, is _modes_ of being, interactivities, epistemologies - making sense of early and early-middle online behaviors. I. Textual Virtual Realities (I live online, inhabit the emails among us, take note of communities developing through Requests for Comments; later, I play Adventure and other games; my online and offline communities intermingle. I find myself "feeling the wires.") II. Prompt screens and foreground/background processes, TCP/IP redundancies. (The screen is my potential; I run several things simultan- eously, distinguished by their process ID. Later, on emacs, I may open several textual windows. Meanwhile, from the beginning, redundancies are the order of the day; packet-routing networks seem revolutionary in relation to direct connection technologies. These networks are visible to me; I can follow nodal mappings, lag times, downed routers.) III. Real-World Dispersions of Humans among IMPs, Terminals, Screens (I move from institution to institution, BBN through other nodes; my mind travels the wires; I play at Eliza from a distance. I'm still aware of the physicality of it all as computers graduate from core memories and punchcards through early hard drives. I work among institutionalized communities, part and parcel of university, corporate, and government social worlds, online and off I travel, physically, to Washington, to demonstrate the new technologies. I am part of the vision. The machines are refrigera- tor-sized and fierce. No longer primarily computation-oriented, a new emphasis is placed on communication.) IV. Hacking Systems (Elegance, smaller and smaller algorithms, the aesthetics of programming, kludging machines together. A rough anarcho- libertarianism prevails; trust is primary, and these systems simply aren't prepared for the cracking onslaughts of a decade or two later. Levey writes about the "hacker aesthetic." Gopher, Usenet, Vernoica, Jughead, Archie, early Web, come into existence. At this point art/design departments play a very small role; later, they'll ascend as webdesigners and multi-media experts come into the corporate playground.) V. Universal, Dispersed Governing / Science and Technology / Education (New models of institutional interactions; education and the information model are primary; entertainment is seen as peripheral. Later the term "Information Superhighway" will be applied. Technology and Net development run parallel; bandwidth and user numbers slowly increase. On MOOs and MUDs, early on, there are questions about governance; distance education and hypertext philosophically inherit the work of Deleuze/Guattari.) VI. Communitas (Shared knowledge spaces develop on all sorts of subjects; even the RFCs leak into poetry and satire. These "interstitial" texts may be considered commentaries; they presage future embedded communities. Both communities and sexualities develop quickly on the early nets; it's unclear to me when "living online" became a reality for some - what sort of lure, seduction, interactivity, was necessary to complete the gamble.) ___________ _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list NetBehaviour@lists.netbehaviour.org https://lists.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
[NetBehaviour] Internet Futures (April 13, 2000)
Alan Sondheim via NetBehaviour Mon, 04 Sep 2023 21:41:22 -0700
