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Speeches by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling
National Academy of Sciences
Convocation on Technology and Education
Washington D. C., May 10, 1993
BRUCE STERLING:
Hello ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for having the
two of us here and giving us a license to dream in public.
The future is unwritten. There are best-case
scenarios. There are worst-case scenarios. Both of them
are great fun to write about if you're a science fiction
novelist, but neither of them ever happen in the real world.
What happens in the real world is always a sideways-case
scenario.
World-changing marvels to us, are only wallpaper to our
children.
Cyberspace is the funhouse mirror of our own society.
Cyberspace reflects our values and our faults, sometimes in
terrifying exaggeration. Cyberspace is a mirror you can
edit. It's a mirror you can fold into packets and send
across continents at the speed of light. It's a mirror
you can share with other people, a place where you can
discover community. But it's also a mirror in the classic sense
of smoke-and-mirrors -- a place where you might be robbed
or cheated or decieved, a place where you can be promised
a rainbow but given a mouthful of ashes.
I know something important about cyberspace. It
doesn't matter who you are today -- if you don't show up in
that mirror in the next century, you're just not going to
matter very much. Our kids matter. They matter a lot. Our
kids have to show up in the mirror.
Today, we have certain primitive media for kids.
Movies, television, videos. In terms of their sensory
intensity, these are like roller-coaster rides. Kids love
roller coasters, for natural reasons. But roller coasters
only go around and around in circles. Kids need media that
they can go places with. They need the virtual equivalent
of a kid's bicycle. Training wheels for cyberspace.
Simple, easy machines. Self-propelled. And free. Kids
need places where they can talk to each other, talk back and
forth naturally. They need media that they can fingerpaint
with, where they can jump up and down and breathe hard,
where they don't have to worry about Mr. Science showing up
in his mandarin white labcoat to scold them for doing things
not in the rulebook. Kids need a medium of their own. A
medium that does not involve a determined attempt by cynical
adult merchandisers to wrench the last nickel and quarter
from their small vulnerable hands.
That would be a lovely scenario. I don't really
expect that, though. On the contrary, in the future I
expect the commercial sector to target little children with
their full enormous range of on-line demographic databases
and privacy-shattering customer-service profiles. These
people will be armed and ready and lavishly financed and
there every day, peering at our children through a
cyberspace one-way mirror. Am I naive to expect better
from the networks in our schools? I hope not. I trust not.
Because schools are supposed to be educating our children,
civilizing our children, not auctioning them off to the
highest bidder.
We need to make some conscious decisions to reinvent
our information technology as if the future mattered. As if
our children were human beings, human citizens, not raw
blobs of potential revenue-generating machinery. We have
an opportunity to create media that would match the splendid
ambitions of Franklin with his public libraries and his mail
system, and Jefferson and Madison with their determination
to arm democracy with the power knowledge gives. We could
offer children, yes even poor children in poor districts, a
real opportunity to control the screen, for once.
You don't have to worry much about the hardware. The
hardware is ephemeral. The glass boxes should no longer
impress you. We've shipped our images inside glass boxes
for fifty years, but that's a historical accident, a relic.
The glass boxes that we recognize as computers won't last
much longer. Already the boxes are becoming flat screens.
In the future, computers will mutate beyond recognition.
Computers won't be intimidating, wire-festooned, high-rise
bit-factories swallowing your entire desk. They will tuck
under your arm, into your valise, into your kid's backpack.
After that, they'll fit onto your face, plug into your ear.
And after that -- they'll simply melt. They'll become
fabric. What does a computer really need? Not glass boxes
- -- it needs thread -- power wiring, glass fiber-optic,
cellular antennas, microcircuitry. These are woven things.
Fabric and air and electrons and light. Magic
handkerchiefs with instant global access. You'll wear them
around your neck. You'll make tents from them if you want.
They will be everywhere, throwaway. Like denim. Like
paper. Like a child's kite.
This is coming a lot faster than anyone realizes.
There's a revolution in global telephony coming that will
have such brutal, industry-crushing speed and power that it
will make even the computer industry blanch. Analog
is dying everywhere. Everyone with wire and antenna is going
into the business of moving bits.
You are the schools. You too need to move bits, but
you need to move them to your own purposes. You need to
look deep into the mirror of cyberspace, and you need to
recognize your own face there. Not the face you're told
that you need. Your own face. Your undistorted face. You
can't out-tech the techies. You can't out-glamorize
Hollywood. That's not your life, that's not
your values, that's not your purpose. You're not supposed
to pump colored images against the eyeballs of our children,
or download data into their skulls. You are supposed to
pass the torch of culture to the coming generation. If you
don't do that, who will? If you don't prevail for the sake
of our children, who will?
It can be done! It can be done if you keep your wits
about you and you're not hypnotized by smoke and mirrors.
The computer revolution, the media revolution, is not going
to stop during the lifetime of anyone in this room. There
are innovations coming, and coming *fast,* that will make
the hottest tech exposition you see here seem as quaint as
gaslamps and Victorian magic-lanterns. Every machine you
see here will be trucked out and buried in a landfill, and
never spoken of again, within a dozen years. That so-called
cutting-edge hardware here will crumble just the way old fax-
paper crumbles. 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 fifty years away.
What I thought was fifty years away, was only ten years
away. And what I thought was ten years away -- it was
already here. I just wasn't aware of it yet.
Let me give you a truly lovely, joyful example of the
sideways-case scenario.
The Internet. The Internet we make so much of today --
the global Internet which has helped scholars so much, where
free speech is flourishing as never before in history -- the
Internet was a Cold War military project. It was designed
for purposes of military communication in a United States
devastated by a Soviet nuclear strike. Originally, the
Internet was a post-apocalypse command grid.
And look at it now. No one really planned it this way.
Its users made the Internet that way, because they had the
courage to use the network to support their own values, to
bend the technology to their own purposes. To serve their
own liberty. Their own convenience, their own amusement,
even their own idle pleasure. When I look at the Internet -
- - that paragon of cyberspace today -- I see something
astounding and delightful. It's as if some grim fallout
shelter had burst open and a full-scale Mardi Gras parade
had come out. Ladies and gentlemen, I take such enormous
pleasure in this that it's hard to remain properly
skeptical. I hope that in some small way I can help you to
share my deep joy and pleasure in the potential of networks,
my joy and pleasure in the fact that the future is
unwritten.
WILLIAM GIBSON:
Mr. Sterling and I have been invited here to dream in
public. Dreaming in public is an important part of our job
description, as science writers, but there are bad dreams as
well as good dreams. We're dreamers, you see, but we're
also realists, of a sort.
Realistically speaking, I look at the proposals being
made here and I marvel. A system that in some cases isn't
able to teach basic evolution, a system bedevilled by the
religious agendas of textbook censors, now proposes to throw
itself open to a barrage of ultrahighbandwidth information
from a world of Serbian race-hatred, Moslem fundamentalism,
and Chinese Mao Zedong thought. A system that has managed
to remain largely unchanged since the 19th Century now
proposes to jack in, bravely bringing itself on-line in an
attempt to meet the challenges of the 21st. I applaud your
courage in this. I see green shoots attempting to break
through the sterilized earth.
I believe that the national adventure you now propose
is of quite extraordinary importance. Historians of the
future -- provided good dreams prevail -- will view this as
having been far more crucial to the survival of democracy in
the United States than rural electrification or the space
program.
But many of America's bad dreams, our sorriest future
scenarios, stem from a single and terrible fact: there
currently exists in this nation a vast and disenfranchised
underclass, drawn, most shamefully, along racial lines, a
permanent feature of the American landscape.
What you propose here, ladies and gentlemen, may well
represent nothing less than this nation's last and best
hope of providing something like a level socio-economic
playing field for a true majority of its citizens.
In that light, let me make three modest proposals.
In my own best-case scenario, every elementary and high
school teacher in the United States of America will have
unlimited and absolutely cost-free professional access to
long-distance telephone service. The provision of this
service could be made, by law, a basic operation requirement
for all telephone companies. Of course, this would also
apply to cable television.
By the same token, every teacher in every American
public school will be provided, by the manufacturer, on
demand, and at no cost, with copies of any piece of software
whatever -- assuming that said software's manufacturer would
wish their product to be commercially available in the
United States.
What would this really cost us, as a society? Nothing.
It would only mean a so-called loss of potential revenue for
some of the planet's fattest and best-fed corporations. In
bringing computer and network literacy to the teachers of
our children, it would pay for itself in wonderful and
wonderfully unimaginable ways. Where is the R&D support for
teaching? Where is the tech support for our children's
teachers? Why shouldn't we give our teachers a license to
obtain software, all software, any software, for nothing?
Does anyone demand a licensing fee, each time a child
is taught the alphabet?
Any corporation that genuinely wishes to invest in this
country's future should step forward now and offer services
and software. Having thrived under democracy, in a free
market, the time has come for these corporations to
demonstrate an enlightened self-interest, by acting to
assure the survival of democracy and the free market -- and
incidentally, by assuring that virtually the entire populace
of the United States will become computer-literate potential
consumers within a single generation.
Stop devouring your children's future in order to meet
your next quarterly report.
My third and final proposal has to do more directly
with the levelling of that playing field. I propose that
neither of my two previous proposals should apply in any way
to private education.
Thank you.
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