Unstable Networks Read online

  Computer activists react in deep existential horror at the thought of political scutwork, patiently testifying to subcommitees, lobbying legislators. Actual politics is beneath them. They want to sit down at the console, hit alt-control- F2 and have a law come out. The price of liberty is said to be eternal vigilance - but that's a pretty steep price, isn't it? Can't we just automate this eternal vigilance thing? Maybe we can just install lots of 24-hour networked videocams.

  The Information Society is not at all a friendly environment for the knight in gray flannel armor, the loyal employee, Mr Cog, the Organization Man. This guy is dwindling like the bison, because we can't be bothered to support him and yet we still want his territory. We don't want to guarantee this guy anything, because we probably won't be around ourselves when he needs us. We Information Age types lack the patience for actual corporations, so we prefer nice, flimsy, gilded-pasteboard virtual corporations. In virtual corporations, there are no corporate power pyramids and no lines of accountability. That's exactly why people like virtual corporations in the Information Society - amazing stuff happens and huge sums change hands, and yet no one can be held responsible. Your average high-tech start-up is one of those decentralized, empowered, Third Wave organizations. Something like a mafia. Not the old-fashioned mafia where people swore loyalty till death, though. No, it's new and postmodern, like the Russian Mafia.

  It's the Silicon Valley ethos. People in Silicon Valley prefer to work for a company for two years and then bail. They don't want to creep up dull and tiresome corporate ladders. I don't blame 'em, because I sure never did it, but they have developed a hack for this. They place their bets on a bunch of different start-ups, and then have one hit big and dump a load of cash in their laps. The idea of being morally, fiscally and socially responsible for your professional activities over a twenty or thirty year period is completely anathema to Silicon Valley people, to electronic frontier people. They really do have a frontier mentality - a brave, optimistic, can-do, strip-mining, clear- cutting mentality. They don't eat what they kill.

  People as bright as really bright computer people just can't stand to do boring things for a long boring time. They fear and despise concepts like political party discipline, institutions, armies.

  That's why the Internet is not at all like an army. An army is a vast machine for forcing somebody's unwilling flesh into the meatgrinder. It gets results by forcing results with blood and discipline and bayonets. The internet is a vast machine for finding somebody else to write your term paper for you. It gets results by mechanically sifting through enormous heaps of useless gibberish. You pay your money and you take your choice.

  The Internet is out of control. No one is responsible for it. This is its most charming aspect. It's that sense of wizardry, that dionysian quality, the spontaneous way it accretes, the way it spreads on the wind all over the place, much like bread mold. People really enjoying watching phenomena that are out of control, especially when they're at a safe distance, like behind the glass of a computer screen. It's a fine spectacle, a truly noble spectacle, a 105% genuine vision thing, one of the very few aspects of contemporary society which isn't transparently motivated by bald greed and ruthless opportunism. People lean on the Net and believe in it with a conviction all the stronger because there is so little else left for them to believe in. They don't mind that it's out of control, when the things that are in control are commonly bent to such sordid ends.

  Of course, living in a way which is genuinely out of control is a rather different business. People like to be out of control for, like, the space of a Mardi Gras weekend. After that they want a back rub and some money. They start looking around for their house shoes. If they can't find them they start getting anxious. And justly so.

  People in the Information Society are adaptable and fast on their feet. They're all road warriors with laptops. They don't need a big clunky ranch house with a white picket fence; they're living out of the back of a Ferrari. Which is very cool. Unless your grandmother loses her ranch house because the entire economy has downsized and devolved into a viral mess. Then your grandmother decides that she has to move into the back seat of the Ferrari with you. Then you and your fleet-footed highly wired lifestyle look a tad less cozy. It becomes a tad hard to tell the jetsetters from the gypsies in that situation.

  All this free-floating anxiety you've been feeling suddenly comes home to roost. Who's logging those frequent-flyer miles, and who's merely homeless? It's great to cut fine distinctions between the keyboard punching virtual class and the rust-belt lumpenproletariat, but a real no-kidding aristocracy has a host of ways to tell Us from Them. The Information Age doesn't have that, it moves too fast for elegant manners. In the Information Age, you can be a physicist with four post-docs and still drive a cab. It's market-driven this and market driven that, market-driven dog and market-driven cat. In the Information Society, the invisible hand of the market isn't a human hand. It never was, but now its nature is obvious. It's some kind of spastically twitching titanium-coated manipulator.

  In the Information Society we like to believe that knowledge is power. Because it is, sort of kind of. On alternate Tuesdays, maybe. People like to say that the so-called knowledge found on the Internet is empowering to the individual. Is it really?

  Let's try a thought experiment. Let's imagine you have a brain tumor. You're in big trouble, but luckily, you're on the Internet. You could try to find a brain surgeon in your home town, but why risk this old-fashioned, limited, parochial solution? Instead, you do an Alta Vista search for the term "brain surgeon." Sure enough, you get an Internet entrepreneur. You go to an IRC channel to have a chat with this guy.

  "So, can you tell me a little about your qualifications?"

  "Sure! I've memorized the Brain Surgery Frequently Asked Questions list. I always read netnews from alt.brain.surgery. I've ftp'd and gophered hundreds of files about human brains. Plus, I have fifteen CD-ROMS about brain surgery. In fact, I've even put on a headset and goggles and performed virtual brain surgery, rehearsing the procedures hundreds of times in computer simulations. Plus, I work cheap! No union! When can you come on down to the lab?"

  "So you're not an actual MD, then?"

  "Sure I got a degree, I've got a nice printout diploma from Dr. Benway's Online College of Virtual Medical Knowledge. It's based in a website in Grenada. I downloaded and read every one of the lessons, so you don't need to worry. Software engineers don't have licenses, politicians don't have licenses, journalists don't have licenses either, and those are all important knowledge- based professions, so I don't see why you need to get all fussy about cutting people's heads open. This is the Information Age, and thanks to the Internet I possess all the photos and words and documents that any doctor has. Why should I go through a a lot of tiresome pro forma nonsense before I hang up my shingle? Let's do business."

  "How about the Hippocratic Oath?"

  "Look, that documentation is over two thousand years old. Get up to date, pal. Your pathetic nationalist government may not approve of our healthcare methods up there in stuffy socialist Canada, but not everybody has your health system. Here in the Turks and Caicos Islands everything we do is perfectly legal."

  There's a word for people who can learn all the buzzwords of medicine without getting a diploma, serving an internship, or joining a professional medical association. We call these people "quacks." Quacks are a very interesting class of people. They're inventive and clever and make a lot of money. They've always made a lot of money, but with the free flow of specialized information on the Internet, incredible new vistas open up for quacks. I haven't seen many of these vistas fully exploited yet, but I rather expect to.

  Information Society people may not be quacks exactly, but they sure do wear a lot of hats. I know people personally who are CD-ROM designers and software entrepreneurs and system administrators and security consultants and conference organizers, and that's all in one week. They are clever, inventive people who are quick studies a
nd can brush up on the jargon of several widely different occupations and convince their clients that they are genuinely skilled and experienced.

  If you do that in the world of computers it's called access to information and self-guided education, but if you try it in law or medicine or civil engineering you are best described as a "charlatan." The Information Age may be the golden age of charlatanry.

  This is the way that system-cracking hackers act, the way that hackers learn things. When system cracker people use convincing language to get people to give them access that they really shouldn't have, they call that practice "social engineering." It's very powerful and very corrosive.

  Hackers are very evangelical about liberating other people's secrets. It's a core myth of the era. There have been several Hollywood movies that hinge on gallant Robin Hood hackers breaking into a system and finding out some terrible and important secret. The baddies try to grab them and shut them up, but in the last reel the hackers always blow the hidden information all over the network and it ends up in the New York Times or CNN. End of story.

  It's a beautiful idea really, one of the central romantic myths of the Information Age. No one can shut up the heroic hacker dissidents, and the bad guys always crumble and scamper off like whipped dogs when the truth comes out. A beautiful myth. I've been following the hack-phreak scene for years now, hoping that someday, just once, something like that would actually happen. Some hacker kid breaks into the sinister corporate mainframe and he finds and distributes the secret and hideous data files that prove that rich guys in suits are deliberately poisoning us with dioxin. Or maybe they've got the aliens from the Roswell incident or just a few of the 47 guys who shot John Kennedy. If a hacker really did something like that would make up for a lot of annoyances.

  Never happens. Never ever. Actually, horrible secrets come up all the time, but they're usually found out by journalists and cops. And even that finishes up with a happy ending about one time in twenty. Does the free flow of information on the Internet help? I wonder. I do know of one revelatory scandal that broke on the Internet, the Pentium chip bug. I don't think I've ever seen an example of people on the Internet unearthing and distributing a real-world non-computer- based scandal.

  Something really embarrassing. The truth comes in over the modems and governments fall. Maybe that'll happen someday. I don't think it's happening now.

  Let me give you what seems to me to be a swell real-world example of this. I think this story is the single weirdest story I've ever heard over the Internet.

  This story has been happening in the country of Slovakia over the past year. Slovakia used to be the right half of Czechoslovakia, but the Czech Republic ended up in the hands of Vaclav Havel, and the Slovak Republic ended up in the pockets of a gentleman named Vladimir Meciar. Meciar became Prime Minister of his new little republic, but he got into a nasty power-struggle with Slovakia's President, a guy named Michal Kovac. Kovac and Meciar were from different parties and they just didn't get along.

  Well, President Michal Kovac has a son named Michal Kovac Jr, and this younger man was involved in some shady business deals in Austria. Meciar knew this, he was making a big deal of it. Nothing much was happening there though, his son's financial scandal wasn't destroying Kovac politically.

  So last August eight guys jump Michal Kovac Jr in his Mercedes limo. First they handcuff him, then they put a black hood on him, then they beat him up, then they torture him with electric shocks, then they force him to guzzle half a liter of whiskey so he gets completely plastered. Then they bundle the president's son into his own Mercedes limo, and they drive him across the border into Austria. Then they dump him and leave.

  So the Austrian cops, all surprised, find the son of the President of Slovakia dead drunk in his car. So they arrest him and take him to the hospital to patch up his wounds.

  So after a while the Austrian cops figure it's kind of embarrassing to have the Slovak President's son in the slammer, especially under these circumstances with the electric shocks and all. It's sort of as if Hillary Clinton had been beaten up and dumped in Canada and accused of shady dealing in Arkansas real estate. I mean, maybe you Canadians would have your suspicions about Hillary, but I figure you would probably want to give her back pronto. So the Austrians let Kovak Jr go back to Slovakia. He goes back plenty mad.

  Well, the Slovaks get a cop to investigate this kidnapping, but the cop gets fired right away. You see, the cop swiftly discovered that these kidnappers were members of the Slovak Intelligence Service, which is a secret police agency in the pocket of the Prime Minister. Another cop took the job, he found out the same thing, and he got fired too. The head of the Slovak Intelligence Service arranged both of these firings. He complained that the police were being too rough on his secret police agents and endangering national security.

  This is all a true story, ladies and gentlemen. I'm not embroidering this, in fact I'm sparing you some of the real Prisoner of Zenda elements because they're too melodramatic even for a science fiction writer. The scandal is looking pretty bad for the Prime Minister at this point, so he gets some of his allies in the Parliament to accuse the President of high treason.

  That doesn't work out. The treason impeachment trial doesn't get off the ground, because the Prime Minister hasn't figured out how to swing votes in his own parliament. And also because the President himself has actually done anything.

  At this point one of the original kidnappers becomes disgusted. He's a secret policeman and a torturer, but he just can't take it any more. He goes to the press and confesses everything. He testifies repeatedly, to the newspapers, to the radio, to the cops, that the head of the secret service was on the radio personally directing the whole affair.

  Prime Minister Meciar and his secret police boss loudly deny this. They swiftly come up with an alternate story. They declare that the President's son kidnapped himself, tortured himself with electrodes, and dumped himself in Austria dead drunk, just to make the Prime Minister look bad.

  Secret police agents then find the family of this guy whose confessed to the kidnapping, and they start beating them up. Later the guy's best friend is blown up by a car bomb. When the autopsy is performed the coroner finds a bullet in the dead man's stomach. The Prime Minister's stooges claim that the car blew up by accident and the bullets was an accidental bullet in the stomach that came from the victim's own gun when it accidentally went off in the terrific heat from the car's accidentally blowing up, and that it's terribly shocking and even libellous to allege that this was a political murder.

  The President's out of patience now. The President openly accuses the secret police of kidnapping his son, so the head of the secret police sues him for libel. He also sues the local newspaper for saying the same thing, and then he sues a priest who presided over the blown-up guy's funeral. The Prime Minister puts yet another stooge on TV who claims that the President's son rigged the whole thing.

  Then the Slovak Parliament gets into the act. They've got an independent commission which has been investigating. Got some results too - the committee gives out the names of the eight kidnappers and the cars they were driving and exactly how they went about kidnapping the President's son.

  And I'm watching this whole thing take place, week by week, day by day, in amazed fascination. Because I'm on a couple of central European Internet mailing lists.

  There's even a tasty phone phreak angle in this, because at one point somebody taps the phone calls coming out of the limo of the chief of secret police, and the chief spook is laughing evilly at the investigators and calling them a bunch of idiots who'll never prove anything. They got the tape and they play it on the radio. The secret policeman says the tape is forged. He refuses to resign. He's still in power right now.

  Now - if having the truth splashed across the Internet was enough to bring down a government, wouldn't this do it? This looks like a pretty whacking good scandal to me. It's quite a story, it's too weird even for Hollywood. It's got kidnappers and
electrodes and carbombs and secret policemen and embezzlement and thugs and politicians. At the risk of being sued for libel by angry Slovak authorities, I would have to conclude that the country's highest officials are - well, let's just say they're strongly implicated. So is the Prime Minister going to resign? Do the decent thing? Skulk off in shame? Bow to public opinion, roused to righteous fury by these unsavory revelations?

  Of course not! He's simply gonna brazen it out in the broad light of day. People from outside Slovakia will simply be ignored, and troublesome people inside Slovakia will be sued, pursued, beaten up, zapped with electrodes and dumped in Austria if not blown sky high. The Prime Minister is like a wolverine with his foot nailed to a board. Except that it's not his foot, and that's not a board, and it's not a big bloody nail, and anybody who says different had better be real careful around an ignition key.

  You shall know the truth and the truth will make you free, right? Sunlight is the best disinfectant. Well, maybe.

  We might learn a lot of truth about a lot of things off the Internet, or at least access a lot of data about a lot of weird junk, but does that mean that evil vanishes? Is our technology really a panacea for our bad politics? I don't see how. We can't wave a floppy disk like a bag of garlic and expect every vampire in history to vanish.

  Isn't it far more likely that we'll get the Internet that we deserve? Cyberspace isn't a world all its own like Jupiter or Pluto, it's a funhouse mirror of the society that breeds it. Like most mirrors it shows whatever it's given: on any day, that's mostly human banality. Cyberspace is not a fairy realm of magical transformations. It's a realm of transformations all right, but since human beings aren't magical fairies you can pretty well scratch the magic and the fairy parts.

  Sometimes computers really are empowering. On the days when they're new, and the days when they really work, which are pretty much contradictory times, actually. When computers do work, it's the power to be your best. It's also the power to be your worst, which doesn't get quite so much publicity in the ads. But you know, a power that was only the power to do good would not be power at all. Real power is a genuine trial. Real power is a grave responsibility and a grave temptation which often causes people to go mad. Technical power is power. When you deal with power you have to fear the consequence of a bad decision before you can find any satisfaction in a good one. Real power means real decisions, real action with real consequence. If that weren't true then we would be puppets devoid of will, permanent children always spared temptation by machinery in the role of the adults.