[NetBehaviour] Internet Futures (April 13, 2000)

Alan Sondheim sondheim at panix.com
Tue Sep 5 06:41:06 CEST 2023



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.)


___________





More information about the NetBehaviour mailing list