In the spring of 1996, at an annual conference organized under the name “Computers, Freedom, and Privacy” (CFP), two science-fiction writers were invited to tell stories about cyberspace’s future. Vernor Vinge spoke about “ubiquitous law enforcement” made possible by “fine-grained distributed systems,” where the technology which enables our future way of life also feeds data to, and accepts commands from, the government. The architecture that could enable this was already being built—it was the Internet—and technologists were already describing ways in which it could be extended. As this network which could allow such control became woven into every part of social life, it would be just a matter of time, Vinge said, before the government claimed ownership over vital parts of this system. As the system matured, each new generation of system code would increase this power of government. Our digital selves—and increasingly, our physical selves—would live in a world of perfect regulation, and the architecture of distributed computing, the Internet and its extensions, would make that totalitarian perfection possible.

Tom Maddox followed Vinge and told a similar story with a slightly different cast. The government’s power would not come just from chips, he argued, but would be reinforced by a common-ground alliance between government and those in commerce. Commerce, like government, fares better in a well-regulated world and would expend vast resources to regulate this frontier. The future of cyberspace would take on characteristics favorable to these two powerful forces of social order and, In a word, accountability would emerge from the fledgling, wild internet.

Code and commerce.

When these two authors spoke, the future they described was not yet present. Cyberspace was increasingly everywhere, but it was hard to imagine it tamed to serve the ends of government. And commerce was certainly interested, though credit card companies were still warning customers to stay far away from the Net. The Net was an exploding social space of something. But it was hard to see it as an exploding space of social control.

I didn’t see either speech. I listened to them through my computer, three years after they spoke. Their words had been recorded; they now sit archived on a server at MIT.¹ It takes a second to tune in and launch a replay of their speeches about a perfectly ordered network of control. The very act of listening to these lectures given several years before—served on a reliable and indexed platform that no doubt recorded the fact that I had listened, across high-speed, commercial Internet lines that feed my apartment both the Net and ABC News—confirmed something of their account. One can hear in the audience’s reaction a recognition both that these authors were talking fiction—they were science-fiction writers, after all—and that the fiction they spoke terrified.

Three years later these tales are no longer strictly fiction. It is not hard to understand how the Net could become a perfectly regulated space or how the forces behind commerce would play a role in that regulation. The ongoing push-and-pull within the battle over MP3—a technology for compressing audio files for simple distribution across the Net—is a perfect example. An ever-increasing amount of music is being made available for download from various services, most from free, unmetered p2p applications. The paradigm of music distribution, if still recognizable, certainly looks to be shifting.

Established interests, of course, are not taking this lying down. The recording industry is pushing a standard that would make it easier to control the distribution and even use of these files, and Congress has passed a statute that makes it a felony to produce software that evades this control. The battle is joined, and the outcome of this fracas has implications for more than just music distribution.

Vinge and Maddox were first-generation theorists of cyberspace. They could tell their stories about perfect control because they lived in a world that couldn’t be controlled. They could connect with their audience because it wanted to resist the future they described. Envisioning this impossible world was sport.

Now the impossible has been made real. Much of the control in Vinge’s and Maddox’s stories that struck many of their listeners as Orwellian now seems quite reasonable. It is possible to imagine the system of perfect regulation that Vinge described, and many even like what they see. It is inevitable that an increasingly large part of the Internet will be fed by commerce, and most don’t see anything wrong with that either. Indeed, we live in a time (again) when it is commonplace to say: let business take care of things. Let business self-regulate the Net. Net commerce is the new hero.

This book continues Vinge’s and Maddox’s stories. I share their view of the Net’s future; much of this book is about the expanding architecture of regulation that the Internet will become. But I don’t share the complacency of the self-congratulatory cheers echoing in the background of that 1996 recording. It was obvious in 1996 who “the enemy” was; nothing is obvious now.

Footnotes

¹

ORIGINAL FOOTNOTE: See http://mit.edu/cfp96/www.

I've attached to this page the MP3 files of the Maddox and Vinge talks cited by Lessig -- scroll to the bottom of the page to see the links.

I've removed a discussion about proprietary file formats (the audio files were originally in a proprietary format) to the Discussion page, for those interested.

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