Copy Link
Add to Bookmark
Report
Voices Issue 1.1.5
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
xx xx
xx V O I C E S xx
xx xx
xx F R O M xx
xx xx
xx T H E xx
xx xx
xx N E T . . . xx
xx xx
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
C a n Y o u H e a r O u r V o i c e s ?
D o Y o u R e a d U s ?
There are a lot of folks with at least one foot in this complex region we
call (much too simply) "the net." There are a lot of voices on these wires.
- all kinds of voices - loud and quiet, anonymous and well-known. And yet,
it's far from clear what it might mean to be a "voice" from, or on, the
net. Enter "Voices from the Net": one attempt to sample, explore, the
possibilities (or perils) of net.voices. Worrying away at the question.
Running down the meme. Looking/listening, and reporting back to you.
* * * ISSUE #1.1.5 * * *
__VOICES CARRY__
Voices carry (and how!)
Sometimes, these things just happen. You set up an interview or two--for
other projects, of course--and then you find yourself in the magazine
business. Just about like that.
That's the way it happened for us. We sent out a couple of queries, and
people responded--net.speed! "Sure, we'll talk! Sounds great!" Almost
before we could ask... (In fact, some folks have beaten us to the punch,
and asked us.)
So we did a little advertising--not a lot--and the subscriptions started
rolling in. Sitting in front of my little Mac in Ohio, I started counting
foreign countries...
The rest is a blur of interviews, copy editing, mailer problems (thanks
for your patience!) and trying to keep up with our email. Crazy,
stressful, exciting stuph. It's tough learning the ropes with an
international audience. =) But I can think of much worse ways to spend my
free time... And the responses so far have been very positive. Thanks to
all who took the time to write, comment and make suggestions.
We'll be back with our second full issue soon, but there's a certain
amount of housekeeping and administrivia that needs to be cleared up
before then--archive changes, etc... And we had a little something extra
just waiting around for the right moment. So, without further ado, here is
a Voices administrative update and more...
Archives:
The text-only edition of Voices from the Net 1.1 is available via
anonymous ftp from:
aql.gatech.edu /pub/Zines/Voices_from_the_Net
uglymouse.css.itd.umich.edu /pub/Zines/Voices
wiretap.spies.com /Library/Zines
The Hypercard stack is available at:
aql.gatech.edu /pub/Zines/Voices_from_the_Net
sumex-aim.stanford.edu /info-mac/recent
And Mindvox subscribers can find both editions in the Uploads section of
the archives.
And now....
__BRUCE STERLING__
A long time ago, in a summer that now seems far far away (okay, it was
just in May), we were fortunate enough to corral science fiction author,
cultural observer, and all around cool guy Bruce Sterling for an interview.
We talked to Bruce about this, that, and the other thing for quite a while
and we thought that our readers out their in net.land (this means you!)
would maybe be interested in his thoughts on a wide variety of net
related subjects. The interview didn't quite fit in with our subjects
for the first few issues of Voices, but we wanted to get the info out
to you. Unlike fine wine net.info does not age well, and you know what they
say, "Old news is no news." Especially on the net. So, we hope, a little
interesting reading in your mbox. Enjoy, thanx for listening to us, and
we'll see you again soon when Voices From The Net 1.2 comes out sometime
near September 1 (although this one might be just a tad late, but what the
heck, you've got this neato Bruce Sterling interview to sift through
between now and then.)
Welp, hit it Bruce......
<voices> What does Cyberpunk mean today?
<Sterling> I have no idea, my basic answer to that is "if you don't know
by now don't mess with it!"
<voices> How did the writers that are considered in the Mirrorshades
group, how did you all meet?
<Sterling> U.S. Mail
<voices> U.S. Mail
<Sterling> yeah
<voices> And did you have a concept that this was going to become a Zietgiest?
<Sterling> Yeah I was actually, I you know, I always had fairly large
ambitions for it. I mean there's one of the early Cheap Truth things I
did where I wrote a sort of long paean about Arthur Clarke, and sort of
how cleverly Clarke had shaped his own role in society and if you
actually look at it, I just saw Clarke last week he was at this
particular gig Gibson and I were at, he was live via satellite from Sri
Lanka, you know and this is a guy who you know I admire him a lot, I'm
not that enormous a fan of his fiction, I certainly loved it when I was
younger and everything, I think it's a bit dated now, but gee whiz he is
in his eighties or something. It's just that he was able to play off sort
of unspoken cracks and weaknesses in our society, he was able to position
himself very deftly in order to really make his voice heard without having
to play any of the conventional power games, you know he doesn't have
tenure he's not in the employ of the military lndustrial complex, and yet
he's able to write what he wants when he wants, he's not a hack writer he's
not a pawn of the publishers he's not enslaved by passing whims of fandom,
he's really able to sort of cut a niche and make a stand and say some
things that are worth hearing. So yeah, I think that can be done and it's
sort of what I aim to do in a way. I didn't think it would quite
look like this, but I'm not really surprised to see it look like this, I
don't think you've seen anything yet really, It's gonna get extremely
twisted after the turn of the century.
<voices> Where do you think it's headed as a literary thing?
<Sterling> Well the Net is going to play a major role in this, the
Internet is like the apotheoses of stuff I was doing in 82 and 83 when I
was doing my non-copyrighted 'zine "Agitation". Here you've finally got a
method of distribution which is global which is incredibly cheap, and
which, you know, as long as you stay away from the commerciality aspects,
you don't' try to make any money from it, you really can proselytize on the
Internet with like fantastic ability, and basically all it takes is the
willingness to say something worth hearing and the willingness to say it
and let it go, not try to control it just release it, just release it.
And obviously not everybody's got it together to do that, but it's sort
of a whole new literary landscape that's going to take shape there one
way or the other.
<voices> You've read TAZ by Hakim Bey?
<Sterling> yeah, sure.
<voices> Did you get ideas for the Data Pirates in Islands in the
Net from that, or did he get any from you?
<Sterling> Well I think those are natural ideas, the ideas for data
pirates that I used were actually from a computer crime book that I read
in like 82 or 83 by some British guy, computer security expert, whose name
unfortunately i don't know (it's in my notes), but he referred to them as
something like gold, he had an acronym for them goldfish he called them
goldfish and essentially they're offshore data banks which use encryption
you know and this is a fairly prescient thing, when I read this I
immediately thought "this guy's on to something", "this is something
really plausible" cause it is you know it's the Cayman island banks at
large, it's sort of BCCI, and BCCI as a Temporary Autonomous Zone, the
idea that like a TAZ is going to be something clever and sweet and you're
all going to sort of go out and have a lovely kind of non-gender rave or
whatever, and it's the same thing as a virtual corporation that was on the
cover of Business Week a couple of months back. It's like you throw
together this jim crack organization they do this shit and they vanish
before the authorities can find out, well the authorities might be brutal
L.A. cops or pig dumb London 40bbies or something, but they could just as
easily be authorities like labor unions, fair employment enforcers or you
know non-pollution people. I mean, you could use a temporary autonomous
zone to commit ecological crimes or drug hits or you could sack towns with
one or something.
<voices> Ok staying in that mode of thought then, do you think cyberpunk
has been a temporary autonomous zone for slipstream literature, and it
just happened to land in science fiction this time?
<Sterling> Well i think that if you look at the way literary stuff is
structured, literary movements and artistic movements, they're never very
well organized, they're always extremely tribal. I mean, anything that comes
out of a Bohemia type situation is going to be tribal, and the ugly
aspect of that is like Manson-esque tribalism, and the happy aspect is if
you've got some guy who is sort of genuinely brilliant and does not go
nuts from it. In any case they very rarely have any kind of rules,
they're less organized than like say a Greek campus fraternity or
something, it's just like a bunch of guys who come out and have dinner
ever other Thursday or something.
<voices> It just happens to form then?
<Sterling> Yeah, it's autonomous in the sense that real kinds of power
structure, legitimate power structure, are basically forbidden in that
milieu cause they're not really workable, but there's nothing new about
that, I mean it's the same way the pre-raphaelites used to run in the
1850's.
<voices> Since you're sort of in the "original" group, does the
commercialization of the term "cyberpunk" bother you at all now?
<Sterling> I don't think it's really been that successfully
commercialized.
<voices> Well they just had an article about it in "Sassy".
<Sterling> I quite liked that Sassy article, I thought it was a great
article! I thought that was actually a fairly prescient article, I'd love
to see people make internet boxes that look like make-up cases. I have no
problem with that idea at all, in fact I would encourage it to the extent
that I could.
<voices> The whole thing with Billy Idol's new album coming out have you
heard about that?
<Sterling> Yeah, I've heard it's called Cyberpunk. That's nothing, there
was an album out in Japan years ago called CyberPink by a band called Pink and
there's been lots of Neuromancer takes, and bands called Neuromancer, and
bands called CountZero, and there's a band out now called Difference
Engine. I mean my feeling is the thing to be upset would be if some
particular person in the movement had like you know...
<voices> Tried to trademark it or something?
<Sterling> Yeah, that would have been something more ugly. You cannot
defend a word, you can't defend a word, you can't defend a concept, the
only thing you can defend in this world is your own integrity. So yeah,
there are guys out running around making absolute pots of money from just
copying the same successes over and over and over again until they run
them into the ground, then you'd have a situation where it would be ugly
and sort of stupid and useless, but I think actually that there's still a
lot of potential in the people who did it, and on the contrary, I'm
really like chuffed that the Clinton/Gore regime is in power now. I feel
like I had to swim under water for 12 years.
<voices> Yeah, well they have some interesting proposals to I'd like to
talk about in a little bit.
<Sterling> Of course, they're just politicians, they're not the be all
and end all, but at least they're not these malignant mother fuckers who
have been sitting on our heads for the past twelve years! Oh man! I think
you can go places with this stuff, things are going to turn interesting
here.
<voices> I've heard this train of thought going on cyberpunk like, any
kind of art form, like music, literature, anything, starts to go stale
after a while, and then there's always something that comes up and
changes it, just like punk music did in the late 70's, and kind of like
Cyberpunk did for Science Fiction in the early to mid 80's. Do you think
that's valid?
<Sterling> Well I think there's likely, well that's sort of the rhetoric
of youth there. I mean, what you're saying is basically "these guys are
all forty and where are my little buddies out here who are gonna really
set it on its ear?" . Yeah we're forty and it is time for somebody else
to come out and really set it on its ear, but that doesn't, I mean,
science fiction is not like pop music. If it were like pop music I'd be
dead of heroin by now. There are science fiction writers, I mean yeah, a
lot of them run out and just sort of ease into meeting the kids college
payments, but there are people around, Ballard, Aldiss...
<voices> Clarke?
<Sterling> Clarke, even, I mean to an extent. There are guys who just
really have enormous amounts of imagination. I mean, Aldiss, everything
Aldiss does is different, he's always trying something new, it's not
necessarily easy to understand, but the guy never repeats himself. He's
just like a fount of brilliant weirdness, and there doesn't seem to be any
end to it, and I think he'll be that way until he's too sick to lift his
hands. Laugherty, a guy who didn't even start writing till he was in his
50's, one of the weirdest American popular culture writers, truly gifted
strange individual. Of course I say that, otherwise, it would be hard to
go on, but I feel like I can do interesting work here. I can't be 20
again, but you know, I'm not interested in pretending to be 20 again. But
I am interested in working cause there's a lot of interesting material
around that is very little explored.
<voices> What are your thoughts on the new Data Superhighway proposal?
<Sterling> Well, you know, I asked somebody once "what's the deal with
this data superhighway? Is there anybody against it?" and she replied
"it's like being against goodness" and it sort of is, I mean sure, if
they want to go out and build a data superhighway, what the hell! I think
there's something goofy about the idea of linking it with supercomputer
centers cause I don't think supercomputers really count for that much
anymore. That kind of has the distressing air of "Big Science" it's kind
of like the superconducting supercollider.
<voices> So "they" can keep their hands in It?
<Sterling> Well, it didn't work very well with the Internet, which had a
stranger thing. I think that it's useful that the government is paying
some attention to this, and I suppose that you could always say to
yourself "well, it's just a plot by 'them' to come and get 'us"', but you
know, the "us" are the "them" the Internet was a military project
originally. It's a thing from DARPA. You don't get anymore
military lndustrial than DARPA. That's who made it and look at it now,
it's really weird. I have no real objection to that at all, what I have
an objection to basically, I have an objection when the police come into
your house at 5 a.m. and carry off all your equipment without ever
charging you with anything. That's a problem ok. That's a problem.
Whether you've got broad band at 96 million baud or 98 million baud yeah
it's not really that crucial a problem. It's true that the architecture
is political to an extent, and it would probably be a good idea to go out
and run some ISDN so the chipmunks would have some way to make a living
in the mean time, but I think the thing is here, it's on its way, the
Internet itself is growing at like just a fantastic rate, and may render
the data superhighway irrelevant by the time they can start laying glass
into the ground. I'm just pleased that people are aware of it and that
they're using it and that it does sort of strike me as being sort of a
"good thing" with a capital G and a capital T, and I'm pleased at the way
things are going. I'm pleased, for instance, to see that there seems to
be no rhetoric left about young hackers crashing the American phone
system.
<voices> Yeah, that whole "War Games" thing.
<Sterling> Yeah that whole phantom has just gone away. I mean, there's a
new phantom now, the child pornography phantom, but that's so unpleasant
to even think about that I don't think they can push it to the extent, I
mean the thing about the child pornography thing is that essentially saying
"we don't want perverts to use computers" is a less workable form of
repression than saying "young people should not own modems because it's
too dangerous". Saying young people should not own equipment because it's
too dangerous, that's a direct threat to electronic freedom of expression.
Saying some of these guys with modems are pervos, well A. it's true and B.
there's nothing you can fucking do about it!
<voices> Some of everybody is a pervo.
<Sterling> Yeah, there's nothing you can do about it. You can sort of try
and whip up the level of hysteria like "they're Satanists", and you're
gonna see that sort of ridiculous nonsense, but it's not the same as the
massive seizures and that sort of material.
<voices> You've already told me generally what you think about the
Internet, tell me thls, do you think well, Can it? or Should it? be used
to foster socio-economic change?
<Sterling> I'm something of a cynic there. Ideally, yeah, if you knew
exactly how to wing it you could actually change things a lot, but to
what end and who's gonna do it? It's sort of like asking "do you think a
newspaper Should be used to foster socio-economic change?" Well, yes, of
course, and they are every day, and we're changing, I mean the world is
changing and it's changing really fast and it's changing in a direction
that nobody understands. Tell me where the hell you're aiming, If you're
aiming for the collapse of large institutions and the general outbreak of
low level anarchy, that seems to be where the fuck we're going! We're
getting there as fast as we can, it's not a pretty sight. I mean, that's
real cool unless your Dad or your Uncle or your Mom is in IBM or DEC or
something, and AT&T's probably next.
<voices> So you see it as an agent of change simply because of its
nature? mean people aren't gonna go out there and do anything like "I'm
not going to be a racist on the Net", "there's no color on the Net", that
sort of thing?
<Sterling> Yeah, but I don't you know, I mean, of course there is. I can
show you a list of black BBS's where guys are going out and going "I'm
black! and I got a modem! and boy am I black! and of course there's race
hate BBS's and all this stuff.
<voices> There's rumors out that the government is thinking about trying
to take over the administration of the Internet again.
<Sterling> Whose government, and what Internet? The thing's all over
Europe man! There are Internet nodes in Antarctica.
<voices> I guess it would be like registering. To be on the Internet
you'd have to register.
<Sterling> I guess to be on the **mumble** backbone or something, but you
know, what about FidoNet, they've still got Internet feeds, you can get
Internet mail on FidoNet. It's everywhere, It's in South Africa, It's in
the Soviet Union, It's in India, It's in China! I'm sure there are guys
around who are thinking about that, but I don't think they understand
what's going on.
<voices> They don't get the concept of what it actually entails?
<Sterling> They don't get the concept of how much it would cost! Prodigy
has gone broke trying to maintain any kind of order over their little
Net. It's like "well you know, we've got to have this clean and decent so
that Tipper will approve, and so we're gonna like read all the email
beforehand" It costs $70 million a month to do that. Imagine going to
Congress and saying "Well these 12 million users are doing all this shit
for free and we have to scarcely pay anything, but in order to take it
over we're going to need at least $500 million a month so give us $6
billion so we can run it".
<voices> Doesn't seem feasible to me.
<Sterling> NO!
<voices> That's why it got out of hand from them in the first place.
<Sterling> Well there's a lot of ridiculous paranoia by Internet people
who just can't believe that they've got it so good and it's bound to be
taken away, you know, this is so fucking wonderful, and they're just
flattering themselves. They somehow feel that if they post something to
alt.smash-the-state.violently anything they say is going to upset the
authorities so much that they're just going to come down on them. They
don't care ok! They don't care. I mean they care when you start your own
private army. When you start buying .50 caliber machine guns then they
care. Every once in a while some guy on the make will care cause you're
running a "legion of doom" BBS, but most of the time you could do all
this shit and they don't care, they just don't care.
<voices> Sort of related to all this, you've heard of the Clipper Chip?
<Sterling> Oh yeah yeah!
<voices> What do you think about that?
<Sterling> Well I'm kind of a Clipper Chip Aficionado actually. I think
it's kind of a good idea. I think it's a great idea for instance that the
federal government should have really shitty encryption. As far as I know
they're not saying they're gonna outlaw other kinds.
<voices> There's some debate about whether that's in the proposal or not.
<Sterling> Well if they try to outlaw encryption, I mean encryption is
outlawed apparently in Europe, lots of different kinds of encryption are
simply illegal. But I was sitting right next to the acting director of
the National Institute of Standards and Technology who said, in so many
words, that they are not planning to make any other kind of encryption
illegal. So you're gonna have this product right, let me put it this way,
suppose you're trying to buy yourself a clipper chip cause you think
somebody's spying on you phone calls, you're in DEC or something. And
you're afraid the Japanese are gonna listen or somebody's gonna listen,
are you really gonna worry about domestic American phone calls? Like you
calling Peoria. Fuck No man! The thing you're worried about is your New
York office calling Paris cause you know that the French Intelligence has
got the French system tapped. And the French are not gonna put up with
the Clipper Chip, they're not gonna go out and buy all that stuff that
they know that the Americans can decrypt whenever they want to. So it's
not going to meet the real need for encryption, the thing that it meets
is, it's a anti-Camilla gate thing. It's like you're driving around in
the back of your van, and you're a really rich guy or something, and
you're talking on the cellular phone to your mistress and you
say something really indiscreet like "I can't wait to get home with the
latex and the ben-wa balls" and some guy is out there with a scanner. It
happened to Prince Charles, It happened to Diana, it happened to Governor
Wilder, it happened to Felipe Gonzalez in Spain. There's no reason for
Bill Clinton to be real happy about the disgruntled mistress aspect of
taped phone calls and stuff.
<voices> But one of the main reasons they give in the proposal is the
concept that the reason they're mainly doing it is because they want to
be able to bust criminals.
<Sterling> Yeah, Yeah. I think as long as they don't make other kinds of
encryption illegal and you and your buddy say "ok we're gonna use PGP on
our phone and look we've got a chip from this guy we know at Sun", look,
let me put it this way, if you think that you are gonna get away with
some kind of massive conspiracy because you and your buddies all have
some sort of red hot encryption, you're out of your mind ok, cause one of
you is gonna rat!
<voices> When they come knocking on the door?
<Sterling> In any group of 10 guys, 2 of them are gonna be rats and seven
of them are gonna be stupid. And one of them is going to be like a really
smart dangerous type character. But the rest are just gonna like get
drunk in a bar and blurt out something one day.
<voices> Well it's like you say in your book, they have to tell.
<Sterling> They have to tell! They have to tell, and besides, even if you
do imagine that encryption gets out and it does all this wonderful stuff,
all its gonna mean is that they'll shift their attention to bugging
people's homes, and their cars, and their bodies! Sure man, I mean,
you're gonna bug their cellular phone itself like they did in the Waco
thing.
<voices> That's my next question Do you see parallels between the Waco
thing and all the stuff in Hacker Crackdown?
<Sterling> Well I was really glad that he didn't have a BBS in there or
an Internet node.
<voices> Yeah, that would have been on the front page!
<Sterling> Yeah it would of like, "a computer cult butchers harmless ATF
agents". Yeah I think there's a problem there. I think the Feds, some of
them at least, have a swat team complex now, and it's for a good reason.
The American Populace itself has become extremely violent. They just will
shoot cops. It used to be when the cops arrived people would run away,
now cops arrive and people just fucking throw bricks at them. I mean,
they will shoot cops, the level of violence out there is just extremely
high so they've taken it upon themselves to get into this sort of crack
gang, all pumped up, they go out and they're gonna bulldoze these things
in, and they're just gonna take these guys out, and I'm sorry you cannot
run civil police enforcement like an armed camp, I mean that just doesn't
work, it only makes the cycle of violence worse and worse.
<voices> Yeah look what happened.
<Sterling> Yeah they charged into this thing cause they think 'well this
guy's a nutty cracker and we'll get this over with in a hurry cause it's
becoming an embarrassment'. They fucking wiped them out! They just laid
them waste. And they meant it! They didn't burn all themselves by
accident! It's not like they didn't intend to go and die, these are
people who didn't give a shit about consensus reality! They were
completely in their own, you know, and they're not the only group like
that either, there are dozens of little Jim Jones people all over.
<voices> That was just sort of the group of the week and it turned out to
be more.
<Sterling> That's right. They happened to be into buying guns, but I can
guarantee you that there are plenty of people out there who are fucking
crazy as loons, and not all of them off by themselves either, some of
them in Urban situations and so forth and so on. But they should have
shown more skill there, they should have just nailed they guy, they
should have gotten Koresh, they should have said "David, c'mon down to
the sheriff's office we need to talk". They should have called him in and
just arrested him. But they wanted to go do ninja Tobacco Inspector. It's
a wicked situation, and people shouldn't get into situations like that
and now they're all dead, and as far as I can tell they didn't break any
laws that demanded that they all be put to death, but once they had
gotten into that siege situation there's a Masada complex, you just can't
push them like that.
<voices> They weren't just going to walk out with their hands above their
heads.
<Sterling> No, they shouldn't have hit them like that early on, but you
could see that once the dynamic gets going there's no way to back down.
<voices> Yeah it just builds up.
<Sterling> I hope they do better next time.
<voices> I certainly hope so, a hundred people.
<Sterling> Well, yeah.
<voices> On alt.cyberpunk there was a thread going through about the
supposed return of the Legion of Doom, have you heard about it?
<Sterling> Yeah, I got one of the distributed things where the guy said
he wants to go out and do the Legion of Doom technical Journal, and come
up and do all this stuff.
<voices> Is that a load of crap?
<Sterling> Well, I thought the LOD originally was pretty much a load of
crap. I mean they certainly were never anything that was supposed to make
the universe tremble and they weren't the high tech street gang, and as
far as I could figure, with the exception of a couple of guys like the
guy who's being tried over in California now, I forget what his handle
is, he actually managed to make some money, he went on the lamb and the
police came and seized all his stuff and he actually split, he went
underground and then he actually made a living ripping off stuff.
Apparently he was making a living mostly by diverting phone calls to free
call-in the LOD people, the Atlanta three and so forth, I mean if you
meet like Lex Luthor, you can't imagine a more harmless little guy. He's
not a malignant character and he just did not deserve to be painted in
such broad stripes by people who were anxious to puff them up so as to
inflate their own reputations when they went and busted these ~'terrible
menaces to the national whatever". LOD was always coming back, and I'm
not surprised to see it come up again. I'm not surprised to see Phrack
being published again. I'm not surprised to see the Hacker underground
reassert itself again and again and again and again with all new people.
But if they think that the cops don't know about it this time,
they do. There are cops on Mindvox there are cops on all the major
boards.
<voices> Well he posted to Usenet.
<Sterling> Well, I wouldn't write anything for it if I didn't want to end
up on a Secret Service dossier immediately, but some people like being on
Secret Service dossiers, they really get off.
<voices> It gives them a kick.
<Sterling> You know but you will probably get busted.
<voices> So you are going to release Hacker Crackdown out on the Net?
<Sterling> Yeah. In fact there's gonna be a new afterward in the
paperback which will be out in October, and I'll probably write a new
forward for the electronic edition that kind of explains what it is you're
supposed to do with it.
<voices> You're going to put it out to FTP sites and places like that?
<Sterling> Yeah, anywhere who wants it, Gutenberg project, various FTP
sites, EFF files, underground boards, anybody who sends me email can have a
copy.
<voices> How do you see that sort of thing changing the social and
economic paradigms of that whole...
<Sterling> The mere fact that I'm doing this isn't going to make any
difference.
<voices> But it's starting to become a trend, Agrippa was release out
<Sterling> I don't think it's starting to become a trend at all. It's
starting to become a trend in that it's something cyberpunks are willing to
do, but on the contrary I see people trying more and more desperately to
make money from electronic releases of stuff, and I don't know it's like
asking "say doctor, didn't you cure that lepper for free? 'why yes I did my
son"' Well what do you think this is gonna do to the AMA Nothing! I mean,
charitable acts, this is a charitable act, it's not going to change the
structure of anything
<voices> Well what do you think as an author, I don't know how close you
are to your work?
<Sterling> Well you may notice I haven't given away any of my fiction
yet! I do give away journalism.
<voices> When it does get put out the subjectivity gets morphed.
<Sterling> Well I think the structure will change eventually, but it's
not going to change anytime extremely soon. I kind of see electronic
publication as equivalent to having a single played on the radio, I expect
that a lot of people will see the thing on an FTP site, download it, look
at it, and go out and buy the book.
.... and that's all for now folx, pretty abrupt yeah yeah, but worth the
price eh???
***
Acceptable Use Statement:
In a perfect world, we could just post this, send it out through the wires
and forget about it. In a perfect world... In this world, we have things
like copyright laws, legal permissions, the need to "own" one's words.
This document is free, but it is not public domain. The individual authors
retain the rights to their work. You may reproduce and distribute it. In
fact, we encourage it. Spreading free information is part of what "Voices
from the Net" is all about. Just keep it FREE. We hope that the zine will
be useful as well as entertaining. If it seems useful to you, then use it.
But be collegial. Cite your sources(*), and don't take liberties with the
text. Respect the voices contained here. [* Thanks to Bruce Sterling for
inspiration, and for support.]
Voices from the Net 1.1.5, copyright 1993.
