I can understand a kid swiping phone service when he's broke, powerless, and dying to explore the new world of the networks. I don't approve of this, but I can understand it. I scorn to do this myself, and I never have; but I don't find it so heinous that it deserves pitiless repression. But if you're stealing phone service and selling it -- if you've made yourself a miniature phone company and you're pimping off the energy of others just to line your own pockets -- you're a thief. When the heat comes to put you away, don't come crying "brother" to me.
If you're creating software and giving it away, you're a fine human being. If you're writing software and letting other people copy it and try it out as shareware, I appreciate your sense of trust, and if I like your work, I'll pay you. If you're copying other people's software and giving it away, you're damaging other people's interests, and should be ashamed, even if you're posing as a glamorous info- liberating subversive. But if you're copying other people's software and selling it, you're a crook and I despise you.
Writing and spreading viruses is a vile, hurtful, and shameful activity that I unreservedly condemn.
There's something wrong with the Information Society. There's something wrong with the idea that "information" is a commodity like a desk or a chair. There's something wrong with patenting software algorithms. There's something direly meanspirited and ungenerous about inventing a language and then renting it out to other people to speak. There's something unprecedented and sinister in this process of creeping commodification of data and knowledge. A computer is something too close to the human brain for me to rest entirely content with someone patenting or copyrighting the process of its thought. There's something sick and unworkable about an economic system which has already spewed forth such a vast black market. I don't think democracy will thrive in a milieu where vast empires of data are encrypted, restricted, proprietary, confidential, top secret, and sensitive. I fear for the stability of a society that builds sandcastles out of databits and tries to stop a real-world tide with royal commands.
Whole societies can fall. In Eastern Europe we have seen whole nations collapse in a slough of corruption. In pursuit of their unworkable economic doctrine, the Marxists doubled and redoubled their efforts at social control, while losing all sight of the values that make life worth living. At last the entire power structure was so discredited that the last remaining shred of moral integrity could only be found in Bohemia: in dissidents and dramatists and their illegal samizdat underground fanzines. Their clothes were dirty but their hands were clean. The only agitprop poster Vaclav Havel needed was a sign saying *Vaclav Havel Guarantees Free Elections.* He'd never held power, but people believed him, and they believed his Velvet Revolution friends.
I wish there were people in the Computer Revolution who could inspire, and deserved to inspire, that level of trust. I wish there were people in the Electronic Frontier whose moral integrity unquestionably matched the unleashed power of those digital machines. A society is in dire straits when it puts its Bohemia in power. I tremble for my country when I contemplate this prospect. And yet it's possible. If dire straits come, it can even be the last best hope.
The issues that enmeshed me in 1990 are not going to go away. I became involved as a writer and journalist, because I felt it was right. Having made that decision, I intend to stand by my commitment. I expect to stay involved in these issues, in this debate, for the rest of my life. These are timeless issues: civil rights, knowledge, power, freedom and privacy, the necessary steps that a civilized society must take to protect itself from criminals. There is no finality in politics; it creates itself anew, it must be dealt with every day.
The future is a dark road and our speed is headlong. I didn't ask for power or responsibility. I'm a science fiction writer, I only wanted to play with Big Ideas in my cheerfully lunatic sandbox. What little benefit I myself can contribute to society would likely be best employed in writing better SF novels. I intend to write those better novels, if I can. But in the meantime I seem to have accumulated a few odd shreds of influence. It's a very minor kind of power, and doubtless more than I deserve; but power without responsibility is a monstrous thing.
In writing HACKER CRACKDOWN, I tried to describe the truth as other people saw it. I see it too, with my own eyes, but I can't yet pretend to understand what I'm seeing. The best I can do, it seems to me, is to try to approach the situation as an open-minded person of goodwill. I therefore offer the following final set of principles, which I hope will guide me in the days to come.
I'll listen to anybody, and I'll try to imagine myself in their situation.
I'll assume goodwill on the part of others until they fully earn my distrust.
I won't cherish grudges. I'll forgive those who change their minds and actions, just as I reserve the right to change my own mind and actions.
I'll look hard for the disadvantages to others, in the things that give me advantage. I won't assume that the way I live today is the natural order of the universe, just because I happen to be benefiting from it at the moment.
And while I don't plan to give up making money from my ethically dubious cyberpunk activities, I hope to temper my impropriety by giving more work away for no money at all.
CATSCAN 11 "Sneaking For Jesus 2001"
Conspiracy fiction. I've come across a pair of especially remarkable works in this odd subgenre lately.
Paul Di Filippo's treatment of the conspiracy subgenre, " My Brain Feels Like A Bomb" in SF EYE 8, collected some fine, colorful specimens. Di Filippo theorizes that the conspiracy subgenre, anchored at its high end by GRAVITY'S RAINBOW and FOUCAULT'S PENDULUM and at its low end by quite a lot of cheesy sci-fi and gooofy spy thrillers, is unique to the twentieth-century, and bred by our modern (postmodern?) inability to make sense of an overwhelming flow of high-velocity information.
This may be true. I'm not inclined to challenge that sociological assessment, and can even offer some backup evidence. Where is that postmodern flow of information more intense, and less basically comprehensible, than in the world of computing? Thus is bred the interesting sub-subgenre of computer paranoia fiction -- hacker conspiracy! I now propose to examine two such works: the movie (and book) SNEAKERS, and the novel (and prophesy?) THE ILLUMINATI.
Let's take the second item first, as it's much the more remarkable of the two. The ILLUMINATI in question today has nothing to do with the Robert Anton Wilson ILLUMINATI series; in fact, its weltanschauung is utterly at odds with Wilson's books. Wilson's paranoid yarn is basically a long, rambling, crypto-erudite hipster rap-session, but Larry Burkett's ILLUMINATI is a fictional work of evangelical Christian exegesis, in which lesbians, leftists, dope addicts and other tools of Satan establish a gigantic government computer network in the year 2001, with which to exterminate all Southern Baptists.
I recommend this novel highly. Larry Burkett's ILLUMINATI has already sold some 100,000 copies through Christian bookstores, and it seems to me to have tremendous crossover potential for hundreds of chuckling cyberpunk cynics. To my eye it's a lot more mind-blowing than any of Wilson's books.
The Robert Anton Wilson oeuvre is perenially in print in New Age bookstores, and quite well known in the SF category racks. Therefore the CATSCAN reader may already be aware that the so-called "Illuminati" were a freethinking secret society purportedly founded in the 1770s, who had something to do with Freemasonry and were opposed to established Church authority in Europe.