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home/earthrod/us/mysteries&megaliths/viewpoints/mazes/aliens/earthRod links
OK - so here's a chance to air your views about anything - no slanders or libellous personal inuendos please. It's a kind of 'letting off steam' opportunity - try to be positive, but often it helps just to get your seriously pissed off thoughts out into the open. You never, know, it might be cathartic and save you some expensive psycho-analytical time.....
Freedom on the WEB-a new Big Brother?
Back in 1997 John Perry Barlow and a team of us making a TV movie: CYBERSPACE, trotted endlessly around Central Park talking about the origins of the WWW and the early aims of the small group out West when they hijacked (in the nicest possible way) the then naiscent Internet. John, as a past lyricist for the Grateful Dead waxed lyrical about the need to retain the freedom of the Internet. He feared what we see now - an increasing commercialism, lack of altruism and moves to suppress or censor free communication.
The idealism of the WELL (as that small pioneering group was known) should have inspired the future direction of this, the most extraordinary revolution in communications maybe since the telephone. Like all cutting edge pioneers they have inevitably suffered the depradations of entrepeneurial and corporate greed; where any semblance of free movement and the inspired aims of individual thinkers has now been well and truly hijacked by the very innovative ideas they first developed.
As the Central Park horse-drawn carriage rumbled on, dodging lycra-clad roller bladers and strolling lunchtime New Yorkers, our conversation ranged from sex and rock n'roll to the growth of virtual cemeteries. He was ambivalent (well ,as ambivalent as J P Barlow could be about the net as a lurking place for paedophiliacs and DIY nuke builders, protesting that this is the price one pays if one posits a genuinely open forum. His main fear was that someone somewhere - ie the National Security Agency - would eventually begin to wonder why they weren't using this marvellous forum to build a database of every citizen in the world daring to access it. Then Hey Presto we discover that Microsoft had allowed just such an opportunity with their secret key. (Not accessible on Netscape so I'm told, but I won't believe it). In an age which is rapidly moving in an Orwellian direction - CCTV cameras everywhere; datafiles on credit transactions; police helmets (the ones worn on the head)equipped with TV cameras - Yes that's true - it's not surprising that the Internet is attracting the 'security' agencies by the drove.
Mark Pesce (inventor of HTML) was equally pessimistic about this, and in him I recognised someone who, caught between the urge to communicate, yet at the same time, to remain intensely private, was at a point where he was wondering what forces he and others were unleashing on an unsuspecting world.
Scientists from Einstein to Oppenheimer have found themselves in exactly the same position when confronted with the practical results of their invention. But that's life (or death) and the human will to transcend its limitations will doubtless continue. If only we could see what the expanding WWW will lead to, maybe we'd be a little more chary of it.
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