randolph@cognito.Eng.Sun.COM (Randolph Fritz) (01/04/91)
[This is a slightly-edited version of an essay I posted in one of the political groups. It seems to have some relevance to the discussions going on here, so I'm reposting it here.] Barlow uses the metaphor of the American frontier to describe the current state of cyberspace. But the frontier brings a whole set of associations which don't really apply: isolation, privacy, wide open spaces. Cyberspace is intensely social (how many of you are reading this?), intensely monitored, and everything is very close -- this message will circle the world before I arrive at work tomorrow morning. I suggest one does better to think of cyberspace as a dense, fast-growing, world-wide city. If you drop a $100 bill on city streets -- you don't expect to get it back if you go look for it in an hour. And no neighborhood shopkeeper is going to leave his shop unlocked and untended, no, not even for a few minutes. I contend that, in fact, the very sloppy password security system used by TRW for credit records is very nearly equivalent to that. Returning to that shopkeeper, he's going to have a devil of a time collecting on his insurance if his insurance company finds out that he wasn't minding the store. This perhaps suggests a different approach to security. One doesn't call out the SWAT team for everyday problems, after all. One relies on watchful neighbors, guards, and the cop on the beat. Surveillance is the word. And one locks doors. The cyberspace equivalent of locks are, of course, access controls and encryption. There is currently a considerable debate over just how widespread such technologies should be, with the intelligence community favoring restrictions and the computing community favoring wide dissemination. In the view I'm proposing, widespread dissemination is necessary for the full use of information technologies. After all, any city dweller needs locks and keys. And banks need vaults. So far as public information is concerned, I propose that major data banks have somewhat the same responsibility with personal information that more conventional banks have with money and, just as monetary banks have legal responsibilities towards their depositors, data banks should have comparable responsibilities towards the people whose personal information they hold. You hold the banker responsible if the banker neglects to lock their vault; negligence creates liability (though of course the actual robbers are also criminals). In this view, there should be some similar liability for data banks, though it's going to be a long time before those banks accept that! (I wonder if anyone's pulled the credit records of the president of TRW Credit :-) So that's another way to think about security in cyberspace. I hope it is of some value. Especially, I hope it is useful in calming the fears of our law-enforcement organizations. nd t ou ui R Press T __Randolph Fritz sun!cognito.eng!randolph || randolph@eng.sun.com ou ui Mountain View, California, North America, Earth nd t
cyberoid@milton.u.washington.edu (Robert Jacobson) (01/05/91)
Barlow lives in Wyoming. It affects the way one sees things. Mountain View is another consciousness. I appreciate the well-thought out critique. However, the "frontier" is yet another consciousness...the American metaphor for new places. A melding of concepts would be appropriate. EFF does a pretty good job, since Mitch Kapor is definitely a city type. Bob Jacobson
nazgul@alphalpha.com (Kee Hinckley) (01/06/91)
In article <13765@milton.u.washington.edu> cyberoid@milton.u.washington.edu (Robert Jacobson) writes: > >Barlow lives in Wyoming. It affects the way one sees things. Mountain >View is another consciousness. I appreciate the well-thought out critique. >However, the "frontier" is yet another consciousness...the American >metaphor for new places. A melding of concepts would be appropriate. >EFF does a pretty good job, since Mitch Kapor is definitely a city type. Metaphors can be dangerous (check out the recent article floating around concerning metaphors of war and our relationship with Iraq). What the City metaphor misses completely, and the Frontier metaphor only gets to a limited extent is the sense of _community_ on the net. It's the kind of thing where a complete stranger comes up and asks you a favor (last night it was a phone call asking for a Usenet feed) and you don't think twice about helping out. That actually probably fits well into the real Frontier, but most people's concept of it has been tainted by too many westerns. Personally, I always think of it as the Electronic Freedom Foundation. -- Alfalfa Software, Inc. | motif-request@alfalfa.com nazgul@alfalfa.com |----------------------------------- 617/646-7703 (voice/fax) | Proline BBS: 617/641-3722 I'm not sure which upsets me more; that people are so unwilling to accept responsibility for their own actions, or that they are so eager to regulate everyone else's.
randolph@cognito.Eng.Sun.COM (Randolph Fritz) (01/09/91)
Kee Hinckley writes:
What the City metaphor misses completely, and the Frontier metaphor
only gets to a limited extent is the sense of _community_ on the
net. It's the kind of thing where a complete stranger comes up and
asks you a favor (last night it was a phone call asking for a Usenet
feed) and you don't think twice about helping out.
Hmmmm. Depends on the neighborhood, I think. There are (or used to
be) city neighborhoods where helping strangers was the norm. And they
used to be called communities. Our newer car-oriented cities don't
develop this kind of community, since they are designed to discourage
casual social contact. And, of course, very wealthy and very
dangerous neighborhoods have different sorts of community.
Continuing the metaphor we might consider the tax-supported and
privately-owned networks to be the analogs of wealthy neighborhoods --
they do not offer courtesy services. And true renegade networks (if
any exist) would be too concerned with self-defense to offer courtesy.
By the way, "civil" is derived from Latin roots meaning city. So
"civilizing" bears something in common with city building.
[My usual sig isn't available . . .]
__Randolph Fritz sun!eng!randolph || randolph@eng.sun.comrandolph@cognito.Eng.Sun.COM (Randolph Fritz) (01/23/91)
Jon Lebkowsky, writes:
Possible that 'city' and 'frontier' analogies are both
inappropriate. The virtual community is unlike the city or the
frontier in an important sense, the sense that it is in fact
'virtual,' with its own sense of space and time. When I am online I
don't feel that I am in a 'place'; rather, I feel that I am inside
an *intelligence.*
Hmmm, interesting. That is much the sense I get when I walk the
streets of a busy city. Only some people respond to cities in that
way; Jane Jacobs, say, did, but I don't think Frank Lloyd Wright did,
or rather he felt that cities as we built them were terribly sick
intelligences.
I was more using the metaphor of city to get at some of the ways in
which social behavior is controlled in information-intensive social
environments. For me, that's the important difference and what makes
cyberspace more city-like than frontier-like. Clearly the metaphor
only works for some people and most people raised in car-oriented
cities miss the point entirely, since car-oriented cities are designed
to discourage casual social contact; crowds in such places are crowds
of cars.
Well, it's been an interesting discussion anyhow.
nd t
ou ui
R Press T __Randolph Fritz sun!cognito.eng!randolph || randolph@eng.sun.com
ou ui Mountain View, California, North America, Earth
nd t