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Dischord ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Theme and variations on the Net seen from France 3 - For the Keyboard But back to the speech by Mr. Baker of the NSA. (...) I'd like to make an even more amusing observation-that I've seen scarier secret police agencies than his completely destroyed by a Czech hippie playwright with a manual typewriter. Bruce Sterling (1994). Everybody says this, and every statistic points towards this: Personal computing is not accessible by everyone, neither is the Internet. This is so because of regrettable but inescapable financial and cultural reasons, which should inspire more restraint to the enthusiastic defenders of direct democracy through the telecom networks. The Net must not become, as is sometimes wished, the compulsory medium for citizenship: it may legitimately help people circumvent some laws or subvert authoritarian governments, but it must not short-circuit parliaments elected normally. This would create a totalitarianism of technology, a situation as iniquitous as that which prevailed in the south of the United States when, in order to circumvent the 15th Amendment to the Constitution, some states prevented people who could not read from voting. Those who cannot or will not access computer keyboards would be excluded from society at large. This is of course unacceptable. But at a time when it is fashionable to pretend that the computer is the new tool used by the white male lite for the furtherance of their domination over the rest of the world, and to accuse Internet users of having outrageous social privileges, I find it interesting to set a few things straight and to expose the motivations of some persons or groups who in various ways fight personal computing and the Net as it exists now. Several converging logics are at work to combat the libertarian values which give personal computing its meaning and structure as an autonomous activity and new culture of the end of our millennium. I think I can identify three: a political logic, unacceptable but predictable, from the various right-wing, conservative parts of the spectrum; another political logic, a perverse one, from the "politically correct" end of the same spectrum; and a commercial logic, from some parts of the electronic industry. Conservatives are eponymously wary of novelties. They have always fought the persons who escaped the control of institutions to express themselves, from Socrates to Giordano Bruno and now Phil Zimmerman. They have always condemned technological evolution when the latter changed the structure of power in their societies. And since the printing press appeared-this diabolical invention which freed books from the confines of abbeys, pushed categories of population that were supposed to be obedient to learn how to read and to question sacred dogmas-they have learned to combat the revolutionary potential of information technology. (As Bruce Sterling notes in the passage I quoted, they have not always been very successful at this . . .) But already those conservatives who realize what is at stake with the generalization of personal computing are putting all their weight in the balance to fight against it. For the moment, they are not really dangerous-no one is genuinely afraid of Senator Exon or French philosopher Paul Virilio. Yet, one should expect their influence to grow in the years to come. Personal computing seen as a threat Because computing is, whether we want it or not, linked to power, and constitutes as such an truly essential political battleground. The idea of personal computing is seen by many as heretical in nature since the PC, like a typewriter, better than a typewriter, gives power to the person who uses it, and even more power to the persons who connect their machines over a network. It may seem ridiculous to try and find where exactly this power is situated, but the question is in fact relevant. The power is not that of the processor on the mother-board, as is often thought; nor does it lie in the definition of the screen-else TV would not be the instrument of submission that we know. It can be found rather in the keyboard, in the recordable memory and in the capacity to send information over the network-of the same nature and at the same rate as it is received. If we understand this, we can understand a number of past and future events in the world of digital technology. We can understand that conservatives, who want power to stay in the hands of recognised institutions that they control (armies, governments, churches, big businesses) do not fight technology as a whole, but the techniques which allow individuals to write, to create things, rather than spend their free time to consume TV programmes. We can understand the obstacles put in the way of the marketing of the DAT (Digital Audio Tape) recorder: DATs constituted a recordable memory that was judged too simple to use, which would have given too much power to individuals. We can understand why computer networking la franaise, designed by the state company France Telecom in a very de Gaullian way, has rested on a truncated computer, "Minitel," which has no recordable memory and sends data 16 times less quickly than it receives it. It does have a keyboard, since when it was introduced graphical interfaces hardly existed, but great care has been put in rendering this keyboard as awkward to use as possible. And we understand at last the well-kept secret which most projects linked to the generic term "information highway" have in common as an essential constituent, what the true reasons are for building a high-bandwidth net modelled on cable TV which could choke the Net as we know it, short-circuiting personal computing, and making data available through a "box" without a keyboard, plugged on the TV to take advantage of the (relatively) high definition of the screen and piloted with a control not entirely unlike a seganintendo joystick, with no more than ten keys. The users of this new toy would be well-behaved consumers and would not risk being initiated in the dangerous culture of virtuality. Only a caste of computer-literate technicians would know how to produce information, just like before the invention of the printing press only monks could access the written word (and even then, not any written word-see The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco). Unnatural alliances All this would be laughable if other groups did not find it useful to attack in their turn the memory, the idea of symmetrical outputs and even more the keyboard. "Politically correct" people, those who can only view the world from the angle of egalitarianism and the fight against exclusion, who dub themselves "forces of progress" in my country, have in this regard extremely dangerous things to say, which I have had the opportunity to analyse and disprove in a previous article (1). Let us summarize quickly. These people say that the main effect of the new information technologies is the division of society into two classes: information haves and have-nots, or, as coined in French by Jol de Rosnay, the "inforich" and the "infopoor." This division, which is more cultural than financial, is according to them, evil incarnate and should be combated at all costs. Which leads them to objectively ally with the conservatives and in their turn reproach personal computer users with having too much power. Their way of thinking is characteristic of Marxist and/or Christian groups, i.e. of groups which are not particularly known for their energy in defending the revolutionary slogan (which has become the official motto of the French Republic) Liberty-Equality-Fraternity. This could be seen for example in the way a participant revealed her true thoughts in an TV show last October (Michel Field's L'Hebdo), when she loudly attacked Internet users in her conclusion to a debate. "Freedom for some people only is not freedom as I see it," she said triumphantly. A noble, generous statement. However, if she had possessed even a rudimentary historical culture, she could have seen that the same applies to the kinds of freedom brought by the virtual age as it did in previous times. At the beginning, the choice is not between freedom for some and freedom for all, but between freedom for some and freedom for nobody. And we are still at the very beginning of the virtual age. Pushing to the extreme the normal desire to reduce the cultural obstacles to the access of the greatest number of people to the Net, egalitarians who will have the opportunity to give their opinion on the Information Highway will want computing accessible to the individuals to be simple, more than that: to be simple enough for an ignorant to use it. OK to the Net, but only if it connects machines piloted with four keys and a joystick and if the documents sent over the wires are suitable for the general public-which implies by the way the setting up of a surveillance committee whose mission would be, as expressed in Newspeak, to "protect the weakest from the contents which could harm them." Face with this convergence of the conservatives and the politically correct left, it would be nice to think we can count on the computer manufacturers to put on the market cheap but complete machines for potential users with little financial means. It would be possible thus to see a great number of students build for themselves a true virtual culture. But no extraordinary power of analysis is required to see that since the appearance on the market of the first personal computer, the price of configurations never stops going down while staying the same. Of course, the raw computing power of a machine sold FF13 000 ($2 900) was worth at least five times as much two years ago. Yes indeed, if the airplane industry had progressed at the speed of the computing industry since the Second World War, a Mirage 2000 would cost as much as a teddy bear. But anyone wishing to buy a new mid-range computer must pay as much as 5 years ago: approximately FF13 000 ($2 900, including the sales tax) in our country. In addition used computers are made to appear more obsolescent than they could be. And there exist almost no independent user groups which could provide the technical help that the industry has ceased to give to users of old machines and early versions of well-known software packages-at least here in France, I do not know if this is the same in the US. This is all the more frustrating as simultaneously the market for truncated computers, those our political adversaries would like to see installed, ersatz machines which do not give the full measure of the virtual culture, evolves rather differently. The Hot-Java project, based more or less on improved "Minitels" has the support of a large part of the industry. A state-of-the-art playstation, which is nothing more than a computer without any keyboard and almost deprived of recordable memory, sell here for about FF3 000 ($650). As if a rising number of manufacturers were in their turn in the business of discouraging their customers of acquiring power tools, especially keyboards. Is this going to last? I am a bit afraid it will, but I do not know exactly. Maybe we can count on the public, even if people most of the time do not realize what is at stake, to ask for complete computers rather than substitutes. We can all work at our level to allow this to happen and help people around us to realize what personal computing, whether networked or not, can bring them practically speaking. I think it is particularly urgent in France to get a rising number of women to take an interest in the virtual culture. Among the points at stake here is something absolutely essential: the human richness of the Net. I will discuss this at length here next year-in a dischordant manner, as can be expected. In the meantime, I will spend the rest of 1995 to work on another dissonant variation of Dischord for you to read in January. Diogne 30 November 1995 translated by the author, 3 December 1995 ----------------------- [1] "Oui la diffrence inforiches-infopauvres", not yet available on the web, not yet translated into English (though I plan to work on it rather soon), but I will nevertheless send this article by e-mail to anyone who asks for it. This issue of Cybersphre is sponsored by [ROL] Mark Tribe