Reason Magazine - Staff

Superhuman Imagination

info@reason.com (Mike Godwin) — Fri, 04 May 2007 12:01:00 EDT

A few decades ago, the most popular science fiction epics were works like Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy or Frank Herbert’s Dune series—stories that were set thousands or even tens of thousands of years in the future but involved human beings more or less like us and societies more or less like our own, but with more advanced technology. Today, by contrast, many of the genre’s top writers are unwilling to speculate more than 20 years ahead. The acceleration of technological advance, they argue, has begun to make traditional visions of far-future humanity look increasingly myopic and parochial.

One increasingly popular vision of that rapidly accelerating progress is called the Technological Singularity (or, sometimes, just the Singularity)—a concept evoked not just in science fiction novels by the likes of Charles Stross and Bruce Sterling but in works of speculative nonfiction, such as the futurist Ray Kurzweil’s popular 2005 book The Singularity Is Near. No name is linked more tightly to the idea of the Singularity than that of Vernor Vinge, 63, who for four decades has written stories about the ways humanity and its technologies are building a future that may be impossible for us even to imagine. “It seems plausible,” Vinge says, “that with technology we can, in the fairly near future, create or become creatures who surpass humans in every intellectual and creative dimension. Events beyond such a singular event are as unimaginable to us as opera is to a flatworm.”

Vinge, who was also one of the first science fiction writers to conceive of cyberspace, formalized these ideas in an essay written for NASA in 1993 and published later that year in the Whole Earth Review. The article noted several trends that together or separately might lead to the Singularity: artificial intelligence, which could lead to “computers that are ‘awake’ and superhumanly intelligent”; computer networks that achieve such intelligence; human-computer interfaces that “become so intimate that users may reasonably be considered superhumanly intelligent”; and biological improvements to the human intellect. “Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence,” Vinge predicted, adding somewhat ominously that “shortly after, the human era will be ended.”

A number of Vinge’s novels, including Marooned in Realtime (1986) and A Fire Upon the Deep (1992), have dealt obliquely with the concept, typically by telling the stories of human beings who have escaped, one way or another, the Singularity’s explosive transformations. But in his most recent book, last year’s Rainbows End (just out in paperback from Tor), Vinge comes toe to toe with imminent change. Humanity, within a couple of decades of the present day, is on the brink
of something transformational—or else on the brink of destruction—in large part because almost everyone is connected, usually via wearable computers, to tomorrow’s In- ternet. The result is a struggle between those who would hobble our independence to make us safer and those who are willing to risk skirting the edge of destruction to see where the Singularity takes us. It’s just the quality of speculation you’d expect from an author whose previous novel, A Deepness in the Sky (1999), won not only a Hugo Award but also a Prometheus Award for the best libertarian novel of the year.

Vinge is a mathematician and computer scientist as well as a novelist; he is now retired from his faculty position at San Diego State University to a life of writing, lecturing, and consulting. Contributing Editor Mike Godwin interviewed him, in part via email, in the weeks following his appearance last year as a guest of honor at the 16th annual Computers, Freedom & Privacy conference in Washington, D.C. At that conference Vinge spoke about both the Singularity and a “convergence” of technological trends that threaten to drastically limit individual freedom.

Reason: In your speech you foresaw efforts to build ubiquitous monitoring or government controls into our information technology. What’s more, you suggested that this wasn’t deliberate—that the trend is happening regardless of, or in spite of, the conscious choices we’re making about our information technology.

Vernor Vinge: I see an implacable government interest here, and also the convergence of diverse nongovernmental interests—writers unions, Hollywood, “temperance” organizations of all flavors, all with their own stake in exploiting technology to make people “do the right thing.”

Reason: Do you believe this pervasive monitoring and/or control might stall the Singularity?

Vinge: I think that if the Singularity can happen, it will. There are lots of very bad things that could happen in this century. The Technological Singularity may be the most likely of the noncatastrophes.
Except for their power to blow up the world, I think governments would have a very hard time blocking the Singularity. The possibility of governments perverting the Singularity is somewhat more plausible to me. (Who wrote the story with the newspaper headline “Today Parliament Met and Abolished the People”?) In A Deepness in the Sky the Singularity didn’t happen, but not because of governments. On the other hand, A Deepness in the Sky showed how government could use technology to create a whole new level of tyranny.

But in my speech, I also wanted to raise the possibility that these abuses may turn out to be irrelevant. There is a national interest, and not just in America, in providing the illusion of freedom for the millions of people who need to be happy and creative to make the economy go. Those people are more diverse and distributed and resourceful and even coordinated than any government.

That’s a power we already have in free markets. Computer networks, supporting data
and social networks, give this trend an enormous boost. In the end that illusion of freedom may have to be more like the real thing than any society has ever achieved in the past, something that could satisfy a new kind of populism, a populism powered by deep knowledge, self-interest so broad as to reasonably be called tolerance, and an automatic, preternatural vigilance.

Reason: It’s now more than 20 years after you first started writing about the Singularity and more than a dozen since you presented your ideas in a paper about it. Are we still on track?

Vinge: I think so. In 1993 I said I’d be surprised if the Technological Singularity happened before 2005—I’ll stand by that!—or after 2030. It’s also possible the Singularity won’t happen at all.

Reason: What kinds of things might prevent the Singularity from happening?

Vinge: First, physical disasters—the usual range of ugly, violent threats to civilization—could intervene. I think the most likely existential threat is simply nuclear warfare between nation-states, most especially MAD [mutual assured destruction] strategy wars. We are so distracted and (properly!) terrified about nuclear terrorism these days that we tend to ignore the narrow passage of 1970 to 1990, when tens of thousands of nukes might have been used in a span of days, perhaps without any conscious political trigger. A return to MAD is very plausible, and when combined with the various likely natural hardships (climate, fresh water issues), it’s a civilization killer. Perhaps a human race killer. If the nation-states don’t blow us all up (and again, if there is no Singularity), then eventually terrorism becomes an existential threat, the reductio ad absurdum example being when technology puts the ability to devastate continents at the fingertips of anyone having a bad hair day.

A second possibility, less likely in my opinion, is that maybe it will turn out that whatever the hardware power of our new computers, we simply never figure out how to connect the parts. In one form or another, I think this is where most thoughtful skepticism resides.

Still less likely, but possible: Maybe we have drastically misestimated the raw hardware power of what we carry between our ears. Hans Moravec had a very nice estimate of our “raw hardware power” back in 1990 in his book Mind Children. His estimate puts us humans way ahead of contemporary machines (and makes predictions of contemporary failures of A.I. [artificial intelligence] quite plausible). On the other hand, his estimate, together with the possibility that Moore’s Law [the observation that the computing power of new microprocessors doubles every 18 months to two years] continues for a decade or two, makes it plausible that very interesting A.I. developments might occur before 2030.

On the other hand, if one looks inside an individual neuron, one could argue that it is much more computationally competent than a microprocessor. This is without invoking quantum or mystical hocus-pocus. There was a researcher at the Thinking Machines meeting in 1992 who saw the possibility of computation taking place via the neuron’s microtubules.

Certainly if one looks at all the stuff going on inside any cell, there is very significant computation. The question is, how much of that is needed to support the brain’s ensemble behavior? The high-end estimates of neuron computational competence could push the Moore’s Law crossover point significantly further into the future.

Reason: What has changed since 1993? What has turned out different or slower or faster than you expected?

Vinge: In the 1993 essay, I categorized approaches to the Singularity into four groups. As time passes, some of these paths seem more likely than others, though that could change again and again, and the ultimate outcome will probably be some combination of approaches. The most intriguing trend over the last few years has been the interactions between people, networks, computers, and databases, perhaps an ensemble critter very much like [biophysicist and science writer] Gregory Stock’s “metaman” [Stock’s name for a “superorganism” consisting of humanity plus its technology].

At the same time, we are at the beginning of an era where computer power and storage is plausibly comparable to that of some animals. Before, this coming parity was simply a talking point. But now, questions about awareness in machines—and in people—should be subject to new insights. Thus, I’d expect these sorts of discussions to become increasingly substantive.

Reason: I increasingly encounter the assumption that consciousness is going to emerge from the growth of processing power and networks.

Vinge: I don’t want to make the assumption that it would just naturally happen. Mucho human genius will likely be necessary to “connect the parts” for the first time, even if the connections are simply the setup for intellectual growth. However, hardware parity between humans and computers is at least a reason for being more optimistic about the possibility of success.

Reason: Some philosophers have suggested that you need to have an actual body, with feelings, to have an emergent consciousness. Is this view just meat-space parochialism?

Vinge: Possibly. But in fact, this has been a selling point for mobile-robot research. Maybe emotions arise most naturally out of specializing broadly defined goals to threats and promises in the complexity of the real world. Of course, this is not to imply that the computer itself must be in the mobile.

Reason: You speculated about the Singularity in your novel Marooned in Realtime, the sequel to The Peace War (1984). Did it inform your writing of The Peace War as well?

Vinge: It’s informed most of my writing back to my short story “Bookworm, Run!” [1965], though I didn’t use the term Singularity until a panel discussion at AAAI ’82 [the 1982 conference of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence]. In the case of The Peace War, I think it’s there, but far offstage.

Reason: What are the sources of your vision of the Singularity?

Vinge: It’s a truism that science fiction is always about the present. That is, the stories are simply a reflection of the concerns of the era in which they are written. That’s a good insight, but imprecise: Science fiction is almost always a reflection of the author’s present. Looking back, I see how I was immersed in stories that pointed in this direction, including stories by Olaf Stapledon, Poul Anderson, and John W. Campbell Jr. Entire generations of science fiction writers had enchanted me with visions of how different the future could be. Many of these writers had speculated on the consequences of superintelligence. The notion that those consequences might be in the near future was often missing, but by the time of my childhood it was obvious to anyone of overweening optimism.

When I was a 10-year-old reading science fiction, there had already been essays by people like [scientist and sociologist] J. D. Bernal and [engineer and computing pioneer] Vannevar Bush. And through the late 1940s and 1950s there was [statistics and probability theorist] I. J. Good. His 1965 paper (which I didn’t find until probably the 1990s) “Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine” includes almost exactly the notion of the Technological Singularity, though without using that terminology.

Reason: What is the role of science fiction in helping us cope with a transformation you believe many of us will live to see?

Vinge: I think science fiction can have all the power of conventional literature, but with the added potential for providing us with vivid, emotionally grounded insights into the future and into alternative scenarios. Speaking grandiosely, science fiction might be taken as having the role for humanity that sleep dreaming has for the individual. Sleep dreams are mostly nonsense, but sometimes we wake up with the stark realization that we have underestimated a possibility or a goodness or a threat.

Reason: Who are the most inspiring writers you’ve been reading lately?

Vinge: In connection with these topics, David Brin, Greg Egan, Karl Schroeder, Bruce Sterling, Charles Stross —and I fear I am missing others. In nonfiction, Ray Kurzweil and Hans Moravec. Hans is awesome, a more radical explorer than just about any science fiction writer.

Reason: You dedicate Rainbows End “to the Internet-based cognitive tools that are changing our lives—Wikipedia, Google, eBay, and the others of their kind, now and in the future.” What’s the story behind this dedication?

Vinge: I regard the current Internet as a test bed for the cognitive coordination of people and databases and computers. Tools such as Google, eBay, and Wikipedia are—I hope—harbingers of much more spectacular developments.

Reason: I notice that people of every age group are now reflexively using search engines—not just to answer questions but to find people, form groups of like-minded folks, and so on. It now feels like such a reflex that, on the rare occasions when I’m not connected to the Internet, I feel sort of hobbled or cut off.

Vinge: Me too!

Reason: In Marooned in Realtime and in Rainbows End you have couples that get together, break up, and then live long enough and change enough that they find each other again. On one hand, that doesn’t seem itself too terribly science fictional, but on the other hand we used not to live long enough, most of us, for such change and rapprochement to happen. It seems to me that learning how to live a long time is going to be a major task for us as individuals and as a society.

Vinge: Yes, and I hope it will be mainly a happy task!

Reason: It seemed like an interesting metaphor about how other long-term relationships in our lives can change or go sour.

Vinge: It would be interesting to see, if people could live in energetic good health for an additional few decades, how many would go back and undo mistakes that in past eras might only be the subject of pointless regret.

Reason: There doesn’t seem to be much of a guarantee in your works, or in Kurzweil’s, that the Singularity is going to be very pleasant or happy-making.

Vinge: Speaking for myself, that’s true. No guarantees. But if the Singularity were in prospect for 1,000 years from now, I think that many, including the likes of Ben Franklin, would regard it as the meliorist outcome of all the human striving down the centuries. It’s the possibility that it could happen in the next 20 years that’s scary!

Contributing Editor Mike Godwin is a research fellow at Yale University and a research scientist for the PORTIA Project.

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Remains of the DNA

info@reason.com (Mike Godwin) — Sat, 01 Oct 2005 00:00:00 EDT

Don't Stop Grokkin'

info@reason.com (Mike Godwin) — Mon, 27 Jun 2005 00:00:00 EDT

If you had a chance to listen to the content companies' press conference on the afternoon the Supreme Court's decision in MGM v. Grokster was announced, you heard nothing but crows of victory. The word "unanimous" was repeated umpteen times (the decision was 9-0 against the peer-to-peer company defendants), and much was said about how unequivocal the record companies' and movie companies' victory was.

As a technical matter the content companies won MGM v. Grokster; the decision remands the case to a trial court for further factfinding as to whether defendants "induced" infringement. But it's clear that they didn't win anything like what they had been asking the Supremes for—a rule that would penalize any company that made money off a product widely used for infringement, regardless of what the company intended. And though the technical companies and consumer groups are troubled by the outcome in this case, there's still much to encourage them.

First, the rundown on what the Supreme Court actually said. Reversing lower courts' summary judgment on the issue of whether the current software offered by defendants Grokster and Streamcast was lawful, the Court adopted a new basis for liability—"inducement of infringement." The new rule adds a bit to the 21-year-old decision in Sony Corp. v. Universal City Studios, which held that a technology is lawful if it is "capable of substantial noninfringing use," even when technology is being widely used for infringement. (That's the VCR we're talking about—the lawful use in question back then was time-shifting TV programs; the more questionable use, which many people nonetheless clearly engaged in, was the archiving of favorite shows over the long term.)

The majority opinion for the court (there are two concurrences as well, each signed by three different justices) adds a new and potentially troubling gloss on this: "We hold that one who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by the clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement, is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties," Associate Justice David H. Souter wrote for the majority. "Nothing in Sony requires courts to ignore evidence of intent to promote infringement if such evidence exists," he wrote. In short, while your technology considered in itself may be legal (and ditto for distribution of same), it may become part of an overall "inducement of infringement" when you design or distribute the technology with the intention of causing infringement.

On its face, this may sound sensible—loaning your car keys to a friend is understood to be legal, except when you do it to help your friend the bank robber leave the state. But as a practical matter this standard makes it harder for defendant technology companies to win an early-phase summary judgment when sued for causing or giving rise to infringement.

As a result, predicts the Electronic Frontier Foundation's staff attorney Fred Von Lohmann, the Grokster decision "is going to unleash a new era of uncertainty for America's innovators." The new theory of copyright liability, he says, is one that "will tie up the courts for some time." Von Lohmann is one of the lawyers who represented co-defendant Streamcast, a peer-to-peer software provider, in the Grokster case. Ed Black, president and CEO of the Computer & Communications Industry Association, is equally gloomy—the ruling, he says, is "a big victory for lawyers," who will be put to work litigating the less-than-clear and not entirely consistent new standard.

There's reason for them to worry. Until now, the Sony decision provided what lawyers like to call a "bright line" rule for lawful technologies—if your tech was "capable of substantial noninfringing use," you were home free, or so it was widely thought, and this was true even if some people used your technology for illegal purposes. Challenges to new technologies, such as the legal challenges brought against the makers of the iPod's precursor MP3 music players, could be wrapped up quickly, without a lot of litigation, just by applying the Sony rule.

Of course, the fact that the Sony rule still stands ought to be encouraging for tech companies and for consumers—nothing in this decision called into question the Court's recognition that the Sony case had allowed two decades of breathing space for technological innovation that included CD and DVD burners, iPods, and TiVos.

But the new decision blurs the bright line of Sony. By opening up the question of whether the designer or manufacturer or distributor of a new technology had the "intent" to "induce" infringement—terms that are not yet fully defined in this context—the Court made sure that company e-mails, advertising, and any other evidence may now be discovered in a trial proceeding, even if the technology itself has the potential substantial lawful use.

One can see why the content companies are happy—9-0 decisions in copyright matters don't come along every day. And it seems clear that the content companies have obtained some measure of the chilling effect on potentially infringing new technologies that they hoped they'd get. But other commentators are not so sure the victory is worth crowing about. Douglas Lichtman, a University of Chicago law professor who wrote a pro-MGM brief favoring an even more restrictive standard, termed the MGM v. Grokster decision "a hollow victory." Writes Lichtman on one Supreme Court-watching blog: "MGM won on paper today, but my first reading of the opinion makes me wonder whether the victory will have any bite outside of this specific litigation. Intent-based standards, after all, are among the easiest to avoid." Lichtman's view is that tech companies have an easy out to avoid liability. "Just keep your message clear—tell everyone, and I mean everyone, that your technology is designed to facilitate only authorized exchange—and you have no risk of accountability," he writes.

Hilary Rosen, former head of the RIAA, is just as skeptical as Lichtman, but for a different reason—the content companies, she says, are not stepping up to the challenge posed by new technologies, and have not yet offered new business models that will lure consumers away from the free, unauthorized trading of copyrighted works. Although winning MGM v. Grokster may be "important psychologically," Rosen wrote in the Huffington Post blog, "it just won't really matter in the marketplace." Why not? "Because by now SEVERAL HUNDRED MILLION copies of this software that the entertainment industry would like to vanquish have been downloaded to individual computers around the world."

Rosen isn't ready to let the tech companies off the hook—she says they "have seen that with enough 'innovation' their consumers can get all the content they want for free without it really being the tech industry's problem to worry about the investment required to make that content." That's a fair comment, although it's equally fair to ask why it should be the tech companies' obligation to look after the copyright interests of other industries.

What's certain is that in the near term it will be harder, given the superficial magnitude of its victory in MGM v. Grokster, for the content industries to ask for more legislation to protect them from those awful file-traders, who certainly include some high percentage of the folks reading this column. That's probably a good thing. It's also likely that the case itself, now remanded to a lower court for more factfinding, will result in further questions that appeals courts, including perhaps the Supreme Court, will need to answer.

Neal Stephenson's Past,Present, and Future

info@reason.com (Mike Godwin) — Tue, 01 Feb 2005 00:00:00 EST

If you met the novelist Neal Stephenson a decade ago, you would have encountered a slight, unassuming grad-student type whose soft-spoken demeanor gave no obvious indication that he had written the manic apotheosis of cyberpunk science fiction (1992's Snow Crash, in which computer viruses start invading hacker minds). It wasn't his debut--he'd published two earlier novels in the 1980s--but the book was such a hit that it put his name on the science fiction map in a way the earlier efforts had not.

Meet Stephenson today, and you'll meet a well-muscled, shaven-headed, bearded fellow who's just published a highly acclaimed, massively popular trilogy of 900-page novels set mostly in the 17th century. Talk to him, though, and you still hear the rigorously humble guy of 10 years ago. Read that trilogy--Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World, collectively called The Baroque Cycle--and you'll have the uncanny sense that you're reading some new kind of science fiction. Actually, with every Stephenson book since Snow Crash, you feel that you're reading some new kind of science fiction, regardless of the nominal set and settings of the story.

The three parts of The Baroque Cycle were published at six-month intervals in 2003 and 2004; they feature historical figures ranging from Newton and Leibniz to Louis XIV and a very young Benjamin Franklin, bound up in a narrative with the fictional ancestors of the characters in Stephenson's similarly huge, cryptology-centered 1999 novel Cryptonomicon. Like Cryptonomicon, the trilogy has attracted praise from mainstream critics as well as Stephenson's science fiction fan base. The Village Voice calls the series "a work of idiosyncratic beauty whose plots boast tangled, borderless roots." The Independent says it is "a far more impressive literary endeavour than most so-called 'serious' fiction." Even a mixed review of Quicksilver in The Washington Post describes it as "often brilliant and occasionally astonishing."

Stephenson has a substantial libertarian following as well, and not merely because the decentralized, post-statist social systems he describes in Snow Crash and The Diamond Age (1995) are so radically different from modern government. The Baroque Cycle is, among other things, a close look at the rise of science, the market, and the nation-state, themes close to any classical liberal's heart. Reading it means reading three long, encyclopedic books and maybe spending half a year in an earlier century. It's not the kind of thing the average reader takes on lightly. But once you find you have a taste for Stephenson's broad range of obsessive interests, his fine ear for period and modern English prose and speech, and his gift for making the improbably comic seem eminently human, the question no longer is whether you'll read his books--it's when.

Contributing Editor Mike Godwin interviewed Stephenson, primarily via e-mail, in late fall.

Reason: In The Baroque Cycle we see two different kinds of nation-states at war with each other: traditional monarchies vs. the modern mercantile state. Some readers see political themes in Snow Crash, The Diamond Age, and Cryptonomicon--e.g., that traditional governmental institutions have collapsed or mutated into some less central form. Is this something you see as inevitable?

Neal Stephenson: I can understand that if you are the sort of person who spends a lot of time thinking about government and commerce, then by reading Snow Crash, The Diamond Age, Cryptonomicon, and The Baroque Cycle through that lens, and by squinting, holding the books at funny angles, and jiggling them around, you might be able to perceive some sort of common theme. But it is a stretch. The themes you mention are so vast and so common to all societies and periods of history that I would find it difficult to write a novel that did not touch on them in some way.

In general I try to avoid the easy, the glib, and the oversimplified in my books. I don't always succeed, but that is my goal. A way to approach that goal is to try to see things through the eyes of reasonably well-wrought characters. So, if I'm writing a book set 350 years ago, when the old medieval system of titled nobility is losing ground to a new power system based on international trade, then I try to get inside the heads of people who lived in those days and see things their way. Similarly, if I am writing something set in a high-tech world where the nation-state seems to be losing ground as compared to other sorts of entities, such as NGOs or traditional cultural groups, I'm going to do my best to reflect that. It is the sort of thing that intelligent people think about from time to time, and it would seem stilted to portray otherwise intelligent and self-aware characters who never think about such topics.

Much of what has gone on since 9/11, not only here but in other places, like the Netherlands, looks to me like a reversal of the trends of the previous couple of decades. Government is getting more powerful, and its (perceived) usefulness and relevance to the average person is more obvious than it was 10 years ago.

Reason: Snow Crash is almost a parody of a libertarian future. Do you think the affinity-group-based societies you outline in that book are on their way? Do you see that as a warning note, or a natural state we're progressing toward?

Stephenson: I dreamed up the Snow Crash world 15 years ago as a thought experiment, and I tweaked it to be as funny and outrageous and graphic novel�like as I could make it. Such a world wouldn't be stable unless each little "burbclave" had the ability to defend itself from all external threats. This is not plausible, barring some huge advances in defensive technology. So I think that if I were seriously to address your question, "Do you see that as a warning note, or a natural state...?," I would be guilty of taking myself a little bit too seriously.

Speaking as an observer who has many friends with libertarian instincts, I would point out that terrorism is a much more formidable opponent of political liberty than government. Government acts almost as a recruiting station for libertarians. Anyone who pays taxes or has to fill out government paperwork develops libertarian impulses almost as a knee-jerk reaction. But terrorism acts as a recruiting station for statists. So it looks to me as though we are headed for a triangular system in which libertarians and statists and terrorists interact with each other in a way that I'm afraid might turn out to be quite stable.

Reason: You gave a speech at the Computers, Freedom, and Privacy Conference a few years back in which you suggested that the focus on issues like encryption was too narrow, and that we should give more attention to what theologian Walter Wink calls "domination systems." This surprised some of the attendees, partly because it reached outside the usual privacy/free speech issue set and partly because, hey, you were citing a theologian. What brought you to Walter Wink, and what other light do you think theologians can shed on our approaches to government?

Stephenson: This probably won't do anything to endear me or Wink to thE typical reason reader, but I was made aware of him by a Jesuit priest of leftish tendencies who had been reading his stuff.

It's almost always a disaster when a novelist decides to become political. So let me just make a few observations here on a human level--which is within my comfort zone as a novelist--and leave it at that.

It's clear that the body politic is subject to power disorders. By this I mean events where some person or group suddenly concentrates a lot of power and abuses it. Power disorders frequently come as a surprise, and cause a lot of damage. This has been true since the beginning of human history. Exactly how and why power disorders occur is poorly understood.

We are in a position akin to that of early physicians who could see that people were getting sick but couldn't do anything about it, because they didn't understand the underlying causes. They knew of a few tricks that seemed to work. For example, nailing up plague houses tended to limit the spread of plague. But even the smart doctors tended to fall under the sway of pet theories that were wrong, such as the idea that diseases were caused by imbalanced humors or bad air. Once that happened, they ignored evidence that contradicted their theory. They became so invested in that theory that they treated any new ideas as threats. But from time to time you'd see someone like John Snow, who would point out, "Look, everyone who draws water from Well X is getting cholera." Then he went and removed the pump handle from Well X and people stopped getting cholera. They still didn't understand germ theory, but they were getting closer.

We can make a loose analogy to the way that people have addressed the problem of power disorders. We don't really understand them. We know that there are a couple of tricks that seem to help, such as the rule of law and separation of powers. Beyond that, people tend to fall under the sway of this or that pet theory. And so you'll get perfectly intelligent people saying, "All of our problems would be solved if only the workers controlled the means of production," or what have you. Once they've settled on a totalizing political theory, they see everything through that lens and are hostile to other notions.

Wink's interpretation of the New Testament is that Jesus was not a pacifist milksop but (among other things) was encouraging people to resist the dominant power system of the era, that being the Roman Empire. Mind you, Wink is no fan of violence either, and he devotes a lot of ink to attacking what he calls the Myth of Redemptive Violence, which he sees as a meme by which domination systems are perpetuated. But he is clearly all in favor of people standing up against oppressive power systems of all stripes.

Carrying that forward to the present day, Wink takes a general interest in people in various places who are getting the shaft. He develops an empirical science of shaftology, if you will. (Of course he doesn't call it shaftology; that's just my name for it.) He goes all over the world and looks at different kinds of people who are obviously getting the shaft, be they blacks in apartheid South Africa, South American peasants, or residents of inner-city neighborhoods dominated by gangs. He looks for connections among all of these situations and in this way develops the idea of domination systems. It's not germ theory and modern antibiotics, but it is, at the very least, a kind of epidemiology of power disorders. And even people who can't stomach the religious content of his work might take a few cues from this epidemiological, as opposed to theoretical/ideological, approach.

Reason: The Baroque Cycle suggests that there are sometimes great explosions of creativity, followed by that creative energy's recombining and eventual crystallization into new forms--social, technological, political. Are we seeing a similar degree of explosive progress in the modern U.S.?

Stephenson: The success of the U.S. has not come from one consistent cause, as far as I can make out. Instead the U.S. will find a way to succeed for a few decades based on one thing, then, when that peters out, move on to another. Sometimes there is trouble during the transitions. So, in the early-to-mid-19th century, it was all about expansion westward and a colossal growth in population. After the Civil War, it was about exploitation of the world's richest resource base: iron, steel, coal, the railways, and later oil.

For much of the 20th century it was about science and technology. The heyday was the Second World War, when we had not just the Manhattan Project but also the Radiation Lab at MIT and a large cryptology industry all cooking along at the same time. The war led into the nuclear arms race and the space race, which led in turn to the revolution in electronics, computers, the Internet, etc. If the emblematic figures of earlier eras were the pioneer with his Kentucky rifle, or the Gilded Age plutocrat, then for the era from, say, 1940 to 2000 it was the engineer, the geek, the scientist. It's no coincidence that this era is also when science fiction has flourished, and in which the whole idea of the Future became current. After all, if you're living in a technocratic society, it seems perfectly reasonable to try to predict the future by extrapolating trends in science and engineering.

It is quite obvious to me that the U.S. is turning away from all of this. It has been the case for quite a while that the cultural left distrusted geeks and their works; the depiction of technical sorts in popular culture has been overwhelmingly negative for at least a generation now. More recently, the cultural right has apparently decided that it doesn't care for some of what scientists have to say. So the technical class is caught in a pincer between these two wings of the so-called culture war. Of course the broad mass of people don't belong to one wing or the other. But science is all about diligence, hard sustained work over long stretches of time, sweating the details, and abstract thinking, none of which is really being fostered by mainstream culture.

Since our prosperity and our military security for the last three or four generations have been rooted in science and technology, it would therefore seem that we're coming to the end of one era and about to move into another. Whether it's going to be better or worse is difficult for me to say. The obvious guess would be "worse." If I really wanted to turn this into a jeremiad, I could hold forth on that for a while. But as mentioned before, this country has always found a new way to move forward and be prosperous. So maybe we'll get lucky again. In the meantime, efforts to predict the future by extrapolating trends in the world of science and technology are apt to feel a lot less compelling than they might have in 1955.

Reason: Is The Baroque Cycle science fiction?

Stephenson: Labels such as science fiction are most useful when employed for marketing purposes, i.e., to help readers find books that they are likely to enjoy reading. With that in mind, I'd say that people who know and love science fiction will recognize these books as coming out of that tradition. So the science fiction label is useful for them as a marketing term. However, non-S.F. readers are also reading and enjoying these books, and I seem to have a new crop of readers who aren't even aware that I am known as an S.F. writer. So it would be an error to be too strict or literal-minded about application of the science fiction label.

Reason: To some of your longstanding readers, it may be a bit of a jolt to find themselves in the 17th- and 18th-century settings of this new trilogy. Is there any clear line connecting your earlier novels to your most recent ones?

Stephenson: The progression from my earlier S.F. works set in the future to The Baroque Cycle is easy to explain:

�� The earlier books like Snow Crash and The Diamond Age actually had a lot of historical content in them.

�� Obviously, I was paying a lot of attention to information technology.

�� Historical novels, such as alternate histories, are common in the S.F. world.

�� The Second World War has been, and continues to be, fertile ground for novelists and other artists.

�� Taking into account all of the above, it was reasonable, verging on obvious, to write a historical S.F. novel about the origins of information technology in the Second World War (Cryptonomicon). That book also ended up having a lot to do with money.

�� As I was working on Cryptonomicon I became aware that a) Leibniz had done a lot of work with information technology and b) Newton had done a lot of work on money, and of course I already knew that c) Leibniz and Newton hated each other and had a philosophical war. When I began to study the period of time in which these two men lived I discovered that d) it was a fascinating epoch in many, many ways. So again, it became reasonable, verging on obvious, to write something about that topic. But the complexity of the era was such that I didn't think I could tell the story I wanted to tell in a single book. And yet the excitement and splendor of the times were such that I hoped I might be able to sustain a reasonably interesting narrative over a large number of pages.

Reason: One of the things you discover reading The Baroque Cycle is just how much of today's understanding of the world--not just the physical world, but the social and monetary worlds--derives from ideas that were current in the time of Newton and Leibniz. Was that a surprise to you when you were researching the period?

Stephenson: The initial surprise was that Leibniz had done so much computer-related work so early. I got that from George Dyson's Darwin Among the Machines. When I began to read about the period, I was surprised by the sophistication of the Amsterdam stock market and the complexity of the Lyonnaise financial system. But the greatest single surprise for me was the welter of ideas contained in [Robert] Hooke's Micrographia. Hooke talks about an incredibly wide range of topics in that volume.

One is how we ought to define thinking--what is intelligence? He cites the way that flies are drawn to the smell of meat, which seems like intelligent behavior. But then he cites the counterexample of a trap that kills an animal. To a primitive person who didn't know that the trap had been invented by a person, it might seem that the trap itself possessed intelligence and will. Of course, this isn't really the case; it's just a dumb mechanism reflecting the intelligence of him who created it. But, Hooke says, who are we to say that a fly isn't just a more complicated mechanism that is designed to fly toward the smell of meat? In which case it isn't being intelligent at all, only reflecting the intelligence of the Creator.

The final surprise I'll mention is that Leibniz's system of doing physics, which is based on fundamental units called monads, has got a few things in common with the modern notion of computational physics, or "it from bit." Furthermore, Leibniz's rejection of the concept of absolute space and time, which for a long time seemed a little bit loony to people, enjoyed a revival beginning with Ernst Mach.

One could argue that people like Leibniz and the others were able to come up with some good ideas because they weren't afraid to think metaphysically. In those days, metaphysics was still a respected discipline and considered as worthwhile as mathematics. It got the stuffing kicked out of it through much of the 20th century and became a byword for mystical, obscurantist thinking, but in recent decades it has been rehabilitated somewhat.

At bottom, anyone who asks questions like "Why does the universe seem to obey laws?" or "Why does mathematics work so well in modeling the physical universe?" is engaging in metaphysics. People like Newton and Leibniz were as well-equipped for this kind of thinking as anyone today, and so it is interesting to read and think about their metaphysics. Seventeenth-century chemistry may have been rudimentary, and of only historical interest today, but 17th-century philosophy is highly developed and still interesting to read.

Reason: The Baroque Cycle is an unusual work of fiction in that it includes an extensive bibliography. Were you pre-emptively answering critics who might not appreciate how much of these books was drawn from life?

Stephenson: I didn't anticipate (and so far have not seen) any such line of attack from critics and so made no effort to pre-empt it. It just seemed obvious to me that anyone who actually bothered to read The Baroque Cycle must have an interest in that era and might want to do some further reading, and so as long as I was killing trees I figured I'd try to save them some time and hassle by supplying a few pointers on where they might look.

Reason: Your Newton and Leibniz (and the fictional Daniel Waterhouse) are remarkable characters because of their deep interest in almost everything around them. Are there modern figures who in your opinion show that range of interests?

Stephenson: To be interested in too many things is not conducive to professional advancement in the sciences today. You can't write a general Ph.D. dissertation. You have to pick something very specific. What does happen from time to time is that you'll have one scientist working on a very specific problem in one field, and another working on what seems to be an altogether different problem in another field, and somehow a spark will jump between them and they'll end up writing a joint paper.

Freeman Dyson and his son George Dyson are two people with extraordinarily broad scope. Beyond that, it is difficult to generalize. One encounters high-tech geeks, lawyers, ministers, businesspeople, soldiers, and construction workers who have made themselves extremely erudite by reading a lot of history, science, and philosophy. In an earlier era, people like these might have gravitated to the Royal Society, and indeed one of the many remarkable things about the early Royal Society was its ability to gather in such people, combined with its ability to identify and marginalize "enthusiasts" (cranks) while fostering the ones who had something to contribute. Modern-day scientific institutions tend to value specialization. But that is an unavoidable consequence of the advancement that has taken place in all sciences in the last 350 years.

Reason: A critic once said of Thomas Pynchon that he was one of the few modern novelists for whom what the characters do for a living is more defining than what their emotional relationships are. It seems to me that you have that same focus. In The Baroque Cycle, the biggest romantic relationship in Daniel Waterhouse's life occurs mostly offstage, unless you count his difficult friendship with Isaac Newton.

Stephenson: There's a false dichotomy embedded in that. It's possible to have an emotional relationship with what you do for a living. And this is especially true when you work with other people, because naturally you form emotional relationships with those people, which get all tangled up with your relationship to the work itself.

Daniel Waterhouse has all sorts of emotional relationships with people. It is true that his romantic relationships with women play little overt role in the book. But he's got a quite complex web of relationships to his father and to the rest of his family, as well as to people like the Bolstroods, who are so close that they might as well be family. And over the course of the story he develops relationships with people like Wilkins, Hooke, Oldenburg, Newton, and Leibniz. The book is much more about those relationships than what Daniel does for a living. We actually see very little of what Daniel does for a living and much more of his interactions with these other people. The reason he is summoned back from Boston in the opening chapters of Quicksilver is precisely because he is known to have relationships with Newton and Leibniz that no one else has.

Reason: In the last decade or two, there's been a surge of fiction set in the 17th century: Tremain's Restoration, Pears' An Instance of the Fingerpost, Chevalier's Girl with a Pearl Earring. Is there something about the era that speaks with particular significance to the 21st century?

Stephenson: The glib answer would be that this is such a broad question that I could only answer it by writing a big fat trilogy set during this era. And if I try to answer this question discursively, that's what it's going to turn into. So I'll fall back on saying that it just feels interesting to me.

Here are a few specifics. The medieval is still very much alive and well during this period. People are carrying swords around. Military units have archers. Saracens snatch people from European beaches and carry them off to slavery. There are Alchemists and Cabalists. Great countries are ruled by kings who ride into battle wearing armor. Much of the human landscape--the cities and architecture--are medieval. And yet the modern world is present right next to all of this in the form of calculus, joint-stock companies, international financial systems, etc. This can't but be fascinating to a novelist.

Some older systems have reached a splendid apotheosis. Probably the most splendid is the court of Louis XIV at Versailles. Others mentioned include the Spanish Empire, the Mogul Empire, and the Ottoman Empire. Unfortunately it was not possible to explore all of these in very much detail in these books without making the cycle five times as long as it was already.

At the same time, with the benefit of hindsight we can see that all of those great systems were peaking and going into decline. The most conspicuous example, again, is Louis XIV's version of the French monarchy, which held together as long as he was there to run it. But he was one of a kind, and as soon as he died it all began to unravel and ceased to exist in a few decades.

Again with hindsight, we can see that the new structures and systems that supplanted the old ones were being established during this period. And they were being established in some unlikely places by some unlikely people. The role of persecuted religious minorities--Jews, Huguenots, Puritans, Armenians--is especially interesting here.

That's all to give some explanation of why the period is interesting to me. Of course, I can't speak for the other writers you have mentioned.

Reason: In The Baroque Cycle, with some exceptions, you stick to a modern, comic mode. Since it's clear from your parodic passages that you can do period voices when you want to, why did you choose to make the language so modern?

Stephenson: The Three Musketeers has a distinctly 19th-century flavor, even though it's set in the 17th century. Shakespeare's Julius Caesar reads like an Elizabethan play, not like an ancient Roman history. I'm hesitant to draw such comparisons because there is always the critic who jumps in with the cheap shot: "Oh, look, he's comparing himself to Shakespeare." So as a parenthetical aside to those who think that way, I'll stipulate that I'm not a Shakespeare or even a Dumas, but I am capable of learning from them.

I could have tried to write the entire Baroque Cycle in Jacobean English, but at some point I'd have had to ask myself, "Who am I kidding? Everyone knows this was written in the 21st century." The sensibility from which it's written is that of the high-tech modern world. To purge the whole cycle of all traces of modern English would have seemed forced and absurd. So I just wrote it in whatever language seemed best to get the story across, which in some places was modern-sounding English and in other places was period English.

Reason: There are some mysteries in the trilogy that you don't fully explain.

Stephenson: Mysteries and unresolved questions are a part of real life, and so it's OK for them to exist in novels. As a matter of fact, I'm inclined to be a bit suspicious of any novel in which everything gets tidily resolved at the end. It doesn't feel right for me to do this. So I typically leave some things unresolved. It's not an oversight.�

Cybergreen

info@reason.com (Mike Godwin) — Thu, 01 Jan 2004 00:00:00 EST

In the 1980s, Bruce Sterling became a leader of the "cyberpunk" revolution -- a literary movement that combined the artistic ambition of science fiction's 1960s New Wave with the hard-core speculation associated with Verne, Wells, Heinlein, and Clarke. Cyberpunk's chief theme was the way technologies evolve us even as we evolve them, and its influence can be seen in almost every science fiction writer of note today, from Ken MacLeod to Alastair Reynolds to Cory Doctorow.

Neuromancer author William Gibson may have been the best-known of the cyberpunks, but the movement's chief theorist and propagandist was Sterling, whose writing covered far more territory than that of his peers. Sterling's books from the period -- Schismatrix, Islands in the Net, Crystal Express -- range so widely in settings and characters that it's hard to talk about them collectively. What they have in common is their author's willingness to stare uncomfortable truths in the face. His 1989 story "We See Things Differently," for example, eerily predicted and captured the jihadic Islamism of the 9/11 era.

In the late '90s, Sterling launched another movement: the Viridian Greens. This one focused on how industrial design could be used to respond to global climate change. "Our society runs on fossil fuel," he wrote in an early manifesto. "We have a substance-abuse problem with carbon dioxide. This is a seemingly abstract issue now, but it's going to get very, very much livelier once we start having evacuation camps and dustbowls and so on. At that point, anyone who isn't talking about the Greenhouse Effect is going to seem very twentieth-century and extremely old-fashioned."

That proclamation in itself might sound old-fashioned -- not entirely out of place in a Greenpeace pamphlet -- but Sterling went on to classify his new cause as an art and design movement. He also gave it a built-in expiration date (2012). He named the movement the Viridian Greens because, as he puts it, "there's something electrical and unnatural about our tinge of green." Sterling's rhetoric is not the renunciatory language of back-to-the-land communal farmers or febrile eco-terrorists. We've made this problem, Sterling tells us, and now it's up to us to design our way out of it -- not by denying ourselves modernity but by embracing a more intelligent version of it.

Sterling is no one-note activist. His mind buzzes with ideas about history, technology, art theory, politics, global cultural trends, and more. The best introduction to the scope of Sterling's interests is his recent non-fiction book Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next Fifty Years (Random House). The book is to typical futurist prognostications what jazz is to a symphony: Sterling riffs on what the present tells us about the world our grandchildren will inherit. But like all the best futurists, Sterling has his eyes set on the past as well. That may explain why, even as he describes the book as "an ambitious, sprawling effort in thundering futurist punditry," he frames it on a set piece from Shakespeare -- "The Seven Ages of Man," from As You Like It. Perhaps surprisingly, the Shakespearean trope works rather well as a way of outlining the oncoming histories, comedies, and dramas we're staging for ourselves.

Contributing Editor Mike Godwin talked with Sterling last summer, in the sprawling house the author designed for himself and his family in Austin, Texas.

reason: Not long after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, you wrote a cri de coeur about how the attacks signified the end of a belle époque, during which the government is relatively technocratic, competent, and bland -- providing basic services but otherwise uninteresting -- and the rest of the world is peacefully progressing, partly as a function of technological advance. Are we going to see that kind of era again?

Bruce Sterling: It depends on who "we" are. For the U.S., the belle époque is over. It lost its steam under this tremendous necromantic thing that bin Laden pulled, and also it's over because this huge surge of energy that was in the dot-com world failed at the last mile. Socially, policy makers have made a series of choices very similar to what preceded the collapse into World War I. There's the same kind of massive gung-hoism for acts of violence and the same kind of irrationality. We're in a very dark time. It's dark enough that it cannot lift overnight.

reason: You were upbeat about the Internet bubble. You don't think it was based on irrational exuberance?

Sterling: I don't think it was an irrational exuberance. Some of it was irrational -- clearly there was a lot of embezzlement going on, buddyism on Wall Street, your basic Enron shenanigans. But computation and ubiquitous sensors and ubiquitous communication offer the opportunity to reform the industrial base along cybernetic and post-industrial lines. Should that be allowed to happen, it will bring a lot of prosperity.

But I think we made really serious missteps in 2000 and 2001, and we've really turned our backs on a world that could have been pleasant, delight-ful, peaceful, and technocratic. Now we face a world that is religious, narrow-minded, fundamentalist, and violent.

reason: We're still seeing technological progress, at least in terms of tools. Some of us have DVD burners in our laptops, when not too long ago we couldn't imagine burning CDs. Content providers are freaking out about this because people are able to make their own product, or duplicate other people's product.

Sterling: I'm not really all that interested in what Hollywood does with its stuff. I mean, they're only the size of the porn industry. I think the real revolution is in industrial production. It's about manipulating factory processes, it's about mass customization, it's about a revolution in industry that gets the toxins out of the air and is more efficient by, say, a factor of four than what we had. When that happens we'll have a genuinely new world. Playing movies off handhelds, that's not really that big of a deal.

reason: Still, the content industries are significant enough to start the kind of moral panic you talk about in Tomorrow Now -- moral panics that drive irrational social or governmental responses. Computers keep empowering people and keep surprising people with what they can do.

Sterling: Well, they used to surprise people. Now they alarm people. You can tell it's a moral panic when people start doing really dirty things that have no effect on what's going on. And that's a classic example -- this culture war where you put out fake MP3s that have cursing on them.

reason: It was interesting that when Madonna started cir-culating ersatz MP3s to fool the file traders -- MP3s that had her cursing at them for trying to trade her music without paying for it -- people started sampling the cursing.

Sterling: Pop will eat itself. I predicted for a long time that the Internet would be a big, stinking deal when there was finally a pop song about it. Sure enough, Destiny's Child did a song that has a line about "some girl trashing me on the Internet." That's funny, but the thing that's peculiar about it is there was always a dark side. There was always the porn/mafia/drug dealer/pedophilia aspect -- the four horsemen of the apocalypse.

reason: The flip side of the empowerment dream.

Sterling: We're empowering people we're afraid of, and we cannot handle the consequences of the social change, some of which are always dark. There is no silver lining without its cloud. It's a Woodstock-Altamont transformation. It's like, hey, we're going to play free music for everybody, including these PCP-demented Hell's Angels with pool cues.

reason: I miss the days when porn and computer crime were perceived to be the big threat, not copyright infringement. Those were more inherently interesting.

Sterling: I miss the teenage menace days: "Children shouldn't have these computers. They're burglar tools. They should be kept out of their hands, like rifles and alcohol. No underage people should control all these extremely dangerous mechanisms."

There are historical periods of license and historical periods of oppression. But the records would get lost. At the height of Victorianism, when woman are shrouding the table legs, you're not really confronted with your regency grandfather who was some drunken fuck wandering down streets accosting semi-nude hookers in his heyday.

The history of pornography is you'd find it in your uncle's stuff when you were cleaning up after he died and you'd burn it. People would just destroy it. "Omigod, he had all this indecent stuff!" And you'd kind of whisper about it later. But there were these cleansing fires. You could burn it and there were only so many copies. A privately printed edition of Autobiography of a Flea, or Fanny Hill. Now it's pig easy to go on the Internet and just grab the planet's most scabrous excesses -- absolute debauchery -- you lay it out there with the complete sterile access of a surgeon or a medical test. By what means do we repress this information? Any red-blooded guy with 80 megabytes of rancid porn on his hard disk can be a publisher on a CD-ROM in seconds.

reason: You map out Tomorrow Now according to Shakespeare's Seven Ages of Man: the infant, the school--boy, the lover, the soldier, the judge, the elderly man, and the senile one. When you characterize the soldier age, you talk less about terrorists and terrorism than figures who are somewhere between warlords and criminals.

Sterling: They're terrorist anti-terrorists. The warlords have got it going on because they command the means of production. Bin Laden is a prophet. He's a cultist, and made this tremendous suicide gesture, which is not that far from the Heaven's Gate/Jonestown thing.

reason: The trick is making other people commit suicide for you.

Sterling: No, that's not even the trick. He's probably more powerful dead than he is alive at this point. My suspicion is that the guy is dead. But I expect to see him issuing tapes for the next 30 to 40 years.

He may have been dying. He may have done this thing as a kind of Gotterdammerung gesture. Hitler did that. The Japanese were very into that. Fanatical gestures capture the public's imagination, but they're just not as important to people's lives as massive economic arrangements. A guy like Arkan, the Serb counterterrorist with connections to the Yugoslav government, is in the business of destabilizing nation-states in order to route the entire productive capacity of his population through his own pockets.

reason: When I started the lover chapter, I said to myself, "There is going to be some sex in there," but there wasn't much. Instead you talk about people's relationship with objects.

Sterling: What I'm trying to talk about are aspects of the 21st century that are visibly different from what we already have. And I don't really think love is going to be that different. There's a fringe for people who like blowup dolls, but in point of fact there's very little going on there that hasn't been going on since the advent of the birth control pill.

What is different about the 21st century is the increasing intimacy of people with objects -- not in a sexual way, but in a bodily way. People have implants, they have gizmos, all these little barnacles in their pockets that are attached to themselves. To which they are completely emotionally dependent.

reason: And drugs.

Sterling: More like performance-enhancement devices. And I found it more interesting and more significant to talk about an intimate relationship with prosthetics and gizmos than an intimate relationship between one human being and another.

reason: What personal relationships with gizmos are you in right now?

Sterling: Well, I send my wife a lot of e-mail, and I never really expected that to happen. She's upstairs on her computer, and I'm downstairs on my computer. And we have an increasingly e-mail-mediated relationship. She's sending me notes, she's forwarding me things from my own family. My uncle, who is sort of the family webmaster, is now a much more influential presence in my life, due to e-mail. This is not uncommon. We have certain family affairs that are now electronically organized. Like, how do we look after our dad? We have little rules about who is going to clean the cemetery. We have a myfamily.com Web site where everyone uploads pictures of the children. My cousin's second cousin's children's nephew's bride -- I don't see these people except through electronic mediation. I wouldn't be seeing them otherwise.

reason: Instant messaging has taken more of that role. You have a sense of presence that's even more immediate than e-mail.

Sterling: My daughter's generation is more into that than I am. She's frequently chatting on her phone, doing role playing games with her closest friends who are a teenage gang wandering up and down the campus playing video games. Then they go home, as a teenage gang, to play role playing games, as a gang. They're the same people; it's just that they have different identities: the elf warrior and the dark gothic dwarf.

I'm very interested in those things, but the only game that commands my own attention is Web surfing. I spend huge amounts of time doing that.

reason: It never ceases to amaze me how much material is sort of spontaneously thrown up on the Web.

Sterling: I think that's an early response. You get this database toxicity. You go into a system like Lexis-Nexis and you put in a search word and get 60,000 hits, and you think, this is all the knowledge there is in the universe. But it's actually 10,000 references to six different things, and the actual story is something very few people know.

reason: I think there are some positive social changes happening as a result of this spontaneous database building and Web page building. There are more and more of us who reflexively look things up.

Sterling: There is a Google blindness. It's a kind of common wisdom generator, but it's not necessarily going to get you to the real story of what's actually going on.

reason: As today's children get older they're internalizing Boolean search logic, and they actually do show some discrimination and drill down to the useful information.

Sterling: It is a form of literacy that's really peculiar. Socrates used to talk about this: "The problem with writing is that no one memorizes the Iliad any more. You've got to just know all of it. And how can you call yourself an educated man if you cannot recite Book Three, not missing a single epithet?" He's got a point there.

It has a profound effect on literary composition. I've got Google up all the time. It gives you this veneer of command of the facts which you do not, in point of fact, have. It's extremely useful for novelists but somewhat dangerous if you're pretending to be a brain surgeon.

reason: One thing I notice about the progression of your novels is that the first ones were significantly different in time and space from where we are, and increasingly we bring things closer to the present day. Does that represent the same kind of shift in attention to the world that we see in your nonfiction writing?

Sterling: It's hard to say what is opportunism and what is very typical science fiction writer development. If you read Jules Verne, one of his first books is Paris in the Twentieth Century, which is far away in time and space and could not get published. Then there is Five Weeks in a Balloon, which is in Africa. Then he becomes a member of the Amiens City Council, and at that point all the technocratic brio and the incredible voyage leaks out of his work, and he starts writing these really quite dark political novels like Robur the Conqueror and Master of the World. Because the guy has actually come to an understanding of where the bodies are buried in the power structure. That's kind of overwhelming, and a departure from his earlier fantasies of technocratic prowess: I am Nemo; I will assemble a superelectric submarine.

It's similar to the mental progression of mathematicians. In their early 20s, they're whipping the four-color theorem, and then by the time they're 90, they're working on some tiny, obscure little movement ahead. It's really interesting to someone who's really interested in mathematics.

reason: Novelists don't quite follow that path.

Sterling: Novelists don't. But science fiction novelists do. Real novelists die in the arms of their fourth wife of cirrhosis of the liver at age 57, but science fiction writers are getting bestsellers by chewing over the supertrilogy of the trilogy's trilogy at age 82.

reason: Do you ever have a feeling of vertigo when you look around and see lot of things that seem science fictional that we didn't anticipate, or that we did anti-cipate but didn't expect would come true so soon?

Sterling: Or that they would be so banal. I have moments of future shock. I'm not invulnerable to that. What interests me is where ideas that are very novel to me become old-fashioned and even antiquated. But it doesn't quite shock me in the way that it once did. I didn't merely read the prognostications of my own epoch; I've been very interested in futuristic prognostications written in the 19th century. They're always off. No one can ever make it as banal as it is. If you're writing about the future, it's hard to write about things that will be omnipresent and boring and explain to your readers that they are novelties to you but boring to your characters.

reason: It's strange that not only are your idle musings on Usenet from 15 years ago still out there, but someone could actually confront you with them.

Sterling: That doesn't surprise me too much. I put it in this new book. There are certain things that, in middle age, become obvious to you. The best way to have a really great idea is to have a thousand ideas. The guy who has the thousand ideas will be valorized for idea 837 and for idea 732, but those were never the ones he treasured. What did Thomas Edison really spend a lot of time on? Trying to get rubber out of milkweeds. He devoted fantastic effort to this mad scheme.

There are offhand comments one makes, or little things that you do, that become catch phrases or stuff that people will stick as signature lines on the Internet. It's rarely the polished aphorism that you're sweating over.

reason: It's like what Derrida tells us: You produced this text, and then it's totally out of your control.

Sterling: I agree with that, and the reason I don't resent it is I have taken such liberties with other people's texts. I don't want to submit to any text control system that would conceivably protect my interests from others, when my interests are so freewheeling.

reason: Are we on the verge of post-humanity?

Sterling: I think we are on the verge of post-humanity, but I don't think it's going to look like what any Extropian thinks it's going to look like. At the end of my novel Holy Fire [Bantam, 1997], two post-humans meet. The woman is assessing her former husband and says he's a god. But he's not a god. He's a tommyknocker or a garden gnome. He's this thing which is no longer human and doesn't have human concerns.

There are methods of speculating about how this will play out, and some will have some traction, and some will be ideological or otherwise mistaken. The Extropian problem is thinking you can upload yourself into a computer and have this rapture of the nerds. It was a powerful fantasy of escaping the unbearable pressures of being human. And there are many unbearable pressures of being human. But you find that when you escape one of these things you generally bring all your baggage with you. We will escape some of the limits, but we will not escape into some pure electro-Platonic world any more than the Internet will turn out to be this pure electro-Platonic philosophers' realm.

reason: The Internet turned out to be a funhouse mirror in which everything is emphasized.

Sterling: It's also peculiarly carnal. In the early days of cyberspace, we were going to escape the meat. Well, there is more meat on the Internet than you can imagine. There are acres and acres of people just pointing cameras at their bodies.

reason: Blogging seems to have taken a place in the culture that used to be occupied by fanzines, and maybe by the science fiction magazines.

Sterling: It had its apotheosis in people like Cory Doctorow [author of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom] and other writers who really aren't that interested in the old paper world. Cory actually publishes stuff electronically, and blogging is his Weird Tales. He is of a generation sufficiently divorced from the old pulps that he's the dolphin among mesosaurs here.

reason: It seems strange to go to the newsstand and see the lone science fiction magazine.

Sterling: It's been anachronistic since World War II. These are the last surviving pulps. I love them dearly.

There's nothing holy about them. Like all forms of media, they are very dependent on their technological circumstances. The transformation comes when the people who understood what it was like die. I'm a transitional figure. I'm the very last generation that worked professionally on typewriters. William Gibson wrote his first book on a typewriter. I wrote two books on typewriters. I was taught to use slide rules in schools. Now it's like having a pet trilobite.

reason: Let's talk about the Viridian movement. You're obviously trying to take some dimension of environmentalism and take it in a new and different direction that isn't particularly anti-modern or anti-technological. And you've tried to frame your "Greens" as an art movement rather than as a political movement.

Sterling: I've always been extremely interested in art movements and political movements and social movements, the small gangs of intelligentsia and who reads whom. Professional musicians are into that too. I just got this new Starbucks album that the Rolling Stones put together. Keith Richards, of all people, talks about how he always wanted to know who the musicians he likes listen to. That's the sign of a true adept there. You want to trace back your spiritual ancestors.

That's what André Breton did, and that's what the pre-Raphaelites did. And they self-published to get the news out. The pre-Raphaelites had this fanzine called The Germ, and it went through four issues. And it always goes through four issues. That's the classic fanzine thing. The surrealists had this fanzine called The Minotaur, and it went through four issues. The cyberpunks had two fanzines -- Cheap Truth and SF Eye. Cheap Truth went through 17 issues. But the issues were only one page long.

They're blogs now. And there are various other social software mechanisms. I'm doing a Viridian blog [www.viridiandesign.org] which is an electro version of a design magazine. I use it as a kind of social probe. It's an experiment for me, a way to give and get back at the same time. It's an organizational experiment. It's a private intelligence network.

reason: And the substance, the topic area, is what?

Sterling: The central topic is the greenhouse effect as a post-industrial design problem. It's not just about raising money for flood victims, which is one way to deal with the consequences. It's about thinking about how we got into this mess, making people realize the mess, and exploring mechanisms -- technologies -- by which we might conceivably get out.

reason: The traditional green approach, as distinct from the Viridian Green approach, is typically framed in negative terms: a "Thou shalt not" or "We must stop X."

Sterling: Traditional environmentalism is tied in with a human self-actualization movement, which says there are certain things we must renounce for moral reasons.

reason: You were not engaged by that?

Sterling: I'm extremely interested in that, actually, but it doesn't really get me anything. One of the things I introduced deliberately in the Viridian movement is Viridian hate objects. There are people who are our bête noirs, on whom we focus scorn and loathing, and of course they are the people who are most Viridian-like but on the other side. Like the Greening Earth Society, which is like six guys getting paid by coal companies. They sit in a hangar out by the Beltway making up lies. So they've got a better budget than us.

Sure, we hate Exxon because they're huge and they're everywhere. They are the worst of the oil majors, and plus they are involved in a lot of black propaganda activities. But the real people you want to hate from a Viridian perspective are the Greening Earth Society, because they are so much like us.

I singled out the Greening Earth Society as a psychological experiment in the manufacture of a social movement because I've noticed that other social movements hate heretics far more than they hate pagans. Pagans who have never heard the gospel -- you should clothe them. You should send out missionaries. They just don't know. It's the people who do know, who have the opposite idea, whom you hate.

reason: Nowadays the political lines seem increasingly blurry, but there were periods in the 20th century when it seemed you could draw some lines.

Sterling: Right now, the Republicans are the party of reckless spending, and the Democrats are the party of responsibility and the balanced budget.

reason: Not many of us saw that coming.

Sterling: In the 17th century, the guys with short hair were the radicals and the guys with long hair were the royalists. The signifiers move, and the issues move from place to place, but there are certain psychological aspects to human social organization that -- I wouldn't call them timeless, but they are commonalities.

I also like to experiment with them. I like to experiment with the media. I'd like to see what people can do with the Internet that they cannot do on paper. And there are certain things one can do that are not worth doing. Like I can set up a discussion group that's open to everybody! And that is not worth doing. It's sort of proven that it immediately turns into a cesspool because it's badly designed.

What I've got in Viridian lists are things like: How do I attract people's attention? How do I not attract too many people's attention? How do I attract interest groups and not alienate other interest groups? How do I move ideas from one interest group to another interest group?

reason: You did something clever by declaring yourself a pope-emperor of the Viridian Greens -- simultaneously declaring yourself as a leader and putting an ironic distance between yourself and that role.

Sterling: "Pope" is from surrealism. For someone to call himself a pope is not a new thing.

reason: I know, but you're a pope-hyphenate. That's new.

Sterling: I'm a pope-emperor. That actually did not work out. The pope doesn't work without a college of cardinals. In the early days of Viridian lists I had that; I would declare people things and give them stars and asterisks and ranks. You can do that for 20 people, but you cannot do it for 3,000.

reason: I've been amused by the spectacle of Harlan Ellison ranting against bulletin boards because they say bad things about him.

Sterling: The guy has great skill in getting headlines when he thinks he needs them. I learned a lot from him, like how to organize a literary movement. You need some controversy. He had a Breton thing, in that he burns friend and foe alike. But he's always been very good at making enemies, and many of his enemies are the proper enemies to make. Spiro Agnew. How many other science fiction writers are upset at the vice president? Norman Spinrad's books were condemned in Parliament. How many other science fiction writers have ever been condemned by the powers that be in a parliamentary inquiry?

reason: You're envious.

Sterling: No, I'm not envious. I'm respectful. If I were envious I'd say, "How come I don't get as much money as Michael Moorcock?"

reason: But don't you want to be condemned in Parliament at least once?

Sterling: I want to testify to Congress, but I've done that. I think it's an improvement over being condemned in Parliament: to be a cyberpunk testifying in Congress. This guy is a science fiction writer, and he's here before our panel. You want to be in a situation where you can screw with their heads.

reason: One of the distressing insights of working in D.C. is the extent to which the panel of witnesses at a congressional hearing is a kind of theater. And whether it serves as input to anybody's thinking is highly questionable.

Sterling: It's not that Congress doesn't listen to science fiction writers. They shouldn't, really. They should have never listened to Newt Gingrich, that's for sure, and he's a science fiction writer.

Shelley said poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. The truth is that legislators are the unacknowledged poets of the world. They're going to remain unacknowledged. If you talk to anyone who is in power, they never think they have enough to get anything done. No one has ever said, "I have too much power; some of my power should be devolved." It's always, "I'm president, and the Senate is driving me nuts!"

Prisoners of Digital Television

info@reason.com (Mike Godwin) — Tue, 01 Apr 2003 00:00:00 EST

In Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, the young student wizard Harry Potter is pursued by a horde of creatures called Dementors. To make a long, well-plotted story far too short, a future version of Harry suddenly appears and waves his magic wand, reciting the spell "Expecto Petronum!" Thus Future Harry manages to scare away the Dementors, protecting the Harry of the present.

The transition from analog broadcast television to digital broadcast television (DTV), now an enshrined part of American broadcasting policy, faces its own set of Dementors -- a horde of technical, legal, economic, and social problems. Taken together, the problems look as unbeatable as any monster. Making things worse, many factions with a stake in the outcome are at war over such issues as technology mandates, copyright protection, and fair use.

But what if we could somehow look back from the future to today's troubled present debate, wave our wands, and magically defeat the problems that bedevil the DTV transition? Such magic is beyond us mere muggles (as Harry's fellow wizards disparage non-magical humans). But it is possible to look back from the future we have long been imagining -- one in which various consumer electronics and information technologies have converged, and in which the broadband Internet reaches every home. From there, we can come up with our own version of a magical solution.

It's fair to ask why we even need a solution, other than letting our DTV industrial policy collapse under the weight of its own mistakes. The short answer is this: There's much more than digital television at stake. Bad government actions in this sphere -- and you can be sure that Congress and the Federal Communications Commission will act rather than refrain from acting -- could permanently shoehorn part or all of the computer revolution under government-driven design control. Not only would this likely kill the dynamism of the information-technology sector, but it is unlikely to do much to protect copyright interests.

Worse, by slowing technical innovation, the Hollywood studios may end up shooting themselves in the foot, since digital innovations have both lowered production costs and let new features and effects be included in modern TV and movies. Since our government is dead-set on taking action, the question becomes one of helping our regulatory Harry Potters invoke the most innovation-friendly spell rather than (as might otherwise be preferable) giving up the magic of regulation altogether.

The Problems

Before we can outline a solution, we have to take a look at the problems. A list follows of the issues each set of stakeholders sees at the center of the transition to DTV. One might reasonably dispute some of the groups' assertions, but for the sake of argument I'll treat all their primary points as essentially valid. Even with that understanding, as we'll see, there may be a win-win solution for all the major players -- especially consumers.

Problems for content companies. Motion picture studios, TV networks, and other companies that produce, publish, or distribute content worry that DTV will allow viewers to record high-quality content, then recirculate it through the Internet or other media, à la Napster. Such copying could undermine the revenue potential of high-quality content, which otherwise could be resold to local broadcasters through syndication or repackaged as VHS tapes and DVDs for sale or rental.

One proposed fix, widely advocated within the content industries, is to "mark" all commercial content that needs to be controlled -- perhaps with a broadcast flag (a string of bits contained in the digital broadcasting stream) or perhaps with watermark technology (a hidden mark designed to survive digital-to-analog conversions, as well as the conversions of content that occur routinely in computers and consumer electronics).

Such marking solutions, however, produce another set of problems. To look for the marks, an unprecedentedly broad range of technologies would be required. Plus, the government would have to standardize the marking technologies. And broad sectors of the information technology, consumer electronics, and communications fields would have to be radically rebuilt. Some industrial sectors -- especially those that produce niche digital-manipulation devices (such as Formac, whose product line converts TV to digital video and back again) or personal video recorder systems (such as TiVo) -- might be wiped out by the cost of the redesign and by limits on developing new products.

Without government regulation and oversight, the marking approach can't work. Unless it's required by law, electronics manufacturers would have little incentive to encumber digital devices with the necessary features. Import regulations would be needed to prevent entry of noncompliant devices. And we might need new regulatory controls over analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog recording technologies. Such devices are currently ubiquitous and cheap, but because they may ignore or even strip out the marks placed in digital content, they form part of what the content industry calls "the analog hole" -- their unsightly term for analog devices' tendency to ignore or sidestep digitally based protections, thus creating a gap through which protected digital content can leak.

Control of analog-to-digital or digital-to-analog technologies may make them more expensive and less functional. Worse, it may add hidden, unanticipated costs to devices not traditionally considered within the FCC's jurisdiction, such as astronomical observation tools and certain types of medical monitors. And don't forget your cell phone, whose cheap microphone takes the analog waveforms of your voice and digitizes them for transmission.

Needless to say, the marking-plus-regulation solution puts the content sector at odds with other industries and with consumers. This has led to trench warfare in the legislature, in the courts, and in public opinion, with each side throwing all its resources into gaining a few feet here (as with the battles over the broadcast flag) or blocking an enemy's advance there (as with the effective killing of Sen. Fritz Holling's (D-S.C.) omnibus copyright-protection legislation, which first brought the struggle between the Hollywood studios and the tech companies into the public eye).

Problems for hardware, software, and Internet companies. Many segments of these industries are also facing flattening sales. The sector as a whole is acutely aware that customers will reject new products that may be more limited than older ones in how they deal with both commercial and user-generated content. The computer and software industries in particular take it as a given that consumers expect more and better functionality and faster processing speeds. They don't want to hear these sorts of complaints: "Every second my computer spends checking whether I'm making an unauthorized copy is a cycle it isn't using on my work!...Why can't I move digital video I made myself back and forth between my computer and my digital video camera?...This computer takes longer to load media files than my old one did!"

Worse yet, the content industry's proposal has to make many classes of hardware and software "untamperable" -- that is, difficult to modify, or "closed." Yet open platforms such as the PC and the Internet have by their very openness encouraged innovation. The results include the Internet as we now know it, the World Wide Web, Linux and other open source software, and graphical browsers. Interestingly, rapid development in this sector has also produced technologies that make filmmaking, music recording, and other forms of content generation much cheaper and more accessible than they used to be.

The Linux problem is particularly acute, as Linux-based operating systems are among the few serious competitors to Microsoft remaining in the operating system market. Linux programs are distributed with their "source code" or simply distributed as source code, which means that they're inherently open and tamperable. A regulatory requirement that Linux-based media players be untamperable would in effect outlaw Linux versions of such products.

Fine, you say: Then the law should recognize the competitive value of open source software and carve out an exception from the untamperability requirement. But that wouldn't just be a big hole in the content-protecting regulatory scheme. It would actually put proprietary software companies at a disadvantage in competing with Linux in the media player market, since Linux-based players could be modified by any programmer to add functionality or remove content protections. In effect, the "untamperability" requirement creates a dilemma -- either permanently hobble open source software (and perhaps lock in Microsoft's current market dominance), or permanently disadvantage proprietary software, including Microsoft's (and thus promote Linux as a matter of industrial policy).

For Internet companies, any regulatory obligation to monitor for copyrighted content signifies a substantial redesign of the Net as it has existed and grown since its beginnings more than three decades ago. Peer-to-peer file trading did not begin with Napster. It is, in a deep sense, a part of the Internet's fundamental design. The Net was created so computers could share data and other resources on a distributed, decentralized network. Digital music files are just another kind of data.

Furthermore, making copies is a fundamental part of what each computer does. It copies information from one part of memory to another, from memory to hard drive and back again, from memory to video, and so on. The Internet, too, works by copying -- transmitted data are typically divided into "packets," which are then copied and recopied from computer to computer until reproductions of all the packets reach the destination computer and are reunited into a perfect copy of the transmitted information.

Problems for Congress. For a number of policy reasons -- the perceived benefit to the public, a purportedly more efficient use of the spectrum, higher-quality broadcasts -- Congress has required television broadcasters to move from analog to digital transmissions. It established the year 2006 as a nominal deadline for the shift, assuming that the general public would see the value of DTV and buy new television sets, with digital tuners, to take advantage of these features. In effect, Congress "loaned" broadcasters extra spectrum to develop DTV (and the DTV audience), but the loan has not produced the expected consumer buy-in.

Making things still more problematic, Congress based its tax and budgeting decisions for the next few years on the assumption that the original "analog spectrum" would be returned. It could then be used for public service purposes (public safety, a larger unlicensed band) or auctioned off, with the latter plan generating perhaps tens of billions of dollars for the government.

As we approach the deadline, the increasingly evident lack of significant consumer purchases of (relatively expensive) DTV receivers means Congress faces the prospect of telling voters that their analog TVs -- including the big new ones they buy just this year, or next year, or in 2005 -- will either be wholly obsolete or require a converter box to keep working. There is no serious doubt that voters will be unhappy about having to buy new, more expensive TVs, or somewhat less expensive adapter boxes, just because Congress has said they must. (An unfortunate side effect of the converter interim solution is that, by adapting legacy devices to receive digital broadcasts, the government may in effect be equipping home-entertainment equipment to facilitate the very "analog hole" infringement that troubles content companies.)

Congress could, of course, push back the spectrum give-back deadline. Broadcasters may also be able to use a loophole in the original deal to push it back themselves. But this would throw off budget and tax calculations and force a revenue shortfall, which in turn would force Congress to make other hard decisions that also may irritate or disappoint voters.

Problems for consumer electronics companies. Quite rationally, the consumer electronics sector likes selling high-margin, high-quality, high-resolution TV display devices. It also knows that just about all of its current customer base for such devices gets its content from cable, satellite, or DVD, and scarcely ever from over-the-air digital broad-casting.

Tuner mandates, such as the FCC's recent requirement that all high-definition televisions (HDTVs) carry both analog and digital TV-signal receivers, mean an added expense per unit at a time when the industry is hoping economies of scale will reduce their costs and get more buyers into stores for crisper, even "cinema-quality," TV displays. Consumer electronics companies now have an incentive to move entirely into the computer-monitor business and abandon selling "TV sets" (monitors plus tuners) altogether. This would allow them to escape the tuner mandates and continue to sell high-quality visual displays that would function equally well on computers or as part of home entertainment systems -- attached, for example, to cable set-top boxes.

Meanwhile, one looming problem has not even begun to be addressed: In-the-field tests of television sets equipped with digital tuners suggest that DTV reception -- at least under the technical standard digital broadcasters are currently required to use, dubbed 8VSB -- is not as reliable as analog broadcast reception. In other words, the FCC is requiring manufacturers to add digital tuners that, while spiffy on the rare occasions that they do work, are nowhere near as reliable as plain old analog TV receivers. This is not the kind of policy that inspires people to buy consumer electronics.

Problems for broadcasters. Broadcasters aren't pleased that digital transmissions are less reliably received than analog broadcasts. Nor are they happy that the bill for "loaned" spectrum will soon come due, especially given most Americans' unwillingness to buy DTV products. If the transition is imposed on the scheduled date, there will be an abrupt decline in the advertising audience base for their broadcasts -- especially when compared to those of cable and satellite.

Furthermore, the generally high costs of refitting broadcasting plants to enable DTV transmissions are, for many stations, an unfunded mandate -- expenses that they are required by law to make as licensees (and may already have begun to make) but that do not translate (or haven't yet translated) into additional revenue.

Historically, one argument for the transition to DTV has been to enable broadcasters to compete against the heretofore more reliable signal quality of cable- and satellite-delivered TV content. It would be ironic if a policy designed to preserve free broadcast TV were in fact to hasten its end.

Problems for consumers. By voting with their wallets, most consumers have demonstrated that they do not yet value DTV's benefits enough to invest seriously in new equipment for it. Consumers who rely primarily on over-the-air broadcast signals may find that their new digital TV sets receive broadcast content less reliably than their old analog sets did. This federally compelled downgrade in reception reliability will likely make a significant number of broadcast-reliant voters unhappy.

In addition, efforts to control analog input-output interfaces, recorders, and display devices, in order to ensure the effectiveness of some marking schemes, may spell the end of plug-and-play interoperability among consumer electronics devices -- a convenience that every Radio Shack or Sears customer has come to expect.

The Harry Potter Fix

Is it possible to create a compromise that addresses the concerns of all these groups? Politically speaking, it might not be. As a matter of public policy, though, it might. I lay out that compromise here, but first, a warning and a request: Please don't hate me for suggesting that the FCC impose a new set of regulations when, in fact, we'd probably be better off if it sat this one out. I'm no fan of the commission, and remain appropriately skeptical of its expansive role in regulating broadcasting. But the fact is that the FCC is under immense pressure from Congress to further the DTV transition. It will almost certainly choose to act, and whatever it chooses to do will probably be big. If we can't stop the commission from acting at all, we should help it find a plan that, at worst, does no harm. At best -- if the stars line up and we hold our mouths just right -- it might actually solve the DTV problem with minimal costs to the rest of the us.

The Harry Potter fix begins with three basic steps.

First, Congress would keep its 2006 deadline for the return of extra spectrum but allow broadcasters to choose which spectrum they return. They could keep their old analog spectrum or their new digital spectrum, but they'd have to give back one or the other. (This step assumes for the sake of simplicity that spectrum is fungible. The actual implementation of the giveback will be somewhat more complicated due to technical allocation issues, but compared to the regulatory problems of the current state of affairs it would be relatively straightforward.)

Second, TV stations could continue analog broadcasting if they wished. Those that wanted to continue analog broadcasting but continue to build out to, or experiment with, digital broadcasting could choose to buy or license additional spectrum, more of which should be available once the "loaned" spectrum has been reclaimed by the Commission, acting as a proxy for the general public. Furthermore, broadcasters who continue to transmit digital signals would be allowed to choose between the 8VSB standard and any other standard that might work more effectively (e.g., the COFDM standard now prevalent in Europe).

Third, the FCC would require all national networks, as a condition of continuing to hold their licenses, to transmit their prime time and late-night programming via the Internet. Local broadcast licensees likewise would be required to Netcast their locally generated programming.

"Wait a minute," you may shout at this suggestion. Internet distribution of licensed creative content? Won't that worry copyright holders? Aren't such worries the very motivation for the technology mandates they keep proposing?

Sure they are. That's why the FCC must also allow content companies to insist that delivery of licensed content be done through one or more secure digital multimedia systems, such as RealPlayer, QuickTime Streaming Video, Windows Media Player, or various Palladium-based schemes soon to be deployed. All of these systems, plus a number of others, offer reasonably secure delivery that prevents all but the most determined viewers from making unauthorized copies of content. They are not entirely hack-proof, but that is also true (indeed, much more true) of the proposed marking schemes. In purely practical terms, they already offer more protection than such schemes, not least because they are less costly to implement. Of course, broadcasters may choose to deliver some of their own content in the clear, and there may be occasions when copyright holders want to authorize or even encourage broadcasters to deliver some of their content in that manner.

What are the advantages to this three-part plan?

First and foremost, it takes advantage of market forces that are already in play. Consider the advantage to content companies in the secure-delivery-system requirement. Market competition already exists in this sector, and there are several major players, including Real Networks, Microsoft, and Apple. Market-driven solutions can evolve more rapidly and respond more quickly to new copyright security problems than any government-imposed standard can. For antitrust reasons, the FCC would not want a regulation that let content licensors dictate which one of the competing systems must be used -- that would permit them to leverage their copyright interests into control over commerce in areas outside of their copyrights. It would nevertheless be possible for the FCC to allow content creators to insist that licensees select a system that meets specified technology-neutral minimum security standards.

Another advantage: Secure Internet delivery of high-quality content would expose more Americans to the quality of high-definition TV and other digital offerings. Recent statistics suggest that about 70 percent of American households have personal computers -- about the same share that has cable. Current PC monitors, including analog ones, are excellent DTV display devices. DTV-Internet offerings may spur demand for even better technologies.

It's true that even the fastest home broadband connections require many hours of download time to deliver digital television. Content companies typically acknowledge that their marking proposals are anticipatory measures. That is, they are addressing not a current problem but a prospective problem they believe will appear when Internet bandwidth is expanded.

But we also know that, for infringers at least, waiting hours for downloads to complete has not been considered a serious problem, even on the current Internet. In addition, it is widely believed (although hotly disputed by many telecom observers) that Internet bandwidth to the home will continue to increase over the coming years. Many early Napster users waited a long time for MP3 files to complete their downloading over 56-kilobyte modem connections. The same is now true for those who download movie and television files via broadband.

This points to a larger development: Live delivery of television is increasingly unimportant to Americans, a fact that helps explain the widespread use of VCRs, TiVo, and other devices for time shifting. Current Internet bandwidth rarely if ever supports live high-definition TV. But we may reasonably assume that a jumpstarted demand for broadband-delivered digital television will fund the kind of infrastructure build-out required to enable quick or even real-time high-definition TV delivery. And since the FCC is concerned with promoting high-definition TV broadcasting we may note here that consumers who've found that their appetites have been whetted for high-definition TV, and who want it faster than the Internet can deliver it, have an obvious solution that also fulfills the Commission's mandate. To wit, they can buy an high-definition TV set and (assuming broadcasters iron out those pesky 8VSB transmission problems) get their must-see TV live, 24 hours a day, from over-the-air broadcasting sources.

Meanwhile, nonsimultaneous delivery of premium content may constitute a new application for pure peer-to-peer distribution. (It would be a great irony if the Internet's peer-to-peer functionality, once regarded as an unmitigated problem, could be harnessed to enhance the delivery of commercial content in ways that financially benefit content producers even as they increase consumer choice.)

And if it doesn't work out that way -- well, then the point is moot. If there is not enough bandwidth to allow a legal market in high-definition TV content, it follows that there isn't enough bandwidth to allow substantial piracy of it either.

Other Beneficiaries

The consumer electronics sector would also benefit: It would still get to sell high-quality computer monitors (essentially TVs without tuners) and might sell many more as audiences discovered alternative ways to access high-definition DTV content.

The information technology sector, remaining unencumbered by the government's technology mandates, would get to compete to develop secure content delivery systems. Provided the choice of secure delivery systems is left to the broadcaster, competition alone ought to be enough incentive for continuous innovation in these delivery components, driving down price while improving ease of use, quantity of features, and quality of playback. (It's instructive, in this connection, that consumer feedback about copy protection schemes revolutionized the software industry in the 1980s. The result was that most commercial software companies either abandoned copy protection or developed protection schemes, such as registration, that were less onerous for ordinary users.)

Broadcasters would be able to approach the shift to digital with a lot more flexibility. Local broadcasters in particular would gain. Not only would they be able to preserve their existing geographically based audiences (by not requiring them to abandon their old TVs and buy more expensive ones), but they would be able to reach new audiences around the world. Diversity of programming would be advanced, since an innovative local program would have the potential to reach a national or international audience. (This has already been the experience of radio stations that have echoed their programming to the Internet.) And reaching that larger audience would mean more advertising dollars for the station.

Consumers, too, would benefit, and not just because they wouldn't have to junk old TVs. They could still do fair-use time shifting (and other legal but unlicensed uses of commercial content) with their VCRs, TVs, TiVos, ReplayTVs, eyeTVs, WinTVs, and other digital and analog devices, including PC capture devices, as long as there was continued analog distribution. Perhaps more important, market competition among secure delivery systems might begin to offer similar fair-use features in the purely digital arena as well, especially once we've refueled the market for competition in the delivery-system sector.

Meanwhile, broadcasters could experiment with offering "must-see" TV at times convenient to audiences, or more than once. As far as the TV viewer is concerned, there would be an immediate improvement in convenience: Instead of waiting until Thursday night to see the new episode of Friends, you could click on the Friends Web link anytime you wanted during the week the current episode was showing.

That, of course, is just one possibility -- lots of experiments would be possible. Another approach would be to give viewers a choice between "free" (that is, advertising-supported) prime time content and subscription-based, ad-free versions of the same programming. In other words, a viewer could choose to treat a network more like NBC or more like HBO. Perhaps you even could choose on Monday night to receive Friends on Wednesday. Since live broadcasting is increasingly unimportant to many TV viewers, your advance choice would allow the program to be buffered either in your system or in nearby servers, to be displayed on command. Such choices might matter more to viewers than any high-quality images.

And Congress? In a nutshell, it would be able to promote a transition to DTV without imposing any new expenses on TV consumers or imperiling "free" broadcasting. In fact, it would offer an expanded set of models for how free broadcasting can profitably work. It would get its "loaned" spectrum back and would be able to auction most of it off, consistent with budgetary plans, while reallocating portions of the spectrum for public use.

In short, every major stakeholder bloc would benefit, and consumers would be inconvenienced minimally, if at all.

Harry's wand-waving plan could work, and there may be other plans that do even better. But we'll only be able to weigh these alternatives if we set ourselves free to find alternatives to the current deadlocks, and resolve to avoid policy solutions that are worse than the problems. Both Congress and the FCC have been known to rival even J.K. Rowling in keeping us frustrated while we wait to find out how the story turns out. Let's hope we don't have to wait until 2006 for the next installment. And let's insist on a happy ending.