Rants & Raves
Surveying Surveillance
I have doubts about Charles Platt's statement (WIRED 1.5, page 112) regarding ubiquitous electronic surveillance: "Personally, I look forward to the time when no one will be exempt from surveillance. So long as corporations, governments, and citizens are equally vulnerable, lack of privacy will be the ultimate equalizer. It will also drastically reduce crime - especially street crime - when there's a constant possibility of electronic evidence turning up in court."
As far as I am concerned, it is still up in the air how all the new technologies are going to be regulated, who's going to make the money, and who's going to be driven underground. One thing that seems evident about any new source of information is that it can be ignored, or, if necessary, brutally suppressed. Outrageous incidents (such as the Rodney King beating alluded to in the text) occur every day in the streets of cities throughout the US (and the world) and are being taped. Whether this information is acted upon by authorities, admitted by (new?) rules of evidence, or causing an uproar in the mass media is another story. Once the novelty has worn off, how can electronic evidence help reduce crime when courts and jails are already burdened with too many cases full of the old-fashioned kind?
Curtis Corum
Rochester, New York
I wanted to comment briefly on your recent article "Nowhere to Hide" (WIRED 1.5, page 112). I found Charles Platt's argument fascinating and useful, but incomplete. Essentially, I agree that new electronic surveillance technologies will tend to equalize rather than reinforce existing power inequities - but only in the sphere of civil society. In the all-important realms of the State and the transnational corporation, however, the situation neither seems clear-cut nor offers grounds for Platt's optimism.
The evidence suggests not that the average person will have any greater surveillance power over the State/corporation in the foreseeable future, but rather that these entities will increasingly be able to monitor every aspect of social relations of society at large. Corporations already know infinitely more about me than I know about them - they know where I live, how much I spend on my credit card, what magazines I subscribe to, and so on. Businesses now watch over the number of keystrokes their secretaries type into their PCs, and monitor how many mistakes they make. They eavesdrop on e-mail messages. And so on. Bentham's panopticon, as described by Foucault, is upon us, writ large: The singular entity at the center can see everyone on the periphery, but none of us on the periphery can see it. (This metaphor is literally the case vis-a-vis relations between the US and the Third World - as was easily demonstrated in Iraq, there is a monopoly on global information flow.) What I see, in fact, is a culture in which relations of domination, oppression, power, and control are increasingly rendered invisible. For example, people confuse buying Nikes with constructing a "unique" personal identity, instant access to pornography and imagined violence with freedom, and confuse the development of new technologies with a solution to hierarchies of domination. Meanwhile, 30,000 children die of poverty every day, the environment gets globally trashed, the DOD continues to develop biological weapons, etc., etc.
The problem with your analysis, finally, is that it reduces the problem of power in our society to a technical or technological one, when the problem is in reality embedded in social relations - including relations of class, gender, and race. It is absurd to think that I will ever have as much surveillance power as the CIA, IBM, the NSC or any other body wielding real social, political, economic, or military power.
The challenge, in my view, is how to theorize strategies of social change - including how to utilize and change the direction of new technologies - in ways that transform these underlying power inequities. Anything short of this sounds idealist (in the Hegelian sense) and quixotic.
My criticism aside, your essay obviously got me to think about this issue, and I'm quite indebted to you for that.
John Sanbonmatsu
batpoet@cats.ucsc.edu
WIRED Gets WWWired
Why haven't you put up a WWW server yet? I find this odd, considering you have already twice published information about it, most recently in "NetSurf" (WIRED 2.01, page 136) . The World Wide Web has to be better for disseminating information than e-mail robots. So, come on, get WWWired! Right now!
Oscar Nierstrasz
oscar@cui.unige.ch
Have no fear, WIRED is wired. Since launch, we have been expanding our online resources as fast as our hardware and wetware resources permit. We are currently accessible via America Online, OneNet, and Mindvox, as well as our own mail server, the WIRED Info-rama. The Info-rama provides access to the text from back issues of the magazine, special features available only online, and other useful information such as press releases. We chose e-mail, rather than higher-tech net.resources (such as ftp, gopher, or WWW), in order to minimize access - another important component of a "better" system of information dissemination.
New online offerings are always in the works here at WIRED. WWW and gopher sites are under development, as are a series of WIRED mailing lists. Indeed, these and other new resources may well be available by the time you read this.
To get an up-to-the-nanosecond report on the State of WIRED's wiredness, send a message to the WIRED Info-rama - info-rama@wired.com - containing the line send wired.online as the message text. If you have specific questions or suggestions regarding WIRED's online presence, please address them to online@wiredmag.com.
- Jonathan Steuer, Online Tsar
Technomads
Many people, including me, dream of living in a nicer place than a big city while still doing interesting work. Feed the chickens, sling some code, chop some wood, write some specs, feed the goat....
With the advancement of the Internet and other global communication links, this becomes more and more possible. And it can have an impact on social life and economics as well; it becomes possible to repopulate the rural areas again, for example. Not all people want to work from home, but it is possible to have "work centers" where you meet your work-pals (although they might all work for different companies).
A few companies have done this in Sweden; for example, a big insurance company and the Stockholm Taxi company both moved their switchboard and customer service center to islands in the Stockholm archipelago. Apparently it has worked out really well.
So I would like to read about people and companies doing this already - the technology as well as the pros and cons of such a lifestyle.
Christer Lindh
clindh@abalon.se
Net Crawlers
I'm a pretty easy-going and open-minded person, and I really like your magazine, but I have to ask: Was your article extolling the virtues of Netrek really necessary (WIRED 1.6, page 54)?
I've spent a lot of hours in public computing labs trying to do some real work and not being able to get it done because our LAN (and quite possibly the Internet itself) was slowed to a crawl. The reason: Netrek. That fucking game should be banned from the Internet. Play it on your own LAN but keep it off the networks where people need the bandwidth for work and communication.
Chris Bienert
cjbiener@iastate.edu
The Mark of the Beast
I read your piece on the implantable ID chips for animals (WIRED 1.6, page 114)with some amusement. For about eighteen months, I've tuned in to a very extreme independent minister on short-wave radio. He's a hoot to listen to, and often rages about the UN security forces and their imminent takeover of the streets of the US. From the beginning, however, he has talked about what he thinks is "the mark of the beast" - implantable ID chips. These are the same chips you discussed in your article; he reported that the chips were "supposedly" designed for veterinary use, but that the "beast government" will suborn them to track every man, woman, and child in the world with a satellite network.
He may be in orbit on the reality scale, but he certainly must be plugged- in to emerging technology to have scooped WIRED by a year and a half!
Steve Baumrucker
author@holonet.net
The Right Source
As I'm sure you'll hear, it was not GEnie who bought The Source but CompuServe. And, as you mention (WIRED 2.01, page 64), CompuServe did incorporate The Source's fiftysome thousand subscribers into its more than half-a-million, as well as adding some of the products that The Source had to offer to its service.
I was in the Customer Service department at CompuServe at the time, assigned to a special "Source Welcoming and Transition (SWAT)" team, and had the honor of taking the first call from a Source subscriber who wanted to know what was up.
Thanks for the excellent article, now with even more correct information.
Steve Luper
72345.1246@compuserve.com
Sorry for this error; that will teach us to trust organic memory rather than silicon. - Editor
Undo!
- Our review of the Plantronics PLX-400 and PLX-500 headsets (WIRED 2.02), the remote controls pictured, from left to right, are those of Zing TV, Macintosh TV, and Phillips Touchpad.
- In our January issue (WIRED 2.01, page 42), we inadvertently printed the number for Spencer & Associates, a print consulting firm in Melville, New York in our "Fetish" item on the E-Print 1000. The correct number for Indigo America Inc. is +1 (617) 937 8800.
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