The Null Device

Must-read: R.U.Sirius and Justin Hall talk about new-edge "cyberculture" and what happened to it:
The great thing about the early-'90s cyberculture was that we got to make it all up. As far as anybody reading Mondo knew, hackers were probably as busy working on implants that would install encyclopedic knowledge in users' brains as they were working on encryption for a digital shopping mall. Instead of preparing to go public and rake in bucks, we were preparing for a singularity after which human life would be beyond current comprehension. It was bullshit, or at least massively premature, but it was hella more fun than our current relatively grim reality.
Reading the news, it seems as though being a "cyberpioneer," in the early-'90s sense of things, may soon be a crime. A young man was arrested for developing software code to watch DVDs on his Linux machine. Soon they'll be throwing people in jail for having MP3 servers, for sharing music with their friends.
That's the basic early-1990s technotopian mistake, believing that the nature of the technology will ultimately overthrow corporate tyranny as well as state tyranny.
...right libertarianism didn't bother me that much until 1994, when Cyber-Newt Gingrich took over the country. Seeing some of my own rhetoric about techno-based boundary dissolution appropriated in order to decentralize the social welfare state while deregulating the corporations came as a bit of a shock.

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