Bruce Sterling - Essays. Catscan Columns

Truck down to the local Walden Software, and you buy the local sword-and-planet trilogy right on a disk! Probably has a game tie-in, too: read the book; play the game!

And why stop there? After all, you've got all this digital processing- power going to waste.... Have it be an illustrated book! Illustrated with animated sequences! And wait -- this book has a soundtrack! What genius! Now even the stupidest kid in the block is gonna want to learn to read. It's a techical fix for the problem of withering literature!

And think -- you could put a hundred SF books on a compact disk for a buck! If they're public domain books.... Still, if there's enough money in it, you can probably change the old-fashioned literary copyright laws in your favor. Failing that, do it in Taiwan or Thailand or Hong Kong, where software piracy is already deeply embedded in the structure of business. (Hong Kong pirates can steal a computer game, crack the software protection, and photocopy the rules and counters, and sell it all back to the US in a ziplock baggie, in a week flat. Someday soon books will be treated like this!)

Digital Books for the Information Age -- books that aspire to the exalted condition of software! In the, well, "cultural logic of postmodern capitalism," all our art wants to be digital now. First, so you can have it. Replicate it. Reproduce it, without loss of fidelity. And, second -- and this is the hidden agenda -- so you can throw it away. And never have to look at it again.

How long will the first generation of "reading-machines" last? As long as the now utterly moribund Atari 400 game machine? Possibly. Probably not. If you write a "book" for any game machine -- if you write a book that is software -- you had better be prepared to live as game software people live, and think as game software people think, and survive as game software people survive.

And they're pretty smart people really. Good fun to hang out with. Those who work for companies are being pitilessly worked to death. Those who work for themselves are working themselves to death, and, without exception, they all have six or seven different ways of eking out a living in the crannies of silicon culture. Those who own successful companies, and those who write major hits, are millionaires. This doesn't slow down their workaholic drive though; it only means they get bigger and nicer toys.

They're very bright, unbelievably hard-working, very put-upon; fast on their feet, enamored of gambling... and with a sadly short artistic lifespan. And they're different. Very different. Digital dolphins in their dance of biz -- not like us print-era mosasaurs.

Want a look at what it would be like? Read THE JOURNAL OF COMPUTER GAME DESIGN (5251 Sierra Road, San Jose, CA 95132 -- $30/six issues per year). It's worth a good long look. It repays close attention.

And don't say I didn't warn you.

I just wrote my first nonfiction book. It's called THE HACKER CRACKDOWN: LAW AND DISORDER ON THE ELECTRONIC FRONTIER. Writing this book has required me to spend much of the past year and a half in the company of hackers, cops, and civil libertarians.

I've spent much time listening to arguments over what's legal, what's illegal, what's right and wrong, what's decent and what's despicable, what's moral and immoral, in the world of computers and civil liberties. My various informants were knowledgeable people who cared passionately about these issues, and most of them seemed well- intentioned. Considered as a whole, however, their opinions were a baffling mess of contradictions.

When I started this project, my ignorance of the issues involved was genuine and profound. I'd never knowingly met anyone from the computer underground. I'd never logged-on to an underground bulletin- board or read a semilegal hacker magazine. Although I did care a great deal about the issue of freedom of expression, I knew sadly little about the history of civil rights in America or the legal doctrines that surround freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and freedom of association. My relations with the police were firmly based on the stratagem of avoiding personal contact with police to the greatest extent possible.

I didn't go looking for this project. This project came looking for me. I became inextricably involved when agents of the United States Secret Service, acting under the guidance of federal attorneys from Chicago, came to my home town of Austin on March 1, 1990, and confiscated the computers of a local science fiction gaming publisher. Steve Jackson Games, Inc., of Austin, was about to publish a gaming-book called GURPS Cyberpunk.

When the federal law-enforcement agents discovered the electronic manuscript of CYBERPUNK on the computers they had seized from Mr. Jackson's offices, they expressed grave shock and alarm. They declared that CYBERPUNK was "a manual for computer crime."

It's not my intention to reprise the story of the Jackson case in this column. I've done that to the best of my ability in THE HACKER CRACKDOWN; and in any case the ramifications of March 1 are far from over. Mr Jackson was never charged with any crime. His civil suit against the raiders is still in federal court as I write this.

I don't want to repeat here what some cops believe, what some hackers believe, or what some civil libertarians believe. Instead, I want to discuss my own moral beliefs as a science fiction writer -- such as they are. As an SF writer, I want to attempt a personal statement of principle.

It has not escaped my attention that there are many people who believe that anyone called a "cyberpunk" must be, almost by definition, entirely devoid of principle. I offer as evidence an excerpt from Buck BloomBecker's 1990 book, SPECTACULAR COMPUTER CRIMES. On page 53, in a chapter titled "Who Are The Computer Criminals?", Mr. BloomBecker introduces the formal classification of "cyberpunk" criminality.

"In the last few years, a new genre of science fiction has arisen under the evocative name of 'cyberpunk.' Introduced in the work of William Gibson, particularly in his prize-winning novel NEUROMANCER, cyberpunk takes an apocalyptic view of the technological future. In NEUROMANCER, the protagonist is a futuristic hacker who must use the most sophisticated computer strategies to commit crimes for people who offer him enough money to buy the biological creations he needs to survive. His life is one of cynical despair, fueled by the desire to avoid death. Though none of the virus cases actually seen so far have been so devastating, this book certainly represents an attitude that should be watched for when we find new cases of computer virus and try to understand the motivations behind them.

"The New York Times's John Markoff, one of the more perceptive and accomplished writers in the field, has written than a number of computer criminals demonstrate new levels of meanness. He characterizes them, as do I, as cyberpunks."

Those of us who have read Gibson's NEUROMANCER closely will be aware of certain factual inaccuracies in Mr. BloomBecker's brief review. NEUROMANCER is not "apocalyptic." The chief conspirator in NEUROMANCER forces Case's loyalty, not by buying his services, but by planting poison-sacs in his brain. Case is "fueled" not by his greed for money or "biological creations," or even by the cynical "desire to avoid death," but rather by his burning desire to hack cyberspace. And so forth.

However, I don't think this misreading of NEUROMANCER is based on carelessness or malice. The rest of Mr. BloomBecker's book generally is informative, well-organized, and thoughtful. Instead, I feel that Mr. BloomBecker manfully absorbed as much of NEUROMANCER as he could without suffering a mental toxic reaction. This report of his is what he actually *saw* when reading the novel.