Magic
Mirror:
The Novel
as a Software Development Platform
Mark Pesce
Visiting
Professor
USC
Cinema-Television
http://www.hyperreal.org/~mpesce
Presented
at
Media in
Transition
Comparative
Media Studies Program,
Massachusetts
Institute of Technology
“This
Snow Crash, what is it? A drug, virus,
or religion?”
“What’s
the difference?”
-
Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash
If
Margaret Mead broke the anthropological canon when she went to live among the
Samoans, it must also be said that she learned more about their culture than
any researcher had before. Objectivity,
which confers a special joisannce upon sociological and anthropological
research, exists essentially as a left-over nineteenth century fraud of
scientism, a myth that bolstered the believability of facts which can not
easily be verified.
This
paper, which covers a twenty-year span of the culture of “hackers” – in the
original meaning of the word, those in love with code and the culture which
nurtures this love – involves an act of internal observation. The author, who grew up in the confines of
this culture, finds himself forced to report from within the culture this paper
attempts to describe, and is therefore necessarily subjective, situated within
the land as it draws the arc of its landscape.
In
1978, the author acquired a first-generation personal computer (a Tandy TRS-80)
and began to learn how to program it, inadvertently entering a subculture still
nascent, mostly confined to the university computing centers around major
technical institutions such as MIT and the University of California (Levy,
1984). As this culture grew from a
marginalized clique of “geeks” into the white-hot focal point of American
culture and commerce (TIME 27 September 1999), it has become increasingly
important to understand that this sub-culture has its roots in the entirely
imaginary realm, that of “hard” science fiction.
Unlike
the fantasy worlds of “soft” science fiction, “hard” science fiction builds
upon physically realistic premises to construct worlds where the “what if”
element very nearly touches the bounds of the technically possible. The fringed edge between the actual and the
possible – constantly evolving in a series of non-linear inflations (McKenna,
1975) – marks the boundary of innovation, the border between ideas and their
realizations. In the case of computer
software, which is itself the logical structuring of codes to produce a
platform for the expression of ideas, the boundary between idea and realization
becomes entirely permeable, an osmotic flow of memes (Dawkins, 1990), which,
insofar as they can infect the hacker mind, engender the design of new software
systems.
It
is the thesis of this paper that, for the last twenty years at least, “hard”
science fiction has functioned as a “high level architecture” (HLA), an
evolving design document for a generation of software designers brought up in
hacker culture, a culture which prizes these works as foundational elements in
their own worldviews. Hackers,
energized by texts which foresaw their own emerging role in planetary culture,
have come to see their “mission” as the realization of the visions brought
forth from authors like Vernor Vinge, Orson Scott Card, William Gibson, Neal
Stephenson and Greg Egan.
A
historical analysis of the last twenty years of “important” science fiction –
texts which have had a pivotal impact on the hacking community – clearly shows
the relationship between these texts and the grand projects of hackers. The author considers his own career in
software development – heavily
influenced by Gibson and Stephenson – as typical within hacker culture, so this
paper will discuss some of the autobiographical aspects of the author’s career
as a case-in-point, bringing particular focus to the generalities under
discussion.
Part
One: Before Gibson (1950 – 1981)
During
a 1980 lecture at MIT’s Kresge Auditorium, renowned science fiction author
Isaac Azimov announced that he had invented the electronic calculator – back in
1950. He pointed to the opening
chapters of his epochal (and influential) Foundation trilogy, in which
Hari Seldon, puppet master of the epic, demonstrates a mathematical theorem on
a device which displayed its results in “red digits, floating in space”
(Azimov, 1950), an eerily accurate reference to the then-popular LED displays
used in pocket calculators. While said
in jest, Azimov clearly felt some sense of ownership in the age of growing
high-tech gadgetry, an age he had described countless times in his books.
A
generation raised on Azimov’s tales created the technological world of the late
20th century, translating his ideas – in particular, the artificial
intelligences explored in his Robot series of novels – into real-world
artifacts. Speaking to Stewart Brand in
1986, Artificial Intelligence pioneer and avid science fiction reader Marvin
Minsky pronounced that his own guiding light came from the pages Azimov’s
works:
“Well,
I think of them as thinkers. They try
to figure out the consequences and implications of things in as thoughtful a
way as possible. A couple of hundred
years from now, maybe Isaac Azimov and Fred Pohl will be considered the most
important philosophers of the twentieth century, and the professional
philosophers will almost all be forgotten, because they’re just shallow and
wrong, and they’re ideas aren’t very powerful.
“When
Pohl or Azimov writes something, I regard it as extremely urgent to read it
right away. They might have a new
idea. Azimov has been working for forty
years on this problem: if you can make an intelligent machine, what kind of
relations will it have with people? How
do you negotiate when their thinking is so different? The science fiction writers think about what it means to think.”
Minsky,
as the prototypical hacker, expresses the essence of the hacker’s relationship
to the science fiction text, seeing it as the theoretical ground for a kind of
natural philosophy that he then tests and actualizes in his own research. Science fiction provides him – and by
extension, all hackerdom – a field of ideas to play within, and select from.
The
roots of the modern movement of “cyberpunk” fiction can be traced back to the
enormously influential writer John Brunner.
In a series of dazzling novels written throughout the 1970’s, Brunner
redefined the field of science fiction, and clearing the way for authors like
William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, established the dystopian world view as the weltanschauung
of choice in hard science fiction.
One
of Brunner’s novels has had an impact far beyond science fiction; in Shockwave
Rider (Brunner, 1975), computer and network sabotage are described in terms
that would be familiar today, with worms and viruses snaking their way across
the physical and cultural structures of the world, unleashed by a protagonist
interested in setting society to rights.
As a text, Shockwave Rider represents the introduction of the
hacker hero, and this myth likely produced an auto-catalytic recognition and
formation of community among the still widely scattered hacker cliques of the
late 1970s. Recognizing their own
impending empowerment in the pages of Shockwave Rider, hackers began to
identify with the goals and methodologies expressed by Brunner, and communities
of common interest naturally formed.
The
next text of major significance to hacker culture presented a unique,
integrated vision of a future both trans-human (in the sense that a
transcendence out of human form is expressed in the narrative) and remarkably
realistic, bridging the two in a classical story of suspense. Vernor Vinge’s novella True Names
(1980) brought apotheosis to the heart of hacker culture:
He looked around, feeling suddenly like a small boy
let loose in a candy shop: he sensed enormous data bases and the power that
would let him use them…In seconds, they were the biggest users in North
America. The drain would be clear to
anyone monitoring the System, though a casual user might notice only increased
delays in turnaround.
--but they
were experiencing what no human had ever known before, a sensory bandwidth
thousands of times normal. For seconds that seemed without end, their minds
were filled with a jumble verging on pain, data that was not information and
information that was not knowledge. To hear ten million simultaneous phone
conversations, to see the continent's entire video output, should have been a
white noise. Instead it was a tidal
wave of detail rammed through the tiny aperture of their minds.
He controlled more than raw data now; if he could
master them, the continent's computers could process this avalanche, much the
way parts of the human brain preprocess their input. More seconds passed, but
now with a sense of time, as he struggled to distribute his very consciousness
through the System.
Then it was over, and he had control once more. But
things would never be the same: the human that had been Mr. Slippery was an
insect wandering in the cathedral his mind had become. There simply was more
there than before. No sparrow could fall without his knowledge, via air traffic
control; no check could be cashed without his noticing over the bank
communication net. More than three hundred million lives swept before what his
senses had become.
As
Roger Pollack, the protagonist in True Names, extends his consciousness through
the planet-spanning networks of the early 21st century, he finds
himself transformed into an Übermensch, as far removed from the
pedestrian concerns of humanity as we are above the fruit fly. Vinge brought the still-nascent networks of the
1970s inside the skin, and in so doing, delivered a radical new vision
to hacker culture. Confusing the
boundaries between the machinic and the biological without resorting to the
simplicities of the cyborg, offering a new mythology of evolution and transcendence,
Vinge infected the hacker community with a new religion, both personal and
realizable. Setting the stage for the
grand architecture of both virtual reality and the World Wide Web, inspiring
those charged with creating these artifacts with a teleology, an expression of
the human destiny within them. In
Stuart Brand’s The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT (1987), he
recognized True Names – with an afterward by Marvin Minsky - as among
the most popular books for sale at MIT’s bookstore, a text reaching hacker
culture at its mainspring, and during its most formative years.
The
third text which significantly radicalized hackers before the emergence of the
cyberpunk movement must undoubtedly be Orson Scott Card’s novel Enders’ Game
(1982). At one level, Ender’s Game
is the coming-of-age story of Andrew “Ender” Wiggin, the biological end-product
of a fascist government program to produce a super-warrior, capable of leading
a human fleet into battle against a race of insect-like “buggers”, who are
challenging humanity for the supremacy of space, even threatening humanity’s
continued existence.
An
alternative reading of Card’s text draws from the generational power-shift
around the new technologies of computing and simulation. Ender Wiggin represents the child raised
within the electronic age, fully able to harness its capabilities to his own
ends. However, without the age and
wisdom to use his power wisely, he is deceived into fighting a war that he believes
is entirely synthetic, constructed as part of his training in “Battle
School”. When, after a climactic battle
scene, Ender realizes that he has in reality committed xenocide – the
intentional destruction of an entire species – that the Battle School is, in
fact, an elaborate real-time control system for Earths’ fleets of warships, he
understands that he has committed the ultimate sin, an absolute loss of
innocence which is among the most moving moments in the entire canon of science
fiction.
Written
in the first great flush of the video game era – a time when Atari was growing
to billion-dollar status – Card neatly reverses the power flows of culture,
placing a seven year-old child into the pivotal role as human protector, but
pairs this with the absolute destructive capabilities forced on him by his
protectors. In the wake of the Persian
Gulf War – the “videogame” war, the distinctions between Card’s fable and
reality have collapsed remarkably; children playing in elaborate simulation
environments have become the marshal arm of the state, using the screen as a
mechanism with which they can dehumanize the enemy, making them more effective
soldiers.
Above
and beyond the ethical dimensions of Card’s work – which has extended into five
sequel volumes – Ender’s Game had a significant effect in the world of
software development. The vision of the
“Battle Desk”, the educational and training environment provided to Ender in
the Battle School, reached Silicon Valley’s newest generation of personal
computer software designers and hackers, including the renowned John Walker,
who, with 8 other partners, founded Autodesk Corporation. Drawing from the possibilities expressed in
Ender’s Game, the Autodesk founders created several “environments”, software
products modeled after concepts found in the Battle Desk. One of these, AutoCAD, has become the
de facto standard for computer-aided design.
All
of the Autodesk founders, great fans of Card’s work, saw in it the
possibilities of the electronic future, and, using their own particular
talents, concretized Card’s visions in a series of products. As the 1980s progressed, Autodesk would
become a leader in the virtual reality industry, and Ender’s Game was
continually cited as an inspiration by Autodesk employees, even over William
Gibson’s Neuromancer.
Brunner,
Vinge and Card set the stage for the cyberpunk movement – brewing in the short
stories of writers like William Gibson and Bruce Sterling – as they identified
the hacker community as central to the emerging electronic culture; in giving
these hackers a vision, they also engendered the concretization of the ideas
they expressed in their works.
Part
Two: Burning Chrome to Snow Crash (1982 – 1992)
Readers
of the March 1992 OMNI – a favored magazine in hacker culture – found in
its pages a short story by a then-unknown writer named William Gibson. The story, titled “Burning Chrome”, changed
the world. In its opening lines, it
introduced a throwaway product name, “Ono-Sendai Cyberspace Seven”, which would
– because if its particular meaning in the minds it encountered – become the
central obsession of Millennial electronic culture.
Taking
a page from Brunner, “Burning Chrome” relates the story of two “cowboy” hackers
who break into the financial databases of a barely legitimate procuress. However, the theft takes place entirely
within a synthetic, imaginal realm that Gibson termed “the matrix”:
The
matrix is an abstract representation of the relationships between data
systems. Legitimate programmers jack
themselves into their employer’s sector of the matrix and find themselves
surrounded by bright geometries representing the corporate data.
And:
Towers
and fields of it ranged in the colorless non-space of the simulation matrix,
the electronic consensus-hallucination that facilitates the handling and exchange
of massive quantities of data.
In
the context of the emerging sciences of computer graphics and human computer
interactions (HCI), these few words decompressed into a galaxy of specific
meanings, interfaces, approaches to software design which would influence the
field for many years. Most
specifically, the word “cyberspace”, now in hyper-common usage as the
descriptor for the inclusive field of electronic communication, shows how a
single idea in Gibson’s work, has, first in hacker culture, and then in the
broader culture (as hackers came to dominate it) become synonymous with a
concrete system of products.
Specific
examples, such as Hani Rashid’s work for the New York Stock Exchange (Asymptote
Architects, 1999), illustrate that the vision delivered by Gibson in “Burning
Chrome” has been developed in toto into a tool for the manipulation of
vast quantities of financial data, a literal interpretation of the work as a
functional description of a software system.
Although
“Burning Chrome” reached the hacker community with a vision of the electronic
culture of the future, the publication of Gibson’s first novel, Neuromancer
(1991), created an entirely new discourse of virtuality, and had a broad and
still-unfolding impact on the culture at large. Allucquere Rosanne Stone, writing in Cyberspace: First Steps
(Benedikt, et. al., 1991), reports on the auto-catalytic effects of the text as
it encountered the communities it would thereby define:
Arguably
the single most significant event for the development of fourth-stage virtual
communities was the publication of William Gibson’s science fiction novel Neuromancer. Neuromancer represents the dividing
line between the third and fourth epochs not because it signaled any
technological development, but because it crystallized a new community, just as
Boyle’s scientific papers…did in an earlier age.
And:
Neuromancer reached the hackers who had been radicalized by George Lucas’ powerful cinematic evocation of humanity and technology infinitely extended, and it reached the technologically literate and socially disaffected who were searching for social forms that could transform the fragmented anomie that characterized life in Silicon Valley and all electronic industrial ghettos. In a single strong, Gibson’s powerful vision provided for them the imaginal public sphere and refigured discursive community that established the grounding for the possibility of a new kind of social interaction…Neuromancer in the time of Reagan and DARPA is a massive intertextual presence not only in other literary productions of the 1980s, but in technical publications, conference topics, hardware design, and scientific and technological discourses in the large.
As
Stone reports, the publication of Neuromancer produced a spontaneous act
of self-recognition among widely scattered communities of interest. Within a few months after its release, the
term “virtual reality” was coined by Jaron Lanier. Efforts at research
facilities as diverse as NASA Ames Research Center and the University of North
Carolina, which had been progressing along similar, though hardly identical
lines, suddenly came to be seen as “cyberspace” research.
During this period, when Neuromancer was published, “virtual reality” acquired a new name and suddenly prominent social identity as “cyberspace”. The critical importance of Gibson’s book was partly due to the way that it triggered a conceptual revolution among the scattered workers who had been doing virtual reality research groups for years: As task groups coalesced and dissolved, as the fortunes of companies and projects and laboratories rose and fell, the existence of Gibson’s novel and the technological and social imaginary that it articulated enabled the researchers in virtual reality – or, under the new dispensation, cyberspace – to recognize and organize themselves as a community.
Because
it produced a seductive mythology of possibility – cyberspace, after all, is a
software artifact, and therefore achievable simply by writing code – Neuromancer
completely energized the hacker community; the grand project of hackers in the
1980s and 1990s, the “sexiest” work, revolved around the production of virtual
reality systems and virtual communities.
The author found himself swept up in Gibson’s vision, and in 1991, founded
a virtual reality company that he named “Ono-Sendai”, pointing directly back at
the inspiration for his own work. It
can only be stated that this was a common occurrence in the years after the
publication of Neuromancer; thousands of hackers around the world began their
own VR projects, working to actualize the text into artifacts.
Although
Gibson had many admirers – and many imitators – he remained the singular force
in cyberpunk science fiction – as this movement came to be known – throughout
the 1980s. No other writer had so
eloquently and emotionally effected the direction of the hacker community,
until Neal Stephenson published Snow Crash in 1992.
Snow
Crash presents a post-Modern view of
post-Millennial electronic culture, an infosphere so polluted by competing
economic and ideological interests that reality has become impossibly bound up
with its virtualization in the “Metaverse”, the field of human activity in
cyberspace. As in Neuromancer,
the protagonist – named Hiro Protagonist – is a hacker par excellence, but in Snow
Crash, Protagonist becomes the savior of humanity, fighting against a set
of ideas/ viruses/software known as Snow Crash, which transform the innate
linguistic abilities of human beings into a prelapsarian Babel of glossalia. The confusion of codes (drug, virus,
religion) produces an equivalence between them, and Protagonist becomes the one
person grasps the significance of this equivalence, using this knowledge to
create a cultural “anti-virus”, inoculating humanity – and in particular, his
hacker comrades – from the vicissitudes of Snow Crash.
In
both Snow Crash and Neuromancer, the position of the hacker as
protagonist and savior gives these texts special significance in the hacker
communities; an act of self-identification takes place almost unconsciously
when a hacker reads these texts; when this happens, the osmotic flow of memes
can progress in full force, and the technological visions expressed within the texts become hyper-saturated with
meaning. The creation of technical
artifacts becomes an act of identification with the protagonists.
Unlike
Gibson, who publicly professes an almost Luddite distrust of technological
apparatus (Gibson wrote Neuromancer on a manual typewriter), Stephenson
has been trained as a software engineer, and brought his understanding of
software architectures to bear in Snow Crash, some parts of which read
like detailed software designs, particularly in his description of the
“Metaverse”. In a sense, Snow Crash
can be read as the recoding of the evocative language of Neuromancer –
broad and ambiguous – into a specific set of techniques that can be defined in
quantitative terms.
Because
it is so specific, and so evocative, Snow Crash has, like Neuromancer
before it, added another word to the language of electronic communication. The term “avatar” (Sanskrit for “incarnation
of a god”) has come to define the human presence in cyberspace, at least
insofar as it can be localized to a position in cyberspace. Originally coined by Chip Morningstar
(Morningstar and Farmer, 1991), the term has now entered common usage. Further, just as a slew of companies named
themselves after companies in Neuromancer’s dystopian universe, another
generation of entrepreneur software engineers took their own company names –
and products – directly from the pages of Snow Crash. For example, Black Sun Interactive, named
after the super-hacker gathering place in the “Metaverse” (recently renamed
Blaxxun to avoid infringement), founded in Germany in 1994, specializes in the
creation of 3D VRML “avatar” environments on the World Wide Web, a direct
translation of Stephenson’s vision into a software artifact.
Neuromancer and Snow Crash can be seen as “bookends”,
defining the opening and closing of the “classical” era of cyberpunk
fiction. Emerging in the brief span
between the invention of global electronic networks and their widespread
implementation as the World Wide Web, these texts fundamentally shaped our
expectations of the electronic era, because they had a defining influence on
the communities which created the artifacts that support electronic
communication. Furthermore, Snow
Crash, because it appeared on the cusp of the Internet revolution, was
picked up and carried by it, like flotsam atop a tsunami. The original myths of cyberspace are
Stephenson’s, and his vision has become ours.
Part
Three: The Diamond Age to Diaspora (1995 – 1999)
Cultural
theorist N. Katherine Hayles (Hayles, 1993) has noted the co-emergence of two
sets of synthetic ideas during the 1980s: virtual reality, which sees the world
as a screen upon which any vision might be projected, and nanotechnology, which
sees the world as a material fabric into which any vision might be
projected. Noting the ontological
similarity of these apparently disparate research endeavors, she indicates that
both imply a reflective world-view, where the concept of “reality” becomes
entirely subordinated to the field of human experience expressed upon it. Both turn the world into code – simulated or
actualized in the fabric of matter – and both provide an idealized universe for
the hacker.
In
the current era of science fiction, the consilience between the real and
the virtual has become the dominant theme; hackers have moved from hacking
cultural codes (Brunner), to synthetic worlds (Gibson), and into the real
world, drawing no distinctions between them.
Once again in the vanguard, Neal Stephenson followed Snow Crash
with The Diamond Age: or The Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer (1995),
projecting himself into the late 21st century (one of the characters
from Snow Crash makes a brief appearance as an aged schoolmistress), an
era of a realized nanotechnology which has ushered in an age of global
hyper-abundance, without resolving the myriad social inequities of wealth or
class.
In
fact, The Diamond Age is really two nearly independent texts, one of
which concerns the development of the “seed”, a fully realized nanoassembler
(Drexler, 1986), another of which concerns the “Young Lady’s Illustrated
Primer”, an interactive “storybook” which helps a young lower-class child raise
herself (by her bootstraps, as it were) into the highest echelons of society
and education. The Primer, a rich
virtual environment, requires nanotechnology in its creation; in return, it
teaches the child how to create with nanotechnology, revealing to her the
mechanical secrets of the material world.
By blending a still-nearly-unrealized technology with one ultimate
application of that technology – a “killer app” – Stephenson provided both the
means and the mythology which catalyzed a collection of hackers, uninterested
in the development of virtual worlds, into a self-recognizing community of
interest. Interest in all things
nanotechnological spiked after the publication of The Diamond Age; it marked
the beginning of a broader awareness of the implications of nanotechnology,
particularly within the community of hackers - including those who had become
loyal fans after reading Snow Crash – who will likely be responsible for the
implementation of nano-computational elements, programming reality.
The
final text which bears admission into this prestigious collection of singular
scientific works has the distinction of opening a new vein in the discourse
between the hacker community and the grand projects of hackerdom. Greg Egan’s Diaspora (1998) mixed the
virtual and nanotechnological with the principles of artificial life and
artificial evolution to produce a text whose long-term impact, the author
argues, will be at least as significant as Gibson’s Neuromancer.
In
his earlier works, such as Permutation City (1993) and Distress
(1995), Egan played with the boundaries between the simulated in the real, and
even touched upon the idea of evolution and growth in a non-biological
medium. But it is in the pages of Diaspora
that these ideas are fully realized, beginning with a stunning and
realistically described process of “psychogenesis” – the embryonic growth of a
conscious entity – in software.
The
Konishi mind seed was divided into a billion fields: short segments, six bits
long, each containing a simple instruction code. Sequences of a few dozen instructions comprised shapers:
the basic sub-programs employed during psychogenesis…Where it was known that
only one code could lead to successful psychogenesis, every route on the map
converged on a lone island or narrow isthmus, ocher against ocean blue. These infrastructure fields built the basic
mental architecture every citizen had in common, shaping both the mind’s
overarching design and the fine details of vital sub-systems.
Built
on a substrate of nanotechnology, Diaspora’s “Konishi polis” entirely
straddles the boundary between the virtual and the real; terms native to one
are freely applied to the other, a mixing of codes typical of this current age
of hard science fiction, brought here to an entirely new level. Egan goes on to describe the fractally
recursive emergence of sentient processes of consciousness:
By the
thousandth iteration, the connections between the traps had developed into an
elaborate network in its own right, and new structures had arisen in this
network – symbols – which could be triggered by each other as easily as any
data from the input channels…Mere recognition was giving way to the first faint
hints of meaning
By
the end of the exegesis, Egan has taken the concept of “psychogenesis” from
conception, through self-identity, and into ego-formation, blending
developmental psychology, artificial intelligence (constructivist) and
artificial life to produce a road map which, undoubtedly, some hacker,
radicalized by Egan’s vision, will attempt to replicate to produce a
self-conscious system.
As
the tools and techniques of virtual reality, nanotechnology and of artificial
life become widely disseminated, hackers infected with visions of a fusion of
nanotechnology and synthetic evolution will concretize their ideas into the
designs of the hyper-animate forms of the third Millennium.
To
sum up: the recent history or hard science fiction has been the defining
influence on the direction of software systems development. The hacker community has been strongly
shaped by science fiction texts, and this has lead to a direct, often literal
concretization of the ideas expressed in those texts. The “grand philosophers” – which is to say, the writers –
propose, in sweeping gestures, the shape of things to come. To the degree they are successful in
“infecting” the hacker community with the beauty of their ideas, they can expect
to see those ideas brought to life.
When
the science fiction novel began moved first to recognize, then empower the
hacker subculture, making it the heroic focus of its mythology, a series of
memetic infections – texts – swept through that subculture, seducing it into
becoming the willing engine of creation, the realizing force of fantasy. Since at least 1980, the epochal novels of
hard science fiction have, more than any economic force or scientific goal,
shaped the output of the hacker community.
As the hacker mindset digests the stuff of possibilities, it excretes
technologies, a one-to-one relationship between fiction and production perhaps
unprecedented in the history of the novel.
Novels such as Les Miserables and Uncle Tom’s Cabin have
sparked social revolutions, but until Neuromancer, no text had sparked a
technological revolution, none had moved from aesthetic to artifact.
In
closing, a question must be posed; is it possible to construct science fiction
stories so infectious in their technological and ontological dimensions that entirely
new revolutions in software can be catalyzed?
Can the hacker community be counted upon to dutifully mobilize its
resources to translate evocation into reality?
Is this a repeatable sociological phenomenon, and is it
predictable? Will we wait until it
happens again – inadvertently – or should we play with these forces ourselves?
2 Men – 4 Caban (6 – 8 October 1999)
Malden