by David Brin
For the first time all night, you and Evan show actual hospitality. Evan does some punching on his computer, and monitoring the codes I can see that the guitarist is being checked into a room.
Into my room. Not the one I’m in, but the one I’m supposed to be in. Number 707. I pull out the fax that Marie at Kensington Place Worldwide Reservation Command sent to me yesterday, just to double-check.
Sure enough, the guitarist is being checked into my room. Not only that—Evan’s checking him in under my name.
I go out into the streets of the city. You and Evan pretend to ignore me, but I can see you following me with your eyes as I circumvent the doorman, who is planted like a dead ficus benjamina before the exit, and throw my shoulder against the sullen bulk of the revolving door. It has commenced snowing for the eleventh time today. I walk crosstown to Television City and have a drink in a bar there, a real Profile Auditor hangout, the kind of joint where I’m proud to be seen. When I get back to the hotel, the shift has changed, you and Evan have apparently stalked off into the rapidly developing blizzard, and the only person there is the night clerk.
I stand there for ten minutes or so while she winds down a rather involved, multithreaded conversation with a friend in Ireland. “Stark,” I say, as she’s hanging up, “Room 707. Left my keycard in the room.”
She doesn’t even ask to see ID, just makes up another keycard for me. Bad service has its charms. But I cruise past the seventh floor and go on up to my own cell because I want to do this right.
I jack into the Spew. I check out what’s going on in Room 707.
First thing I look at is the Robobar transcript. Whoever’s in there has already gone through four beers and two nonsparkling mineral waters. And one bad mai tai.
Guess I’m a trendsetter here. A hunch thuds into my cortex. I pop a beer from my own Robobar and rewind the lobby security tape to midnight.
You and Evan hand over the helm to the Irish girl. Then, like Picard and Riker on their way to Ten Forward after a long day of sensitive negotiations, you head straight for Elevator Three, the only one that seems to be hooked up. So I check out the elevator activity transcript too—not to be monotonous or anything, but it’s all on the Spew—and sho’nuff, it seems that you and Evan went straight to the seventh floor. You’re in there, I realize, with your guitar-player bud who wears shorts in the middle of the winter, and you’re drinking bad beer and mai tais from my Robobar.
I monitor the Spew traffic to Room 707. You did some random surfing like anyone else, sort of as foreplay, but since then you’ve just been hoovering up terabyte after terabyte of encrypted data.
It’s gotta be media; only media takes that many bytes. It’s coming from an unknown source, definitely not the big centralized Spew nodes—but it’s been forwarded six ways from Sunday, it’s been bounced off Indian military satellites, divided into tiny chunks, disguised as credit card authorizations, rerouted through manual telephone exchanges in Nigeria, reassembled in pirated insurance-company databases in the Netherlands. Upshot: I’ll never trace it back to its source, or sources.
What is ten times as weird: you’re putting data out. You’re talking back to the Spew. You have turned your room—my room—into a broadcast station. For all I know, you’ve got a live studio audience packed in there with you.
All of your outgoing stuff is encrypted too.
Now. My rig has some badass code-breaking stuff built into it, Profile Auditor warez, but all of it just bounces off. You guys are cypherpunks, or at least you know some. You’re using codes so tough they’re illegal. Conclusion: you’re talking to other people—other people like you—probably squatting in other Kensington Place hotel rooms all over the world at this moment.
Everything’s falling into place. No wonder Kensington Place has such legendarily shitty service. No wonder it’s so unprofitable. The whole chain has been infiltrated.
And what’s really brilliant is that all the weird shit you’re pulling off the Spew, all the hooch you’re pulling out of my Robobar, is going to end up tacked onto my Profile, while you end up looking infuriatingly normal.
I kind of like it. So I invest another half hour of my life waiting for an elevator, take it down to the lobby, go out to a 24-hour mart around the corner and buy two six-packs—one of the fashionable downmarket swill that you are drinking and one of your brand of mineral water. I can tell you’re cool because your water costs more than your beer.
Ten minutes later I’m standing in front of 707, sweating like a high school kid in a cheesy tuxedo on prom night. After a few minutes the sheer patheticity of this little scene starts to embarrass me and so I tuck a six under my arm and swipe my card through the slot. The little green light winks at me knowingly. I shoulder through the door saying, “Honey, I’m home!”
No response. I have to negotiate a narrow corridor past the bath and closets before I can see into the room proper. I step out with what I hope is a noncreepy smile. Something wet and warm sprays into my face. It trickles into my mouth. It’s on the savory side.
The room’s got like ten feet of open floor space that you have increased to fifteen by stacking the furniture in the bathroom. In the midst of this is the guitar dude, stripped to his colorful knee-length shorts. He is playing his ax, but it’s not plugged into anything. I can hear some melodious plinks, but the squelch of his fingers on the strings, the thud of calluses on the fingerboard almost drown out the notes.
He sweats hard, even though the windows are open and cold air is blowing into the room, the blinds running with condensation and whacking crazily against the leaky aluminum window frame. As he works through his solo, sighing and grunting with effort, his fingers drumming their way higher and higher up the fingerboard, he swings his head back and forth and his hair whips around, broadcasting sweat. He’s wearing dark shades.
Evan is perched like an arboreal primate on top of the room’s Spew terminal, which is fixed to the wall at about head level. His legs are spread wide apart to expose the screen, against which crash waves of black-and-white static. The motherly warmth of the cathode-ray tube is, I guess, permeating his buttocks.
On his lap is just about the bitchingest media processor I have ever seen, and judging from the heavy cables exploding out of the back it looks like he’s got it crammed with deadly expansion cards. He’s wearing dark shades too, just like the guitarist’s; but now I see they aren’t shades, they are VR rigs, pretty good ones actually. Evan is also wearing a pair of Datagloves. His hands and fingers are constantly moving. Sometimes he makes typing motions, sometimes he reaches out and grabs imaginary things and moves them around, sometimes he points his index finger and navigates through virtual space, sometimes he riffs in some kind of sign language.
You—you are mostly in the airspace above the bed, touching down frequently, using it as trampoline and safety net. Every three-year-old bouncing illicitly on her bed probably aspires to your level of intensity. You’ve got the VR rig too, you’ve got the Datagloves, you’ve got Velcro bands around your wrists, elbows, waist, knees and ankles, tracking the position of every part of your body in three-dimensional space. Other than that, you have stripped down to voluminous plaid boxer shorts and a generously sized tanktop undershirt.
You are rocking out. I have never seen anyone dance like this. You have churned the bedspread and pillows into sufferin’ succotash. They get in your way so you kick them vindictively off the bed and get down again, boogying so hard I can’t believe you haven’t flown off the bed yet. Your undershirt is drenched. You are breathing hard and steady and in sync with the rhythm, which I cannot hear but can infer.
I can’t help looking. There’s the SPAWN TILL YOU DIE tattoo. And there on the other breast is something else. I walk into the room for a better look, taking in a huge whiff of perfume and sweat and beer. The second tattoo consists of small but neat navy-blue script, like that of names embroidered on bowling shirts, reading, HACK THE SPEW.
It’s not too hard to trace t
he connections. A wire coils out of the guitar, runs across the floor, and jumps up to jack into Evan’s badass media processor. You have a wireless rig hanging on your waist and the receiver is likewise patched into Evan’s machine. And Evan’s output port, then, is jacked straight into the room’s Spew socket.
I am ashamed to notice that the Profile Auditor 1 part of my brain is thinking that this weird little mime fest has UNEXPLOITED MARKET NICHE—ORDER NOW! superimposed all over it in flashing yellow block letters.
Evan gets so into his solo that he sinks unsteadily to his knees and nearly falls over. He’s leaning way back, stomach muscles knotting up, his wet hair dangling back and picking up detritus from the carpet as he swings his head back and forth.
This whole setup is depressingly familiar: it is just like high school, when I had a crush on some girl, and even though I was in the same room with her, breathing the same air, sharing the same space, she didn’t know I existed; she had her own network of friends, all grooving on some frequency I couldn’t pick up, existing on another plane that I couldn’t even see.
There’s a note on the dresser, scrawled on hotel stationery with a dried-up hotel ball-point. WELCOME CHAZ, it says, JACK IN AND JOIN US! followed by ten lines of stuff like:
A073 49D2 CD01 7813 000F B09B 323A E040
which are obviously an encryption key, written in the hexadecimal system beloved of hackers. It is the key to whatever plane you and your buds are on at the moment.
But I am not Chaz.
I open the desk drawer to reveal the room’s fax machine, a special Kensington Place feature that Marie extolled to me most tediously. I put the note into it and punch the Copy key, shove the copy into my pocket when it’s finished and leave the note where I found it. I leave the two six-packs on the dresser as a ritual sacrifice, and slink out of the room, not looking back. An elevator is coming up toward me, L M 2 3 4 5 6 and then DING and the doors open, and out steps a slacker who can only be Chaz, thousands of snowflakes caught in his hair, glinting in the light like he’s just stepped out of the Land of Faerie. He’s got kind of a peculiar expression on his face as he steps out of the elevator, and as we trade places, and I punch the button for the lobby, I recognize it: Chaz is happy. Happier than me.
Another “classic”—this one an essay-rant from the beginning of the cyber age–
sheds light on how our concerns have evolved …
… yet stayed much the same.
PRIVATE LIFE IN CYBERSPACE*
JOHN PERRY BARLOW
I have lived most of my life in a small Wyoming town, where there is little of the privacy which both insulates and isolates suburbanites. Anyone in Pinedale who is interested in me or my doings can get most of the information he might seek in the Wrangler Café. Between them, any five customers could probably produce all that is known locally about me, including quite a number of items which are well known but not true.
For most people who have never lived in these conditions, the idea that one’s private life might be public knowledge … and, worse, that one’s neighbors might fabricate tales about him when the truth would do … is a terrifying thought. Whether they have anything to hide or not (and most everyone harbors something he’s not too proud of), they seem to assume that others would certainly employ their private peccadillos against them. But what makes the fishbowl of community tolerable is a general willingness of small towns to forgive in their own all that should be forgiven. One is protected from the malice of his fellows not by their lack of dangerous information about him but by their disinclination to use it.
I found myself thinking a lot about this during a recent San Francisco conference on Computers, Privacy, and Freedom. Like most of the attendees, I had arrived there bearing the assumption that there was some necessary connection between privacy and freedom and that among the challenges to which computers may present to our future liberties was their ability to store, transfer, and duplicate the skeletons from our closets.
With support from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Apple Computer, the WELL, and a number of other organizations, the conference was put on by Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, a group which has done much to secure to Americans the ownership of their private lives. Their Man in Washington, Marc Rotenberg, hit the hot key which resulted in Lotus getting thirty thousand letters, phone calls, and e-mail messages protesting the release of Lotus Marketplace: Households.
In case you haven’t left your terminal in a while, this was a product whose CD-ROMs of addresses and demographic information would have ushered in the era of desktop junk mail. Suddenly anyone with six hundred bucks and a CD-ROM drive could have been stuffing your mailbox with their urgent appeals.
Marketplace withered under the heat, and I didn’t hear a soul mourn its passage. Most people seemed happy to leave the massive marketing databases in institutional hands, thinking perhaps that junk mail might be one province where democracy was better left unspread.
I wasn’t so sure. For example, it occurred to me that Lotus could make a strong legal, if not commercial, case that Marketplace was a publication protected by the First Amendment. It also seemed that a better approach to the scourge of junk mail might be political action directed toward getting the Postal Service to raise its rates on bulk mailing. (Or perhaps even eliminating the Postal Service, which seems to have little function these days beyond the delivery of instant landfills.) Finally, I wondered if we weren’t once again blaming the tool and not the workman, as though the problem were information and not its misuse. I felt myself gravitating toward the politically incorrect side of the issue, and so I kept quiet about it.
At the Conference on Computers, Privacy, and Freedom, no one was keeping quiet. Speaker after speaker painted a picture of gathering informational fascism in which Big Brother was entering our homes dressed in the restrained Italian suit of the Marketroid. Our every commercial quiver was being recorded, collated, and widely redistributed. One began to imagine a Cyberspace smeared all over with his electronic fingerprints, each of them gradually growing into a full-blown virtual image of himself as Potential Customer. I could see an almost infinite parade of my digital simulacra marching past an endless wall of billboards.
There was discussion of opting out of the databases, getting through modern American life without ever giving out one’s National Identity Number (as the Social Security Number has indisputably become by default), endeavoring to restrict one’s existence to the physical world. The poor fellow from Equifax mouthed smooth corporatisms about voluntary restraints on the secondary use of information—such practices as selling the fact of one’s purchase from one catalog to fifteen other aspirants—but no one believed him. Everyone seemed to realize that personal information was as much a commodity as pork bellies, fuel oil, or crack, and that the market would be served.
They were right. In the week following the conference, I got a solicitation from CACI Marketing Systems which began: Now Available! Actual 1990 Census Data. This despite Department of Commerce assurances that census data would not be put to commercial use. Marketplace is dead. Long live Marketplace.
When it came down to solutions, however, an all-too‒familiar canonical approach seemed to be developing: let’s write some laws. The European Community’s privacy standards, scheduled to be implemented by the member nations in 1992, were praised. Similar legislation was proposed for the United States.
Quite apart from the impracticality of entrusting to government another tough problem (given its fairly undistinguished record in addressing the environmental, social, and educational responsibilities it already has), there is a good reason to avoid this strategy. Legally assuring the privacy of one’s personal data involves nothing less than endowing the federal government with the right to restrict information.
It may be that there is a profound incompatibility between the requirements of privacy (at least as achieved by this method) and the requirements of liberty. It doesn’t take a paranoid to beli
eve that restrictions placed on one form of information will expand to include others. Nor does it take a libertarian to believe that the imposition of contraband on a commodity probably won’t eliminate its availability. I submit, as Exhibit A, the War on Some Drugs.
I began to envision an even more dystopian future in which the data cops patrolled cyberspace in search of illicit personal info, finding other items of legal interest along the way. Meanwhile, institutions who could afford the elevated price of illegal goods would continue to buy it from thuggish data cartels in places like the Turks and Caicos Islands, as sf-writer Bruce Sterling predicted in Islands in the Net.
I returned to Wyoming in a funk. My ghostly electronic selves increased their number on my way home as I bought airline tickets charged to my credit cards, made long-distance phone calls, and earned another speeding ticket. The more I thought about it, the more I became convinced that nothing short of a fugitive cash-based existence would prevent their continued duplication. And even that would never exorcise them all. I was permanently on record.
Back in Pinedale, where I am also on record, my head started to clear. Barring government regulation of information, for which I have no enthusiasm, it seemed inevitable that the Global Village would resemble a real village at least in the sense of eliminating the hermetic sealing of one’s suburban privacy. Everyone would start to lead as public a life as I do at home.
And in that lies at least a philosophical vector toward long-term social solution. As I say, I am protected in Pinedale not by the restriction of information but by a tolerant social contract which prohibits its use against me. (Unless, of course, it’s of such a damning nature that it ought to be used against me.) What may be properly restricted by government is not the tool but the work that is done with it. If we don’t like junk mail, we should make it too expensive to send. If we don’t trust others not to hang us by our errors, we must work to build a more tolerant society.