Free space
I've spent a lot of time over the last few years paying attention to the internet and what people have to say about it, particularly Lawrence Lessig. Many have looked at the Net and dreamed of a place free from regulation and other interference; some have believed that this was inevitably its nature. Others have disabused me of this notion rather thoroughly. The Internet is not immune from government control. In the end, there is a man in the server room with a gun.
Can we have the kind of space that we thought the Net would be? Also, some early believers thought that the Net would be a place completely divorced from real space, and to which real space would be irrelevant (or at least ineffectual). Conversely, governments care about the internet because its effects are felt in real space. Can we have a space that really is divorced from real space in this way, that neither knows nor cares about the state of the world, and vice versa?
For the first, there are some interesting possibilities in ad-hoc networks. The Net is vulnerable as it stands not because the FBI can bust down the doors of individual users (though it can) but rather because the government can apply pressure to centralized entities, who have a stake proportional to their size. When such entities were smaller, numerous and more distributed, it was harder to regulate the Net; as the megacorporations of cyberspace resemble those of real space more and more, it is easy to apply the thumbscrews.
These centralized targets are inevitable to the Net of now. Would it be possible to setup an entirely distributed network of computers? I believe MIT is working on some project of this sort. The point is that even peer to peer networks need to bootstrap themselves across something relatively attackable, and their traffic certainly passes through a medium controlled by large (vulnerable) corporations. But ad-hoc wireless networks perform both tasks in a medium which may be owned but which is difficult to control - "empty" airspace, over radio frequencies. The government could still regulate by banning the spectra in use, but I don't know that that is likely or politically feasible. Centralization is powerful, and a network of this type would have tons of limitations, and many practical difficulties in getting it set up, but I wonder if something nice couldn't be done. There are lots of interesting and effective distributed techniques which would function quite nicely over this kind of network.
As to a separate space, the closest I've seen is things like Second Life, which has been pretty good, but which seems to be trying to bring itself closer to the real world. In some ways I care more about this than the other.
Can we have the kind of space that we thought the Net would be? Also, some early believers thought that the Net would be a place completely divorced from real space, and to which real space would be irrelevant (or at least ineffectual). Conversely, governments care about the internet because its effects are felt in real space. Can we have a space that really is divorced from real space in this way, that neither knows nor cares about the state of the world, and vice versa?
For the first, there are some interesting possibilities in ad-hoc networks. The Net is vulnerable as it stands not because the FBI can bust down the doors of individual users (though it can) but rather because the government can apply pressure to centralized entities, who have a stake proportional to their size. When such entities were smaller, numerous and more distributed, it was harder to regulate the Net; as the megacorporations of cyberspace resemble those of real space more and more, it is easy to apply the thumbscrews.
These centralized targets are inevitable to the Net of now. Would it be possible to setup an entirely distributed network of computers? I believe MIT is working on some project of this sort. The point is that even peer to peer networks need to bootstrap themselves across something relatively attackable, and their traffic certainly passes through a medium controlled by large (vulnerable) corporations. But ad-hoc wireless networks perform both tasks in a medium which may be owned but which is difficult to control - "empty" airspace, over radio frequencies. The government could still regulate by banning the spectra in use, but I don't know that that is likely or politically feasible. Centralization is powerful, and a network of this type would have tons of limitations, and many practical difficulties in getting it set up, but I wonder if something nice couldn't be done. There are lots of interesting and effective distributed techniques which would function quite nicely over this kind of network.
As to a separate space, the closest I've seen is things like Second Life, which has been pretty good, but which seems to be trying to bring itself closer to the real world. In some ways I care more about this than the other.