"Bruce Sterling - Statement of Principle, A" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

anxious to have a good long contemplative look at the other side. I
don't feel much confidence in my ability to draw these lines. But I
feel that I should. The world won't wait. It only took a few guys
with poolcues and switchblades to turn Woodstock Nation into Altamont.
Haight-Ashbury was once full of people who could trust anyone they'd
smoked grass with and love anyone they'd dropped acid with -- for about
six months. Soon the place was aswarm with speed-freaks and junkies,
and heaven help us if they didn't look just like the love-bead dudes
from the League of Spiritual Discovery. Corruption exists, temptation
exists. Some people fall. And the temptation is there for all of us,
all the time.
I've come to draw a line at money. It's not a good line, but
it's something. There are certain activities that are unorthodox,
dubious, illegal or quasi-legal, but they might perhaps be justified by
an honest person with unconventional standards. But in my opinion,
when you're making a commercial living from breaking the law, you're
beyond the pale. I find it hard to accept your countercultural
sincerity when you're grinning and pocketing the cash, compadre.
I can understand a kid swiping phone service when he's broke,
powerless, and dying to explore the new world of the networks. I don't
approve of this, but I can understand it. I scorn to do this myself,
and I never have; but I don't find it so heinous that it deserves
pitiless repression. But if you're stealing phone service and selling
it

-- if you've made yourself a miniature phone company and you're
pimping off the energy of others just to line your own pockets -- you're
a thief. When the heat comes to put you away, don't come crying
"brother" to me.
If you're creating software and giving it away, you're a fine
human being. If you're writing software and letting other people
copy it and try it out as shareware, I appreciate your sense of trust,
and if I like your work, I'll pay you. If you're copying other people's
software and giving it away, you're damaging other people's interests,
and should be ashamed, even if you're posing as a glamorous info-
liberating subversive. But if you're copying other people's software
and selling it, you're a crook and I despise you.
Writing and spreading viruses is a vile, hurtful, and shameful
activity that I unreservedly condemn.
There's something wrong with the Information Society. There's
something wrong with the idea that "information" is a commodity like a
desk or a chair. There's something wrong with patenting software
algorithms. There's something direly meanspirited and ungenerous about
inventing a language and then renting it out to other people to speak.
There's something unprecedented and sinister in this process of creeping
commodification of data and knowledge. A computer is something too
close to the human brain for me to rest entirely content with someone
patenting or copyrighting the process of its thought. There's
something sick and unworkable about an economic system which has already
spewed forth such a vast black market. I don't think democracy will