cellular antennas, microcircuitry. These are woven things.
Fabric and air and electrons and light. Magic
handkerchiefs with instant global access. You'll wear them
around your neck. You'll make tents from them if you want.
They will be everywhere, throwaway. Like denim. Like
paper. Like a child's kite.
This is coming a lot faster than anyone realizes.
There's a revolution in global telephony coming that will
have such brutal, industry-crushing speed and power that it
will make even the computer industry blanch. Analog
is dying everywhere. Everyone with wire and antenna is going
into the business of moving bits.
You are the schools. You too need to move bits, but
you need to move them to your own purposes. You need to
look deep into the mirror of cyberspace, and you need to
recognize your own face there. Not the face you're told
that you need. Your own face. Your undistorted face. You
can't out-tech the techies. You can't out-glamorize
Hollywood. That's not your life, that's not
your values, that's not your purpose. You're not supposed
to pump colored images against the eyeballs of our children,
or download data into their skulls. You are supposed to
pass the torch of culture to the coming generation. If you
don't do that, who will? If you don't prevail for the sake
of our children, who will?
It can be done! It can be done if you keep your wits
about you and you're not hypnotized by smoke and mirrors.
The computer revolution, the media revolution, is not going
to stop during the lifetime of anyone in this room. There
are innovations coming, and coming *fast,* that will make
the hottest tech exposition you see here seem as quaint as
gaslamps and Victorian magic-lanterns. Every machine you
see here will be trucked out and buried in a landfill, and
never spoken of again, within a dozen years. That so-called
cutting-edge hardware here will crumble just the way old fax-
paper crumbles. The values are what matters. The values
are the only things that last, the only things that *can*
last. Hack the hardware, not the Constitution. Hold on
tight to what matters, and just hack the rest.
I used to think that cyberspace was fifty years away.
What I thought was fifty years away, was only ten years
away. And what I thought was ten years away -- it was
already here. I just wasn't aware of it yet.
Let me give you a truly lovely, joyful example of the
