sideways-case scenario.
The Internet. The Internet we make so much of today --
the global Internet which has helped scholars so much, where
free speech is flourishing as never before in history -- the
Internet was a Cold War military project. It was designed
for purposes of military communication in a United States
devastated by a Soviet nuclear strike. Originally, the
Internet was a post-apocalypse command grid.
And look at it now. No one really planned it this way.
Its users made the Internet that way, because they had the
courage to use the network to support their own values, to
bend the technology to their own purposes. To serve their
own liberty. Their own convenience, their own amusement,
even their own idle pleasure. When I look at the Internet -
- - that paragon of cyberspace today -- I see something
astounding and delightful. It's as if some grim fallout
shelter had burst open and a full-scale Mardi Gras parade
had come out. Ladies and gentlemen, I take such enormous
pleasure in this that it's hard to remain properly
skeptical. I hope that in some small way I can help you to
share my deep joy and pleasure in the potential of networks,
my joy and pleasure in the fact that the future is
unwritten.
WILLIAM GIBSON:
Mr. Sterling and I have been invited here to dream in
public. Dreaming in public is an important part of our job
description, as science writers, but there are bad dreams as
well as good dreams. We're dreamers, you see, but we're
also realists, of a sort.
Realistically speaking, I look at the proposals being
made here and I marvel. A system that in some cases isn't
able to teach basic evolution, a system bedevilled by the
religious agendas of textbook censors, now proposes to throw
itself open to a barrage of ultrahighbandwidth information
from a world of Serbian race-hatred, Moslem fundamentalism,
and Chinese Mao Zedong thought. A system that has managed
to remain largely unchanged since the 19th Century now
proposes to jack in, bravely bringing itself on-line in an
attempt to meet the challenges of the 21st. I applaud your
courage in this. I see green shoots attempting to break
through the sterilized earth.
I believe that the national adventure you now propose
is of quite extraordinary importance. Historians of the
future -- provided good dreams prevail -- will view this as
