In a novel, Bruce Sterling envisions a troublesome future resulting from wiring America:

We had an Atomic Age, but that was dangerous and poisonous. Then we had a Space Age, but that burned out in short order. Next we had an Information Age, but the real killer apps for computer networks are social disruption and software piracy. Just lately, American science led the Biotech Age, but it turned out that the killer app there was making free food for nomads! (Sterling 1998, 86, my emphasis)

Political reality in modern America was the stark fact that electronic networks had eaten the guts out of the old order, while never finding any native order of their own. The horrific speed of digital communication, the consonant flattening of hierarchices, the rise of net-based civil society, an the decline of the industrial base had simply been too much for the American government to cope with and successfully legitimate.

There were sixteen major political parties now, divided into warring blocs and ceaseless internecine purges, defections, and counterpurges. There were privately owned cities with millions of "clients" where the standard rule of law was cordialy ignored. There wre price-fixing mafias, money laundries, outlaw stock markets. There black, gray, and superbarter nets. There were health maintenance organizations staffed by crazed organ-sharing cliques, where advanced medical techniques were in the grip of any quack able to download a surgery program. Wiretapping net-miliatias flourished, freed of any physical locale. There were breakaway counties in the American West where whole towns had sold out to tribes of nomads, and simply dropped off the map.

There were town meetings in New England with more computational power than the entire U. S. government had once possessed. Congressional staffs exploded into independent fiefdoms. The executive branch bogged down in endless turf wars in an acronym soupof agancies, every one of them exquisitely informed and eager to network, and hence completely unable to set a realistic agenda and concentrate on its own duties. The nation was poll-crazy, with cynical manipulation at an all-time toxic high -- the least little things produced tooth-gritting single-issue coalitions and blizzards of automated lawsuits. The net-addled tax code, having lost all connection to fiscal reality, was routinely evaded by electronic commerce and wearily endured by the citizenry.

. . . . Decentralization of powers had simply gone too far. A policy once meant to be fluid and responsive had turned into blinding, boiling confusion. (Sterling 1998, 100-1)

It had never occurred to the lords of the consumer society that consumerism as a political philosophy might one day manifest the grave systemic instabilities that Communism had. But as those instabilities multiplied, the country had cracked. Civil society shriveled in the pitiless reign of cash. As the last public spaces were privatized, it became harder and harder for American culture to breathe. Not only were people broke, but they were taunted to madness by commercials, and pitilessly surveilled by privacy-invading hucksters. An ever more aggressive consumer-outreach apparatus caused large numbers of people to simply abandon their official identities.

It was no longer any fun to be an American citizen. Bankruptcies multiplied beyond all reason, becoming a kind of commercial apostasy. Tax dodging became a spectator sport. The American people simply ceased to behave. They gathered to publicly burn their licenses, chop up their charge cards, and hit the road. The proles considered themselves the only free Americans. Nomadism had once been the linchpin of human existence; it was settled life that formed the technological novelty. Now technology had changed its nonexistent mind. Nomads were an entire alternate society for whom live by old-fashioned political and economic standards was simply no longer possible. (Sterling 1998, 307)

Index
technology is ...

(c) David Kolb, 1 August 2001