Science Fiction novelist Bruce Sterling and his wife, feminist Belgrade-based journalist Jasmina Tesanovic, concluded the conference with vigor. America is a nice place, but the telecommunications system sucks.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [March 30, 2007]

Bruce Sterling and his wife Jasmina Tesanovic live in Belgrade. "My life fell apart," said Tesanovic, speaking of her experience of the NATO bombing at the Freedom to Connect conference. "I lost everything."

Fascism arrived in Serbia.

So she connected to the internet. "At that moment, there were two wonderful people who put a server in Serbia, called Zamir, peace. We . . . collected refugees' testimonies (The Suitcase: Refugee Voices from Bosnia and Croatia) and they were published by the Berkeley University Press."

She said she helped found Women in Black's Belgrade Chapter, which was declared a number one enemy for its anti-militarist activism. Attacks against the organization's membership continue.

"Then we had peace, until our premier was killed by the state mafia."

She said that the local blog, B.92 (English version) is the most read blog in Serbia and is powered by Open Source Software.

She said that when she asked for an interview with a member of the military charged with killing civilians, he said he wanted a space on B.92. Should she give it to him, she asked us. We had no answer.

Sterling told the audience that the international court had just ruled that Serbia was guilty of failing to prevent genocide, but was not guilty of genocide. "Genocide can be committed by non-state actors who are free to connect. That's the dark side of the freedom to connect," he said.

Coming into America
Here in the U.S., he said, we see the best of America, but if you ever want to see the face America presents to the world, just leave the country and return by way of an international airport. (Sterling's lucky his experience wasn't as bad as that of war journalist Tyler Brűlé.)

"I came from Europe, and the first thing you do in a new country in Europe is buy a SIM chip. But I couldn't. So I went to a pay phone. The phone is covered with litigation stickers: do not dial this, etc. This is a transaction costing 50 cents! I'm being jerked around by a machine for a petty amount of cash. There are no Google maps on the kiosk to help me figure out where I want to go. This is a republic where the telecommunications market is predicated on maintaining discrepancies."

"The telecommunications system in Dulles airport is a series of blatant ripoffs. Our attitude to you, the visitor to the U.S., is predatory. We're here to insult and demean and harm you. You see large signs saying, 'please do not accept taxi rides from people offering taxi rides' and you wonder, what kind of government tolerates this kind of lawlessness? Also, there's no signs in French, German, or Hindi."

He's glad to be here. "People ask me if I'm excited to be here. I'm not excited to jump hurdles! I'm changing an e-mail list into a social network. I'm more excited about the life I'm living on my laptop."

But you like the conference?
"If I had to summarize your conference, I'd say . . . I like your slogan. It's like, why should my groovy new hardware have to link up to your cruddy deceptive legacy hardware? I'm not eager to connect. Connecting is like spam. Somebody's trying to phish my account. It's an open source attack."

The freedom to connect is a freedom to be attacked. "The internet is full of racketeers. More than 90 percent of e-mail is spam. Increasing amounts are organized crime spam. I wouldn't call that civilization! If you went down the street and 90 percent of the people were trying to steal from you, you'd assume you were in an extremely menacing third world environment. People aren't used to it; they're not boiled frogs like us. I'm a computer crime reporter."

Criminals are anonymous. "We don't see a blog by the real Sopranos, but we know they're out there. Why aren't we connected to them? Well, sure there are some in Serbia, but they're national heroes. This is not the kind of thing that will enchant Joe Sixpack and Jane Winecooler."

This new thing has happened before
Sterling mentioned the internet precursor that became Prodigy, Trintex. "This is a memory from 20 years ago. There were these bright eyed super well funded happening guys called Trintex. The company had a $250 million market capitalization. It was put together buy Sears, CBS, and IBM. They were gods of computation, business 301, we're going to eat our own lunch, cyber and sleek and gorgeous. They came down so hard and so fast that they're beyond gone, like the ghost of Jacob Marley."

Behemoths will die again. "Look at AT&T. Who cannot love to hate the Death Star? It's a shambling skin thing. AT&T was stagnant for decades and now it's like they harpooned it and skinned it and are wearing it. I remember the organization that would go to manholes at 4 AM to fix problems."

The cause of the predicted death of AT&T is clear. "If you have not yet read Clayton Christensen's book The Innovator's Dilemma, you should. It describes the helpless pitifulness of major industries when confronted with disruption in the means of production."

Sterling liked Benkler's talk at the conference. "I'm shocked that I understood every damn thing Benkler's saying. Online experiences need to be granular, modular, and integratable. Furthermore, I didn't know about self-selection, humanization, and trust construction. I'd love to see that industrialized. Norm creation, transparency, peer review, discipline, yeah, all of that's lacking today. Internet institutions lack sustainability. They have the lifetime of my skin. They get bought out. The available platforms for self-expression are terrible. I use seven word processors, all of them terrible."

"Why are social applications businesses? Why aren't they political parties?"

He mentioned DailyKos, which was founded by one person, Markos Moulitsas Zuniga. "He's just some kid. It's a sign of the weakness of politics that you cannot get a political movement going on the internet. There's moveon.org, but mostly it's pretty weak."

The future
"What if you get what you want," Sterling asked. "I hang out at a lot of gigs like this. Everybody's sticking it to the man; nobody's the man. What if the state of Vermont gets metal-spined ubiquitous broadband? If it leaks over state borders, are you going to sell connectivity? Will they make sure nobody in New Hampshire can 'steal' Wi-fi? What if New Hampshire becomes the next Baltic-style e-state, the next Estonia?"

What you build, you cannot contain or control. "I'm a cyberpunk. Information wants to be free. It used to be hard to find, but Google was my apotheosis. We now have this unbelievable tidal wave of information. There's no end to it. It's endlessly seductive. Suddenly, your skills at ferreting out obscure information are almost worthless. Now they don't want to pay you. I say, follow your bliss. I spend more time with Google now than with novels and magazines. I'm swimming in it. I'm marinating it."

"Follow your bliss into the abyss. That's my new bumper sticker. This is the abyss. This is where my explorations led me. You guys are the denizens of the abyss. I strap on my diver helmet and go into the internet as far as you can go. You're the guys laying the pipe. It's a cyberpunk Mariana Trench in this room. I have to cheer you. Thank you for having us here."

A freedom to disconnect?
Should the internet be pervasive? For some reason, I start to think of the Unabomber at this point. "Primal government is government underreach, government collapse. There's no habeas corpus. People can be liquidated. There's no Magna Carta, no legalisms. I'm not a fan of autocratic states, but I'm seeing this franchise. Turkmenistan went on the internet and hired China to build a local franchise of the Great Internet Wall of China. Now China's building walls around the world's petrochemical dictatorships."

Tesanovic concluded by asking America why there's no dissent. She said that in Italy, the word "silent majority" refers to the people who accepted the rule of Mussolini. "It's always happening to somebody else. You are not called on to react. What Italians learned from this is that they have a huge democratic instinct (although Berlusconi was backsliding). They take to the streets. They question everything. The police kill them. The mafia rob them. But they have no fear."

Here in the U.S., it's different. "Everybody was a bit indifferent, and then intimidated and introverted. What are people afraid of here?"

— End