Ayale-com.661
net.news
utzoo!decvax!yale-com!harley
Wed Jan 6 03:31:43 1982
a vision
i had a vision which i want to share with you now.
----------
on a cold windy day far in the future, i sit at my CRT watching
the world go by. i am the ruler of the netwaves, & by implic-
ation, of the world.
how this came about is a long story ... i don't remember all
of it. it began when networks were young & so was i.
in those days the networks were used by computer professionals
& academics. these people foresaw that soon most information
would travel via data circuits, but in their excitement they
did not recognize the changes this would bring to the patterns
of society. therefore, like the opportunists who made a mess
out of television, the early netusers depended on old ways of
thinking to solve the problems of networking. in fact, as new
problems arose, some were so confusing that the instinctive
reaction became too strong to resist -- "hold on here, let's
ORGANIZE so we know what's going on ..."
fortunately, reactionism killed itself off as the networks
which stuck to their hierarchies were left far behind. the
frontrunners were those who took the incredible ease of commun-
ication to heart, deciding that the right to be heard was as
important as the right to speak. soon the networks gave rise
to a functional anarchy ...
... so functional, in fact, that the example was taken up by
many others. governments & big business found themselves
usurped. there had been no overthrow, the establishment simply
found itself outperformed in the way that big computer firms &
the big record companies lost ground to their independent
counterparts during the 1980's.
at the time, i was a government agent. my mission: to
infiltrate one of the numerous "underground" groups that
existed on the networks. i took my work seriously; network
activities threatened the stability of the world. i began to
understand that no outside influences could stop the monster
networks, so i changed my aim & shot singlemindedly for the
top.
of course, there was no top -- i had to create one. great
reforms are always in danger of subversion, just as germany
had been an example to the world's progressives until hitler
stepped in ... well i stepped into the networks, & in ways
that you can imagine, i have brought all the world's communi-
cation under the sway of my thinking. within a few years, i
will have repaired government sufficiently that it can resume
benign control over a changed world.
but until then, i must ensure that none of my nodes go astray ...
----------
sorry for the mixture of straight & satirical commentary, but i hope
you all get my point, junior imperialists of USENET.
- steve harley (harley!yale-comix)
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Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.
