POTHOLES IN THE HIGHWAYS OF THE MIND
David R. Hughes

[note: Remarks delivered to the Electronic Networking
Association (ENA) Conference, Philadelphia, PA May 14th,
1988. May be ported or quoted at will.]

For the past 11 year, I have intensively explored, developed,
celebrated, publicized and promoted the use of personal computers
hooked to modems interconnected to other devices to enhance every
part of individual and community life.

I am no less enthusiastic about the potential benefits to
mankind of the universal use of these personal digital devices
today than I was that morning in 1977 when I loaded the earliest
small systems wordprocessor, called Electric Pencil, into the
first personal computer I could get my hands on, a TRS-80 Model
I with cassette drive, and contemplated the revolution in
writing inherent in the keys which let me backspacY{ and blot
out.

I have been singing ASCII songs ever since.

But there is nothing predestined about whether the
Information Age is going to be a curse or a blessing. By
themselves, microchips and modems are neither good nor evil. Only
the acts of individual and collective man will make them so.

Unless those few hundreds of thousands of us sprinkled
amongst the other 5 billion people of this planet who have never
typed ATDT - we who have both explored and integrated into our
lives and work these revolutionary tools of the mind take the
leadership in insisting that existing powers and inertias do not
either perpetuate the compromises forced on us by the gigantism,
and yes, 'mass' mindset of the Industrial Age, or use these
tools to constrain and limit rather than liberate the individual
human spirit, it simply will not occur.

There are already Potholes showing up in the Highways of
the Mind. And the most insidious of them are being dug with the
best of intentions. And those who have not spent much time
before a CRT cannot even grasp the implications of trends and
decisions that will decisively determine how the Information Age
will affect their lives and that of their children and
grandchildren.

Some of these potholes we are creating ourselves. Pogo is
right. We have met the enemy and he may be us.

When Admiral Poindexter, who didn't even know how to
delete his own e-mail, wrote an Executive Order for the
President that created a whole new genre of government
controlled information called 'sensitive, not classified' he was
attempting to deal with the problem of technological leakage to
foreign powers - with obvious implications for national
security. But when implemented by zealous bureaucrats in
agencies such as NASA, as well as FBI, CIA, and NSA, the
interpretation of what is 'sensitive' was so broad that
executives at Mead Central and Lockheed Dialog data bases were
being intimidated to remove general scientific and legal
information from subscription access.

We were saved by the Ayatollah Khomeni - whose
Machiavellian acts so discredited Poindexter and North that the
President's Chief of Staff Howard Baker promised the Commerce
Committee of Congress that the order would be withdrawn.

Neither the problem of technological leakage nor the vaguely
worded attempt to control it have gone away. It will be back in
many forms, I promise you. And the necessary exchange of papers
and collaboration by scattered minds via telecommunications if
we are to progress in an era where the main strategic resource
of the United States is its knowledge and brainpower, can be
profoundly affected.

The increasing control of personal information by
government, at the very moment in time when it is becoming more
accessible to all, in a nation where freedom of speech, assembly
- online or off - underlies a great deal of our success as a
people, is an anathema to me. Don't Tread on my Cursor.

Paralleling these efforts to control information are
attempts to define it in ways that encumbers what you put on a
CRT with all the baggage of history of other media.

I contend that the decisive heart of what you and I do
online, whether it be free local computer bulletin-board, a
university conferencing system, or a national commercial service
with e-mail, conferencing, and chat is essentially 'speech.' And
should be dealt with as such. But like the blind men at the
Elephant, some influential powers, such as the Office of
Technology Assessment, lobbyists for print publishers and
broadcasters would like to have it defined as 'publishing.'

Now some of it *is* an extension of publishing. That
does not concern me. Gutenburg is dead, and I want to do all I
can to bury him once and for all. I just mutter to myself when
otherwise sensible online people try to reincarnate him in such
bizarre forms as desktop publishing.

But if it is 'publishing,' then whole sets of precedences
and laws start applying, not the least of which affects the
legal obligations of system operators - sysops - of even the
smallest one-line bulletin boards.

If what you enter onto my computer system which others
can read openly is 'publishing,' then I am a publisher, and
therefore responsible for your utterances! I can be sued for
what you say on my computer, even if I am not around when you
say it! As a newspaper editor can be. So then, like newspaper
editors, I have to censor your unfettered speech, control you,
limit you, take away your freedom of public expression that the
blinking cursor and the dance of the red leads gave you.

Good heavens. We shall become no better than that
permitted us by the Wall Street Journal, New York Times or
Rolling Stones. That is hardly my idea of the highest
attainment of the civilization of man.

I do not pretend to be able to answer conclusively what
this new form of human communications that we refer to as
'computer conferencing' really is, but I can tell you that until
we understand and define it suitably, so that laws may be struck
to both enable and fit it in with all other forms of human
communications, then it shall be at once an orphan and appendage
to history, not the dawning of a new age where the Minds of all
5 billion people on this planet will be connected to each other
directly and without interpreters. When that occurs, THEN I will
be prepared to give an audience to those strange beings called
reporters and print publications.

Another whole area of concern is that of national, state
and even local telecommunications policy. When the Congressman
from my state of Colorado, now Senator Timothy Wirth, attempted
to accompany the deregulation of AT&T with an update of the
Telecommunications Act of 1934, that company so inundated the
naive public - at their own expense ultimately - with lobbying
efforts to defeat it, the Congress of the United States crumpled
under the assault and left us with a crippled, technological
obsolete basic national law, left on the one hand to the FCC to
regulate as best it could, and on the other to put the whole
burden of defining our communications future on one man - Judge
Greene.

When the FCC, in its abysmal ignorance of the profound
implications of what they were doing attempted to add a $5 per
hour access fee charge to all the kinds of services you and I
use, and in league with well meaning but equally misguided
defenders of plain old residential voice telephone user
consumers, only the rattling of cursors from some 22,000 modem
telecom users slowed down the train. It did not stop it
completely. The FCC bent over backwards to excuse their delayed
imposition by every reason *except* the right ones, that it was
a long term self defeating public policy.

But while all modem users congratulate themselves in
stopping the FCC, I remind them all that the immediate reason
was the prospect of being hit hard soon in the personal pocket
book, and not, as we like to kid ourselves, that the response was
only from altruistic motives of defending the online economic
freedom of future generations. If immediate $$$ decisions are
not at stake, will the citizens of our Network Nation be so
vigorous.

The threat is not all national. Only with the utmost online
political vigor, in improbable league with AT&T and MCI, were we
able in the city of Colorado Springs to force the mayor to
withdraw his proposal to put a city sales tax on all out of LATA
telecommunications to raise a million dollars a year - at the
very time small information business telecom is struggling to
get off the ground this act would have further retarded the
development of information economics. While ironically, at the
same Council meeting in my very business-conservative town, the
same Council was granting equipment tax relief to manufacturing
business. Companies rooted in the declining economics of the
late great Industrial Age. And nobody influential saw the
grotesque contradiction.

Hopefully, they soon will. I can't suppress my urge to
make one small cheer for the 7 to 2 vote last Tuesday by my City
Council to issue everyone on Council a personal computer and
modem with which to communication with staff, each other, and
the public. Even with provisions for the public to dial in on
any electronic meeting and on a 'read only' basis monitor the
conduct of our government. So I can help keep the bastards
spending my $500 million a year honest.


I am hoping as a by-product that they will quickly enough
grasp the economics of the Information Age and make better
telecommunications decisions on account of it.

But how many of the 30,000 towns, 7,000 county
governments are online? Much less Congress. Without them so
being and quite soon, do you think they will make the right
decisions over the next critical decade as one dark regulatory
scheme after another slouches toward Washington to be born?

The threat posed by large business interests are very
great. The Regional Telephone Companies are knocking hard at the
Judge Greene's door to permit them not only to expand their
role as common carriers, but to become providers of
information themselves. I believe Bob Shayon of the Annenburg
School talked about this as the control of both the conduit and
the content. That's the last thing we need.

Robert Horovitz, in Washington, who pops onto systems
occasionally out in the sticks where I live noted that:

"And things never are what they seem when dealing
with giant corporations. It seemed clear that
well-meaning technically-naive fronts like the
ACLU's Jerry Berman and Congs Kastenmeier and
Leahy were just being used by corporations
intent on converting legitimate privacy
interests into information control. The only
group that lobbies for public access is the news
media, and there again for selfish reasons."

But there is a far more subtle danger that is our fault!
Who amongst us bothers to try and communicate with sensible
brains inside the giant telephone companies? They are not
monoliths.

Then there is a most subtle and yet little understood
threat that at first glance seems a blessing. The trend that has
been gathering force to put most government information online!
That's great you say. Oh? When coupled with an equally zealous
effort to "privatize" government services, the result may mean
that hitherto free and accessible information which affects
everyone's lives will be increasingly unaffordable and
inaccessible!

At least ONE institution is tracking this, the American
Library Association. In a marvelous little book published two
months ago, the ALA reports that the combination of the
withdrawal of 1 out every 4 of the 16,000 government
publications since 1982 and the trend to both privatize and put
into electronic form everything else has carried the policy of,
and I quote, "cost-benefit analysis of all government
information activities, maximum reliance on the private sector
for the dissemination of government information, and cost
recovery through user charges" to the point that the ALA has
established the Ad Hoc Committee to Form a Coalition on
Government Information. The book is entitled "Less Access to Less
Information by and about the U.S. Government."

I could go on and recite a litany of ruts in our road to
the future, any one of which can become an unbridgable chasm.

There are some which are so subtle and deeply, perhaps
unconsciously, imbedded into the ethos of our culture that unless
we think about them we may never be able to deal with them
later.

One tiny one deals with what that incredible
telecommunications journalist from San Diego, Brock Meeks,
pointed out on the Well a few days ago when I asked Wellites
what were their deepest communications fears.

"Dave, you might discuss the 'moral rights'
issues of electronic communications. Here again
is an idea that springs from a column I'm working
up. So many of us have been talking about
privacy, access charges, etc., but what about the
*base* level concern of electronic communication
and information: that it is mailable and pliable
and that *IT CAN'T BE TRUSTED TO BE ACCURATE AND
TRUE* Why? A simple text editor can change the
outcome of the war of 1812; place Rommell at the
Eastern Front; make Hinkley the assassin of Robert
F. Kennedy."

He is talking about online ethical standards that inhibit
the rewriting of history by a twist of the Del Key.
It was brilliantly validated this morning when we were
discussing the distribution of the 27 Dukakis Campaign Issues on
BBSs. Some in the Dukakis campaign are rightly concerned - in
this day of political dirty tricks - that if his positions are
spread on every BBS, that they can be tampered with. Dukakis'
could easily be made to be for SDI, rather{than against it.

The list is growing of the things we have to start
getting far more concerned with.

W.B Yeats said it long ago - "In dreams begin
responsibility."

But it is only we who, riding far ahead of the 250
million other American travellers, can not only spot these
potholes, but do something about them.
Let me call this the 'Unfinished Speech' - for I managed to
lose the concluding three paragraphs in a disk crash. But my
main points were made above. I'll let others complete the plot.