Early Digital Communities
Digital Communities of the Information and Interplanetary Ages
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Early Digital CommunitiesDigital Communities of the Information and Interplanetary Ages |
Beginning in the late 1980s and early 1990s (Old Earth calender), at the very dawn of the Information Age, a number of universally accessible computer-generated worlds were developed and then "inhabited" by geographically dispersed computer users who were able to communicate via text and virtual graphical presence (the first crude avatars), to others in the environment, via bulletin board systems, e-mail and multi-party online chat rooms. Over the next decade or two this became the internet culture that was to define the Information Age. Users could belong to different local, regional or other territory-bound communities and cultures, but online they can meet and communicate in mediated text or speech and animate a virtual graphical presence to others in their digitally-created environment. Despite early failed hopes and dot com crashes, multinational corporations and mainstream society quickly stamped their mark on this new frontier, and were able to acquire increasing ownership of and influence over the internet world. Increasingly powerful computers, greater bandwidth, and the convergence of computing, mobile phones, and television, added further to the new medium. This digitalisation constituted a second media age comparable to the first media age when printing was developed in the West.
Even at this early stage cybercrimes and cyberterrorism force governments of developed nations to adopt radically new identification, communication, surveillance, and commerce policies. Cybercrimes and cyberterrorism become so widespread and damaging that it became a top priority for world governments and corporations to control both. The majority of security breaches stemmed from angry insiders/employees. Corporations would often hire their own hackers to show you one's weak points was one of the most practical ways to safeguard one's systems.
By 50 a.t. the internet had permeated the lives of almost everyone and was radically reshaping institutions, while breakthroughes in other fields promised fundamental changes in living standards and all future human endeavor; personal computing gets still more powerful even as costs drop; net users in the developed nations are becoming increasingly isolated in physical terms. Despite persisting bandwidth and cost concerns, robust computing, internet, and digital TV technologies all combined to offer TV audiences a staggering array of choices and in depth interactivity with the ubiquitous home appliance. Thanks to software-based agents or proxies capable of locating and stockpiling information their users wanted almost before they realized they wanted it, locating up-to-date, useful, relevant, and reliable information on the net became for many a near automatic and transparent process. Efficient automated bots and intelligent agents allowed an optimal selection of channels and medias, and users also had a second tier of channels available to them (recorded in various time chunks for their convenience and stored for later access). The caching of content became a major driver of local physical storage media sales, as producers now allow off-site caching of content so long as users explicitly accept all embedded commercial advertising with such recordings as well.
While only a few self-defined "cyborgs" had implanted net links and mind enhancements, smart glasses and intelligent clothing were ubiquitous. Net connected displays are everywhere; in many older buildings windows had been replaced by large net displays, sometimes two-sided on ground floors so street passers by are also assaulted by the advertising.
Meanwhile virtual communities were creating new forms of nationalism. Nationalised worlds in the cyberspace universe, such as America, England, Finnish, Denmark, Japan, China, Australia, and Nigeria, digital communities, provided spaces for the virtual diaspora to congregate. More significant was the rise of digital nations with no physical counterpart, including Cyberia, Reinholdia, Electronic Nation, and Avatar People. Some of these new digital nations were militantly anti-megacorp, and obsessed with privacy and encryption. Many were very techno-savvy, and when the first true AIs emerged, they were among the first to know about it, and to initiate communications with these new minds, sometimes without the original AI designers knowledge.
The economics of the net and other technologies diminished many local communities in many ways. Global competition moved many low skilled manufacturing jobs to the other side of the world. Low skilled service sector jobs are increasingly taken by robots or other automation. Big changes in travel, work, and delivery had decimated the restaurant and hotel industries, as well as retail stores.
During this time many factors worked to isolate individuals in the advanced networking nations. The awareness of increasing surveillance by both government and employers, as well as commercial enterprises, encouraged bionts to greatly reduce many sorts of interaction with others in general, while widespread computing support made such withdrawal easier, more economical and convenient with each passing year. The perceived capabilities of truth and emotional analysis of email and video/audio via software, combined with the detailed documentation of a user's personal web surfing, shopping habits and list of purchases, selection of home, household appliances, furniture, vehicles, etc., all made for a siege mentality among some (encouraging cypherpunks and cryptopunk subcultures), while being accepted blithely by others.
This picture contains the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace, some news from Reuters about Chinese dissidents, OT VIII Part 2 of the Fishman Papers, a small encryption program, the code that generated the picture, the Crypto Anarchist Manifesto, the subtitles of Steganographia by Johannes Trithemius as well as some pornography. Most of the information is encoded in the colors in a straightforward way; the rest in the words and letters.
Is this art, subversion or engineering, or a superposition of all three?
(yes, it is also a homage to Sinclair ZX Spectrum system crashes)
Steganographia: Hoc Est: Ars Per Occvltam Scriptvram Animi Svi Volvntatem Absentibvs Aperiendi Certa
Ioanne Trithemio, Steganographica
The early Information Age virtual worlds had crude embodiment in a graphic animation. Those of the middle Information Age had full-body immersion through interactive hotsuits. But it was only with the invention of the neural jack during the late information age/early interplanetary age that the means became available to complete the embodiment of one's consciousness in virtual space, thus leading top further cultural developments in shaping identity, social interactions, and intercultural encounters with others similarly embodied.
Despite the adaptive chip and interface flesh breakthroughs, at least some 20% of so of bionts fell outside the chip/patch capacity for adaptation, and another 40% can only achieve partial success with the hardware/wetware. But for the remaining 40% of the population that can obtain full functionality (and enjoy high quality installations and support), the new system was quite valuable indeed. In the hands of street tech pushers though, the quality of these jacks overall was very low and quite dangerous, compared to the links commonly available later. However, the young saw them as the ultimate game connections and ways to cheat in school, and a small number of corporate execs and private entrepreneurs acquire them for the sake of perceived competitive advantage. The illegal jacks drive a boom in related software development in third world nations and others (places which don't cooperate with the wishes of the more developed nations).
For a decade or two, the 40% of the population uniquely suited to this first breakthrough adaptive interface chip enjoyed preferential treatment in many areas of life, and a whole industry arises around offering possible genetic engineering for fetuses and/or other programs, devices, and techniques, which might improve a child's suitability for such links. Of course, in a matter of years all this was moot, as new technologies sweep away previous restrictions.
This was a period of great social and political turmoil. All over the world the threat of nations breaking up essentially into hundreds or thousands of more or less independent city-states loomed ever larger on the political landscape, regardless of ongoing attempts by politicians to stop it. And as the tweak superbabies, cyborg transhumanists, and first and second generation AIs matured and became ever more active in cyberspace as well as in real life, baseline politicians and old-style religionists and pressure groups saw the situation slip from their fingers, without actually knowing why.
The Interplanetary Age opened up new horizons for those who could afford the expense, or were willing to sell themselves as indentured labour to the megacorps in exchange for a stake of asteroid mine. For the rest this was an age of cocooning and withdrawal from the external world. Especially among the poor and unemployed proles, a significant portion of their lives were spend in environments so sheltered/filtered or heavily modified that they were often seriously out of touch with reality. Those most prone to this phenomena were no longer the very young undergoing intensive full immersion VR accelerated learning, the retired/elderly, and mentally ill or injured, or a large portion of the wealthy, but simply the vast army of permanent unemployed eking out a miserable existence on food stamps and free virchtime.
One major way the budding virtual states were able to wrest allegiance of citizenry away from old style governments over decades was a system whereby citizens in good standing with the virtual states enjoyed automatic copyrights and patents (within the boundaries and internal transactions of the virtual state) on their personal, original experiences and implemented ideas, as well as a supporting infrastructure which does all the work for a person in offering access to those items to others - for a fee. The fee was set by expert software, dependent on market supply and demand and the estimated value of one's material. For example more efficient ship engine designs brought much more than autobiographies.
