Made out of people

Bruce Sterling on the End of the World

Thanks for Liz for pointing this out to me. At SXSW, Bruce Sterling talked about what the future looks like. Liz is thinking about how to handle her 9 year olds' experience on the 'net. It's certainly too late to keep him from running into porn--it pervades the network experience, it's everyhere. Porn has changed from when I was a kid: it's no longer hidden or forbidden--it's pushing at your inbox, not pulling from behind school; it's all over the place.

The Internet is coming apart at the seams. It's choking on this stuff. I remember cops telling me in 1990 that there was no security on the Internet and that the stuff was being built hastily. Well, it's gotten really bad. It's really, really bad on the Internet right now. But what frustrates me is not what's happening in America. We've been doing this for decades. We're used to it. If you just grab some of it and email it to your earlier self, you'd be disgusted. What I'm worried about is someone in China getting a machine and plugging it in in their village, and they're swamped by the world's worst filth. The spammers and scammers are a terrifying army, but they've got carte blanche to come into our homes.

What's next? What will we think of porn in a decade or two, when we pretty much always expect porn everywhere? I assume that it's decreasing the American (at least) fear of obscenity--but will it loosen the national moral standards as some fear, or will it force us to talk about sex better and earlier?

My advisor, quoting someone else, says, "All software evolves until it has a mailer built in." And Bruce Sterling writes:

Outlook? That's a flaw with a mailer built into it.