The reporter had two lip piercings, and a matt of close-cropped micro-dreads, and an attitude.“So here’s what I don’t get. You’ve got the Market wired—”“Unwired,” Kurt said, breaking in for the tenth time in as many minutes. Alan shot him a dirty look.“Unwired, right.” The kid made little inverted commas with his fingertips, miming,Yes, that is a very cute jargon you’ve invented, dork.“You’ve got the Market unwired and you’re going to connect up your network with the big interchange down on Front Street.”“Well,eventually,” Alan said. The story was too complicated. Front Street, the Market, open networks… it had no focus, it wasn’t a complete narrative with a beginning, middle, and end. He’d tried to explain it to Mimi that morning, over omelets in his kitchen, and she’d been totally lost.“Eventually?” The kid took on a look of intense, teenaged skepticism. He claimed to be 20, but he looked about 17 and had been the puck in an intense game of eyeball hockey among the cute little punk girls who’d been volunteering in the shopfront when he’d appeared.“That’s the end-goal, a citywide network with all-we-can eat free connectivity, fully anonymized and hardened against malicious attackers and incidental environmental interference.” Alan steepled his fingers and tried to look serious and committed.“Okay, that’s the goal.”“But it’s not going to be all or nothing. We want to make the community a part of the network. Getting people energized about participating in the network is as important as providing the network itself—hell, the networkispeople. So we’ve got this intermediate step, this way that everyone can pitch in.”“And that is, what, renaming your network to ParasiteNet?”Kurt nodded vigorously. “Zactly.”“And how will I find these ParasiteNet nodes? Will there be a map or something with all this information on it?”Alan nodded slowly. “We’ve been thinking about a mapping application—”“But we decided that it was stupid,” Kurt said. “No one needed to draw a map of the Web—it just grew and people found its weird corners on their own. Networks don’tneedcentralized authority, that’s just the chains on your mind talking—”“The chains on my mind?” The kid snorted.Alan held his hands up placatingly. “Wait a second,” he said. “Let’s take a step back here and talk aboutvalues. The project here is about free expression and cooperation. Sure, it’d be nice to have a city-wide network, but in my opinion, it’s a lot more important to have a city full of people working on that network because they value expression and understand how cooperation gets us more of that.”“And we’ll get this free expression how?”“By giving everyone free Internet access.”The kid laughed and shook his head. “That’s a weird kind of ‘free,’ if you don’t mind my saying so.” He flipped over his phone. “I mean, it’s like, ‘Free speech if you can afford a two-thousand-dollar laptop and want to sit down and type on it.’”“I can build you a desktop out of garbage for twenty bucks,” Kurt said. “We’re drowning in PC parts.”“Sure, whatever. But what kind of free expression is that? Free expression so long as you’re sitting at home with your PC plugged into the wall?”“Well, it’s not like we’re talking about displacing all the other kinds of expression,” Alan said. “This is in addition to all the ways you’ve had to talk—”“Right, like this thing,” the kid said. He reached into his pocket and took out a small phone. “This was free—not twenty dollars, not even two thousand dollars—just free, from the phone company, in exchange for a one-year contract. Everyone’s got one of these. I went trekking in India, you see people using these out in the bush. And you know what they use them for? Speech! Not speech-in-quotes meaning some kind of abstract expression, but actualtalking.”The kid leaned forward and planted his hands on his knees and suddenly he was a lot harder to dismiss as some subculture-addled intern. He had that fiery intensity that Alan recognized from himself, from Kurt, from the people who believe.Alan thought he was getting an inkling into why this particular intern had responded to his press release: Not because he was too ignorant to see through the bullshit, but just the opposite.“But that’s communication through thephone company,” Kurt said, wonderment in his voice that his fellow bohemian couldn’t see how sucktastic that proposition was. “How is that free speech?”The kid rolled his eyes. “Come off it. You old people, you turn up your noses whenever someone ten years younger than you points out that cell phones are actually a pretty good way for people to communicate with each other—even subversively. I wrote a term paper last year on this stuff: In Kenya, electoral scrutineers follow the ballot boxes from the polling place to the counting house and use their cell phones to sound the alarm when someone tries to screw with them. In the Philippines, twenty thousand people were mobilized in 15 minutes in front of the presidential palace when they tried to shut down the broadcast of the corruption hearings.“And yet every time someone from my generation talks about how important phones are to democracy, there’s always some old pecksniff primly telling us that our phones don’t give usrealdemocracy. It’s so much bullshit.”He fell silent and they all stared at each other for a moment. Kurt’s mouth hung open.“I’m not old,” he said finally.“You’re older than me,” the kid said. His tone softened. “Look, I’m not trying to be cruel here, but you’re generation-blind. The Internet is great, but it’s not the last great thing we’ll ever invent. My pops was a mainframe guy, he thought PCs were toys. You’re a PC guy, so you think my phone is a toy.”Alan looked off into the corner of the back room of Kurt’s shop for a while, trying to marshal his thoughts. Back there, among the shelves of milk crates stuffed with T-shirts and cruft, he had a thought.“Okay,” he said. “Fair enough. It may be that today, in the field, there’s a lot of free expression being enabled with phones. But at the end of the day"—he thought of Lyman—"this is thephone companywe’re talking about. Big lumbering dinosaur that is thrashing in the tar pit. The spazz dinosaur that’s so embarrassed all the other dinosaurs that none of them want to rescue it.“Back in the sixties, these guys sued to keep it illegal to plug anything other than their rental phones into their network. But more to the point, you get a different kind of freedom with an Internet network than a phone-company network—even if the Internet network lives on top of the phone-company network.“If you invent a new way of using the phone network—say, a cheaper way of making long-distance calls using voice-over-IP, you can’t roll that out on the phone network without the permission of the carrier. You have to go to him and say, ‘Hey, I’ve invented a way to kill your most profitable line of business, can you install it at your switching stations so that we can all talk long distance for free?’“But on the net, anyone can invent any application that he can get his buddies to use. No central authority had to give permission for the Web to exist: A physicist just hacked it together one day, distributed the software to his colleagues, and in just a very short while, people all over the world had the Web.“So the net can live on top of the phone network and it can run voice-calling as an application, but it’s not tied to the phone network. It doesn’t care whose wires or wireless it lives on top of. It’s got all these virtues that are key to free expression. That’s why we care about this.”The kid nodded as he talked, impatiently, signaling in body language that even Alan could read that he’d heard this already.“Yes, in this abstract sense, there are a bunch of things to like about your Internet over there. But I’m talking about practical, nonabstract, nontheoretical stuff over here. The real world. I can get a phone forfree. I can talk toeveryonewith it. I can sayanythingI want. I can use itanywhere. Sure, the phone company is a giant conspiracy by The Man to keep us down. But can you really tell me with a straight face that because I can’t invent the Web for my phone or make free long distance calls I’m being censored?”“Of course not,” Kurt said. Alan put a steadying hand on his shoulder. “Fine, it’s not an either-or thing. You can have your phones, I can have my Internet, and we’ll both do our thing. It’s not like the absence of the Web for phones or high long-distance charges aregoodfor free expression, Christ. We’re trying to unbreak the net so that no one can own it or control it. We’re trying to put it on every corner of the city, for free, anonymously, for anyone to use. We’re doing it with recycled garbage, and we’re paying homeless teenagers enough money to get off the street as part of the program. What’s not to fucking like?”The kid scribbled hard on his pad. “Nowyou’re giving me some quotes I can use. You guys need to work on your pitch. ‘What’s not to fucking like?’ That’s good.”
The reporter had two lip piercings, and a matt of close-cropped micro-dreads, and an attitude.
“So here’s what I don’t get. You’ve got the Market wired—”
“Unwired,” Kurt said, breaking in for the tenth time in as many minutes. Alan shot him a dirty look.
“Unwired, right.” The kid made little inverted commas with his fingertips, miming,Yes, that is a very cute jargon you’ve invented, dork.“You’ve got the Market unwired and you’re going to connect up your network with the big interchange down on Front Street.”
“Well,eventually,” Alan said. The story was too complicated. Front Street, the Market, open networks… it had no focus, it wasn’t a complete narrative with a beginning, middle, and end. He’d tried to explain it to Mimi that morning, over omelets in his kitchen, and she’d been totally lost.
“Eventually?” The kid took on a look of intense, teenaged skepticism. He claimed to be 20, but he looked about 17 and had been the puck in an intense game of eyeball hockey among the cute little punk girls who’d been volunteering in the shopfront when he’d appeared.
“That’s the end-goal, a citywide network with all-we-can eat free connectivity, fully anonymized and hardened against malicious attackers and incidental environmental interference.” Alan steepled his fingers and tried to look serious and committed.
“Okay, that’s the goal.”
“But it’s not going to be all or nothing. We want to make the community a part of the network. Getting people energized about participating in the network is as important as providing the network itself—hell, the networkispeople. So we’ve got this intermediate step, this way that everyone can pitch in.”
“And that is, what, renaming your network to ParasiteNet?”
Kurt nodded vigorously. “Zactly.”
“And how will I find these ParasiteNet nodes? Will there be a map or something with all this information on it?”
Alan nodded slowly. “We’ve been thinking about a mapping application—”
“But we decided that it was stupid,” Kurt said. “No one needed to draw a map of the Web—it just grew and people found its weird corners on their own. Networks don’tneedcentralized authority, that’s just the chains on your mind talking—”
“The chains on my mind?” The kid snorted.
Alan held his hands up placatingly. “Wait a second,” he said. “Let’s take a step back here and talk aboutvalues. The project here is about free expression and cooperation. Sure, it’d be nice to have a city-wide network, but in my opinion, it’s a lot more important to have a city full of people working on that network because they value expression and understand how cooperation gets us more of that.”
“And we’ll get this free expression how?”
“By giving everyone free Internet access.”
The kid laughed and shook his head. “That’s a weird kind of ‘free,’ if you don’t mind my saying so.” He flipped over his phone. “I mean, it’s like, ‘Free speech if you can afford a two-thousand-dollar laptop and want to sit down and type on it.’”
“I can build you a desktop out of garbage for twenty bucks,” Kurt said. “We’re drowning in PC parts.”
“Sure, whatever. But what kind of free expression is that? Free expression so long as you’re sitting at home with your PC plugged into the wall?”
“Well, it’s not like we’re talking about displacing all the other kinds of expression,” Alan said. “This is in addition to all the ways you’ve had to talk—”
“Right, like this thing,” the kid said. He reached into his pocket and took out a small phone. “This was free—not twenty dollars, not even two thousand dollars—just free, from the phone company, in exchange for a one-year contract. Everyone’s got one of these. I went trekking in India, you see people using these out in the bush. And you know what they use them for? Speech! Not speech-in-quotes meaning some kind of abstract expression, but actualtalking.”
The kid leaned forward and planted his hands on his knees and suddenly he was a lot harder to dismiss as some subculture-addled intern. He had that fiery intensity that Alan recognized from himself, from Kurt, from the people who believe.
Alan thought he was getting an inkling into why this particular intern had responded to his press release: Not because he was too ignorant to see through the bullshit, but just the opposite.
“But that’s communication through thephone company,” Kurt said, wonderment in his voice that his fellow bohemian couldn’t see how sucktastic that proposition was. “How is that free speech?”
The kid rolled his eyes. “Come off it. You old people, you turn up your noses whenever someone ten years younger than you points out that cell phones are actually a pretty good way for people to communicate with each other—even subversively. I wrote a term paper last year on this stuff: In Kenya, electoral scrutineers follow the ballot boxes from the polling place to the counting house and use their cell phones to sound the alarm when someone tries to screw with them. In the Philippines, twenty thousand people were mobilized in 15 minutes in front of the presidential palace when they tried to shut down the broadcast of the corruption hearings.
“And yet every time someone from my generation talks about how important phones are to democracy, there’s always some old pecksniff primly telling us that our phones don’t give usrealdemocracy. It’s so much bullshit.”
He fell silent and they all stared at each other for a moment. Kurt’s mouth hung open.
“I’m not old,” he said finally.
“You’re older than me,” the kid said. His tone softened. “Look, I’m not trying to be cruel here, but you’re generation-blind. The Internet is great, but it’s not the last great thing we’ll ever invent. My pops was a mainframe guy, he thought PCs were toys. You’re a PC guy, so you think my phone is a toy.”
Alan looked off into the corner of the back room of Kurt’s shop for a while, trying to marshal his thoughts. Back there, among the shelves of milk crates stuffed with T-shirts and cruft, he had a thought.
“Okay,” he said. “Fair enough. It may be that today, in the field, there’s a lot of free expression being enabled with phones. But at the end of the day"—he thought of Lyman—"this is thephone companywe’re talking about. Big lumbering dinosaur that is thrashing in the tar pit. The spazz dinosaur that’s so embarrassed all the other dinosaurs that none of them want to rescue it.
“Back in the sixties, these guys sued to keep it illegal to plug anything other than their rental phones into their network. But more to the point, you get a different kind of freedom with an Internet network than a phone-company network—even if the Internet network lives on top of the phone-company network.
“If you invent a new way of using the phone network—say, a cheaper way of making long-distance calls using voice-over-IP, you can’t roll that out on the phone network without the permission of the carrier. You have to go to him and say, ‘Hey, I’ve invented a way to kill your most profitable line of business, can you install it at your switching stations so that we can all talk long distance for free?’
“But on the net, anyone can invent any application that he can get his buddies to use. No central authority had to give permission for the Web to exist: A physicist just hacked it together one day, distributed the software to his colleagues, and in just a very short while, people all over the world had the Web.
“So the net can live on top of the phone network and it can run voice-calling as an application, but it’s not tied to the phone network. It doesn’t care whose wires or wireless it lives on top of. It’s got all these virtues that are key to free expression. That’s why we care about this.”
The kid nodded as he talked, impatiently, signaling in body language that even Alan could read that he’d heard this already.
“Yes, in this abstract sense, there are a bunch of things to like about your Internet over there. But I’m talking about practical, nonabstract, nontheoretical stuff over here. The real world. I can get a phone forfree. I can talk toeveryonewith it. I can sayanythingI want. I can use itanywhere. Sure, the phone company is a giant conspiracy by The Man to keep us down. But can you really tell me with a straight face that because I can’t invent the Web for my phone or make free long distance calls I’m being censored?”
“Of course not,” Kurt said. Alan put a steadying hand on his shoulder. “Fine, it’s not an either-or thing. You can have your phones, I can have my Internet, and we’ll both do our thing. It’s not like the absence of the Web for phones or high long-distance charges aregoodfor free expression, Christ. We’re trying to unbreak the net so that no one can own it or control it. We’re trying to put it on every corner of the city, for free, anonymously, for anyone to use. We’re doing it with recycled garbage, and we’re paying homeless teenagers enough money to get off the street as part of the program. What’s not to fucking like?”
The kid scribbled hard on his pad. “Nowyou’re giving me some quotes I can use. You guys need to work on your pitch. ‘What’s not to fucking like?’ That’s good.”