Speaking the other week at different conferences, Dan Geer and Bruce Sterling provided different views of the future of Internet and world governance, or, more specifically, the continued involvement of meritocracy in it.

Dr. Dan Geer is a famous security expert with more than a passing interest in the big picture. Bruce Sterling is a famous science fiction writer with more than a passing interest in technological details. I read both their stuff all the time. It’s interesting to see them produce such variant prognostications.

Here’s Dr. Dan Geer:

“At the same time, increasing threat will, as it must, lead to shrinking perimeters thus away from a focus on enterprise-scale perimeters and more toward perimeters at the level of individual data objects. Security and privacy are, indeed, interlocking but, much as with twins in the womb, the neoplastic growth of the one will be to the detriment of the other hence the bland happy talk of there being no conflict between the two will soon be shown to be merely that. Finally, the Internet as a creature built by, of, and for the technical and ethical elite being no longer consistent with the facts on the ground, its meritocratic governance will yield to the anti-meritocratic tendencies of government(s).”

–Dan Geer, USENIX Security Symposium, 12 August 2004, page 20.

And here’s Bruce Sterling:

“ You might think, now that Hollywood slums around your gig, and even novelists show up, and Pixar drags Disney around by its big financial nose, that there were no new worlds to conquer for SIGGRAPH. But there’s one world that you direly need to conquer anyway. Even if hobbits win Oscars by the bushel full.

“Having conquered the world made of bits, you need to reform the world made of atoms. Not the simulated image on the screen, but corporeal, physical reality. Not meshes and splines, but big hefty skull-crackingly solid things that you can pick up and throw. That’s the world that needs conquering. Because that world can’t manage on its own. It is not sustainable, it has no future, and it needs one.

[After much development of the idea of spimes, which are objects that tell the user all about themselves and everything related to them….]

“The upshot is that the object’s nature has become transparent. It is an opened object.

“In a world with this kind of object, you care little about the object per se; that physical object is just a material billboard for tomorrow’s vast, digital, interactive, postindustrial support system. This is where people like you, your evolved successors, rule the earth. This is a world where the Web has ceased to be a varnish on barbarism, and where the world is now varnish all the way down.

“By making the whole business transparent, a host of social ills and dazzling possibilities are exposed to the public gaze. Everyone who owns a spime becomes, not a mute purchaser, but a stakeholder. And the closer you get to it, the more attention it sucks from you. You don’t just use it, any more than I can pick up this Treo and just make a simple phone call. This device wants to haul me into the operating system; I’m supposed to tell all my friends about it. We’re all supposed to become its darlings and its cultists, we’re all supposed to help out. Sometimes we do that willingly, sometimes we just fight for breath. We’re not customers. We’re not consumers. And with spimes, we’re not even end-users. We spend our time wrangling with the real problems and opportunities of material culture. We’re wranglers.”

–Bruce Sterling, SIGGRAPH, 9 August 2004

I suppose comparing them next to each other like this is not completely fair, since Dan was speaking about Internet security over the next decade, and Bruce was talking about the entire material world longer term.

Maybe they’re both right. Maybe first we have to go through a defensive regimented unsustainable period before we can get to a transparent integrated enhancing future.

Or maybe the details of what Dan was talking about are part of the way to what Bruce was talking about. If, as Dan recommends, we beg, borrow, or steal metrics from public health, accelerated failure time testing, insurance, portfolio management, and physics, and we distribute the resulting measurements with various forms of information sharing, plus take many of the measurements in a distributed manner, and connect that up with gizmos for people to use, don’t we get pretty close to Bruce’s spimes?

With Dan’s recommended always-on sensor network, crackers and terrorists won’t be able to sneak in exploits without them being known. This doesn’t mean exploits won’t happen; however it may mean that the perpetrators will be more likely to be caught, and faster. And that companies and individuals will have more incentive to install patches. And that vendors will have more incentive to not sell buggy software. And that insurers can better cover business losses that happen anyway.

In other words, maybe increasing threat leads not to shrinking perimiters, rather to expanding interdependence and transparency.

Security and privacy may or may not be a zero-sum game.

Security and liberty are not a zero-sum game.

-jsq