A glimpse into the future from Cyberspace

A view from one of many Occupy Wall Street's livestream websites depicts a live video feed (left), ribbons to select OWS streams from various cities (upper-left) and an instantaneous chat room (right).  This is part of the cyber infrastructure as much as it is a part of the movement's architecture.  The chat is hosted by a technology resurrected from the early days of the Net:  IRC, or Internet Relay Chat.  It has been coupled with the technology of livestreaming video to produce a moderated forum--a sanctuary for solidarity, discourse and real-time feedback.  Users of the chatroom are now able to interact with those on-camera.  They are afforded the option to view streams from OWS encampments worldwide and the chatroom switches to that location as well, when the users select a new location ribbon. 

The facilitation of an active feedback loop has occurred.  Not only are cyber-users able to connect to movements in solidarity, they are able to contribute and pose questions to the demonstrators, on-the-fly.  The power of the feedback loop replicates, into the demonstrators watching the onliners, who are  watching the demonstrators (above).  This is a new iteration of the very concept of demonstration, never before seen en masse. 



 Given that much of this movement had begun via IRC--OWS had sown their Cyber seeds--and has harnessed the power of corporate technology, a new discourse is needed.  What has taken place is the exploitation of the digital sphere around the tangible globe. 

In 1989, cyberpunk author William Gibson published Neuromancer--the novel that coined the term Cyberspace.  Gibson painted a dark and daunting view of our future; a world where government was subserviant to corporations.  Where renegade "cyber jockeys" corral their needs, or those of their employers, through the corridors of computers and the influence of information.  The free-market is not governed by currencies nor corporations--the only relevant commodity is information, the only obstacle is dubbed "ice"--and all beings are individual entities.  Gibson's term "ice" refers to electronic/information technologies, acting as boundaries to obtaining the covetted commodity of information.  He felt that in the future, government has no relevance, corporations have no relevance and we are all left to our own devices to traffic, retain and confiscate information.  Worldwide, technology, business and government have been trending toward Gibson's anarchisitic view of the future.

In a World where the core of the global economy was shown to be a complete farce--the implosion of toxic "assets" and the credit crisis of 2008--the concept of information-based value is ever more plausible.  Look at the sectors that are currently in the highest of demand:  IT, consulting and computer programming (a field that has seen a twofold increase in salaries, over the past several years). 

Yet as we diverge into independent cells of bits of information, it appears this very phenomenon has brought us together in reality.  Ironically enough, it was the privatization of Zuccotti Park that allowed this very movement to usurp government regulations.  Clearly our ice is much more corporate than it is legislative.  Paradoxically, Occupy Wall Street has cut through many layers of ice to obtain a physical presence of unity.  Global movements and American will have now enraptured humans to a material manifestation of solidarity--a Pangea of core ideals...

"Bodiless, we swerve into Chrome’s castle of ice. And we’re fast, fast. It feels like we’re surfing the crest of the invading program, hanging ten above the seething glitch systems as they mutate.  We’re sentient patches of oil swept along down corridors of shadow.  Somewhere we have bodies, very far away, in a crowded loft roofed with steel and glass. Somewhere we have microseconds, maybe time left to pull out.

We’ve crashed her gates disguised as an audit and three subpoenas, but her defenses are specifically geared to cope with that kind of official intrusion. Her most sophisticated ice is structured to fend off warrants, writs, subpoenas.

When we breached the first gate, the bulk of her data vanished behind core-command ice, these walls we see as leagues of corridor, mazes of shadow. Five separate landlines spurted May Day signals to law firms, but the virus had already taken over the parameter ice. The glitch systems gobble the distress calls as our mimetic subprograms scan anything that hasn’t been blanked by core command.The Russian program lifts a Tokyo number from the unscreened data, choosing it for frequency of calls, average length of calls, the speed with which Chrome returned those calls.
“Okay,” says Bobby, “we’re an incoming scrambler call from a pal of hers in Japan. That should help.”

Ride ‘em, cowboy." 

-- William Gibson, Burning Chrome