Bruce Sterling
bruces@well.sf.ca.us
Speech to the Library Information Technology Association
June 1992, San Francisco CA
"Free as Air, Free As Water, Free As Knowledge" (Speech)
Hi everybody. Well, this is the Library Information Technology
Association, so I guess I ought to be talking about libraries, or
information, or technology, or at least association. I'm gonna give
it a shot, but I want to try this from an unusual perspective. I
want to start by talking about money.
You wouldn't guess it sometimes to hear some people talk, but we
don't live in a technocratic information society. We live in a
highly advanced capitalist society. People talk a lot about the
power and glory of specialized knowledge and technical expertise.
Knowledge is power -- but if so, why aren't knowledgeable people
*in* power? And it's true there's a Library *of* Congress. But how
many librarians are there *in* Congress?
The nature of our society strongly affects the nature of our
technology.
It doesn't absolutely *determine* it; a lot of our technology is
sheer accident , serendipity, the way the cards happened to fall,
who got the lucky breaks, and, of course, the occasional eruption
of *genius,* which tends to be positively unpredictable by its
nature. But as a society we don't develop technologies to their
ultimate ends. Only engineers are interested in that kind of
technical sweetness, and engineers generally have their paychecks
signed by CEOs and stockholders. We don't pursue ultimate
technologies. Our technologies are actually produced to optimize
financial return on investment. There's a big difference.
Of course there are many elements of our lives that exist outside
the money economy. There's a lot going on in our lives that's
not-for-profit and that can't be denominated in dollars. "The best
things in life are free," the old saying goes. Nice old saying.
Gets a little older-sounding every day. Sounds about as old and
mossy as the wedding vow "for richer for poorer," which in a modern
environment is pretty likely to be for-richer-or poorer modulo our
prenuptial agreement. Commercialization. Commodification, a
favorite buzzword of mine. It's a very powerful phenomenon. It's
getting more powerful year by year.
Academia, libraries, cultural institutions are already under
protracted commercial siege. This is the MacNeill Lehrer News
Hour, brought to you by publicly supported television and,
incidentally, AT&T. Welcome students to Large Northeastern
