Opening Statement to the House Subcommittee on
Telecommunications and Finance, Washington DC, April 29,
1993
Hello everyone and thanks for inviting me here.
My name is Bruce Sterling and I'm a science fiction writer
and sometime science journalist. Since writing my
nonfiction book HACKER CRACKDOWN: LAW AND DISORDER ON THE
ELECTRONIC FRONTIER, I have returned to writing science
fiction. And I've returned to that with some relief,
frankly, since the world of science fiction is in most
ways rather less strange and less bizarre than the
contemporary world of telecommunications policy.
I hope therefore that you will forgive me if I
testify today as a science fiction writer. It's one of
the perks of my profession to write about the future, or
attempt to, and I thought you might like to meet someone
from the telecommunications future that you are so busy
creating.
With your kind indulgence for my novelist's
whimsy then, the rest of my brief presentation today will
be given by a Mr. Bob Smith, who is an NREN network
administrator from the year 2015.
I present Mr. Smith.
"Thank you, Mr. Sterling. It's a remarkable
privilege to talk to the legislators who historically
created my working environment. As a laborer in the
fields of 21st Century cyberspace I of course would have
no job without NREN, and my wife and small son and I are
all properly grateful for your foresight in establishing
the Information Superhighway.
"Your actions in this regard have affected
American society every bit as strongly as did the
telegraph, the railroads, the telephone, the highway
system, and television. In fact, it's impossible for me
to imagine contemporary life in 2015 without the Global
Net; living without the Net would be like trying to live
without electricity.
"However, it's a truism in technological
development that no silver lining comes without its cloud.
Today I'd like to mention two or three trifling problems
that have come up that were not entirely obvious from the
perspective of the early 1990s.
