Under Heavy Weather:
An Interview with Bruce Sterling
conducted by Dwight Brown, Lawrence Person and Michael Sumbera
The Interview continues with Part 2.     Link to Part One or skip to Part Three.
Bruce Sterling: Well, there was a BlackNet announcement followed by--I can't even say who the hell did it. I have my suspicions, but for me to speculate on who the author of that document is would probably be libelous.
Lawrence Person: But we can edit it out later, so go ahead.
BS: Uh-huh. Right. Well, it was obviously somebody who had read the Kevin Kelly article, and probably one of the sources for the Kevin Kelly article. And this guy put out--he's been spreading these things through personal E-mail. They begin with the line, "Your name has come to our attention as a possible" something or other-consumer, contributor for our services, and they claim they're setting up a black market public key cryptography digital data haven, which will be run through anonymous remailing services, and which they hope to retail the entire gamut of forbidden knowledge. Industrial secrets, military technology, software piracy--any information, anything that can be put into 1's and 0's, and sold to anyone privately. And they're going to use that internal currency in order to do it. And if you want to do it, encrypt it with the following public key and post it onto one of the Internet newsgroups, through anonymous remailers, and we'll get in touch with you. I mean, don't tell us who you are.
LP: So, literally anything? I mean, like, child pornography, or murder for hire, or...?
BS: Anything. I mean, they really feel that information wants to be-they're not gonna know. They themselves aren't gonna know. They're just offering to run a service that will pass encrypted material from one anonymous person for money to another anonymous person for money, none of whom know. You could say it's a zero knowledge proof. You can tell that it came from a certain person, but you can't tell who that person is. It's just a private retail source for anything you might care to give them. And with all links severed between the act itself and the identity of the perpetrator. So they wrote this long manifesto, and they've been circulating it to people, and of course, some guy who was sent it immediately posted it on the Well. Which has got 7,000 journalists on it, plus CIA and FBI.
LP: So do you think that all this underground "activity" is going to cause a reaction from the Federal Government? Do you think the Clipper bill's going to go through? Do you think they're going to crack down on public key encryption, or try?
BS: Well, I have no idea, but this is a very bold announcement. This BlackNet thing, you could not have designed a thing more likely to atttract police attention. It's literally as if you came out and said, "Hey, everybody, I'm going to," uh, you know...
LP: "I'm going to shoot Bill Clinton."
BS: "I'm going to pedophiliacally rape a child at high noon in front of the Washington Monument, and would you like to come watch?" It's just an extremely outragous thing, and I can't imagine that a law enforcement official who was at all aware of this kind of material would not take some kind of interest. The implications of this stuff are extremely radical. It could destroy the whole practice of police search and seizure of computers if you encrypt everything on your hard disk. I mean, you go in and seize the computer and you've got a box full of Sanskrit. You can't do anything with that. And the cops have been doing that since the Year 0 in computer crime. They think you're hacking, or you're up to something, they just come and they fucking yank every electronic item out of your house down to the answering machine. Down to CD's. You know, compact discs--down to pop music, down to tapes. Down to manuals--everything. And they never give it back, because there's usually something in there-pirated software, some codes. But then the machine is in fact evidence of some kind of criminal activity, and then they can say, "Well, this has been used to commit a crime, we cannot return it to the owner, even if we don't press charges."

Well, in this case, you probably need to grab this stuff, and yet everything in it is invisible, except to the user. There is no longer any legal justification to seize that machine. There might be some legal justification to compel the guy to divulge the password, but that strikes me as being a 5th Amendment thing. I mean you're basically requiring him to incriminate himself by giving up his password. And what if he doesn't do it? What are you gonna do? Put him in prison? Journalists go to prison all the time for refusing to reveal their sources: they're never kept in there very long. I'd rather be in prison for refusing to reveal my password than in prison for credit card theft, or any other of the cute things that teenagers do with modems. It's a powerful technology with some weird impications. I haven't seen anything done with it yet. But the whole idea of data havens is probably going to take off. The thing that doesn't come up about public key cryptography, which is sort of an Achilles Heel of the whole fucking scam, is that the mere fact that your transmissions and your storage are bulletproof, unbreakable, does not really give you any security whatever. There's never been any security in that. There's never been a hacker ring in the world that was busted because the police interrupted their communications. It's always that somebody ratted. Somebody finks, you know? And if you've got 10 guys who are using public key cryptography, you're gonna have one genuinely ingenious and dangerous character, seven well-meaning idiots, and two policeman. And the police are all over the fucking place on this now. There are police on boards all over. They got modems, they know what's going down. There's not a lot of time to spare for it, or a lot of resources, but they're not ignorant.
LP: Sort of like, there was supposedly one informant for every Black Panther in the 60's?
BS: I don't think there's any "supposedly" about it.
LP: At what point you realize that the government was really serious about computer crime and its crackdown? Was it the Steve Jackson games raid, or was it earlier than that?
BS: I assume the government is serious in pretty much anything it does. I mean, people in the government don't arrest people because they think it's a cute thing to do. They don't do it because they think it's a joke. They don't sit around saying, "Who should we arrest today?" and throw at a dartboard.
LP: Well, what action or incident made you sit up and take notice?
BS: The Jackson raid. Because it was in my own hometown. And because there was that ridiculous thing about "the dangerous cyberpunk books." I mean, I could not be expected to take that in stride. But I must say, though. Jackson just installed a T-1 trunk in that place. You know what a T-1 trunk is? You've got, like, 36 phone lines in it. It's like, the upshot of this particular action, was to cut the neck of the hydra in one place, and have 36 new lines grow from the bloody stump. <LP cackles madly.> It was really, really counterproductive. <BS joins LP>. In terms of the hazard to the stability of society, I really think that the cypherpunk people, the people on the cypherpunk network, are more dangerous, by something like four orders of magnitude, than anybody in the Legion of Doom ever was, or probably ever will be.
Dwight Brown: Thank you. I'm flattered.
BS: And in terms of the potential change to our society, or just the collateral damage that can be done with their revolutionary transformation of electronics and banking-just the seismic shock from true electronic money. I mean, this could do for money what copying machines have done for copyright. It could mess with stuff the way faxes have messed with the US Post Office. It's like an entire alternate way of doing business. And those don't come along very often. This is really weird. It's far weirder than some guy getting onto a switching station somewhere and rerouting phone calls as a prank. The Legion of Doom liked to brag a lot, but they were just a bunch of kids. These cypherpunk people-why, some of them are millionaires! They've got private lawyers on tap. The whole scene has calmed down a little bit, because the police are not as anxious to get out and harass people with modems as they were before. In fact, the whole rhetoric of police enforcement has changed, from "Modems are too dangerous to be in the hands of these young men" to "we must protect young boys from these pedophilic maniac kid-porn dealers." Most of the prominent busts lately, BBS busts, have been porn busts. They have not been hack or hack/phreak busts. You just don't see the "this knowledge is too dangerous to be circulated" line of argument very much anymore. They're after forbidden data, generally kid porn, which arouses less societal defense.
LP: Do you think EFF has had a key role in changing the police view?
BS: I think police losing their jobs has had a key role in changing the police view. When you're a policeman, you keep in touch with the activities of your colleagues. And if they're flying high, and making a lot of busts, you get real chuffed. And if they're flying high, and making a lots of busts, and they have to dismiss a case, and then they get sued themselves, and then their boss calls them in, and their ass gets a pink slip-then you don't do what they do. It's like, "Oh. Okay. We'll find something else. That's not working."
DB: I'd like to touch on this pornography point for a second. And I'm curious what you think the implications are going to be of the National Information Infrastructure, for the Internet, and whether you think we're going to see a certain level of suppression of some of the less...socially acceptable groups, like alt.sex.foot.fetishes, or...?
BS: You know, I have no idea. And it's not from lack of thinking about it, either. This is a highly non-linear situation. This is really, really unstable. It could go any of ten different ways. I could see it going anywhere from total reactionary frenzy by the government--something along the lines of a Pat Robertson regime--not very likely, but a possibility--a truly reactionary regime could spring up and really try and smash this whole thing down we could end up with a situation with people being yanked in by their collar and saying, "When did you first use PGP? When did you know him?" You know...
LP: "Have you now or have you ever used PGP?"
BS: That's right. The entire "computer community" is still rather small in comparison to the rest of society. As their numbers grow, there's more safety in numbers, but they're not beyond the..I mean, I could imagine some kind of dreadful network disaster that would cause a lot of people to be essentially purged. We could have HUAC hearings, that sort of thing. Or it could go all the way to a basic confession of defeat by people who are trying to stop the free interchange of any kind of information. People just giving up. Just saying, "Okay, we admit it. We can't do it. We just can't stop it."
WAITRON: Okay. Are you guys still working on the chips?
BS: No, don't take them. Yet. But anyway, I think that confession of defeat seems like more of a possibility now because that's basically what happened in the Soviet Union. Here you have a one party state, which had this vast political police and a huge network of informants at every level of society. Its entire reason for existence is basically to keep people from telling one another things that the government didn't want them to know. And you go into, like, Romania, and they had the telephone switching station, and on top, there's literally an entire other floor for the Securitaté. The entire thing was literally designed by, for, and through the secret police. And they still couldn't stop people from organizing. But I think the trend is moving very strongly against censorship. I can understand how you might be able to stop certain Internet newsgroups at certain sites. But the Internet is not an American thing. The Internet is not in our pocket. The FBI doesn't own the Internet. The Christian League for Decency doesn't own the Internet. Nobody owns the Internet. There are Internet sites in Antarctica. There might be Internet sites in orbit in some relatively short period. There's gonna be phantom nodes on the Internet-Donn Parker talks about this-things that just appear that you have no fucking idea where they are, or where they came from. If you combine that with the use of cryptography and anonymous remailing, then you get into a situation where data has escaped all human control. The problem with having stuff escape all human control...you know, it's like the invisible hand of the market that Adam Smith used to talk about? It's not a human being's hand, okay? It's not a human hand. It's not nice to you. It doesn't pat you. I mean, it would have been different if Adam Smith had said, "the invisible suckered tentacle of the market." But it really...
LP: "The invisible Cthuloid horror."
BS: ...it's an alien thing. It doesn't give a shit about anything that a human being cares about. I mean, the market is perfectly happy to eviscerate you and take your liver out and sell it on the street, if there's dollars that can be gotten from that. Markets can spring up to commit the most heinous kinds of activity, the most dreadful things. Not only that, but markets are blind to vast aspects of reality, like ozone. There's no market for the ozone layer. There's no market for a clean gallon of sea water. You can't go "Hey, I want a gallon of sea water without any DDT in it, please. Go get me a bucketful, now. Here's $50." It won't work! All of the seawater has DDT in it! All of it! All of it! There's a layer of radioactive strontium in the polar snows. You can't tell the market, "Go get that layer of radioactivity out of the polar snow, please." You can't say "I want a dodo." "I want a passenger pigeon, please. I'd like 10,000. I have a lot of money."
LP: Well, maybe ten to twenty years from now, with cloning...
BS: Well, there'll be no place for them to live. You know? There'll be no place for them to live. The market can get certain things that are available, the market can't give you a lot of things. There are a lot of things that the market simply can't supply. It's a parasitic thing, and it's not a human thing. It's a very small subset of reality. I think you can make a very strong argument for a certain amount of government control over the nature of humanity, of interchanges between human beings. You can make a strong argument that human beings should be morally required to take some kind of responsibilty for their own destinies. That they should not be complete puppets of forces beyond their control. The course of human civilization has been sort of, naked superstitious people aquiring a piece of rock, slowly, slowly working their way up to more knowledge, more control, more ability to control their own circumstances. Here you have a situation where we may be in fact abdicating huge amounts of control over our own destiny. It's like in Europe now, where governments have lost control over their currency. They've just been humiliated by private currency traders. Who elected those private currency traders? What right do they have to make public policy over economics? They have no right. They're completely self-appointed. But the governments can't do anything about this. That is an area of governmental control over the destiny of their society that is completely lost, and probably not for the better. I don't think it's gonna make people happier. It's not for the good of society. It's not for anybody's good. It's like asking, "What's the good of having your city torn apart by an earthquake?" And there'll probably be some good in that, in a funny kind of way. You come back here later, it's like, "Look at all these new buildings." But you don't see people in Dresden coming up and saying, "Well, I'm glad Dresden was bombed flat in 1945. If I had my chance I'd bomb it flat again, by golly. There's nothing I enjoy better." That just doesn't happen.
LP: Getting back to science fiction for a moment, do you think that the cyberpunk movement, that your and Gibson, Shiner and Shirley's work, had any real effects on the field as a whole? Do you think it's moved it or changed its direction any?
BS: I have no real idea. I think it's had some effect on society as a whole. I think it's had a lot of effect on general popular culture. In terms of like, does Anne McCaffrey get more cyberpunk now, I have no idea. The covers of her books look a lot more cyberpunk, but when Anne's writing her next dragon book, she doesn't suddenly think, "Say, I need a flying dragon with a Mohawk here." That doesn't happen. There's a lot going on in SF, there's dark fantasy, there's sword and planet stuff...if anything, I think maybe it did have a little effect on space opera. You can't even read a space opera now that doesn't have a cyborg in it. Somebody with-I don't know where the hell this came from-but that classic token of scifiberpunk, the guy with one eye covered. A guy with one mechanical eye, or a head enshrouded in some kind of virtuality rig. It's not for the better. I don't think SF is any better now than it was in the 1980's...
LP: So...
BS: I think I'm a lot better writer than I was then. And I think that some people have come along into the field who are quite good writers who were in Mirrorshades and so forth. And they're there. Now, whether that could actually elevate the taste of people as a whole, and make the average science fiction rack product more worth reading, I very much doubt that.
LP: So you don't think it's had even as much effect as, say, the New Wave did?
BS: I think it's had a little more effect than the New Wave did, because the people who did it did better by it. I don't remember any New Wave writers getting written up in Time magazine, or getting really hip and being on the cover of Wired, for instance. Wired is a really significant development. The New Wave never had anything like Wired, or Mondo, or Boing Boing, or anything like the Internet, where people are just going ape now. E-zines, electronic 'zines and so forth, that's a really significant development. Those electronic magazines are like the apotheosis of stuff that I was trying to do in 1982, through the US Mail and Xeroxing™. I really wanted to have a magazine that could be infinitely replicated and distributed for free, and I was trying to do it with postage stamps and paper. Doing it on the Internet, in something like the Future Culture List or Voices From the Net, or Risks Digest--or Phrack, even. That's a really significant development in a funny kind of way. It's a new kind of way to organize culture, really. To organize literature and--especially to organize fan writing. Stuff that is non-commercial, and done for love. Amateur material, amateur criticism.
LP: Speaking of which, what, what made you decide to do Cheap Truth, back in the early '80s?
BS: Complete desperation. I just thought things were utterly awful, and I could not figure out how to make them any better. I was just blazingly determined to do something. It was that or else watch things go on as they were, and they were just too horrible. In terms of, like, being a 20 year old writer--I mean, I was young when I wrote Cheap Truth--I wasn't 20, I was, like, 28, 29, then-
LP: Unthinkably young.
BS: Well, I'd published two novels, you know. To basically no effect whatsoever. Of course, they weren't actually very good novels. They were the best I could write at the time, but my thinking wasn't very clear. Everything seemed very derivative. I needed something to break me out. Everything seemed just very stale and very hopeless. I really needed some way to grab this by the scruff of the neck--really, to grab myself by the scruff of the neck and shake my head until I could think more clearly. I needed a way to discuss things with other people, a way to figure things out. To that extent it worked. It didn't change the nature of the genre, really, even though it talked about changing the nature of the genre. What it really changed was the way I did stuff. I do stuff a lot better now then I did. I actually have a fairly coherent grasp of what it is that I think that I'm doing, and have the whole repertoire of professional skills here. I could go head to head with anyone in the genre, basically. It's not that I could pastiche anything that anybody does. Like, I've never gonna write a really good ghost story.
LP: High fantasy.
BS: Yeah. But I'm not interested in that. It's just that I can do Sterling books now that are really pretty good Sterling books. They're probably the best Sterling books that I could have done. They're pretty well informed, and I know what I'm doing. It doesn't mean that everybody's gonna like 'em, it doesn't mean that they're going to deserve to live very long, and it doesn't even mean that they're destined to be very influential. But I have really found my metier. I can really do it. I can really do what I want to do. I've learned what I want to do. I'm not saying it's good or pleasant or anything, but it's really me.
LP: You've become more like yourself.
BS: I have become more like myself. Much more like myself. I have "self-actualized", as they like to say. Abraham Maslow talks about that. The top human need, after food, sex, shelter and the rest of it, self-actualization. The process of becoming more like yourself? Yeah. I have found a way to do that. And it's made me happy.
LP: You show a certain fascination with other cultures, especially Japan and Islam.
BS: Yeah.
LP: What gives you that interest?
BS: Well, I'm still real interested in Japan, and I was very interested in the Soviet Union for a long time, because it was clear that something dreadful was happening to them. Japan at the moment has something quite dreadful happening to them. It's not getting a lot of press, but basically, they figured out that all their politicians had their hands in the cookie jar. That's been the Achilles heel of that particular society. And it's the Achilles heel really of any one party state, which Japan basically has been until quite recently. The LDP run everything, and the LDP are very well educated technocrats and so forth and so on. But the fuckers are all on the take, okay?! They're all on the take! Because any one party state always ends up with everybody on the fucking take! They're crooks! They're all crooks! Not only that, I would go so far as state it as a political principle that any human society which doesn't have some kind of powerful competing power groups, all the way up and down, all the way to the top-there have to be people around keeping each other honest-you're gonna end up on the take. The whole thing has been a giant fucking web of deceit. And now that party--they've split it up and they've kind of messed with it some, and maybe there'll be something better out of it. But they've got a long road to hoe. They've been been living in a dreamland, the poor bastards. Unfortunately, having a two-party state rather than a one-party state is a lot less efficient. I mean, the most efficient form of government is the benevolent dictatorship. Except that power corrupts, dictators go bad. And these guys have got it bad. They've got bad problems in Japan. They're gonna be out of it for quite some time. They've got their hands full.

As for Islam, Islam...is the worst threat to global stability since 1917. The stuff that's going on, in the south, with Islamic resurgence and Islamic fundamentalism--these guys are bad news. They've got the whole can of worms. They've got the zealotry, they've got the ideological correctness, they've got the camps, they've got the public humiliation, they've got the contempt for human life. They have a hateful repugnance for free expression. They cannot bear open public debate. They cannot bear the questioning of their religious principles. They're zealous, they're fanatical, they're poor, and they have nothing to lose. They are very, very dangerous people.
LP: And in the near future they might have nuclear weapons.
BS: That's the least of our problems. It doesn't even fucking matter if they have nuclear weapons. Any time when you're living cheek by jowl with people on the planet who have nothing to lose...it's just very dangerous. Their populations are out of control, their governments are very unstable, they have virtual class warfare breaking out in the bread lines, they have the example of Iran to finance stuff. Some of them have lots of money. I don't know, it's the most turbulent situation around. And what the hell's going on in the PLO and Israel now? I have no fucking idea. There is something very strange going on there. [Editor's Note: This interview occured before the Israel-PLO accord] I don't know. I'm gonna watch them for a long time. I worry about them. I really worry about Islamic religious fanaticism. It's the wild card in the scenario. And they're not gonna calm down for a long time. I would give it 70 years, 70 years from 1979, when the Iranian revolution happened. In a way, the Iranian revolution was every bit as significant as the Soviet Revolution. It's gonna take 70 years for them to realize, "Wait a minute. We've been studying the fucking Koran for five hours a day for 70 years, and we're broke, okay? We're broke, we're stupid, and we don't have any fucking idea about what we're doing, and we're just going to have to give up and beg the Americans to come in and set everything straight." It's gonna take that long to happen. In the meantime, we're probably going to have the Dean Acheson Islamic containment doctrine. It could get really ugly.
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