Mastering the Net

Coming soon, the InterPlaNet. Testing is underway to link up the SpaceWideWeb, extending the internet to reach spacecraft and other planets in our solar system.

In this talk, given in Zurich, Switzerland, on 22 November 2007, Vint addresses the current status of the net, some of the technological changes that are driving its evolution, and some of the global policy issues that have to be dealt with.

Tipton said he had more than 35 windows open on his computer at the time of the crash. He had been downloading the Yo La Tengo discography from iTunes while streaming several YouTube videos, listening to an NPR broadcast, instant messaging his friends, checking 3 email accounts, talking on Skype, and playing online poker, all while installing the latest version of Firefox and updating his system's software. When he opened a friend's MySpace profile, an animated GIF of the Peanuts character Linus dancing started to play along with a midi version of Justin Timberlake's "Sexy Back."

In the final episode of his 1985 series, science historian James Burke offered a prophetic look at our interconnected destiny:

You might be able to give everybody unhindered, untested access to knowledge, because a computer would do the day-to-day work for which we once qualified the select few in an educational system originally designed for a world where only a few could be taught. You might end the regimentation of people living and working in vast unmanageable cities, uniting them instead in an electronic community where the Himalayas and Manhattan were only a split second apart...

In a future world that we would describe as balanced anarchy, and they will describe as an open society, tolerant of every view, aware that there is no single privileged way of doing things. Above all, able to do away with the greatest tragedy of our era -- the centuries old waste of human talent that we couldn't, or wouldn't, use. Utopia? Why? If, as I've said all along, the universe is at any time what you say it is -- then say.