A fable on the new monks in cyberspace
A fable on the new monks in cyberspace
“... The Internet is a tidal wave. It will wash over the computer industry and many other, drowning those who don’t learn to swim in its waves.”
Bill Gates
We are approaching the end of two thousand years of recorded history. In all this time mankind has rarely succeeded in being democratic in any form of organisation larger than a city-state, the likes of Athens and Sparta. Even there, it ended in Socrates having to drink hemlock when his observations became too bizarre for the “thinking” majority.
The twentieth century has seen a technological flowering never before witnessed in the history of mankind. All this advancement however did not free man from his primordial impulse of the few dominating the many. Technology just made it easier and more efficient. At last however, scarce years before the dawn of the 21st century the same technology has come in the garb of a liberator and its fathers have the mien of the ascetic.
The computer whiz is the new monk. He is spartan in his single-minded obsession with cyberspace. He is unconcerned about boundaries and sceptical of hierarchies. He thinks like an anarchist, wants free access to information as a birthright for every surfer. His genius explodes on the PC screens of the world, careening down the information highway like a drunken juice truck with the driver inebriated at the wheel.
Alas! he cannot keep things pristine outside the confines of his work-station monastery. Mammon comes visiting, regular as a rent collector, in a suit and stuffed shirt, slithers around the new-born software, offering lewd blandishments, corrupting the new monk’s innocence and commercialising his anarchism.Mammon damns the cyberspace monk with faint praise, and weaves languages of denial around the hardware he controls so that the monk is reduced to writing software, in effect, for Mammon’s acceptance. There are many precious gems mined by the monk from his inner reflections, but the buyer, Mammon, makes it clear that he, not the monk, will set the price.
The new monk hates this fettering of his spirit. So he climbs another mountain, more stark, far away from the cacophony of the bazaar, and there invents a new language and gives it a sunny name, Java, after his dreams of Utopia. This is a universal new language of enabling cues that transform difficult access commands into pictures a child can point his mouse at. It is an open sesame that blows away all the locks and controls installed by Mammon. Suddenly, the arcane, jealously guarded study of adepts, shut away in ivory towers, is stripped and laid bare, cowering and shivering under the lustful appraisal of the ignorant. The rag-tag band swarms up from the streets and alleys, dancing their way in after the pied-piper monk of cyberspace. Soon the numbers of the converted become legion, some thirty million strong, and growing continuously, like the self-reproducing amoeba.
The new monk hates this fettering of his spirit. So he climbs another mountain, more stark, far away from the cacophony of the bazaar, and there invents a new language and gives it a sunny name, Java, after his dreams of Utopia. This is a universal new language of enabling cues that transform difficult access commands into pictures a child can point his mouse at. It is an open sesame that blows away all the locks and controls installed by Mammon. Suddenly, the arcane, jealously guarded study of adepts, shut away in ivory towers, is stripped and laid bare, cowering and shivering under the lustful appraisal of the ignorant. The rag-tag band swarms up from the streets and alleys, dancing their way in after the pied-piper monk of cyberspace. Soon the numbers of the converted become legion, some thirty million strong, and growing continuously, like the self-reproducing amoeba.
The joiner is a neophyte but he goes from virginal coyness to seasoned convert in the twinkling of a graphic wink. His appetite for cyberjunk grows stronger, more demanding and familiar everyday. To provide for his hunger and burgeoning numbers, the new monk undertakes a recruitment drive. But here a contradiction arises. A true monk is, by definition, a solitary individual. A good joiner he is not! Conformity, with its elaborate language is like poison to his original thinking. The new monk can find hardly any joiners, but all is by no means wasted. The clarion call is heard in isolated caves, metal and glass towers, fishing cabins, deep in the desert, high on the mountains, on islands, on trains and undergrounds, in short, all over cyberspace...
Then the responses come, tumbling onto bulletin boards and virtual shopping malls. The message is unambiguous; unstoppable, a new set of Commandments, “there is no one way to use the Internet. It will become what you make of it. I can join you from my work-station wherever I am. We can work together even though we have never met, and probably, never will”, and, “let me show you how”.The truth shines in like divine light, penetrating in its simplicity. Neophytes who can’t type, others who are phobic about computerese, all kinds of doubting Thomases, have no need to worry. The new generation software, to come, soon enough to greet the millennium, will take voice commands.
The etiquette of the Internet is being established. Because of its free-wheeling democratic parentage, soon it will be de rigueur that ordinary level access to basic information on any topic under the heavens, will be granted to any thirsty visitor to a website.The new monk has already left his mark, that too in his lifetime. Commonsense told him old fashioned window-shopping is a ritual old as time, in the tango between buyer and seller. Access to websites half way around the world in seconds, will gradually become as ubiquitous as the STD/ISD/PCO booths we now find from Mathura to Mallikery.
The basic allure is that of a bordello;-- no would be lover is turned away from a whore-house because his pockets are shallow, but, for that all important walk up the stairs and the comfort of company behind closed doors, you’ve gotta pay!Everyone needs to strut his stuff and display his wares on the virtual mall, for the millions of browsers and cruisers. It is no wonder that the earliest Johns came looking for smut, not wisdom. Others came for cyber-romance, intimacies of mouses and screens in mardi-gras masks of anonymity.
Marshall Mcluhan punned prophetically on the medium and the massage in the dreamy sixties, but at the turn of the millennium, the massage has become all-pervasive and the medium is the Internet, through cyberspace, via satellite and other wired and wireless deliverers. This medium is global, cheap, comprehensive and virtually irresistible. It mocks the epaulettes off global policemen who wish to block access in this “pernicious and anarchic manner”. It is a technology that threatens to bankrupt authority everywhere, handing over dominion to the masses. It will crown and anoint the rag-tag legions of surfers in global cyberspace. It will gift each surfer an itty-bitty piece of a sovereign crown as a souvenir, reminiscent of the “bits of brick in plastic” that came from the Berlin wall, when that abomination, in its turn, was wiped off the face of the earth.
But can there be a cyberspace heaven without a concomitant hell? Purveyors of child porn, as well as porn for our children, are lurking out there on the mall. Modern day safe crackers can reduce carefully crafted clandestine passwords to child’s play as they rifle through secrets housed in unsuspecting PCs. Experts! you scream for experts, to prevent this invasion of privacy, but who will keep us safe from these saviours?
The cyber-monk will have to solve these problems of voyeurs and safe crackers and new, improved, pestilences from Pandora’s box, lest Mammon hijacks his platform again. He will have to reassure the timorous while simultaneously pursuing his quest to discover fresh galaxies in cyberspace. He is probably not afraid because the monk knows how to work patiently, and with abiding faith in his futuristic creed.
He knows that most of humanity will become purveyors of information in the 21st century. Hierarchies will be flattened by technological great-levellers and there will be little power to be gleaned in the future, from position alone. Wild new technology will seep into everything and transform our things, cars, houses, films, music, books, and even the nature of energy itself.The new monk knows all this because he has the vision to renew the earth and rescue all its inhabitants from blind alleys, where all the corruption of the neo-imperial age stands slavering in the shadows, waiting to make quick work of any innocent who ventures into its recesses, after dark.
(1,331 words)
By Gautam Mukerji
March 11, 1996
First published in The Times of India, 1996www.timesofindia.com on Sunday April 7, 1996 in the TOUCHSTONE column on the Edit page
Then the responses come, tumbling onto bulletin boards and virtual shopping malls. The message is unambiguous; unstoppable, a new set of Commandments, “there is no one way to use the Internet. It will become what you make of it. I can join you from my work-station wherever I am. We can work together even though we have never met, and probably, never will”, and, “let me show you how”.The truth shines in like divine light, penetrating in its simplicity. Neophytes who can’t type, others who are phobic about computerese, all kinds of doubting Thomases, have no need to worry. The new generation software, to come, soon enough to greet the millennium, will take voice commands.
The etiquette of the Internet is being established. Because of its free-wheeling democratic parentage, soon it will be de rigueur that ordinary level access to basic information on any topic under the heavens, will be granted to any thirsty visitor to a website.The new monk has already left his mark, that too in his lifetime. Commonsense told him old fashioned window-shopping is a ritual old as time, in the tango between buyer and seller. Access to websites half way around the world in seconds, will gradually become as ubiquitous as the STD/ISD/PCO booths we now find from Mathura to Mallikery.
The basic allure is that of a bordello;-- no would be lover is turned away from a whore-house because his pockets are shallow, but, for that all important walk up the stairs and the comfort of company behind closed doors, you’ve gotta pay!Everyone needs to strut his stuff and display his wares on the virtual mall, for the millions of browsers and cruisers. It is no wonder that the earliest Johns came looking for smut, not wisdom. Others came for cyber-romance, intimacies of mouses and screens in mardi-gras masks of anonymity.
Marshall Mcluhan punned prophetically on the medium and the massage in the dreamy sixties, but at the turn of the millennium, the massage has become all-pervasive and the medium is the Internet, through cyberspace, via satellite and other wired and wireless deliverers. This medium is global, cheap, comprehensive and virtually irresistible. It mocks the epaulettes off global policemen who wish to block access in this “pernicious and anarchic manner”. It is a technology that threatens to bankrupt authority everywhere, handing over dominion to the masses. It will crown and anoint the rag-tag legions of surfers in global cyberspace. It will gift each surfer an itty-bitty piece of a sovereign crown as a souvenir, reminiscent of the “bits of brick in plastic” that came from the Berlin wall, when that abomination, in its turn, was wiped off the face of the earth.
But can there be a cyberspace heaven without a concomitant hell? Purveyors of child porn, as well as porn for our children, are lurking out there on the mall. Modern day safe crackers can reduce carefully crafted clandestine passwords to child’s play as they rifle through secrets housed in unsuspecting PCs. Experts! you scream for experts, to prevent this invasion of privacy, but who will keep us safe from these saviours?
The cyber-monk will have to solve these problems of voyeurs and safe crackers and new, improved, pestilences from Pandora’s box, lest Mammon hijacks his platform again. He will have to reassure the timorous while simultaneously pursuing his quest to discover fresh galaxies in cyberspace. He is probably not afraid because the monk knows how to work patiently, and with abiding faith in his futuristic creed.
He knows that most of humanity will become purveyors of information in the 21st century. Hierarchies will be flattened by technological great-levellers and there will be little power to be gleaned in the future, from position alone. Wild new technology will seep into everything and transform our things, cars, houses, films, music, books, and even the nature of energy itself.The new monk knows all this because he has the vision to renew the earth and rescue all its inhabitants from blind alleys, where all the corruption of the neo-imperial age stands slavering in the shadows, waiting to make quick work of any innocent who ventures into its recesses, after dark.
(1,331 words)
By Gautam Mukerji
March 11, 1996
First published in The Times of India, 1996www.timesofindia.com on Sunday April 7, 1996 in the TOUCHSTONE column on the Edit page
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