Viridian Note 00324: 911.net Key concepts: ubiquitous computation, emergency relief, Khaki Green, 911.net, Terrorspace, Cradle.net, Battlespace, Prosthetic Ubicomp, SO/HO Ubicomp, Safetyspace, Street.net, Punish.net, Industrial Ubicomp, Ubitopia Attention Conservation Notice:  It's the Pope-Emperor blue-skying it at some computer industry event in Brussels. Links: I was there. http://www.highgrounddesign.com/design/design.htm And then I went to Brussels and delivered this speech. http://www.ttivanguard.com/ And next I'm going here! http://conferences.oreillynet.com/os2002/ And right after that I'm going to another, weirder event that I can't even tell you about! ------------------------------------------- Entries in the Global Civil Society Design Contest. From: Steven W. Schuldt  http://www.americanrobotz.com/images2/Soon_GlobalCivilSocietyLaptop.jpg From: Ben Davis  http://www.digitaleverything.com/GlobalComputer.htm From: Joerg F. Wittenberger  http://www.askemos.org/  http://www.askemos.org:9080/RomePaper.pdf From: Scott Vandehey  http://spaceninja.com/viridian/notebook.html From: Bob Morris  http://viridianrepository.com/GlobalCivil/ From: Anonymous http://home.freiepresse.de/befis/zx2000.html http://apollo.spaceports.com/~bodo4all/zx/zx97.htm http://www.vkb.co.il/ From: Jim Thompson  http://www.simputer.org http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/ptech/07/05/india.simputer.reut/index.html From: Mike Rosing  http://www.eskimo.com/~eresrch/viridian From: till*tillwe.de (Till Westermayer) Date: Sun Jul 14, 2002  05:38:00 PM US/Central "What do we need for a global civil society notebook? Six design criteria are highlighted, combined with some rough sketches." http://www.westermayer.de/till/projekte/02gcsdl.htm Best regards, Till Westermayer - till we *) http://www.westermayer.de/till/index.htm This contest expires August 15, 2002.  -------------------------------------------------------- Speech at TTI Vanguard: "Designing for Resiliency"  Conference "911.net" by Bruce Sterling      Late last month I had the joy and privilege of hanging out with a big crowd of American computer scientists who were, basically, trying to find some  reasons to live.     Despite all evidence to the contrary, they've definitely got some reasons.     When you go to a conference which is very high-energy,  with a lot of paradigmatic reassessment going on, where  ideas are being flung around bodily well outside the box,  well, that's an impressive thing.  But it's my principle  as a sometime working journalist  not to get all carried  away whenever I witness something like that.  They might  well be drinking their own bathwater.  This sort of thing  generally requires a reality check from some *other*  conference.     So, I'm now fresh back from Colorado, from the yearly  meeting of the High Ground Design Conversation.  These are  my best pals in the industrial design world, some dear,  long-time friends of mine, whose judgment I always trust.   And why would a science fiction writer trust the judgment  of industrial designers?  Well, because they're very  *trendy.*  They're very shrewd,  and very stylish, and very  hands-on people.  They're  peculiarly self-effacing and modest, yet quite  imaginative.  Better yet, they're even practical.   So they're kind of like science fiction writers, only with  much better shoes.     Usually when I go to this High Ground event, I just  deliver some wacko chat about popular aspects of  cyberculture and then I take some worshipful notes.  But!   I have to report that when I took them my notes from the  "CRA Grand Challenges in Computation" conference, I was  bringing the noise.     This is the first time I have ever seen their jaws  drop.  They're still kinda wringing their hands over the  dotcom boom and the Ka-boom. They miss those glory days of  the World Wide Web == because for them, that was the  Graphic Designers Full Employment Act.  So they're pretty  broke, and they're a little shell-shocked, so I guess they  should join the club.  But  when I brought them *this*  stuff == a rather extensively worked-out vision in  worldbuilding from the point of view of ubiquitous  computation in the 21st century...  Well, of course this  is merely a scenario, but to me, "911.net" smells like the  future.      And frankly, it doesn't smell good.  But that's all  right.  Because these aren't good times.  These are rather  harsh, dark times, and in its own peculiar way, 911.net is  a similarly harsh, dark concept.     "Ubiquitous computation" is by no means a new idea.    The guy who invented the term is dead, and even his R&D  lab doesn't look all that great these days.  Ubicomp has  been around for quite some time == in the table-napkin,  handwaving stage.  But it's lacked the means, motive and  opportunity to get any real-world traction.    I believe that may be changing.  If so, it's mostly due  to the events of September 11.  After that experience,  ubicomp has got motive and opportunity as it never had  before.  And the means, although they are still  speculative, are starting to make some sense.     What am I talking about when I use the term "ubicomp"?   Well, the term is a grab-bag, a congelation of different  technologies.  Some are here, commercially available off  the shelf; some are in the lab; and some may be physically  impossible.     Let's get down to some brass virtual tacks.  What are  the key technical drivers for widely distributed, self- organizing networks of sensors, processors and actuators,  embedded in the physical world?  And what do you do with  these things?     Okay, number one:  fuel cells.  Not chemical  batteries.  Small, portable, dependable, long-lasting,  power sources with some punch.  They may not be fuel cells  as they are now known.  They might be MEMS fuel cells, or  aluminum-air cells, or something enzymatic, I don't care;  just something much, much better than today's batteries.   Portable power is the crux.  Ubicomp's  future, if it has one, entirely hinges on this.  If we don't get some seriously  advanced,  portable sources of power then everything I am  about to tell you is a sci-fi phantasm. (Not that there's  anything wrong with that!)     Number two, RFID.  Radio-Frequency ID == gotta have  some taggers.  Gotta be on the Net.  It'd be nice if they  had some powered processors in them.  Something internal,  pervasive, a little computational action that is going on  inside physical objects.     Number three, wireless broadband.  Getting real close  here.    Number four, dongles.  I think this part is seriously  underappreciated.  This is the weird part of ubicomp, the  part that may turn out to be its Achilles heel:  some way  to turn the damn thing off.  And to *know* it's off.  The  problem of the authorized user.  The authorized  administrator, the authorized access.  This is likely to  play out as ubicomp's functional equivalent of the  Internet's intellectual-property problem.  In other words,  it's a very serious issue which is going to be neglected  from the get-go, as people are eagerly building the basic  infrastructure.  Then, as they lamely try to build it in  later, they are going to find out that they have  inadvertently poisoned the water-stream for everybody.     You don't want to wander into a Kazaa and Napster  version of George Orwell.  Ubiquitous computation, unlike  information, does not "want to be free."  This is not a  technology of freedom. Ubiquitous computation wants to  make you its slave. Try to remember that, for all our  sakes, all right?  This is not a water-cooler for gossip,  like the Internet is.  This is a hard-case, hard-times,  hands-on, rather ruthless command-and-control system.     Number five, GPS, global positioning systems.  Been  there, done that.     Number six, convoy traffic.  I think this is also  underestimated, for when I started looking at serious  applications for ubicomp, time and again, rapidly shipping  large amounts of physical material in and out of the  ubicomp zone is a killer application.  Getting stuff in,  numbering it, assembling it, moving it out. Lots of it.  Train loads, truck loads, bus loads. And airlifts.     Bringing up the van, a whole bunch of other ubi-stuff,  of varying degrees of use and practicality.  High speed  fiber optic networks, check.  Massive storage and routers,  check.  Big databases, check, but they need to be fast and  flexible. Some "MobiHoc" action: mobile ad-hoc self- assembling networks: networks that are always  reconfiguring in real-time, always on the move.       Facial recognition has a considerable number of  ubicomp applications, by no means all of them good.  Human  presence-sensing systems?  Oh yes.  Ruggedized hardware  suitable for outdoor deployment in all conditions and  weathers.  Real-time simulation of ongoing major  situations.  Toxin detectors of various kinds,  environmental monitoring of almost every sort, biometric  ID...  I have a long list of these.  I'm cross-checking  them.  I'm using them to build scenarios.     One thing about 911.net makes it very distinct from  earlier visions of ubicomp.  This is not Microsoft Windows  for Housekeeping.  This is a hard, tough web that you  throw down fast over dire emergencies.  The key concept  here is that we are finally moving computation out of the  ivory tower, for good and all.  No more glass boxes of the  1950s, no more clean abstractions of cyberspace.  We are  deploying computation at unheard-of speed, into the  darkest, dirtiest, most dangerous places in the world.     It is a resilient security apparatus for emergencies.  That is 911.net.       Now, you might well argue that ubicomp is very  invasive of privacy.  That's just what my industrial  design pals said about it, immediately, and they were  right.  It's been hard to find reasonable deployments for  ubicomp in peacetime commerce and in private homes,  because it is so Orwellian. However.  Under certain  circumstances, other social circumstances do trump this  issue.     For instance, when you are breathing your last under a  pile of earthquake rubble, you don't really care much  about privacy under your circumstances.  What you really  want is  a smart bulldozer, a tourniquet, and some direct  pressure against your open wounds.  And that is what  911.net is about == or will be about, should it find its  way out of the computer-science talking-shop and into  daylight.        It is an emergency response system for the planet's  open wounds.  And those wounds exist in plenty.  There are  more of them all the time.     I rather doubt that the Orwellian version of ubicomp  has much of a future.  That's a scenario that I have  dubbed "Terrorspace", which is ubicomp in the context of  airports and nuclear power sites.  If you've been in  airports recently, I believe you are seeing a pretty apt,  early version of Terrorspace.  At any random moment, you  can have your possessions rifled through by strangers.   Your shoes are scanned, and various small but vital  objects in your pockets can be confiscated by semi- educated security geeks.  They're either pathetically  under-trained for the job (in which case you certainly  feel no safer), or else they are intelligent and capable  people (in which case you pity them and wish they had some  other job, for the sake of general human happiness and the  GNP).  Rather than making us any safer, Terrorspace  airports serve as political indoctrination centers that  humiliate our voting population on a broad scale. They are  meant to inure us to ever-escalating levels of  governmental clumsiness and general harm.     The difficulty with this Terrorspace approach is that  airports and airlines are going broke.  Airports are  hemorrhaging money trying to maintain this terrorspace  apparatus.  It is likely to spread to the brittle power of  nuclear power plants, nuclear waste dumps, bio-sites,  chemical sites, liquid petroleum gas centers and so forth.  That will hugely increase the overhead of all these  dangerous industries.      That's a very considerable tax burden.  So, though  Terrorspace may serve as a full employment program for the  loyal and slightly stupid, that's not going to pay off  socially or economically in the long run.    However, 911.net is a different matter.   An air- deployable 911.net that allowed first responders to  rapidly deal with fires, floods and other major disasters  would *save* money, especially for the insurers, who are  already on the ropes.     The actual September 11 event, 9/11, was a rare and  remarkable thing.  And, with fewer than 3,000 people dead,  it's just not that big a deal as genuine catastrophes go.   Politically, theologically and militarily it was huge, but  a workaday 911.net wouldn't fret much about terrorism.   Instead, it would have to deal mostly with floods, fires,  climate change, earthquakes, volcanoes and (let's hope  never) asteroids and weapons of mass destruction.    So, basically, with 911.net, we are describing a social  re-definition of computer geeks as firemen.  Native  twenty-first century computer geeks as muscular, with-it,  first-responder types.  I think this would be pretty good  for the computer industry.  We all need to take the  dysfunctional physical world far more seriously.  This  week, Italy's flooding, Texas is flooding, Colorado's on  fire.  This morning, the brand-new wilderness forests  around the site of the former Chernobyl are on fire,  spewing radioactive ash hither and yon.   Chunks of  Antarctica the size of Rhode Island have fallen into the  sea. I could go on.     This is the sort of activity that humanity is required  to deal with in this new century. If we build a successful  method with which to do this, those useful tactics will  spread across the fabric of our civilization.  I believe  they are already spreading.  An innovation like 911.net  will likely serve as a camel's nose in the tent for a  whole series of ubicomp applications across society.     I've been speculating about these new forms of  ubicomp, and giving them some flashy neologisms, because  that is what science fiction writers bring to the table.   We build little scenario worlds and make up names for  them.  First we've got "911.net," then "Terrorspace," but  there are others. BATTLESPACE.  A term already much-used by the Pentagon.   Battlespace means military C4ISR. The "Revolution in  Military Affairs."  I would point out that the military,  unlike some sectors, is not reneging on their enthusiastic  commitment to the digital revolution.  On the contrary.  I  haven't seen anybody in the military saying that they long  to go back to the good-old-fashioned, solid, easy-to- understand methods of the War in Vietnam.  The military  are very into "network-centric warfare," and they couldn't  be happier about their spysats and surveillance drones. PROSTHETIC UBICOMP.  This is eldercare.  A huge, steadily  growing market. Alzheimer's disease is a flat-out domestic  catastrophe that lasts seven years.  Any computational  help here == in elder-proofing spaces, tracking the sick  and so forth == would be of huge benefit to society. CRADLE.NET.  Babies have no privacy.  Children have little  privacy. Child-proofing a room against a crawling tot...  if you've ever done this, you can realize how much use it  might be to have this process automated.  Any two-year-old  always wonders:  "Why can't Mr Fork and Miss Wall Socket  be friends?"  A real-time checklist, at the very least!   And then we're faced with the interesting, large-scale  prospects of "K-12.net." STREET.NET.  This would be traffic management and urban  systems management.  Water networks, power networks, subways, sidewalks and so forth. PUNISH.NET.  Two million people are in the American prison  population.  They've got no privacy.  They've gotta be  watched all the time.  They're basically crammed in iron  cages now. INDUSTRIAL UBICOMP. Managing supply chains, industrial  assembly and so forth.  This will eventually be the  biggest application. SO/HO UBICOMP.  Ubicomp in the home, the home office and  small office.  Some very interesting consumer uses here,  but in the grand scheme of things, not that big a deal. SAFETYSPACE.  These would be military bases, U.N. safety  zones, refugee camps, and disaster evacuation centers.   It's fairly easy to imagine ubiquitous computation as a  sinister "gated community" that walls off privileged areas  under threat.  But we can also think of it as importing  some human comfort, solidarity, mercy and safety into  various benighted areas that are severely disturbed.  One  can imagine a Gorazde UN safe zone version of this, new  and improved of course: a black helicopter ghosts over in  the dead of night, deploys a scattering of small drones,  smart-mines and sensors, and suddenly the war just stops  within these bounds of Safetyspace.  Rapine, looting,  sacking, smashing and burning are  ruled out of existence  through computer awareness.  The handiness of a technique  like that for life in the 21st century... well, it might  be a bit underestimated. And last, coming up with a bullet should the good times  return in all their carefree glory:  UBITOPIA.  This I  take to be ubicomp as an Urban Entertainment Destination.   You go there for fun just because there is cool, wacky  stuff embedded in the physical world, and it's behaving in  a way that brings joy and hilarity and good spirits, like  the funhouse mirror at a digital carnival.       When and if Ubitopia really hits, it will mean that  humanity's basic relationship with our material goods has  been radically redefined.  That is the apotheosis of  ubiquitous computation. Just: material goods, and the way  we deal with them, are different.  Different in character,  different in quality.  Not recognizable by 20th century  standards.      So. I have no idea if the Homeland Security  department, or FEMA or DARPA or the NSF, are going to pony  up any money for any of these notions.  That's not my  lookout.  I'm a science fiction writer.  And ladies and  gentlemen, with this material, I have struck platinum.   This stuff is really hot.  This is a great, attractive,  contemporary idea that is really new, really different,  and really ominous.  The implications are huge and they  spread across the board of society. I am going to be a  very busy guy with this material.  If you want to help me,  send some email. Thanks a lot for your attention. O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O IT'S HERE IT'S THERE IT'S EVERYWHERE O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O