NEAL STEPHENSON
107
copper wires, one at a time. Government busted them up-at the same time when I was starting cable TV franchises in thirty states. Haw! Can you believe that? It’s like if they figured out a way to regulate horses at the same time the Model T and the airplane were being introduced.”
“But a cable TV system isn’t the same as a phone system.”
“At that stage it wasn’t, cause it was just a local system. But once you get local systems all over the world, all you got to do is hook ‘em together and it’s a global network. Just as big as the phone system. Except this one carries information ten thousand times faster. It carries images, sound, data, you name it.”
__________ A naked PR plant, a halfhour television commercial with no purpose whatsoever other than to let L. Bob Rife tell his side of a particular issue. It seems that a number of Rife’s programmers, the people who made his systems run, got together and formed a union-unheard of, for hackers-and filed a suit against Rife, claiming that he had placed audio and video bugs in their homes, in fact placed all of them under twenty-four-hour surveillance, and harassed and threatened some programmers who were making what he called “unacceptable lifestyle choices.” For example, when one of his programmers and her husband engaged in oral sex in their own bedroom one night, the next morning she was called into Rife’s office, where he called her a slut and a sodomite and told her to clean out her desk. The bad publicity from this so annoyed Rife that he felt the need to blow a few million on some more PR.
“I deal in information,” he says to the smarmy, toadying pseudojournalist who “interviews” him. He’s sitting in his office in Houston, looking slicker than normal. “All television going out to Consumers throughout the world goes through me. Most of the information transmitted to and from the CIC database passes through my networks. The Metaverse-the entire Street-exists by virtue of a network that I own and controL
‘But that means, if you’ll just follow my reasoning for a bit, that when I have a programmer working under me who is working with that information, he is wielding enormous power. Information is going into his brain. And it’s staying there. It travels