The View from the Brooklyn Bridge
In response to "The Five Imperatives for Electronic Trade"

John Perry Barlow
Co-Founder, Electronic Frontier Foundation and
Advisory Board Member, CSC Vanguard


Last week, I took a Dutch friend on a walk across the Brooklyn Bridge and
submitted her to an extemporaneous lecture on the parallels between that
literal and genuinely religious leap of faith in 19th-century American
engineering and the Internet as the current manifestation of the same wild
thrust, engendering some of the same popular anxieties.

I told her that I thought the decade in which it was designed and largely
built, the 1870s, was a decade which in some ways resembles the present. It
was a time of shattering invention and originality. Many of the
technologies that would utterly alter us during the intervening century -
the telephone, commercial electricity, sound recording, and steel
construction - exploded into the world.

It was another time when engineering suddenly endowed us with apparently
limitless potential. The prophets of that time - from Marx to Edison to the
Roeblings, father and son - were as feverish with the inevitability of
their visions as the Tofflers and cypherpunks of the present.. And, as
Larry says, many of the ordinary folks were scared to death of a future
which they could neither prevent nor understand.

As symbols, there are some important differences between the Brooklyn
Bridge and Internet though, many of them related to the sources and
advantages of faith. These were brought into sharp focus at the privacy and
security conference in Palm Springs, and I've been mulling them over ever
since.

Faith in the Known

The Promethean engineers of the 19th century were thrust upward on
Toffler's Second Wave at the time of its maximum velocity. They were in a
matrix of progressive zeal that spread from the crisp vertices of Descartes
to the vanishing points of Manifest Destiny. They believed in Control, and,
of course, Almighty God, by whom Control had been ordained and in whose
name it was imposed.

The Roeblings' bridge may have terrified the hoi polloi, but to the men who
financed it, it was a reasonable statement of faith in physics - the most
dramatic of its time perhaps - but well within the confines of a paradigm
that had been bearing steadily increasing fruit since Newton and, in many
ways, since Moses.

Further, the Brooklyn Bridge undermined none of the institutions of its
day. Indeed, it was part of what was building them. Coming out of an era in
which the only large institutions had been religious in the classical
sense, it represented both the Church and its new siblings, the Corporation
and Large Government. It's no mistake that its arches ascend to an
ecclesiastical point.

If you walk across the bridge today, you feel its blunt simplicity. In
addition to stone and steel, it was made of physics. And physics, at least
Newtonian physics, is a lot simpler than biology. Once you've done the
math, you can trust the trajectory.

It was also, as Larry suggests, made of faith, but it was a very different
kind of faith than the present asks of us. Where the Brooklyn Bridge was
built on faith in what was known and controllable, we are now required to
place our trust in what can neither be known nor controlled.

Faith in the Unknown

We have left the Machine Age and are plunging into the fogbank of something
completely different, the Era of the Organism. The new masterworks of
humanity,  of which the Net is very likely the most important, are of such
complexity that they can no longer be designed and built. Instead they must
be grown. It isn't physics. It's biology. It's nature.

There are no smooth, catenary curves in nature. The trajectories of biology
are forky and unpredictable as lightning. There is a new mathematics to
describe them, but what these numbers tell you is only that you can't know
where things are headed. It's hard to imagine the Brooklyn Bridge would
have been funded had it been designed according to fractal geometry rather
than calculus.

The current hurdle of civilization into cyberspace has required, like the
bridge, the assembled acts of the existing institutions, but it hardly
reaffirms them. For one thing, large collective enterprise loves certainty
above all other things, including profit.

In the pursuit of certainty, almost any established corporation will follow
the Devil It Knows, whether buggy-whips or minicomputers, straight to doom.
Nothing is certain in cyberspace but accelerating change. The curves we can
plot - processor speed, Internet growth, Web use, bandwidth - are all
increasing logarithmically or faster. Furthermore, there is reason to think
many of them will become irrelevant in this new environment, devoted as
they are to distributing centralized goods and services.

For this reason, it is hardly surprising that many of the corporations that
were putting us up at the corner of Dinah Shore Drive and Bob Hope Way
resist going into Cyberspace. In some deep, organic recognition of their
own, they know there be dragons there. They have a sense of nameless dread.

Of course, dread hates to be nameless so, in this instance, it finds its
focus in the Nightmare Hacker, bent on lobotomizing corporations for the
hell of it. Never mind that there is no evidence with which I'm familiar
that this beast actually exists. He is a creature of the unfamiliar. The
premise that he could exist is sufficient reason to stay out of this
mysterious realm.

If corporations must go into Cyberspace, they insist on doing so with
certainty and control assured. They want the government to send in troops
first and ferret out such guerrillas as Kevin Mitnick and his kind. They
want to establish the predictable rule of law. But this isn't Panama. It's
more like Vietnam but worse, since the threat is largely imaginary (and
thus impossible to contain). It's also worse because this jungle is
infinitely expansible, and worse still, it's not even clear whose troops
should go in or whose law should reign.

Faith in Openness

This relates to another of Larry's statements that I found telepathic:
"What if Cyberspace isn't in the United States, or any country at all, but
rather exists as its own, sovereign, virtual nation? Worse, what if
cyberspace is in fact the home country of all global businesses?" When I
read these lines, I was fresh from giving a speech at the TED conference in
Monterey in which I had proposed precisely that.

In the created world that arose from Newton, power was derived from closed
architectures of one sort or another. Creating wealth was a matter of
skillfully managing scarcity and maintaining clear boundaries. But the
natural world favors open systems. Indeed, it requires them, since the
energy exchange processes upon which it builds its increasing layers of
complexity must be interoperable in the deepest sense of the word. The Net
is no different.

As I listened to Bill Cheswick, I realized that he was describing a system
of such perfected security as to be fundamentally incompatible with the
requirements of both the Internet and the World Wide Web, both of which
need highly permeable membranes in the systems that make them up. The only
way they can interact properly with their environment and maintain the
security of their contents is through the internal use of cryptography, but
this is another technology that existing institutions find threatening.

Then there are the threats to the control of intellectual "property" upon
which many existing institutions have based their sense of well-being. If
they cannot assure their ability to "own content," and there is no longer a
business to be had in putting their intellectual property into objects and
shipping it around in trucks, then what will they do for a living? Hard
questions.

But can anyone not explicitly involved in the local manufacture of physical
goods expect to be successful without entering this great region of
ambiguity? I don't think so. We are at one of the great watersheds of
history, a more momentous moment than the Brooklyn Bridge. All of us,
whether individuals or institutions, will be required to make enormous acts
of faith and leave our old beliefs at the border. Those who can't will be
left behind.

But where the Brooklyn Bridge required of its builders faith in their
ability to control technology, going into cyberspace demands a much purer
form of faith: faith without control. Faith in nature. Faith in human
nature. Faith that what goes around really does come around. Groundless
faith.

But I have often suspected that groundless faith, like unconditional love,
is the only kind there is.


Pinedale, Wyoming
Tuesday, March 21, 1995