- Vallee, Jacques. The Heart of the
Internet. Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads Publishing,
2003. ISBN 1-57174-369-3.
- The author (yes, that Jacques Vallee) recounts
the history of the Internet from an insider's perspective: first as
a member of Doug Engelbart's Augmentation group at SRI from 1971,
and later as a developer of the pioneering Planet conferencing
system at the Institute for the Future and co-founder of the 1976
spin-off InfoMedia. He does an excellent job both of sketching
Engelbart's still unrealised vision of computer networks as a means
of connecting human minds in new ways, and in describing how it,
like any top-down system design, was doomed to fail in the real
world populated by idiosyncratic and innovative human beings.
He celebrates the organic, unplanned growth of the Internet so far
and urges that it be allowed to continue, free of government and
commercial constraints. The present-day state of the Internet
worries him as it worries me; he eloquently
expresses the risk as follows (p. 162):
“As a venture capitalist who invests in high tech, I have to
worry that the web will be perceived as an increasingly corrupt police
state overlying a maze of dark alleys and unsafe practices outside
the rule of law. The public and many corporations will be reluctant
to embrace a technology fraught with such problems. The Internet
economy will continue to grow, but it will do so at a much slower
pace than forecast by industry analysts.” This is precisely
the scenario I have come to call “the Internet slum”. The description
of the present-day Internet and what individuals can do to protect
their privacy and defend their freedom in the future is sketchy and not
entirely reliable. For example, on page 178,
“And who has time to keep complete backup files anyway?”,
which rhetorical question I would answer, “Well, anybody who isn't
a complete idiot.” His description of the “Mesh” in chapter 8 is
precisely what I've been describing to gales of laughter since 1992
as “Gizmos”—a world in which everything has its own IPv6
address—each button on your VCR, for example—and all connections
are networked and may be redefined at will. This is laid out in
more detail in the Unicard Ubiquitous
section of my 1994 Unicard paper.
May 2004 