CONCRETE INFORMATION
The Information Superhighway - an image of vast expanses of asphalt and concrete, channeling all travel along a single system of easily controlled and regulated routes. The re-creation of information in the image of real-estate; a rural electrification project of the senses and the mind.

The laying of cable and fiber, access to which can be controlled, monitored, sold or denied, the transformation of interpersonal communication into a product rather than a natural process: How much would you pay for the power of speech? How much would you pay for the ability to see and hear? How much would you pay for air?

Speech, sight, hearing, air, information. All of these represent singularities of value at which the theory of supply and demand break down. Air is essential to live, priceless in every sense: yet so far no one has figured out how to get people to buy the air they breathe. Information is defined by its ability to self-replicate and give form to unlimited copies of itself. Information is non-material, non-energetic, though it organizes these matter and energy into complex and meaningful forms. Information is the negentropic annihilation of scarcity. The natural price point of information, like air, is zero.

The information superhighway is an attempt to channel all information through proprietary channels, is intended to create "value" by enforcing artificial scarcity.

While a network is superficially the image of decentralization and heterarchy, this embodiment of network as real-estate is an act of centralization, a perpetuation of the empire of property.

Fiber/Cable networks are fixed in place geographically. Geosynchronous satellites occupy unique stations in fixed space. Both are technological embodiments of stasis.

And it is through this web of material stasis that all communication must pass?

How to create a network that is as protean and ephemeral as the information which moves through it and gives it form?

Such a network would spawn nodes and connections within a continuously mutating topology.

Immune to central control, immune even to mapping, such a network would re-shape itself to the desires of the people connected to it, to the contours of information and meaning flowing between them.

Such a network would be in constant homeostatic flux, without fixed material form or intrinsic obsolescence.

Ripples in an ocean of guerilla information.

The hierarchy of Broadcasting is based on the scarcity of spectrum. While 2-way use of the electromagnetic spectrum is possible, it is not feasible on a massive scale over long distances at high bandwidth: such signals will become unintelligible as they overlap and mutually interfere.

But squeezing communication into fiber exchanges the broad mobility of the antenna for the focused statis of a wire.

Are wires neccessary?

A narrow beam of light shares the characteristics of both wire and antenna. Like antennae, the points exchanging information over a beam of light can relocate anywhere. Like wire, a beam of light connects only the points through which it passes. Unlike an antenna, a beam of light does not spray its signal everywhere. Unlike a wire, a beam of light is unfixed in space. It is an energy event and and has no material existence.

The same techniques that allow the exchange of signals over optical fibers can be used to exchange information over beams of light in free space.

(6-24-94 12:44a MST)