Word: code
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...People of the Book fear that the page (and reading and writing) will die. Who will adhere to the linear rationality found in books, new and old? Who will obey rules if books of laws are diminished or replaced by lines of code? Who will turn nicely bound pages when everything is available (almost free) on flickering screens? Perhaps only the rich will read books on paper. Perhaps only a few will pay attention to the wisdom on their pages...
Picture this scene from the near future: organized crime gets hold of encryption technology so powerful even IRS supercomputers can't crack it. An underground electronic economy emerges, invisible to U.S. tax code. The Federal Government, unable to replenish its coffers, let alone fund a standing army, shrinks until it wields about as much power as a local zoning board. Militias and gangs take over, setting up checkpoints at state borders and demanding tribute of all who pass...
Being nerds, however, they are rather unworldly. They are similar in dress, zip code, outlook and philosophy to the Berkeley free-speech activists of the early 1960s, except that the cypherpunks have a bigger megaphone: the Internet. They can encrypt free speech and software as well, so various uptight authority figures cannot stop their heroic data...
...most of the upfront p.r. in the anti-crypto effort. The FBI doesn't like the prospect of losing some wiretaps. That's just the FBI; it would say the same thing about telepathy if it had it. The true secret mavens of crypto are at the NSA. Spy-code breakers such as Alan Turing invented electronic computers in the first place, so the NSA has a long-held hegemony here. The NSA sets the U.S. government's agenda on crypto, and it will not fairly or openly debate this subject, ever...
...Barbarella, the Orgasmatron in Sleeper, the fembots in Austin Powers), reality has remained painfully elusive. In his 1991 book Virtual Reality, Howard Rheingold devoted an entire chapter to "teledildonics," his not-so-clever name for devices that allow people to have sex without being in the same area code. Rheingold imagines putting on a "diaphanous bodysuit, something like a body stocking but with the kind of intimate snugness of a condom" and having a virtual-reality sexperience over the Net. "You run your hand over your partner's clavicle and, 6,000 miles away, an array of effectors are triggered...