The Future Does Not Compute

The Great Information Hunt

This is Chapter 17 of The Future Does Not Compute: Transcending the Machines in Our Midst, by Stephen L. Talbott. Copyright 1995 O'Reilly & Associates. All rights reserved. You may freely redistribute this chapter in its entirety for noncommercial purposes. For information about the author's online newsletter, NETFUTURE: Technology and Human Responsibility, see http://www.netfuture.org/.

It really is amazing, this odd acquisitiveness with which hordes of academics, engineers, cyberpunks, and self-advertised “infonauts” roam the Net looking for treasure troves of information, like so much gold. They hear the cry -- “There's information in them thar nodes!” -- and the rush is on. Who knows what they do with this gold when they find it, but for now most of the excitement seems to be simply in discovering that it's there -- on the Net! It's almost as if the “electrons” themselves exuded a certain fascination -- a kind of spell or subliminal attraction.

So-called Netsurf discussion groups and publications have been created for the sole purpose of identifying and sharing Net “finds.” An announcement reached my screen a short while ago, advertising a new forum of this sort and promising experiences comparable to the great world explorations of the past or to the adventures of a fantasy novel.

The dissonance occurs only when one tries to imagine these same adventurers standing in a library, surrounded in three dimensions by records of human achievement far ...