Cyberspace
in the 21st Century: Cyberspace and Twelve Monkeys
By
Crosbie
Fitch
Gamasutra
March
13, 2000
URL: http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20000313/fitch_01.htm
I’d
like nothing better than to leap straight in with the technical details of how
to implement cyberspace, and no doubt many of you would prefer that I did nothing
else. Alas, ‘tis not to be.
Last
month I presented a sort of overview of the whole series of articles (fractal
writing?!), and I suspect that even that contained enough futurism for some
of you. However, in my original outline of this series (as sent to Gamasutra)
I seem to have decided that further futuristic prognostications were necessary
before the technical stuff. So that’s what I’ve done – for better or worse I’ve
followed my plan.
No
doubt you’ve got enough of your own ideas about the future of the Internet without
trawling through mine. Your vision of cyberspace may be quite different too.
Even so, I think I have to make some philosophical case for the technical stuff
that will follow next month. I want to present something beforehand to help
ward off pessimism, and defend against negative criticism from those who have
not yet bought into the whole cyberspace concept. So anytime you hear someone
whine about how silly an idea cyberspace is, just tell them that it’s too late,
it’s already been written into the script of progress. That’ll sort them out
– oh yes.
Introduction
What
follows should be seen as a sort of morale boosting exercise. It could also
be a little amusing in that I’m using a near circular argument: saying that
because cyberspace is inevitable, because there are so many indications of its
imminent arrival, that this should give us plenty of confidence and encouragement
in embarking upon its creation. Furthermore, I might as well be declaring that
it’s feasibility is therefore guaranteed. As always, there’s just a tiny little
problem, and that’s discovering the system that demonstrates this feasibility.
But, it’s such a trifle really.
So,
this month: the inevitability of cyberspace. Next month: its design and implementation,
so neatly lying upon its self-referential foundation…
How
Could Anyone Not See It Coming?
In
the movie Twelve Monkeys, there are some characters in the post-apocalyptic
future who are so desperate to discover why things went wrong in the past that
they send good old Bruce Willis back in time to find out. Well, right now it’s
that time of paradox and inevitability for cyberspace. Not that I’m saying it
presages an apocalypse, but rather that it vaguely marks the dawning of a new
age. It’s happening now, and decades in the future they’ll look back at the
early years of this new century and wonder how we didn’t notice.
I’m
amused that instead, today, many people seem to think that cyberspace is just
a case of better connectivity and a chance for everyone to have 15 megabytes
of HTML fame.
Yup,
plenty enough prophets without me joining in perhaps, but it’s a little bit
spooky if not a bit fun to take a couple of minutes and have a go at holistically
comprehending the ‘now’ of technology. The Web, is still largely a publishing
medium (and probably always will be), but maybe if you squint your mind’s eye
say, you might just make out the flow of technological progress that is driving
us towards a fully interactive cyberspace medium.
It’s
a bit like looking out of the back of a slow car. You can see where you’ve been
and where you’ve just been, and despite continuous progress, things just don’t
seem to change that quickly, but you know they might. You can only guess at
what’ll come up next, and you might have an idea of where the car’s probably
going. But you can never be sure, and no-one but the driver and those that can
see into the future actually know. Of course, I’m facing backward like everyone
else, but my hunch is that we’re on a journey to cyberspace – the scenery, the
vegetation and billboards rolling by seem to be hinting that at least.
In
ten or twenty years time, how will you look back and discern the origins of
cyberspace?
Will
you say “Oh, it all began with the X-Box having a hard disk and an ADSL Internet
connection as standard”, or perhaps it’ll be “BeOS simply came from nowhere
man – none of us expected it!”. Then again it could be the killer app: “MS Allegiance
II just gripped gamers across the world like a plague”.
Let’s
now go over the clues that should persuade us that today is the time for all
good coders to roll up our sleeves and build cyberspace…
Clue
1: The Internet and the Web
The
Internet and the Web just have to be the most obvious harbingers of cyberspace
and so I’ll mention these as the first big clue.
Some
people may think these are already cyberspace, and like television will remain
largely unchanged (albeit increasing in resolution) for another century. No,
I don’t think so.
The
Internet, yes, I think it’s pretty much consolidated itself in future history.
Perhaps IPv6 and improvements to various layers: M-Bone, something like ATM
(though some say it’s unsuitable), broadcast and cellular channels may enhance
it, but the Internet will do quite some time thank you very much.
The
Web on the other hand, well, it’s a jolly useful publication medium, and that’s
all I’ve really got to say about it. However, thank god someone invented the
search engine. It's a bit of a last minute add-on, but it works. Without it,
the Web would be a little different in terms of usefulness.
HTML
is such a simple system though. Sure it works, and I don’t want to knock it,
but the future holds far more sophisticated means of expressing ‘content’. Imagine
that one day it is as easy to create a massive multiplayer 3D game, as it is
to create a web site today. It would stop being a ‘game’ or ‘web site’, it would
be a portion of cyberspace. Visitors wouldn’t read your pages, they’d explore
your world. Instead of discussion pages, you’d have rooms: workshops with works
in progress, meeting places with avatars wandering around (no, not the dire
avatars we have today).
Instead
of links to other sites, you’d have portals or scaled down references to other
worlds. It would all be dynamic, interactive, live, you name it.
It’s
on its way.
The
web gives us a clue that everyone will collaborate to produce the vast content
required for cyberspace. Imagine going to a venture capitalist in 1985 and saying
you had this great idea for a massive hyperbook that could be accessed via a
global network. “Oh no sir, it wouldn’t cost much to produce as there must be
quite a few hobbyists who wouldn’t mind giving up some of their spare time free
of charge to help come up with some content”. You must be totally off your rocker!
Clue
2: Interactivity
Why
has passive entertainment been so passive for so long? Well, it’s a technology
thing isn’t it? I bet there are many kids who start off thinking the TV presenter
is talking directly to them, and respond as though it was an interactive medium.
Trouble is, because it is indeed passive, the kids are effectively taught at
an early age that such wonders are strictly a one-way process. The TV is a box
of tiny people who don’t seem to listen or care – even if they pay lip service
to the idea.
Even
video games are relatively passive. You don’t really get to see the kid in the
other Porsche get out and kick the tires in frustration at getting beaten yet
again. Nor then get to realize that oops, it’s the school bully.
Once
children start growing up with the idea that they are linked in ever increasing
fidelity to other children across the planet, then we should see better and
more interactive uses made of the Internet. Or at least, there’ll be loads of
frustrated kids trying to remedy the situation.
It’s
getting that way already. School kids are learning to use e-mail (and lots more
besides). So watch out! The demand to interact with other humans in constructive
and recreational ways will increase. That means games as well as business oriented
collaboration.
But,
why don’t we all just go outside and collaborate with our neighbors in person?
You sure have got me there pal. I haven’t a clue. I guess computers are a glass
shield against people’s more emotional natures. But, it could work completely
opposite to the pessimists’ fears: cyberspace could break down the barriers
between people so much, that people start treating each other in person in a
far more familiar way – and then realize a bit too late that maybe they shouldn’t
have been so derogatory to the guy on the other side of the street…
The
online experience is getting far more interactive, and you ain’t seen nothing
yet!
Clue
3: Birds of a Feather
Being
a diverse bunch, people will probably find it much easier to associate with
like minded souls if they can select from billions rather than just a few other
folk they know in the same town.
Cyberspace
will bring birds of a feather together. Great minds will think alike, and severally,
so better than one. Surely this is a significant acceleration of the human capacity
for invention and progress?
The
Web is enabling this today. Of course, it produces concentrations of all sorts
– sweet as well as savory.
But,
the ability of a global system to bring the best of each discipline together
must surely harness mankind’s creative ability like nothing else before?
If
we were suddenly threatened by an alien invasion, you can bet that the Internet
would be indispensable in bringing the best minds to bear in solving all the
problems involved in mounting a defense.
The
Internet is too useful to be a flash in the pan. The better it gets at allowing
special interest groups to converse and cross-fertilize, then the more it will
be used. Interactive, even immersive, cyberspace is bound to be compatible with
these ends.
Clue
4: Leisure Time
Well,
there’s a hell of a lot of people producing Web pages and I don’t see many people
paying to read ‘em! It must be leisure time. People evidently have far too much
of it (from the perspective of a puritan work ethic).
Without
leisure time, perhaps few people would read the Web let alone write it. But,
anyway, it seems that people do have enough time to spend using it. This is
probably down to macro-economic thingy-bobs, you know, modern society over-producing
to such an extent that most people get some hours each day to perform non-survival
based activities. I presume that barring world wars, leisure time is going to
increase.
This
is good news for cyberspace. It’s just a communications mechanism and so it’s
a bit difficult to see how anyone using it is actually creating anything necessary
for survival. And so it may appear a little obscene to some people to envision
a future where most of the developed world spends a good deal of their time
cruising cyberspace. Perhaps we can build robots to plough the fields, and use
nuclear fusion for power?
More
leisure time means more demand for better and more sophisticated ways of utilizing
it. Cyberspace meets that need!
Clue
5: Computer Power
How
many times do we have to say this? Computer power just keeps on doubling every
year or so doesn’t it?
So
anyone who doubts that computers will ever be powerful enough to do things like
they do in the movies only needs to wait a few years – probably within their
lifetime – before today’s far-fetched ideas soon end up on their list of electronic
goodies to buy for Christmas.
OK,
perhaps Moore’s law will grind to a halt when CPUs hit the light speed barrier
(circuit latency and unplanned quantum effects), or will it? Well, I very much
doubt it. I expect that by that time, CPUs will then be so cheap that the number
of them appearing on a motherboard (or wafer) will double every so often – instead
of the clock speed. We’ll see computers getting more and more parallel in operation.
With
this endless escalation of client-side computing power, VR can’t be far off.
If we sort out the networking issues then cyberspace won’t be at all held back
by technology. I trust that haptics will make good progress too.
Clue
6: The Information Age
Internet
or not, the computer is certainly not going away, and nor is the vastness of
the information it is increasingly given to process. We are in the information
age and the more tools and facilities that can help our poor Neanderthal brains
digest and comprehend just a fraction of this information, so much the better.
Being
able to explore this information universe in an immersive fashion, using all
our senses, 3D vision, hearing, touch, taste, and smell, will provide us with
richer and more powerful ways of understanding the mass of information we’ll
have to cope with in the future.
If
cyberspace allows us to collaborate interactively while so immersed, then the
shared task of comprehension must be a much lighter and more enjoyable burden.
Clue
7: Society
We
are a social creature. We like to play and manipulate, build things – build
concrete and social structures. We like to tell stories, to make things for
other people to use.
The
Web is just one of the latest in a long line of technologies or mediums in which
people are able to express themselves, by building information spaces for others
to explore.
Similarly,
cyberspace will be an environment in which people can construct miniature worlds
for others to explore and interact with and within. These worlds will allow
us to explore our heritage, our past, our history, our present, our future,
and our imagination. And this recreation will often be constructive.
Clue
8: Progress and Inevitability
Well,
if you’re a fatalist, then you probably know that the way of progress is inexorable.
If something is plausible, and feasible with the right equipment, well there’s
simply no stopping it. Cloning of US Presidents, GM plants that extrude spaghetti
directly, old black & white movies in 3D color, cyberspace – they’re all
bound to happen whether or not some people think other things are more worthy
pursuits.
Cyberspace
is not a separate idea that geeks waste their time over while the rest of the
world continues using conventional methods – like the Web – if that’s conventional.
In fact, it is these so called conventional methods that are undergoing change
beneath our feet.
Just
as you think you’ve got DOS pinned down, along comes Windows, and E-mail, and
then the Web. Perhaps people think it’s just themselves that are the ones adapting
to a fairly sedate, but advanced computer technology? Oh no, people are racing
along trying to jump onto moving trains, and then realizing that they still
can’t rest, they have to run along the roof of this train and hop on to a faster
one. The trains just keep on getting faster and you can never stop jumping or
you’ll be left behind.
Did
I just hear someone ask: So who’s driving the damn trains? Interesting question…
There is a bit of a green movement that suggests that perhaps we should stopping
putting coal in the furnace of progress and revert to a more pastoral life,
or at least a more sustainable one that is kinder to the environment. Somehow,
I doubt our competitive nature will let that happen.
But
you never know, cyberspace may end up doing such a good job of putting producers
in touch with consumers, that the environmental impact of consumption decreases,
i.e. less travel and transport, and so less building and fuel required. Food,
shelter, and cyberspace – what more could anyone want?
It’s
a bit like the computer heralding the paperless office, but ending up producing
far more paper than ever before. Perhaps the Web is the same? Everyone thought
that it was the end of the book, but it turned out to be just a far better way
of selling the damn things. Could cyberspace be not necessarily the end of personal
contact, but instead a far more effective way of bringing people together?
Don’t
wait. Jump now.
So,
Cyberspace is Coming
That
should be enough clues for you. Perhaps you’re already convinced and have spotted
these and more clues yourself. Either way, it’s about time we started the ball
rolling.
There’s
been enough hype about cyberspace that it’s a bit like Santa Claus and his reindeer.
There are a lot of kids who’ll be disappointed if the evidence of their existence
fails to materialize at the right time. So like parents putting out stockings
on Christmas Eve, there’s going to have to be a team of us coders hard at work,
doing our best to demonstrate to the world that cyberspace is, as the portents
promise, on its way. Of course, it’ll never really exist, but then that’s VR
for you.
I
don’t think there’s really a surfeit of coders working on the problem at the
moment, so I wouldn’t be shy about adding your shoulder to this tricky problem.
Cyberspace
needs you!
The
Interconnectedness of All Things
So
we’ve identified the clues to its arrival. How about some indications of its
very nature? Let’s try and get a grasp of cyberspace, what the thing is, or
will be, indeed, for what we want it to be.
You
know how in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, it was explained that
the entire universe could be extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake? Well,
given enough computing power it’s quite plausible that this could be done –
it’s just the word ‘enough’ that is the problem.
I
like the similar, but more numerical idea of repeatedly rolling a die – eventually
patterns will emerge in the numbers rolled, from which the rest of the universe
can be extrapolated. This is given that, like the piece of fairy cake, everything
influences the die in some way. The trouble is again one word: ‘eventually’.
Such a time would probably not be far from the Restaurant at the End of the
Universe.
For
less fictional theories check out the EPR Paradox, which describes ‘spooky action
at a distance’ – apparent ‘communication’ between particles at the quantum level,
but across astronomically large distances. This is a little bit of evidence
that particles are connected in some way, albeit currently unknowable. From
this we can conclude that everything in the universe is in some way connected
to everything else. This is what you might term the interconnectedness of all
things.
You’re
probably wondering what tangent I’ve gone off this time. Well, perhaps it this
interconnectedness that enables the operation of the colossal simulator that
runs our universe? Perhaps we might one day be able to harness this interconnectedness
and bypass the need to transmit information via the tediously slow optical media
we’re lumbered with today. On such a day the Internet would be able to dispense
with optical fiber and use an instantaneous or zero latency backbone instead.
Cyberspace as an alternate reality would then definitely be with us.
Until
that time, and here is the point I’m making, we have to simulate our virtual
universes by communicating across what might as well be wet bits of string strung
between rusty tin cans. Yup you’ve got to face it: the Internet is an anachronistic
pile of relays, punched cards and vacuum tubes when it comes to comparing it
against what we’d really need to achieve seamless cyberspace.
Oh
well, I don’t suppose we could have expected our task to be that easy.
Internet
Pea Soup
Somehow
we’re going to have to do the best we can with what we’ve got. The Internet
isn’t perfect, but it’s getting better. From this simple conclusion, we can
immediately deduce that any attempt at using the Internet as a foundation for
cyberspace must firstly cope with imperfection, and secondly exploit increasing
performance.
Talking
of the Internet’s performance, at the level we’re interested in, little is reliable
or particularly speedy. Yeah, yeah, people keep telling me that it’s getting
better and that people will soon have thousands of channels of video on demand
via their cable modem. But, I remain suspicious. Heck, I’ll even say skeptical!
Just
like personal transport getting faster, and people traveling in increasingly
large volumes, something just doesn’t seem to be improving that much. Roads
get wider, cars get faster, but with higher traffic densities, it still takes
just as long (if not longer) to get from one side of a city to the other. Even
air travel, with the delays in traveling to and from the airport, check-in and
other delays, can sometimes be similar to the equivalent train or coach journey
time.
How
long have we been waiting for our CPUs and graphics cards to be fast enough,
our hard disks and memories to be large enough, and our web pages to download
fast enough? It’s always a case of “Whoa! Wait until you see what they’re bringing
out next year – it’ll blow your socks off!”, but the hit is transitory, it’s
never enough and before you know it, you’re back waiting for the next ‘improvement’.
Things
do get better, but something remains the same. Moore’s law plus Parkinson’s
law (work expands to fill space) seem to add up to status quo. In other words,
double the performance, double the workload, and you still get a 10 minute coffee
break while you wait for that compile or render to complete.
In
the case of the Internet, I strongly suspect that as fast as the network capacity
is increased, so the volume of traffic will expand to exhaust it. The thing
that remains the same is latency. The trip time, in other words.
You
can apply this to other areas as well. I might also say, that frame rates in
video games will always range between 20 to 30fps, packaged software will always
arrive on between one and seven disks (or holo-cubes), and word-processors will
always take a minute or so to print out your resume…
So
I’m sorry to have to break this to you, but web pages will never download any
quicker than they do today.
What
a depressing thought eh? Well, think about it – while the Internet remains fundamentally
hierarchical in its topology, and demand keeps pace with capacity, the same
bottlenecks that cause delay today, will still be with us tomorrow. The solutions
are either to string a piece of optic fiber between each pair of computers on
the planet (a hell of a lot of spaghetti!), or to reduce demand, impose tolls
say.
Design
for High Latency
In
the face of performance meeting workload, the best you can ever do to increase
latency is to improve the efficiency with which the available resources are
used, and this invariably means improving your understanding of the nature of
those resources.
So,
in the case of the Internet, you cannot treat it like a reliable LAN and expect
to use it efficiently. If you treat the Internet like a LAN in the hope that
it will soon be as good as a LAN, it’s not much different than writing a flight
simulator (including renderer) in interpreted BASIC in the hope that by the
time it’s finished computers will be fast enough to run it at a decent frame
rate.
OK, so some of you will allow me faint praise for a few good points, but regard my pessimism as ultimately misguided. Moreover, I suspect that various network experts would be more forthright, and gently suggest that I’m actually wrong about the Internet, i.e. in the next ten years it will in fact easily be able to support permanently online, retinally scanning, holographic video-phones and haptic body suits worn by the population of the entire planet (dogs and other pets included). Conventional system architectures are just fine thanks.
Blimey!
Well, that’s a few terabytes per second of bandwidth per carbon unit there,
and I’ll be very impressed if supply can so dramatically outpace demand.
On
the other hand, maybe it might just be a good precaution to make more efficient
use of the Internet, just on the off-chance that latency doesn’t improve. Of
course, even if it does improve, then a more efficient utilization would fully
exploit that improvement.
You
just can’t lose can you? Come on, abandon those secure and nice, comfy servers,
put down your reliable protocols. Let’s get down to the smelly, leaky sewers
of UDP and see if we can make better use of them directly.
Making
the Best Out of a Bad Situation
Confucius
would probably have a few words to say about how games have to be written in
harmony with the inherently flaky nature of the Internet, instead of stubbornly
demanding 100% reliability from an intermediate layer. In protocol terms, that’s
“Use UDP, and don’t use TCP”. But then, it’s always been a case of using the
right tool for the job.
To
simulate a large scale virtual world across large numbers of computers, we need
as much interconnectedness as we can get. And that means it is better to get
low latency, noisy communication, than high latency, perfect communication.
If you insist on any compromise then you must ensure that improving the quality
of the communication has insignificant impact upon its latency requirements.
What
do I mean by that last bit, ‘latency requirements’? Well, communication only
needs to be timely, it doesn’t need to be any better than that. Some things
you may need to know as soon as possible, some things you can wait a while for.
Some things are important, some aren’t, some are in between. Some information
has a limited lifespan, some information may always be potentially useful. When
you’re communicating the state of play in a game to all its players, it’s typical
that each player has specific and distinct information needs peculiar to its
current situation. So, there’s rarely any point in communicating everything
to everyone – though if you have a broadcast medium then sometimes you may end
up sending something to everyone.
Not
only must we understand the system upon which we build cyberspace, but we must
also understand the sorts of cyberspace application that we hope to run.
A
Global Venture
The
global network is vast, and cyberspace will match it. Its enormous scale requires
a complete paradigm shift in the way you approach the development of Internet
based systems. I know I’m repeating myself here, but it is important to bear
in mind several things when trying to understand the philosophy behind my descriptions
of the technical issues over the next few months.
Scale We have no control over the number
of computers, the size of the network, or the workload that the system must
support. The system must work just as well on two computers as it does on two
billion.
Simplicity We haven’t got forever to develop
a global system. The software has to be easy to develop, self-contained, and
self-supporting. It’s got to be developed by a small group of people (possibly
dispersed) and so decomposition into small modules would be a good idea. It’s
also got to be possible to develop it even whilst it’s running. This means continuous,
live, automatic upgrade across every computer participating in cyberspace –
zero administration.
Open There’s little hope of retaining
or defending any intellectual ownership, patents, licensing or distribution
rights. The Open Source approach would appear to be an appropriate model for
development.
Global and open collaboration also appears to be a good way of a system
being widely adopted, and probably becoming a standard.
Content ‘Content is the way to happiness’
seems to be the motto of the Web today, and it applies just as much to cyberspace.
Vast capacity means vast content and vice versa. It also means far too much
work for a single organization, let alone a single person. Just like the Web,
cyberspace content will have to be created by the masses, and that means we
have to produce good content creation tools.
I
see no reason why a system cannot be developed to achieve all these ends. Although
it may seem fairly ambitious to achieve real-time distribution of vast virtual
worlds across billions of simultaneous participants, I hope I can convince you,
eventually, that it’s not that big a deal really.
Have
We Got What it Takes to Produce Cyberspace?
Before
we bake a cake, we need to check we’ve got the necessary ingredients:
1) A global network
2) Add computers to taste
3)
A database engine and plenty of hard disk space
4) 3D scene modeler and a
decent graphics card
5) A few software engineers
6) Time and money
Do
some searches on “Next Generation Internet” if you want the low down on the
future of the Internet. Here’s one interesting find to give you a start: http://fox.rollins.edu/~tlairson/ecom/next.htm
What
would improve the circumstances is if we evangelized against the wasteful use
of the Internet, e.g. sending video across it. Thankfully there are companies
aware of the merits of greater efficiencies in such things. Check out Obvious
Technologies’ (www.obvioustech.com)
approach for an example of a better way of distributing video – in effect passing
it ‘by reference’.
Anyway,
I think we’ve got everything we need to get started. Oh no, I almost forgot:
Money! No one can do anything these days without money. You always have to keep
an eye on the financial aspects, or so I’ve heard. However, these days for e-Ventures
it seems venture capital is a broken fire hydrant. Perhaps I should finish up
with a little waffle about the difficulties of making money in digital media…
Will
Money Still Make the World Go Round?
Money
was supposed to be a convenient means of exchanging labor and its products.
Perhaps, as in the Star Trek universe, civilization will elevate itself to a
position where money becomes superfluous and everyone puts their potential into
society and gets as much out of it as they want. I think some might think the
Internet will facilitate this, perhaps it will, but it’s pretty likely we’ll
have to go via a transitionary phase where there is a form of cyber-cash. This’ll
help migrate the old way of doing business into its more direct, electronic
equivalent.
But,
more and more, I think we’re seeing information become the key commodity. Whether
it’s the right share to invest in, the most economic way to build a bridge,
a DVD, or even the color of Sigourney Weaver’s toothbrush: information is in
demand and people are willing to pay for it. Trouble is, they rarely have to.
Information is getting easier to distribute and duplicate. It only takes one
altruistic (some might use a less benevolent term) person to spill the beans
on a web page and the whole world gets it for nothing.
It’s
not a problem to ensure that communication is secure, from vendor to purchaser,
but how do you prevent the purchaser from passing on that information for nothing
and thus devaluing it?
The
problem that the Internet now presents us with is that the vendor can no longer
hope to maintain their monopoly over information once they’ve sold it. It used
to be that purchase of mass produced information (newspapers, books, records)
was a much better experience overall (price, quality, convenience) than illicit
duplication was for the potential customer or pirate. But, now a digital copy
is free, perfect, and more convenient.
Of
course it’s unfair, but what can you do?
Even
in the digital realm, software producers have still been clinging to the hope
that transmission costs dissuade people from illegitimate downloading. Sure,
even with digital technology, there are still always costs in transmission,
and these are in proportion to the quantity of information – whether it’s downloading
a file or throwing a DVD across the room. But, these transmission costs are
rarely proportional to the production costs.
It
seems one idea Microsoft’s trying out to address this problem, is to not let
the software out of its factory in the first place. The user only has the presentation
layer on their local machine, but must pay a subscription to obtain the use
of the back-end on a secure server somewhere.. I suppose this is an understandable
approach if as some pundits predict, there will soon be vastly more web browsers
around than installations of Windows alone.
But
software isn’t the only information based product around. What about works of
art? Why should anyone produce a movie, album, or other easily duplicated work
of art if only a single sale can be obtained?
Well,
it’s difficult to swallow, but the answer has to be that the single sale must
cover the cost, even in spite of the fact that the work is unlikely to have
a resale value.
This
means getting millions of punters to stump up cash in advance before the artist
hands over their work. So say Sting produces a new album. First, he’ll keep
it under strict security. He then releases a low grade recording that gives
a hint of how good it is. The near perfect, 5.1 channel, digital encoding of
it is then put up for a kind of reverse auction. The marketplace is invited
to make limited pledges for it, e.g. up to $1, up to $5, up to $15, etc. Sting
can then, at a favorable point in time, select which price point he wishes to
sell it at, and then it is delivered to all those whose pledge covered that
price. After this point it is a free for all and anyone may give it away or
sell it on – including Sting who may still be able to sell the original recording
at a premium price (given its packaging).
The
key thing in this scheme is that the product is not released until the artist
feels they have arrived at the best return they can get, which may well be at
least the production cost. Sometimes they may declare that the current pledges
are insufficient and the work will be withheld until such time as the pledges
increase. Conversely, the market may gradually reduce its offers for the work
and the artist may take the best price while they can.
Of
course, you can only practically do this kind of deal where the market can be
addressed as though it were a single unit – something greatly facilitated by
the Internet.
Similar
types of deals can be done in advance of the work, for example, where the audience
is presented with a movie script, and invited to stump up the funding necessary
to produce the movie. I can see it now – “Star Wars: Episode IX – we
need between $5 and $7 billion to complete this movie. The current optimum pledge
only amounts to $3 billion. Please increase your pledge and/or encourage your
friends, and remember that you get merchandising shares!”.
Do
I hear five thousand broadcasters laughing their heads off?
Yeah,
go ahead and laugh. You can still continue with the old ways of doing things
if you want. However, even with the public subscription type approach I’ve just
outlined, broadcasters could still do the big deals you’re familiar with (perhaps
as a cartel), but once transmission has occurred it should be a free for all.
The thing is, it will be a free for all anyway, and you can’t really stop it.
So copyright becomes redundant for art in digital form. This should apply to
software too.
Anyway,
these are just hints as to how the Internet is going to force a revolution in
the marketplace. There will be other ways of working and buying and selling,
but even with a totally derestricted market, I hope you can see that there are
still mechanisms that will continue to support the development of films, music,
and other works of digitally reproducible art. It’s not as bleak as the big
companies would have you think. They’ll just have to forget about region coded
DVDs and secure DVD-Audio…
Coming
Next
In
my next installment, I’ll be getting technical – very technical. So less of
this futurism and let’s let the cat out of the bag: how on earth do we build
cyberspace?
Jump
into to the deep end of distributed systems programming with me next month and
find out!
Until
then, if you’re going to the Game Developer’s Conference be sure to check out
Proksim Software (http://www.proksim.com)
as one of the few companies sharing this road to enlightenment.
Copyright © 2003 CMP Media Inc. All rights reserved.