Steven Miles is a professor of medicine and bioethics at the University of Minnesota. His forthcoming book, which has the working title Oath Betrayed: Military Medicine and the War on Terror, stemmed from his attempt to learn why the U.S. medical staff in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay did not report or intervene to stop the abuse of prisoners for the two years preceding the public release of the Abu Ghraib photographs. For this, he reviewed about 25,000 pages of government documents and trial testimony obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. Miles has assisted victims of war and torture in 25 years of international work with the American Refugee Committee and the Center for Victims of Torture. He is a past president of the American Association of Bioethics and served on President Clintons Bioethics Working Group on Health Care Reform. Dr. Miles was interviewed for the National Catholic Reporter by Richard Thieme about the failure of physicians to reveal torture.

Thieme: What first attracted your attention to the issue of the medical community’s responsibility toward torture?

Miles: When the Abu Ghraib pictures were published, it was clear this had been going on for a while. Clearly doctors were present in the prisons because doctors are always present in prisons so they must have seen the abuse or signs of the abuse. Why was this surfacing as a leaked CD rather than a report by the medical profession? I found somewhat to my amazement that it was not just a matter of not reporting but it was actually a matter of being involved in setting the harshness of the interrogation plans and delaying reports of homicide, which would have been an important signal to the public of what was wrong inside the prison.

Thieme:Are you aware of formal or informal pressures or influence brought to bear on the medical profession to enlist doctors in the practices you decry?

Miles:At the present time, I do not see any research agenda or set of programs comparable to MKSEARCH or MKULTRA [mind-control research conducted by the CIA from the 1950s to the late 1960s, including covert drug tests on unwitting citizens]. On the other hand, it is very clear that if you go all the way back to the beginning of the war on terror, the United States decided that the Geneva Convention did not apply. The next thing that happened was Guantanamo asked for policies to guide interrogations in the absence of the Geneva Convention. The JAG [Judge Advocate General Corps] officer at Guantanamo proposed an outline of policy for monitoring interrogation. The antecedent memos by the Department of Justice had already written off prisoner standards as not being violations of the Geneva Convention. Then [Secretary of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld set up a board to develop interrogation policy that fleshed out the role for medical monitoring and has since sketched the policy that was elaborated on as it went down the chain of command. It was not a matter of an informal pickup at the prison of various practices in the prison system but rather a matter of recruiting professionals into a centrally directed policy with guidelines. Thats an important difference.

Thieme: One antecedent for this discussion is Operation Paperclip, the program that brought formerly Nazi scientists and engineers to the United States after the war. Some were rocket scientists, but some were doctors who carried out horrific experiments with freezing, for example. One of those concentration camp doctors continued his experiments on behalf of helping American flyers downed in cold waters and I believe theres a building at Brooks Air Force Base named after him.

Miles:Paperclip was not the only one. We tried some doctors at Nuremberg [in Germany where war crimes trials were conducted by the United States following World War II] but elected not to have doctors trials in Japan in order to secure their cooperation in getting their biological warfare data. We made a policy decision that it would endanger the appropriation of that material if we went ahead with a war crimes trial. Some experiments using vivisection were done on American POWs.

I think there is a difference, however. I am just not finding a research agenda in Iraq. I have been looking at different historical roots because there are different historical problems. For example, in terms of the neglect of prisoners, you can look back to Andersonville [in Georgia, a notorious Confederate prison in the Civil War] and Elmira [in New York, a Union prison in the Civil war]. Or alternatively go back to World War II and the Thai-Burmese railroad. [During the building of the Thai-Burmese railroad, 11,000 of 60,000 prisoners died of starvation.] The Japanese had not signed the Geneva Convention but signed the Hague Convention of 1927, which promised adequate treatment of prisoners. They waived that in World War II, but said they would treat prisoners well anyway. Their documents have astonishing parallels to United States documents in 2005. The president issued an ambiguous directive suspending the Geneva Convention directing the Armed Forces to treat detainees humanely to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity.The government traduced domestic and international laws to create special categories of people, illegal combatants,who had truncated rights and who were dispatched to secret prisons and subject to special Kafkaesque tribunals. Red Cross monitors were locked out of prisons, given false information and were especially kept from ghost detainees.Hundreds of people were secretly transported to nations who imprisoned, interrogated and tortured them on our behalf.

Thieme: The book Journey into Madness by Gordon Thomas discusses Dr. Aziz al-Abub, who assisted Hezbollah in the torture of William Buckley, CIA station chief in Beirut, who was tortured to death over a long period of time, with video tapes of his treatment provided to document the event. Thomas drew a parallel with what we did during MKULTRA, Bluebird, Artichoke and similar programs when we experimented on people without their consent in often-horrific ways. He suggested that perhaps the moral high ground so often claimed by Americans had been surrendered through those programs and practices.

Miles:There are a couple of ways to look at that which are of great interest to ethicists. One is to speak of creating a precedent. For example, there was the business of Spc. Keith Maupin, an American soldier in Iraq who was kidnapped and killed — but only after the Abu Ghraib photos were shown. Before the photos became public, every POW returned alive, but not afterward. [Television carried the Abu Ghraib photographs on April 29, 2004. The first of the 11 beheadings in Iraq occurred 12 days later.]

The other way to look at it is using the concept of legitimacy. A world power does not simply have power, it has legitimacy. By behaving in these ways, we undermine our legitimacy as a world leader. Thats a different problem than establishing precedents for others to follow.

The State Department issued a report, for example, that criticized China for violation of human rights, for detentions and torture, and China blew off the United States and so did Russia. How do we speak on behalf of these matters? What is the legitimacy of our protests in the present climate?

Thieme:There seem to be things Americans need to believe about themselves that require that we filter certain facts out of our awareness. In my work with the Hoover archives at Stanford, I came across documentation from an authoritative source who named 10 specific countries with which we partner in torture. We may not be the ones turning on the electricity, but our people are present when it happens. He claims this did not begin with 9/11.

Another source discussed the use of children in those experiments done decades ago.

Miles: Its interesting that there was a certain coyness about the data that came out of Iraq. The photographs that have been released so far are all photographs of men. Photographs of women have been retained and have not been released by the media sources that have them.

Thieme:[Investigative journalist] Sy Hersh said the other photos are much worse. He mentioned audio recordings of children screaming while being sodomized.

Miles:All of the prisoner deaths that have been included in official tabulations, which are admittedly incomplete — curiously, you find references to the death of children by the Department of Defense only in footnotes. There is no reporting of kids’ deaths in official lists or in death certificates or anything else. So there are sets of this data that remain hidden. The data has obviously been scrubbed.

Thieme: What have you seen?

Miles:I have seen the footnotes referring to the kidsdeaths and have seen credible evidence of sexual abuse described in Army investigations. I have not seen photos. I do not need to see them, but I have seen investigators’ reports.

Thieme:Steve, aren’t we describing war crimes?

Miles:Yes. We are describing war crimes and I think its important to name them for what they are for a couple of reasons. First, when you name it as a war crime, you hint at the reality of the things we have described, the gravity of the harms that have occurred. Second, in describing it as a war crime you also describe accurately the transgressions against a framework of justice and the damage to the civil order that would be avoided by pretending these are not war crimes. I think thats important to do.

Thieme:If there are war crimes, there are war criminals. Do you anticipate trials of named war criminals? They would probably include Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush, wouldn’t they?

Miles:As you know, many war criminals have never been tried for a variety of political reasons. That does not mean it is not worth stating that they are war criminals, that indictable war crimes have been committed and that the people who created the policies that led to them are responsible. It is the nature of war crimes that they are patterns of offense, not isolated events. You cannot track an individual act — for example the arrest of Anne Frank — to Adolph Eichman. Instead you see broad policy implications and a pattern, a series of acts at many different sites over a long period of time. In this case, there were all those things and these are war crimes. Its worthwhile naming what they are because historical accountability is important. In the case of Pinochet, we see that the long-term tracing of the acts can result in increasing accountability.

Now, I think this is a very important point. The world is at a very interesting tipping point as to war crimes as we steadily ratchet up degrees of accountability. We see, for example, Slobodon Milosevich tried in almost real time. We have seen action around Nazi stolen art totally change in the last 15 years. Swiss bank accounts no longer lack transparency. So even if indictments and trials do not follow, it sets the stage for greater accountability and thats a good thing.

Thieme:Who are your allies in this work?

Miles:Dr. Robert J. Lifton is one. Looking at why people or how people can do these things, Lifton coined the term “atrocity-producing situations” in a study of veterans of the war in Vietnam. Some soldiers suffered severe psychic damage by participating in atrocities. Lifton, a psychiatrist, proposed that extreme stress, a dehumanized enemy, and encouragement to commit moral transgressions create atrocity-producing situations. He quotes a combat medic in Vietnam. “I delighted in the destruction and yet was a healer.” That medics words strikingly resemble a medic who described his feeling while beating prisoners during his service in Iraq: “You get a burning in your stomach, a rush, a feeling of hot lead running through your veins, and you get a sense of power. … Imagine wearing point-blank body armor, an M-16 and all the power in the world, and the authority of God. That power is very attractive.”

Its also important to look at groups like HRW [Human Rights Watch] and the ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union]. By pulling out the documents and working on their largely legal pieces, they make it possible for more specialized scholars like myself to do our work. If the ACLU had not put all those documents on their Web site, I’d be just another guy with opinions and a pen.

Thieme:Groups like HRW, because they scrutinize the practices of nations cooperating with us in counterterror, are designated terror support groups and the police in those countries are encouraged to treat them accordingly. This can be daunting.

Miles:Yes, but thats an epiphenomenon of being a torturing society. A torturing society is a society that is abraded by the process of dehumanization. In that process, we essentially create our own mirrored netherworlds. We posit a secret omnipresent anarchist non-Christian entity against which we put up the people of the true faith,and thats one reason torture is so dangerous to societies, because torturing societies do have these epiphenomenon that spill out into the broader society and result in less discriminating thinking and less understanding. People ask me all the time if I think I’ll be killed for doing this work, which to me is an astonishing statement. I dont see a risk in getting killed. What I do see in the question is a direct indication of the degree to which living in a torturing society has damaged our larger civil society.

One of our problems is the paradox that we are one of the most parochial and provincial empires ever to exist on earth. That creates real problems for us because many of our political debates wind up being hermetically sealed and that hurts our ability to engage constructively with the world. Our ability to contextualize our own internal discussions of what it means to be a global empire is impaired. We wind up misreading our incredible impact not only on the world but on our own desires to project a civil society around the world. We can’t contextualize our actions internationally if we don’t have an international vision within our own domestic conversation.

Thieme:That brings us full circle. We start with transparency and accountability and the need for third-party points of view and contributions. Why are so many Americans incapable of hearing how others perceive us?

Miles:Americans have kept the reality of torture far from consciousness. Although we are steeped in fictional torture, we are nearly insensate to the reality of torture. We are unfamiliar with its techniques, its effects on individuals and civil societies, and with how widely it is used. Fictional governmental torture is usually depicted as occurring in developing countries. We are only dimly aware of the United Statesdisastrous complicity with torturing regimes in El Salvador, [Fulgencio] Batistas Cuba, Cambodia, Chile, Iran, South Vietnam, Guatemala, Argentina, Israel or Egypt.

There are creative voices in the United States that can speak to the larger international issues, outside the provincial paradigm, groups like Human Rights Watch that are perceived as a threat within the provincial perspective because of their cosmopolitan view of society and thats why they are marginalized and precisely why they are necessary. They are necessary because of the torture issues but also because, if we want to globalize the economy, we have to transcend our limited point of view.

Thieme:Do you get much negative response, that is, hate mail?

Miles:Many people express a fear that writing a book on the subject endangers my life. That disturbs me, as I said, because of what it says about fear of our government, a fear that reveals the damage that a torturing society does to the sense of civil liberties. That fear fosters a silence in which torture thrives. The implication that I, a citizen of the United States, should acquiesce to that fear strikes me as deeply disrespectful to my colleagues in Turkey, Egypt, Chile, South Africa, Cuba, and the former Soviet Union who have assumed much greater risks to fight torture in their nations. Some have been jailed, tortured or had their children murdered. For most Americans, it takes little more than the courage to be inconvenienced to speak against torture in the United States. If we are truly at risk of greater danger, it is all the more necessary that we should speak out.

A brief review of CIA-funded research into mind control
By Richard Thieme

Projects MKULTRA, MKSEARCH, Bluebird and Artichoke were code names for a series of mind control research programs in the 1950s and 1960s. Details were revealed by hearings of the Church Committee, headed by Sen. Frank Church, and the Pike Committee, headed by Rep. Otis Pike, and the Rockefeller Commission investigations in the 1970s, despite efforts to destroy evidence of the program. Then- CIA director Richard Helms ordered the documents related to the programs shredded, but thousands of financial documents were overlooked that detailed links between covert medical research funded by the CIA using hypnosis, electromagnetic fields, drugs and other chemicals to alter brain functioning, memory and behavior.

The intelligence community at the time was searching for a solution to the problem of brainwashing,which was believed to be the result of sophisticated new methodologies discovered by the Chinese and Russians. In fact, nothing new was involved, but the United States pursued the research in a way consistent with its own cultural bias, that is, the use of technology to alter human behavior.

One of the most notorious accounts of experimentation details the work of Dr. Ewen Cameron, a psychiatrist who believed that he had the right to destroy the personalities of mental patients entrusted to his care and endow them with new personalities. The sleep roomof Montreals Allan Memorial Psychiatric Institute was the site of a series of barbaric experiments conducted on patients over a nine-year period beginning in 1955. Cameron invented a technique he called psychic drivingthat the CIA thought might have potential as a brainwashing technique. Cameron used electroshock in extreme doses, drugs and sensory deprivation to depatternbehavior, create amnesia, and attempt to restructure the personalities of patients. Cameron died with many honors and was at various times head of the Quebec, Canadian, and American Psychiatric Associations, and a cofounder and first president of the World Psychiatric Association.

By locating the experiments on foreign soil, the CIA intended to establish a basis for plausible deniability of its involvement.

The Church committee wrote: The deputy director of the CIA revealed that over 30 universities and institutions were involved in an extensive testing and experimentationprogram which included covert drug tests on unwitting citizens at all social levels, high and low, native Americans and foreign.Several tests involved administering LSD to unwitting subjects in social situations,resulting in at least one death.

Bluebird was approved by the CIA director on April 20, 1950. In August 1951, the Project was renamed Artichoke. Bluebird and Artichoke included work on the creation of amnesia, hypnotic couriers and what came to be called Manchurian Candidatesafter the novel and movie of the same name. Artichoke documents verify that hypnotic couriers functioned effectively in real-life simulations conducted by the CIA in the early 1950s. Artichoke and Bluebird were administratively rolled over into MKULTRA by the CIA on April 3, 1953. MKULTRA was in turn rolled over into MKSEARCH on June 7, 1964. MKSEARCH ran until June 1972, at which time Helms ordered the shredding of the files. Documents that survived are available through Freedom of Information Act requests and on the Internet.

Further information on these programs can be found in:

Undue Risk: Secret State Experiments on Humans by Jonathan D. Moreno (W.H. Freeman and Company, 2000)

The Mind Manipulators by Alan W. Scheflin and Edward M. Opton Jr. (Paddington Press Ltd., 1978)

The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control/The Secret History of the Behavioral Sciences by John Marks (W. W. Norton and Company, 1979)

Bluebird: Deliberate Creation of Multiple Personality by Psychiatrists by Colin A. Ross M.D. (Manitou Communications, 2000)

This interview with Dr. Steven Miles was published on January 13, 2006 by the National Catholic Reporter (http://www.natcath.com/). Copyright The National Catholic Reporter Publishing Comapny.

Related Web sites

American Civil Liberties Union
www.aclu.org

Center for Bioethics
www.bioethics.umn.edu

Human Rights Watch
www.hrw.org

By Richard Thieme

I am not a futurist, but I take solace in the knowledge that most futurists aren’t either. Futurists usually describe the present, not the future. Since ninety-five per cent of us haven’t arrived at the present yet, it sounds like the future.

To talk about the future of networks is fraught with peril because our conversation about the future has itself been changed by the revolution in information systems.

We used to think of the future as railroad tracks headed toward the horizon in a straight line. Something might derail the train, but the tracks would remain straight. Now the idea of a straight line toward a single future is laughable. Exponential change — everything everywhere changing at the same time — has changed how we think about change.

It is not merely the speed of the flow of information that makes straight-line thinking untenable but how we construct the future as a result of interacting with networked computers. How we construct ourselves has changed as well.

How we define and think about ourselves, how we frame our possibilities for acting in the world, is a function of the structure of the information systems with which we interact. We internalize that structure as a metaphor for our selves, our psyches. Our symbiotic relationship with networked computers transforms not only how we think and feel but who we in fact ARE.

To talk about the future of networking, then, really is to talk about the future of humanity. Everything — everything from our self-conception to our relationship with God — is going through the looking-glass of transformation.

Network professionals are not engaged in a peripheral activity. Network professionals — from those who build LANs and WANs to the architects of the Internet — are participating in the re-creation of what it means to be a human being.

I want to explore the impact of the Net on individuals and organizations (meaning by “the Net” everything from a few PCs in an office to the Internet). Like a good futurist, I will talk about the future by gazing into the crystal ball of the present.

Hannibal Lecter, in “Silence of the Lambs,” said to Clarice, the young FBI agent, “First principles, Clarice. Read Marcus Aurelius. Of each particular thing, ask what is it in itself. What is it’s nature?”

What is the Net — right here, right now? What is it in itself? What is its nature?

My life changed when my family unpacked an Apple II+ over a decade ago. We chortled with delight at the little stick man dancing to music on our green screen.

The organizations and institutions of which I have been a part have also changed since then. The contrast between all of us then and all of us now is like the terminator on the moon, enabling us to see mountains and craters in bold relief where the darkness meets the light.

One thing we did with that Apple was play games. When a new Infocom game was published, it was a major event. “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” was my favorite.

As we made our way past babel fish and Vogon poets, I discovered that what happened to me when I played that game was not what happened when I read a book. Information in the game was organized differently, and as a result, after playing the game, I was organized differently. I experienced myself as a different set of possibilities for action in the world.

The maze of branching possibilities altered my view of the future. The illusion of an endless set of options became a metaphor for myself and my experience. The power of recursion became a metaphor for my growth. I imagined myself in terms of fractals, not the straighter line of text. My life began to look like a rising spiral.

In those days I worked as an Episcopal priest. I saw in a flash that the organized life of religious institutions as we had known it — as it had been generated by the world of the printing press — was over. While it might take years, or decades, or even centuries for the process to work itself out, something new would emerge from the cracked egg.

The systems of spirituality and religion that are emerging will include and transcend everything that came before — but that will only be seen, as always, in retrospect.

Every genuine transformation requires that we traverse a zone of annihilation in which everything we thought ourselves to be is called into question. Then “we” are reorganized at a higher level of the spiral and see that we are still ourselves — only different.

Did all that really come from playing a text adventure? It did indeed because the “space” in which I played that game required that I conform to its parameters; that shape became a metaphor for the shape of my “self.”

The structure of the game was like a slice of a hologram. That slice contained the shape of the networked world in which we live in its entirety.

When we interact with networked computers, we think of ourselves in new ways. The possibilities disclosed by computers change our understanding of history, the arts, the sciences — everything.

Here’s an example of how that works.

Prior to a retreat for the management of a bank, I interviewed key leaders. The retreat was intended to initiate a process of corporate reorganization.

Each person with whom I spoke was intelligent, experienced, dedicated. Yet each spoke of “the bank” as an obstacle that frustrated their best intentions. When they were off-site, alone together in a conference room, I asked: “Where’s the bank?

The bank that restrained them was in their heads.

We internalize the structures of our organizations in ways that define our possibilities for action. The bank was hierarchical. The executives shared a map of the landscape, an organizational chart built of rectangles connected by straight lines. That chart described a win/lose game. Power is exercised in such a system by knocking someone else out of a box. Power is exercised by dominating and controlling.

The first time I connected to the Internet, I discovered myself present in a web or network. As I moved from web site to web site, no matter where I went, I remained at the center, but everyone else was also at the center. Everyone was at the center and no one was displaced.

My sense of possibilities changed as I realized that power is exercised differently in a web or network than in a hierarchy. It is exercised by contributing and participating.

Participating in a network discloses a different way of participating in life.

When organizations are networked, new behaviors are required of managers. The buzzword describing the life inside the new structure is empowerment, but empowerment is more than a buzzword. Real empowerment happens when people adapt successfully to the organizational changes caused by computer networks.

Rigid hierarchical structures were appropriate during times of relative stability. They provided for the management and distribution of information in a way that worked.

The redistribution of information throughout the system, putting it into the hands of people who need it, transforms the roles of employees and supervisors. Those who administer such systems inevitably find the uses of authority redefined. Managers are asked to morph into coaches. They still have authority, but it must be used differently to assist empowered employees.

Yet hierarchy has plenty of lives, making organizational life today paradoxical. Lateral communities like Usenet groups or empowered work-teams will continue to grow and flatten the structure, but hierarchy will also replicate itself at a higher level of organization. Hierarchy persists because it defines roles in a way that conserves energy. The constant negotiation necessary when there is role confusion dissipates energy. That’s why exclusively “virtual corporations” with little vertical structure will find it difficult to remain stable in the long run.

Viable organizations live in the creative tension between horizontal and vertical structures. Centralized, hierarchical structures — the vertical trunks of trees — will grow taller, while lateral branching communities grow wider.

Fractals, in short, are self-similar at all scales.

That our conversation about the future — and our conversation about the future defines our possibilities in life — has itself changed is illustrated by “scenario planning.”

According to Peter Schwarz and the Global Business Network, scenario planning evolved when Shell Oil was shocked by the oil crisis of 1973 into realizing they needed to do a better job of anticipating the future.

Scenario planning is a way of recognizing that exponential change makes the world unthinkably complex and the future impossible to predict. Input is gathered from knowledgeable people in diverse fields to imagine possible futures; these scenarios are given names and the social, economic, or political events that would have to be true for them to happen are identified. Frequent comparison of the models with what subsequently happens enables organizations to adapt and respond appropriately.

It is not the future that has changed but the way we construct the future as a set of possibilities. That construction now resembles the structure of the information systems with which we interact. Scenario planning is a way of simulating a computer program.

The computer program — a metaphor for the Network — is the model. Life is the simulation.

What will this sea-change mean for education? Inasmuch as education is a process by which we learn to assimilate, organize, and use information, it is no surprise that the shape of education is also bending.

I was taught as I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s that the content of adolescence was learning. I didn’t know that adolescence was a modern invention, that the printing press had invented school as a collection of benches on which to sit and read and adolescence as the time to do it.

Learning had previously been accomplished through apprenticeship. Young people worked beside adults, learning by doing. The village was their teacher. The invention of text postponed adulthood because time was required to master the art of symbol manipulation.

The structures of education today are out of synch with the structures of adulthood. Because businesses need to bring employees up to speed, then keep them there, more and more education takes place today in conference rooms, seminars and workshops, and via remote telepresence and onsite computer-assisted learning than in classrooms. Continuous learning is now an unquestioned assumption of life.

But the content of that learning as well as its form is changing — again, due to the impact of computer networks.

A business executive complained to me that the graduates of a local school were well educated in every way but one: they did not know how to work cooperatively.

What he meant by cooperative learning — sharing resources and subordinating goals to the group process — we used to call “cheating.”

I was taught to work “independently.” Information was delivered at the convenience of the curriculum and the teacher. The teacher controlled the learning environment.

Cooperative learning and teamwork are labels for the needs of a workplace or learning environment created by distributed computing. Power is exercised differently in a web or network. Teachers taught to be dominant in command-and-control systems cannot model or teach cooperative learning until they know how to do it themselves, then know that they know it so they can teach it.

Computer assisted learning delivers information to students when they are teachable. Teachers must learn to coach students when the students need it, not when teachers choose, just as managers have to learn how to coach workers empowered by networks.

The best teachers are often enthusiastic about “getting computers into the schools,” but alas, that thinking too is mired in the old paradigm. Networked computers do not need to be in the schools. They need to be available to us where we are.

Those quick enough to see what they need pursue knowledge through a growing “black market” in education. The global network is a virtual marketplace for the exchange of educational goods and services.

Networked computers are physical symbol-manipulating machines in symbiotic relationship with people who are also physical symbol-manipulating machines. Using Marvin Minsky’s definition of thinking in “The Society of Mind.” the Network can be said to think.

“If you understand something in only one way,” he wrote, “then you do not really understand it at all. The secret of what anything means to us depends on how we have connected it to all the other things we know. If you have several different representations, when one approach fails you can try another.

Well-connected representations let you turn ideas around in your mind until you find one that works. That is what we mean by thinking!”

The network thinks and expresses its ideas through a multiplicity of representations. When one of us expresses one of those representations, we say, “I have an idea!” But the idea is never ours alone.

Similarly the notion of “individual authorship” is under assault because the network integrates the contributions of everyone who works on a literary or artistic project. Intellectual property rights, while not a thing of the past, are being reinvented to deal with the reality of shared responsibility.

Individuals who think in the context of networks will frame possibilities differently than people who see things in only one way. Those who stay stuck in a single way of representing themselves and the world will be isolated and fearful. That very isolation makes the mutuality of networks — the kind of cooperative truth-seeking that would set them free — beyond their grasp. Because the Network itself generates the mutuality which makes ambiguity and complexity manageable, those who are well-connected will thrive, while those who are isolated will stay stuck in the downward spiral of self-defeating behaviors.

Economically as well as spiritually, conversion — the reversal of the downward spiral — is society’s responsibility. One task of our public institutions is to assist people in learning how to morph from anxiety to excitement, from paralysis in the face of change to flexibility.

One of the most profound changes occasioned by networks is the loss of privacy. We are even losing the possibility of getting lost. Because we are always observable, we can always be located. How will it change us to know that the light is always on?

A panopticon is a prison invented by Jeremy Benthem in the 19th century. It consisted of cells with glass doors arranged in a ring. Prisoners can see neither one another nor the guard but the guard can see them — all of the time.

People who know they can be observed behave differently. We censor ourselves. We give lip service to consensus reality but live private lives in hiding.

The networked world is a panopticon, but no Orwellian Big Brother is building it. We’re building it ourselves.

We’re like the inhabitants of New York described in the film, “My Dinner With Andre:” “It’s a new model for the concentration camp, the camp has been built by the inmates themselves, and the inmates are the guards, and they have this pride in this thing they’ve built–they’ve built their own prison–and so they’re both guards and prisoners. They no longer have the capacity to leave the prison they’ve made or even to see it as a prison.”

Individual and organizational privacy — invading it and protecting it — is big business and will get bigger. “Privacy brokers” who know how to encrypt, decipher, capture, or secure communications and proprietary information are a necessity in the networked world.

The privacy taken for granted in the past, when all it took was a walk outside to have a conversation behind a tree, is gone forever.

We will invent intermediate structures to protect ourselves from the prying eyes of the Net. We will need them to make sense of the vast sea of data that would otherwise remain inchoate, but they will also enable us to hide. We will increasingly interact with one another and with the Network through intelligent agents.

Applets, distributed objects, and software components communicate transparently among themselves, antecedents of the agents and avatars that will move through the arteries of the network. Some will act like digger shovels mining mountains of data for nuggets of gold. Some will act like virtual detectives. In their efforts to communicate with one another, do our bidding, and protect themselves at the same time, agents may collude or create cabals or even kill each other off. Some will evolve the skills they need to survive in the virtual world.

Agents are specialized applications that will be invested with our projections. We will personalize them, then believe in them. Microsoft’s “Bob” didn’t work out, but other smiley-faced interfaces will show up. The gods and heroes of Greek mythology were personifications of archetypes or aspects of our own souls. The Net will develop its own mythology and evolve personae to represent us. Invisible messengers, they will traverse the Net like demons and angels.

Some will be as powerful as gods.

To speak of the transformation of spirituality and religious systems in cyberspace is a way to say we are discovering new ways of framing ourselves in relationship to one another and to our gods. Our moral and ethical dilemmas, however, will resemble those we face today. Everything good and evil in human nature will be expressed on the Net. When we look into the Net, we will see ourselves.

The Net is a mirror of our hive mind, feeding back to us symbols of our new selves. Our interaction with the Net is a self-conscious dialectic, a rising spiral of symbiotic interaction. Do we speak our native language or does it speak us? Do we use computers to express ourselves — or do our networked computers use us to express the Net?

The Net is the backbone of a new nervous system, necessary to the infrastructure of a crowded planet. In the next century we will move in earnest into trans-planetary space. The Net is a good place to practice how to live in a universe that is more complex, more diverse, more gregarious than we — or our Networks — can imagine.

1995