Idoru
No word yet on whether Aimi Eguchi will be changing her name to Rei Toei and marrying Rez.
Try explaining this one to someone from the nineteenth century: according to the Guardian, prisoners in China are being forced to ‘farm’ gold for World of Warcraft. The prisoners, who have been sentenced to hard labor, work on physical tasks by day. By night, they are forced to play World of Warcraft to generate virtual gold, which their guards then resell to players in the West.
It’s a concept that properly belongs in a cyberpunk novel, but the abuse is real. And maybe I’m wrong in suggesting that you couldn’t explain it to someone from the nineteenth century. People in positions of power have been exploiting others to get rich for most of recorded history, and people in comfortable situations have always enjoyed the results without asking too many questions about where it all came from. Everything I eat or use was probably created in part or in whole by someone whose working conditions and standard of living are very much less comfortable than mine.
I’d always hoped that information technology might be a great equalizer, allowing poor countries with smart people to compete head-to-head with the rich world. To some extent, that’s proved true: look at the growth of the outsourcing industry in India and elsewhere. But the flip side of the IT revolution is that mindless rote tasks can also be exported, to be performed by people who are reduced to pairs of eyes and hands, their economic value determined by work that brings in fractions of a penny for every operation. As the Chinese example shows, it’s a sector that is ripe for coercion and abuse.
In the film “The Matrix”, the sinister world of the intelligent machines is powered by immense farms of human beings, locked up in individual capsules to generate energy for their mechanical masters. As a concept, this always struck me as poetic but impractical: the human being is hardly an efficient source of the kind of energy that machines would need. Still, in a metaphorical sense, that might be where we’re headed. Maybe we’re already living in a Mechanical Turk future, with vast populations of information workers in cramped cells churning away at repetitive tasks, making intangible assets in imaginary spaces for someone else’s benefit - and amusement.
We live in the future. More specifically, we live in William Gibson’s cyberpunk future.
Microsoft has acknowledged the existence of a bug affecting ‘all versions of Windows’, that allows attackers to trigger execution of malicious software via a shortcut link. It’s a serious bug, and one that’s apparently ripe for exploitation.
The flaw is already being exploited, and experts predict more attacks will follow. What’s interesting, however, is that the first observed attacks using the exploit have an unusual goal. Instead of trying to turn the hijacked home or office PCs into spam relays, pestering their unlucky owners with ads, or trying to steal passwords and credit card numbers - the standard repertoire - the attack targeted systems used as controllers for industrial machinery. Moreover, according to information put out by Siemens, the goal of the malware wasn’t to disrupt the connected systems (a recurrent nightmare scenario in a world where heavy machinery and essential utilities are increasingly controlled by computers running mass-market OS’s), but to “steal secrets from manufacturing plants and other industrial facilities”.
Computer hackers using sophisticated malware to conduct corporate espionage? This is the stuff of cyberpunk fiction. The future’s so bright, we gotta wear mirrorshades.
Wake up and smell the zeitgeist. The idea of ordinary Brazilians - and criminals - using US military satellites as a free communications channel is something that could have come straight out of a William Gibson novel (now I come to think of it, the protagonists in Vernor Vinge’s novella “True Names and Other Dangers”, which may be the original cyberpunk novel, do a fair amount of satellite hacking).
It’s more than just the technological aspects. One of the leitmotifs of cyberpunk is the story told from the point of view of the ‘rats in the walls’, the people who are shut out of the society of the wealthy and powerful, but who use their ingenuity to subvert and exploit their technology for their own ends. As an expression of that, you can hardly do better than the idea of ordinary people in the developing world hitching a free ride on equipment belonging to the world’s most powerful military.
Evidently, it’s later than we thought.
