Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    

Last time I checked, Rimm worked for a company called Dialogics, which
specializes in computer-telephony products. Rimm is a salesperson for the
company, whose products are critical to ... phone-sex services, among
others.
  

    

That's tremendous.

Mike, what advice would you give an intelligent educator or parent who
is trying to do the right thing by the children s/he cares about? What
about the adult mentors of high school students? 

And what advice would you give directly to the young people?
  

    

Well, I'm not sure I have enough experience as a parent to feel comfortable
giving advice to other parents (and I'm not sure I'll ever have enough, to
be frank). But I can say that the focus for me and for Ariel's mother has
been less on trying to shape what our child sees than it has on trying to
shape what she *values*. It's a big, diverse, pluralistic world out there,
and it's hubristic to imagine that we that we can control to any great
degree how much of that world's speech our children hear. What we can do
with a somewhat greater degree of confidence is communicate our values to
our children, so that they disapprove of the kinds of things that we
disapprove of. Hence the emphasis (for us at least) on values rather than
censorship (of the Internet or anything else).

Beyond that, I think there is very little I can say to parents (or mentors)
that's very comforting, because the fact is that children have wills of
their own, and lives of their own, and even so even the best-supervised
children often don't turn out the way we'd expect them to. The best we can
do is love them and teach them what we think is important -- if we do that
right, the odds are that they'll be strong enough to handle whatever they
encounter in the larger world, including the larger world of the Net.

As far as the everpresent fear of strangers on the Internet goes, I think
kids who receive and follow the advice with regard to strangers that
today's adults got 20, 30, and 40 years ago will be fine.

To "young people" I'd say "Be patient with your parents. They may turn out
to know something, even if they can't configure TCP/IP on the family
Gateway."
  

    
Shape the kid's values? Good luck.

(Although it is surprising how well my kids are turning out now that
they are adults.)
  

    

Note my qualified statements with regard to shaping kids' values.
  

    
what kind of validation can you give to Gore's comments recently in regards
to internet voters?  Do you cover any of these kind of revelations in your
book?
  

    

I've missed Gore's comments -- can you reprise them here for me?
  

    

Gore noted that he wanted to see a new era of voter registration and
internet voting.  He see this as a new chioce for a faster paced electorate.
 He feels that there are safeguards that can be used for fraud detection
that will allow national, state, county and state elcection to be done in
the privacy of one's home, freeing up the time it takes to register
(registration up to the day of the election) and take the hassle out of
going to the voting booth.  He noted that he feels this will increase the
voting electorate considerably, giving more Americans the ability and time
to vote.  (I think that about sums it up)
  

    

Hmmm.  Fraud is still a question even with vote-by-snail-mail, which is less
easy to duplicate and stuff ballot boxes than electronic communications
should be.  Maybe a pgp signature...  yet another argument for stronger
encription than the feds have wanted to offer.
  

    <scribbled by silly Fri 11 Aug 00 09:28>
  

    

dwaite, I don't really deal with electronic voting at all in CYBER RIGHTS.
What Gore says sounds right -- electronic voting will certainly increase the
percentage of eligible voters who vote. But I see no particular reason
to limit alternative voting methods to the Internet -- how about the
telephone system, which reaches more people? I mean, if I can order
movie tickets with a credit card over the phone, I can probably vote
by phone (without a credit card).
  

    

Good point...  He address those less fortunate, in as much mentioning
efforts to get all public libraires online and offer the services to those
who are without computers.  Then again, as soon as I mention public
libriaries, I think about potentials for local communities to censor and
block access where others have no access.
  

    

I wonder whether Internet access in libraries will do much to revivify the
notion of the library as a civic center. I hope it does. But if that were
my project, I'd spend the most money on enabling libraries to serve coffee
and snacks, like Border's and Barnes and Noble.
  

    
Maybe extend their hours like a good bookstore, too.

Say, Mike, here's something I wonder about, and which I know you won't shy
away from.  Reading Cyber Rights, I am struck by your description of various
online hangouts, and their role in informing and galvanizing you and others.
I'm sure you also have had that slightly obsessive experience of having a
good long romp though your conference list and then wondered where the
evening or the afternoon vanished to.  I know for many people, online
hangouts are almost too tempting, and more of a distraction than a career
aid, but you seen to have maintained a balance.

Does it feel that way to you?  How did your online relationshihps contribute
to your work in online civil liberties, and did they ever get in the way?

Oh... and what was that Austin BBS scene really like?
  

    
Well, I'm not sure that I've maintained quite the balance I should
have, Gail. I think I got more book-reading done before joining the
WELL.

As to my online experiences informing my civil-liberties work, well,
they've been immensely helpful. One sees all the ways in which freedom
of speech can play out in cyberspace, and one has many opportunities to
learn to be tolerant of differing viewpoints. (I'm putting this in the
nicest possible way.) I know I've been tempted into immoderate speech
in the past, and I've seen the same thing happen to others, and that's
been instructive.

I've seen places like the WELL demonstrate both the best and the worst
aspects of small communities, and I think the best and worst may be
intimately connected. And understanding the dynamics and needs of
virtual communities has shaped my thinking of what the proper legal and
constitutional frameworks of cyberspace should be. (I'm the person who
insisted that the term "virtual communities" appear in the final
Supreme Court brief for the plaintiffs in Reno v. ACLU. Or perhaps
"insisted" is not the right word -- I begged and pleaded and got my
way.)

Talking about legal and constitutional issues on the WELL has kept me
sharp and improved my ability to think about them and write about them,
I feel. And occasionally one gets a powerful inspiration -- it was a
posting by <dkline> that got me thinking about how to seize the
pro-parent rhetoric away from the censors in the fight against the
Communications Decency Act.

Austin BBSs were a great preparation for the WELL. There were dozens
of active BBSs in Austin during the 1980s, and even though individual
ones were small, many of us hung out on more than one. A BBS and its
postings and membership might be about the size of a WELL conference --
all the BBSs together added up to a pretty thriving community. I used
to log into BBSs in one tiny window of my Mac Plus, all the while
working on legal outlines and notes in another window. (You could do
this in the days prior to Windows and Mac System 7 by using Desk
Accessory programs.) It was good for me to have frequent contact with
non-law-students.
  

    

Was the writing process enjoyable for you or was it more like a lengthy
labored childbirth? Do you think you have one or more future books in
you?
  

    <scribbled by mnemonic Sat 21 Aug 99 16:49>
  

    

Some parts of the book came easily, and others came hard. Possibly the
single easiest long stretch of writing had to do with day-by-day account of
the Rimm scandal. I wrote 10 or 12 thousand words in three days, and they
appear only slightly edited in the book.

Dealing with the CDA fight was the hardest -- I rewrote that chapter several
times, and at one point it was actually three chapters. Condensing it and
keeping it current (we won the Supreme Court victory between the first and
revised drafts of CYBER RIGHTS) was very taxing, and I ultimately had to
sacrifice a passage that I had really poured my heart and soul into, and
that I thought drew the connection between the WELL, the Rimm scandal, and
the fight against the CDA very well. But it didn't fit, and ultimately I
agreed with my editor that it needed to go.

I think I have more books in me, but want to make sure I pick the right
project. A couple of the possible projects are novels -- one a thriller
involving a lawyer who's rebuilding his life after the murder of his wife,
and the other a comic/sf story about the Mafia and UFO aliens facing off
in the Nevada desert in the late 1940s.
  

    

Ariel (my daughter) has just discovered a Hello Kitty site
--<http://www.groovygames.com/kitty>. I know this because she just sent me a
custom postcard from the site.
  

    
> the other a comic/sf story about the Mafia and UFO aliens facing off
>  in the Nevada desert in the late 1940s.

That sounds like something I'd love to read, Mike. Can you say more about
the plot line?
  

    

Well, it occurred to me a few months back that the first wave of UFOs
appeared in the sky over the American Southwest in the late 1940s, right
when Las Vegas and Reno were being staked out by organized crime as homes
for legalized gambling. And I found myself wondering what a turf war between
mobsters and ETs would look like and whether the crash at Roswell, NM,
might have been caused by gang warfare.

I'm still working this out.
  

    

Looking forward to seeing what you come up with!
  

    
Wow!
  

    

Sounds like *Men in Black* meets *Analyze This*.  Write
up a treatment, and we'll call my people.
  

    

Nah. Do the wacky SF novel first. We need more wacky SF novels. Then
make 'em pay for the film rights.