Living in the Future

[vin_petrol]

It struck me recently that Wikileaks now represents another Science Fiction idea I read years starting to form in real life.

John Brunner's 1975 book The Shockwave Rider contains something very similar. Allow me to copy and paste a small amount of Wikipedia:

"The worm is eventually activated, and the details of all the government's dark secrets (clandestine genetic experimentation that produces crippled children, bribes and kickbacks from corporations, concealed crimes of high public officials) now become accessible from anywhere on the network"

The book was written in 1975, but I seem to recall reading shortly after the first ever Internet worm got loose in 1988. I have a memory of reading it in the library of the Computer Science department at University, probably when I should actually have been doing some studying for something more relevant to getting a good grade in my CompSci degree :-)

OK, so wikileaks still relies on humans to leak the files to it, but it's getting there.

It's interesting that in the book this revolution does lead to social change, and the book ends optimistically. We shall see...

Comments

[andrewducker]

See also The Transparent Society (from David Brin's "Earth"). Where privacy is a matter of social convention and secrets are both effectively impossible and illegal.

[vin_petrol]

<checks Wikipedia entry for book>

Ooh, looks interesting. Argh! Another good book to read :-)

<stares at "to read" shelf, groaning under weight of books>

[andrewducker]

You can get the majority of the gist from this article on Wired:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/fftransparent.html

Heh

[angryangeltoo.livejournal.com]

You just made me go get my copy from my bookshelf I love the shockwave rider, one of the first cyberpunk books I read :D

Re: Heh

[vin_petrol]

I don't actually have a copy. I think I had borrowed it from the library.

I actually managed to read cyberpunk before it was even called that. I read "Burning Chrome" in the July 1982 issue of Omni. It totally blew my mind, and is one of the reasons I ended up in IT (srsly!)