Electric Dreams
© Copyright 1994-2002 , Rishab Aiyer Ghosh. All rights reserved.


See also my article on Cooking-pot markets - an economic model for free goods and services on the Internet, and the interview with Linus Torvalds on the same topic.

Send me mail at: rishab@dxm.org


Electric Dreams
Weekly column for the Asian Age newspaper
by Rishab Aiyer Ghosh (rishab@dxm.org), Copyright and all rights reserved


#1, 21/February/1994: Lose your illusion Virtual reality intro
#2, 28/February/1994: All together now... Cyberspace intro
#3, 7/March/1994: Digital chatter, signatures and more. Cryptography technology intro
#4, 14/March/1994: Big Brother inside Clipper/Digital Telephony
#5, 21/March/1994: Talking to a machine Voice recognition and interfaces
#6, 28/March/1994: Cyberbanking and Digital Cash anonymous digital cash intro
#7, 11/April/1994: Neural wiring for silicon brains Neural networks
#8, 18/April/1994: Reading books and saving trees Electronic libraries, copyright
#9, 25/April/1994: Those microscopic factory workers Nanotechnology
#10, 2/May/1994: Information agents as guides in cyberspace Intelligent agents, knowbots
#11, 9/May/1994: Property rights in a new age Intellectual property rights and the Net
#12, 16/May/1994: I e-mail, therefore I am Anonymity and identity
#13, 23/May/1994: When the Net goes commercial... Implications of commercialization, CommerceNet
#14, 30/May/1994: Beaming up to the grocery store Teleshopping
#15, 6/June/1994: Living inside a book MUDs, entertainment and education
#16, 13/June/1994: News on the wires News and the Net, top-down vs bottom-up journalism
#17, 20/June/1994: Utilities on the information superhighway Profitable, affordable public information utilities
#18, 27/June/1994: All work and no play... Video games go Hollywood
#19, 4/July/1994: The wild west of cyberspace Cryptoanarchy intro
#20, 11/July/1994: How digital children grow up Babies don't need textbooks. They could use some VR
#21, 18/July/1994: Reading order into chaos Chaos theory intro
#22, 25/July/1994: Chasing comets down the wires Shoemaker-Levy 9, LIVE in cyberspace!
#23, 8/August/1994: The Internet - What's in it for YOU Part 1 of 3 on getting onto the Net
#24, 15/August/1994: The Internet - Netiquette, flames and kill files Part 2 of 3 on getting onto the Net
#25, 22/August/1994: The Internet - Getting on and moving about Part 3 of 3 on getting onto the Net
#26, 29/August/1994: Distributed minds - the cyberorganism Cyberspace is humankind's collective brain; human-computer interfaces
#27, 5/September/1994: Virtual theatre - Art in cyberspace Drama, literature, art
#28, 12/September/1994: Green wires - saving the planet in cyberspace Environmental resources
#29, 19/September/1994: Tongue twisters - digitizing human languages Language and the information economy; automatic translation systems
#30, 26/September/1994: Lamplighters in cyberspace Digital appliance microcontrollers; Little Brother; Echelon
#31, 3/October/1994: Herbs and cyberspice - what's cooking on the Net Cuisine, food resources and recipes
#32, 10/October/1994: Telepathy - making computers foretell Intelligent interfaces; auto-customization; behaviour recognition
#33, 17/October/1994: The friendly inhabitants of cyberspace Why royalty-free standards spread; informality on the Net
#34, 24/October/1994: Information farms in developing countries The radical nature of the information revolution against the industrial
#35, 31/October/1994: Selling privacy as a commodity The value of privacy; profiling services; public libraries
#36, 7/November/1994: Knowledge brokers and the decline of corporations Stock exchange as a corporate model for the information economy
#37, 21/November/1994: The rise of an information barter economy Cooking-pot markets, knowledge for nothing, CIX
#38, 28/November/1994: The owners and controllers of cyberspace Could someone take over the Internet?
#39, 5/December/1994: The explosion of diverse cultures Mainstreaming is dead. De-streaming has begun.
#40, 12/December/1994: Processing data, information and knowledge Natural language processing; statistical text-keying; concept searches
#41, 19/December/1994: Envelopes speak - tracking information flow Traffic analysis; Anonymous untraceable remailers; DC-Nets
#42, 2/January/1995: Information highways, oceans and islands Cyberspace is an ocean; 'distance' in cyberspace and brickspace
#43, 9/January/1995: Gateways to the infosphere Universal service unnecessary; Bombay slums have TV, no clean water
#44, 16/January/1995: When a word is worth a thousand pictures Why videoconferencing is not so hot; visual pseudonymity
#45, 23/January/1995: Being analogue - when digital is not enough Boolean algebra, analogue VLSI, optical and bio- and quantum computing
#46, 30/January/1995: Tribes, cyberspace and the communication society History repeating itself: common property, tribal justice, decentralization
#47, 6/February/1995: Labour and capital in a post-industrial economy Knowledge labour overtakes knowledge capital
#48, 13/February/1995: Digging up the past in cyberspace Cave paintings only found online; digital museums etc
#49, 20/February/1995: Knowledge, control and digital democracy Distributed control goes against the nation state
#50, 27/February/1995: Burying the media magnate Shopping for dreams vs creating your own; media conglomerates fade
#51, 13/March/1995: When goods and payments are both just data Money wants to be free; private currencies; segmented economies
#52, 20/March/1995: Feeling your way through cyberspace Electro-sensory stimulation; images without screens
#53, 27/March/1995: An orderly anarchy World Orders a la carte; the loosing battle of governments and companies
#54, 3/April/1995: No war in an anarchy No cybernations; non-competitive co-dependent distributed local economies
#55, 10/April/1995: Fewer middlemen, fewer poor The information age will have less intermediaries, and less poverty
#56, 17/April/1995: Keeping information useful Reliability, virtual expertise & unrestricted information; epistemic logic
#57, 24/April/1995: Computing in the fourth dimension Time and causality; temporal logic and neural nets; bringing data alive
#58, 1/May/1995: Cyberspace's juries need no judges Jurisdiction over cyberspace; distributed and voluntary justice
#59, 15/May/1995: Censorship is bad for business Freedom of information implies success in an information economy
#60, 22/May/1995: Laws work without enforcement Goodwill law based on acceptance; the pen finally mightier than the sword
#61, 29/May/1995: Crime classified in cyberspace Knowledge crime, information crime and data crime
#62, 5/June/1995: Fines and exile but no cyberjails Reputations are fines of social standing; punishment and goodwill law
#63, 19/June/1995: The problem with infinity Infinite information and value; creation with consistency and variety
#64, 3/July/1995: Traders and originators Relationships dominate the consistent content business; traders fade
#65, 10/July/1995: Trade reborn through diversity Trade in variety - where the value of content is in diversity
#66, 24/July/1995: Trading in people Bits, not atoms, perhaps. But the value is in the people behind the bits
#67, 31/July/1995: Paying your readers People matter, at both ends of the content stream
#68, 7/August/1995: The age of information, or of illusion? When information feeds on itself, you have only hype
#69, 14/August/1995: Knowledge, the fifth dimension The knowledge economy can be quite independent of industry - space-time
#70, 21/August/1995: Implicit transactions need money you can give away The currency that matches the nature of information: reputation
#71, 4/September/1995: Advertisements are simply information products An ad is a product, just like a magazine...
#72, 11/September/1995: Not content or superhighways, but bridges Those who customise others' products make money in niche markets
#73, 18/September/1995: From corporations to guilds Organising people by knowledge rather than by monetary capital
#74, 25/September/1995: Following the knowledge flow The efficient flow of knowledge is not the same as that of capital
#75, 9/October/1995: Reality and abstract economies Entities in cyberspace need not be "real" to be good for business
#76, 23/October/1995: The mirage of infinite bandwidth Centralised servers and infinite bandwidth vs distributed computing
#77, 30/October/1995: When the world moves too fast You make money when you stop to think
#78, 13/November/1995: A World Court for knowledge? Need a global justice system for knowledge be the one we have?
#79, 20/November/1995: Ruling by consensus Flat social structure vs democracy; informal rule
#80, 27/November/1995: Knowledge, revolution, and cotton-mill capitalism Revolution takes a long time


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