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Neal Stephenson on Digital Village
Doran writes: "We interviewed Neal Stephenson this Wednesday morning for Digital Village and will be playing Part One of the tape this Saturday and Part Two on April 29th. We discussed his recent talk at CFP2000, his thoughts on Open Source vs. Everything Else, and how the cypherpunks have received latest effort. It starts a little slow (it was 6 a.m. for us, 9 a.m. for him) but once we got going, it was pretty interesting. For those of you not in Southern California, we'll be posting the program in RealAudio by Sunday evening.
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Q: Which reminds me. Why do you guys talk about politics so much? Isn't this a show about computers?
A: Digital Village is actually a program about communication and technology. When we started the program, we found there were a number of other computer programs on radio (Gina Smith, etc.) and TV (Computer Chronicles, etc.) that talked about the hardware. And that's good, because people wanted and needed to know more about how a computer worked.
But there weren't any programs on the air that focused on the social and cultural ramifications of computers and the Internet (and the whole telecommunications revolution). We decided that we'd be that program. We agreed to focus on this impact until we ran out of topics. That agreement still stands.
Don't get me wrong. Ric and I enjoy the toys and want to talk about the goodies too. But the core of the show is how these technologies are *fundamentally* changing the way we communicate. I can't overstate that point. Because of this, we'll never in good conscience be able to ignore the politics of a digital society.
I'm glad that this is being discussed on traditional media rather than just on the Internet alone. If enough people listen to that station and if we can put "The Slashdot Show" or something on it, we can get our message about freedom out. I personally haven't listened to the station or the show, though the show looks interesting with or without Neal Stephenson.
US businesses that currently accept chip and PIN/signature
If this continues, we'll have to rename all our habitat to correspond with the new convention into something like the following:
Silicon Valley - Digital Hell
Berkley - Digital Heaven
Xerox - Digital Gods
IBM - Digital Goliath
Microsoft - Digital Terrorists
DEC - ? Analog company ?
Cisco - Digits Commute
AT&T - Digital Washroom
Apple - Digital Fruits
etc
You can't handle the truth.
No, Unfortunately we won't be able to post the audio until after it airs on the station (they get first use since we recorded it with their equipment). It WILL be posted next weekend, barring another power outage. I did send an update to /. yesterday, hoping it would be received before this story went up. Alas, it was not meant to be. -db