[12825] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
My Beat is Cyberspace - Episode 15
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (The future Ross Stapleton-Gray)
Mon May 30 10:05:10 1994
Date: Sun, 29 May 1994 20:02:42 -0700 (MST)
From: The future Ross Stapleton-Gray <STAPLETON@bpa.arizona.edu>
To: com-priv@psi.com
My Beat is Cyberspace - Episode 15, "Reach Out and Touch Someone"
The pawn shop turned up nada, and I decided to switch gears and get by
with a little help from an old acquaintance from the seamier end of
Cyberspace. I hailed a taxi and headed uptown to see a certain
someone...
Ms. Amour (Polly-Jean to her friends, whether longstanding or by the
hour) ran a virtual bordello out of a swanky loft uptown. She'd made
her fortune back in the 90s, when she'd secured the patent on CU-DoMe,
a commercial spin-off of an abortive collaboration between NSF and the
Department of Education for sex education distance learning. I
knocked on the well-appointed door, which bore shiny gold-leaf
lettering, "NaughtyButNICERNet," and waited all of a second and a half
before the door swung open.
"Ms. Amour," I grinned, "you've done well for yourself." And she had,
too. I've never been one to let an opportunity for diplomacy elude me,
but the Polly-Jean I saw draped against the doorframe, dripping with
pearls and with a fine veneer of a smile, was a far cry from the small-
town kid I used to know.
I knew how she had gotten where she was, and I admired her spunk.
She'd been a librarian before the Big Crunch, when all of the money for
schools and libraries sluiced down the drain of the S&L managers' gold-
plated tubs. When the Federal troops supervised the telcos'
installation of the last mile of fiber to them in December of 1999, the
schools, libraries and clinics were empty shells: most of the kids were
at home, being spoon-fed civics on The Barney Channel, and re-enacting
the Battle of South Central in telehistory. But nobody bothered to
tell the teachers, and they haunted the buildings, booting and
rebooting old Apple IIs, and punching the shreds of ancient time cards.
The first public school district to be "sweated," as they call it, was
in Kansas: some big shot from New York got a judge to creatively
interpret "must carry" regulations, and secured a OC-256 pipe to pump
petabytes of offshore data into the KC schools for jobbing out to
unemployed teachers and anyone else who could do simple editing for
pennies an hour. Most of the work was in close-captioning imported
Malaysian soft-core to comply with the Freeh-Love Info Highways Ready
Access Act of '96. Polly-Jean had played her cards right, and hired a
hundred of the randier teachers away to work the fiber on the profit
end of her first interactive "hospitality net"... between that and
farming the rights to CU-DoMe out to a horde of hungry East Asian
resellers she had quickly amassed a cool megasimoleon or so.
"How's tricks?" I coulda been a hell of a lot cleverer, but there are
times when dumb-as-a-brick obvious lines gotta be said.
"Pretty good, Sam" she lilted, and the veneer dissolved into a genuine
grin. "How's by you?"
"I'm on a case, doll," I said, "and I need information..."
