by Bruce Sterling

About the author: A science fiction writer and the author of the nonfiction book The Hacker Crackdown, Bruce Sterling is a contributing writer for Wired, a monthly magazine covering telecommunications.

I’m an author and I’m interested in free expression. That’s only natural because that’s my bailiwick. Free expression is a problem for writers, and it’s always been a problem, and it’s probably always gonna be a problem. We in the West have these ancient and honored traditions of free speech and freedom of the press, and in the United States we have this rather more up-to-date concept of “freedom of information.” But even so, there is an enormous amount of “information” today that is highly problematic. Just because freedom...