Date: Sun, 21 Mar 1993 16:18 CDT
From: Sharon Boehlefeld <BOEHLEFELD@WISCSSC.BITNET>
Subject: File 12--A Few Final Words about CFP '93

With apologies to John Perry Barlow.....

I saw him in the halls and lobbies of the conference hotel several
times during CFP '93, but he was one of the few people I recognized
that I didn't approach. I kept thinking I would have opened my
mouth
and said something like I used to say to the farmers I grew up
with.
("So, what's the cattle market look like this morning?") And I
heard
he retired from that life. (So did some of those friends of
mine...when the bottom dropped out of the cattle market in the
mid-70s.)

But he mentioned in his luncheon talk that he likes to rely on
personal experience before he passes judgement on things. I tend to
agree.

So, anyone reading this will have to remember that this is my
perspective on the Third Conference on Computers, Freedom and
Privacy.
Let the reader beware.

I wondered what I'd said in my scholarship application that had
caught
the committee's (John McMullen's?) eye, and garnered me one of the
42
awarded this year. I'm still not sure how I got in, but I'm awfully
glad that I did. The conference was everything I'd hoped and
expected
it to be. Most of the folks I'd heard of were there. Some of them
were
on the program; some were just wandering around with the same
innocuous nametags that everyone wore. I had to do double takes
dozens
of times to realize just who I was talking or listening to. (I
mean,
really...there was this guy with a nametag that said "John
Draper"...and I overheard one attendee asking him, "Are you Captain
Crunch?" Should he really have needed to ask?)

Since the only people I'd seen before were Barlow and Mike Godwin,
there were plenty of unfamiliar faces waiting to be attached to
very
familiar names. Bruce Sterling, who so recently chronicled CFP's in
_The Hacker Crackdown_, was one of those previously faceless folks
to
me. But I think he finally decided I was OK to talk to; he even
gave
me a copy of his Agitprop disk. But it's in a Mac format and I
haven't
had a chance to look at it yet. A couple of days into the
conference I
decided the only point of disagreement I had with his book was his
description of Dorothy Denning. I kept look for this *old* woman.
(Maybe Bruce is just younger than I thought *he* was.)

Cliff Stoll has been photographed just enough that I knew who he
was
when I saw him. So did Rebecca Henderson, a sociology grad student
from the University of Washington. She smiled as he passed us
before
dinner Wednesday night, and after he walked by we quickly decided
to
ask him to join us if he wandered back our way. He did; we did;
and,
surprisingly, he said yes. After sharing a meal with him, I decided
it
really wasn't so surprising after all. He was funny, and witty, and
charming...and as down to earth as anyone I've ever known who
spends
much of his time wondering about the stars and the planets. He
regaled
us with the tale of how 'the book' was written, adding some
elements
that must have died at his editor's hands. (See, there's this other
English word that sounds like 'cuckoo' and that carries a whole
different set of connotations...but ask him yourself when you see
him.)

Phiber Optik was holding court with the other hackers most of the
times I saw him. Mostly I just tried to listen. I did have a sense,
though, that I was just too "straight" to be in that crowd. (Maybe
I'm
just too old.) But he and his crew seemed like most of the other
hackers I've met. And maybe I'm just a bit perverse, but I still
haven't met a hacker I didn't like...at least a little. This was
the
only time, though, that I got the impression that I couldn't just
walk
in, sit down, and be included in the conversation. Once I stopped
by a
group that was gathered in a lobby, and when they noticed I had
joined
them, a previously animated conversation ground to a halt. I just
walked away. Felt like one of those "common people, housewives"
with
the audacity to think I could be hanging around the nets, and the
el33te who populate them. Oh well...

One of the best parts of the conference for me, though, was meeting
four (count 'em...four) other sociology grad students who are
interested in cyberstudies. Marc Smith from UCLA, and Lori Kendall
and
Eva Skuratowicz, both from UC-Davis, and Rebecca (I already
mentioned
her), managed to locate each other by Wednesday morning. We decided
to
stay in touch, and Marc's already got the Virtual Center for the
Study
of Virtual Spaces up and running on a UCLA computer. We talked
about
organizing a session for CFP '94 in Chicago, and one for the
American
Sociological Society meetings in '94, too.

The only bad part about the conference was the pace. It was
daunting.
A week later I've decided that part of the problem with the pace
was
me. I was so caught up in where I was that I wanted to just absorb
every element of the conference. And I tried. But there are
limits...and I didn't get to meet everyone there, or talk to some
of
them for more than five minutes or so. Part of that is due, of
course,
to the fact that I actually attended most of the sessions. From the
first ones at 8:30 in the morning to the end of the "Birds of a
Feather" (BOF) sessions at 11 at night. What a grind. (The EFF BOF,
btw, wasn't the shouting match some folks had predicted in the
halls
earlier in the day. My money was on a generally calm discussion,
since
the reorganization was already a fait accompli.)

I finally had to admit defeat, and opted out of parts of a couple
of
sessions on Friday. I was out in the hall, in fact, on Friday when
I
heard what most resembled booing during the last formal session. I
popped back in a few minutes before it was over, and learned that
George Trubow had inadvertently offended some of the audience
members
with a remark he'd made.  (This was even before his
"point-counterpoint" session with Barlow.) I can't help but think
that
some of the acrimony could be attributed to the fact that I wasn't
the
only exhausted soul wandering the halls by then. Tolerance,
however,
seems to have prevailed.

Another of the fascinating elements of the conference, though, was
the
incredible mix of people. There were "names" of all sorts wandering
around with the rest of us. And some of the rest of us were pretty
fascinating folks in our own right.  I can't begin to explain how
interesting it was to meet people from poets to pilots to postmen
who
deal with computers in their daily lives. And all of those people
have
given some thought to the social ramifications of the technology.
(Given the nature of the conference, that's probably little more
than
a truism. But I also know I wasn't the only one there who voiced
the
notion that "Gee, I'm not the only one who's wondered about
(___fill
in the blank___)." )

And that may be the best thing about CFP. Folks have said it
before;
they'll undoubtedly say it again.

"There's people in them thar nets."

And I like them.

But, as does any attempt to translate life into a mediated form,
this
brief review falls far short of covering the experience that was
CFP
'93. Listening to some of the session tapes, reading the comments
others are sharing in various parts of the nets, will help to round
out a view of what happened. But, like cyberspace itself, CFP '93
is
now a "place that isn't a place."

I'm glad I was there while it was.

Sharon Boehlefeld
Sociology/University of Wisconsin-Madison

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