True Names Quotes

“If some genie offered you three wishes, would not your first one be, “Tell me, please, what is it that I want the most!”
― Vernor Vinge, True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier

“I think the Mailman is taking us on one at a time, starting with the weakest, drawing us in far enough to learn our True Names—and then destroying us.”
― Vernor Vinge, True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier

“consider the table in your dining room; your conscious mind sees it as having a familiar function, form, and purpose: a table is “a thing to put things on.” However, our science tells us that this is only in the mind; all that’s “really there” is a society of countless molecules. The table seems to hold its shape only because some of those molecules are constrained to vibrate near one another, because of certain properties of the force fields which keep them from pursuing independent paths.”
― Vernor Vinge, True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier

“It is paradoxical that these are just the times when we say we are “confused,” because it is very intelligent to know so much about oneself that one can say that—in contrast merely to being confused and not even knowing it.”
― Vernor Vinge, True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier

“People frequently tell me that they’re absolutely certain that no computer could ever be sentient, conscious, self-willed, or in any other way “aware” of itself. They’re often shocked when I ask what makes them sure that they, themselves, possess these admirable qualities.”
― Vernor Vinge, True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier

“Processors kept getting faster, memories larger. What now took a planet’s resources would someday be possessed by everyone.”
― Vernor Vinge, True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier

“Workers who had any resources became data commuters and lived outside the cities.”
― Vernor Vinge, True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier

“One of the vandals’ favorite sports—and one that even the moderately skilled could indulge in—was to infiltrate one of these office complexes and simulate higher level input to make absurd and impossible demands on the local staff.”
― Vernor Vinge, True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier

“The one bringing up the rear carried an old-style recoilless rifle decorated with swastikas and chrome.”
― Vernor Vinge, True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier

“They were wild dogs now, large enough so as not likely to be bothered, small enough to be mistaken for the amateur users that are seen more and more in the Other Plane as the price of Portals declines and the skill of the public increases.”
― Vernor Vinge, True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier

“Erythrina seemed frozen for a moment, and he realized that she too must be using the low-altitude satellite net for preliminary processing: her task had just been handed off from one comsat to a nearer bird. Ordinarily it was easy to disguise the hesitation.”
― Vernor Vinge, True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier

“Mr. Slippery suspected that most banks still looked wistfully back to the days of credit cards and COBOL.)”
― Vernor Vinge, True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier

“he had no trust for the government standard encryption routines, but preferred the schemes that had leaked out of academia—over NSA’s petulant objections—during the last fifteen years.)”
― Vernor Vinge, True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier

“Like most exurb data-commuters, Pollack rented the standard optical links: Bell, Boeing, Nippon Electric.”
― Vernor Vinge, True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier

“he had traced through three changes of carrier and found a place to do his intermediate computing. The comsats rented processor time almost as cheaply as ground stations, and an automatic payment transaction (through several dummy accounts set up over the last several years) gave him sole control of a large data space within milliseconds of his request.”
― Vernor Vinge, True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier

“As frightened as I am by the prospect of this change, I am also thrilled by it. I love what we are, yet I cannot help but hope that we are capable of turning into something better. We humans can be selfish, foolish, shortsighted, even cruel. Just as I can imagine these weaknesses as vestiges of our (almost) discarded animal past, I can imagine our best traits—our kindness, our creativity, our capacity to love—as hints of our future. This is the basis for my hope. I know I am a relic. I am a presymbiotic kind of person, born during the time of our transition. Yet, I feel lucky to have been given a glimpse of our promise. I am overwhelmed when I think of it … by the sweet sad love of what we were, and by the frightening beauty of what we might become. True Nyms and Crypto Anarchy Timothy C.”
― Vernor Vinge, True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier

“I cannot help but feel ambivalent at the prospect of this brave new world, in which I will be a small part of a symbiotic organism that I can barely comprehend. But then, I am a product of another kind of society, one that celebrates the individual. My sense of identity, my very sense of survival, is based on a resistance to becoming something else. Just as one of my hunting-gathering ancestors would surely reject my modern city life, so do I feel myself rebelling at this metamorphosis. This is natural. I imagine that caterpillars are skeptical of butterflies.”
― Vernor Vinge, True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier

“In 1851, Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote, “Is it a fact—or have I dreamed it—that, by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time? Rather, the round globe is a vast head, a brain, instinct with intelligence!” Now, more than a century later, we can see the signs of his vision.”
― Vernor Vinge, True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier

“It seems to me that it’s still an open question whether computers and networks will help or hurt human freedom—but this is one place where the extreme scenarios are also the most plausible. I think we could easily go in the direction Tim May indicates, perhaps ending up with a world very like the one in Neal Stephenson’s Diamond Age. On the other hand, there are the “Four Horsemen” that Tim, Alan, and Lenny remark upon. All four Horsemen are good excuses for the incremental tightening of regulation and enforcement (some being more effective with one constituency than another), but I think the “Terrorist Horseman” is the one that could shift our whole society toward strict controls. Just a few really ghastly terrorist incidents would be enough to cause a sea change in public opinion. It’s not hard to imagine the entire country run the way airports were run in the late twentieth century. But there are worse nightmares: Imagine a government that mandated control of some part of each communicating microchip. In that case, the computing power of the Internet could be used for much tighter control than George Orwell described.”
― Vernor Vinge, True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier

“It is notable that the response to each public tragedy or threat in modern America seems to involve a call for citizens to surrender more of their rights.”
― Vernor Vinge, True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier

“The freedom of expression and entrepreneurship that have characterized the Internet to date would be a thing of the past, and the Internet, which has until now resisted the forces of corporate clout, and has maintained open and equal access for individuals as well as for corporate entities, would become a failed dream”
― Vernor Vinge, True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier