Speaker by Various Artists

In case you hadn’t picked up on this already, the title of my speech tonight is firmly tongue in cheek. The title of Barack Obama’s first volume of memoirs is The Audacity of Hope. My facetious suggestion is that our own Great Pretender should call his memoirs The Audacity of Hype. Call me a cynic if you must , but it strikes me that John Key’s reputation and rise to political prominence has been enabled by fairly shameless marketing and spin.

You could say this is true of many politicians, but I think Key is a case worthy of special examination – mainly because he could be our next Prime Minister. Yes, all politicians are public constructs to a certain extent … perception being reality, as we’re so often and glibly reminded by political commentators, they contrive to present an electable persona based on aspects of their real selves and a grab-bag of focus-grouped viewpoints and talking points.

But Key seems to need the grab-bag more than most. This is a guy, recall, who when asked where he stood in 1981 on the Springbok tour, pretended he couldn’t remember. Now, I wasn’t even in the country in 1981 and furthermore I was in the middle of an adventurous phase of my life that involved the consumption of various substances both legal and illegal, and I can remember what I thought. What is Key’s problem that he is so palpably nervous about expressing a position without apparently first running it by the backroom boys for likely electoral appeal?

At times he simply plays to whichever gallery he’s facing. On the matter of his religious beliefs he has variously said, talking to students in Victoria University’s Salient student newspaper: “I’m not deeply religious, and I don’t believe in life after death.”
When talking to the born-again reactionary editor of Investigate Magazine: “I have lived my life by Christian principles.”
And to the readers of the Jewish Chronicle: “I will be the third Jewish prime minister in New Zealand.”
As the Labour affiliated website The Standard observed, this actually makes Key the Ken doll of Kiwi politics - he’ll be whoever you want him to be. The Standard went on to note that both Key and Ken were born in 1961, and opined that contrary to media wisdom, he has more in common with the plastic toy than with Barack Obama.

Something he probably also shares with Ken is a certain kind of innocence. Key is on record as claiming to have never taken drugs, even a puff on a joint. Now, that must seem to him to be a safe position to adopt, but really this is one issue he perhaps should have checked first with marketing. He’s exactly the same age as me as well as Ken, and let me tell you, it would have been pretty remarkable to get through the 70s and 80s of our youth without at least finding out what certain things were like, even if you ended up avoiding them for the rest of your life. I wonder how many middle-aged Kiwis would really be much concerned about the admission of a bit of youthful experimentation. I do know plenty who would look askance at someone so naïve and incurious as to have never even been tempted.

My point is, he’s either being disingenuous, or he’s inviting the obvious question: can we trust the country to a man so patently unworldly?

Key has routinely made himself out to be the blandest, least offensive, beige-coloured politician whenever questioned about matters of personal history or taste. As a friend of mine of similar vintage observed, our generation has now thrown up its political figurehead and he turns out to be a former forex dealer who likes Robbie Williams and owns a MacMansion at Omaha Beach. What have we done to deserve this?

Even Barack Obama has got away with admitting to a little drug experimentation when he was younger. Apparently, unlike the previous White House Democrat, he even inhaled! He’s also black, has an Islamic middle name and was linked to a firebrand paranoid preacher … and he’s still the likeliest next president of the USA. John Key can really afford to get a little more interesting.

But, apart from the diverting spectacle of watching early season episodes of the great American political reality show, are there any deeper lessons for us in all the arcane rituals of choosing a president? After all, we may have already chosen our next prime minister by the time the US finally gets around to its own electoral climax. And we have been told for years now that our own election campaigns have become increasingly “presidential” in style.

Sticking to the Democratic race for now, there’s a certain superficial similarity in the race between an older experienced woman and younger man peddling a message of “hope”. Hillary Clinton is very much Helen Clark’s vintage - not to mention sharing her initials - while Obama is exactly the same age as John Key (and Ken, and me). While it’s true that Key isn’t quite as black as Obama, he is very much trading on the impression of freshness and generational change versus institutional exhaustion and the corruptions of power.

Both elections will be low down and dirty, but negative campaigns are also a proven turnoff, so the other similarity will be the meta-messages designed to inspire or at least reassure. Labour’s may well be another version of the “don’t trust these bastards, look what they did last time” theme that was wheeled out in 2005, sugar-coated with appeals to Clark’s proven experience and competence (shades of Hillary there, too). In fact, I look forward to Helen’s version of Hillary’s famous red phone commercial, in which she asked her fellow Americans who they wanted picking up the hotline at 3am – the young untested dude or the trusted elder stateswoman. In Helen’s version I imagine her rolling over and saying, “Get that would you Peter …”

In some ways, though, Key reminds me less of Ken or Obama than of another prototype prefabricated politician. He’s gone now – and how suddenly! – yet the ghost of Tony Blair still haunts modern image politics. Some people liken Key to the British Conservative Party leader David Cameron – even younger than Key, by the way, but a man prone to making the same sorts of noises about being a “modern compassionate conservative” and the need to “create a new style of politics”. But Cameron himself is in turn a response to the Blair phenomenon, which was essentially a masterly act of party political re-branding.

Clues to the New Zealand National Party’s rebranding strategy can be seen in the way Key has tried to court the younger voter – by which I mean younger than the youngest baby-boomer, who is in his or her mid 40s by now – and in his recent DVD marketing exercise, in which he declared himself “ambitious for New Zealand”, which we’ll get to shortly.

At 2007’s “40 Below” event, youngish modern conservatives, compassionate or otherwise, were “invited to celebrate New Zealand’s future” at an Auckland hotel. Incidentally, the hotel is called the Rendezvous, which always strikes me as sounding unfortunately like the kind of place where you can rent rooms by the hour, which may or may not be appropriate in the context of the National Party.

Event publicity read thus: “The National Party is trying to woo younger voters by inviting celebrities and socialites to meet leader John Key and other National MPs. They are being asked to join them at an event that is being billed as a chance to ‘Groove into the future with National’.”

Now, the etymological dynamics of the verb “to groove” are more complex than might be assumed at first glance. Probably deriving from the grooves etched into vinyl records – only some under-40s would actually have such folk memories, I guess - the word evolved into a slang term for the act of enjoying popular music, and more generally a certain attitude or response to anything considered, well, groovy.

After the 1970s, however, “groove” as a colloquial term became outmoded, associated with an era of music and culture now deemed passé (the Austin Powers effect, in other words). Later it took on an ironic usage, which in turn made “groove” groovy - but only in the right hands. Or mouths.

Context is all when it comes to the lingua franca of hipness, and in the context of the New Zealand political centre-right there are definite caveats attending its use.
The correct time and place for the contemporary usage of “groove” is subject to a shifting code of coolness (another term that needs to be used advisedly). Deliberate self-referential retro awareness? Fine. Unintentionally patronising fauxness? Not so great. In short, if Jeremy Wells asks you to “groove into the future” you would laugh and “get it”. When the National Party does it, the effect isn’t quite the same.

Yet it’s a sensible and probably essential tactic for Key, who needs to back up his non-Don brand and disconnect the perception of his party as still the natural home of grumbling old codgers or whiny young fogeys. But as fans of Tony Blair discovered once the hype of “Cool Britannia” died down, cocktails and canapés with Oasis and Ben Elton did not miraculously herald a new dawn of switched-on government.

So is New National’s policy mix sufficiently in the same groove as its intended X and Y audience? There’s little doubt in my mind that a strain of reflexive ideological orthodoxy does run through the generations raised on Rogernomics, many of whom are the genuine social liberal/fiscal conservative hybrid Key seems to know he needs.

As luck would have it, a big study of “Generation Next” (18-26 year olds) by the US Pew Research Centre found young Americans to be, among other things, unprecedentedly tolerant in their political attitudes. They were also more likely to identify as Democrats than Republicans, while at the same time a majority said “getting rich” was their main aim.

Will their Kiwi counterparts buy into Key’s “party for people in their 20s and 30s with an interest in New Zealand’s future”? I’d say the auguries are good - one of the 40 Below event sponsors was local vodka company 42 Below, recently bought to great media acclaim by a foreign liquor giant for a tidy sum. Let’s see - an essentially colourless, flavourless substance transformed by clever brand marketing into a saleable commodity ...

Semantics aside, Key’s positioning is very deliberately an Obama-esque claim to being a break with the past and - more importantly – offering a new but fairly fuzzy vision of the future. Given that the main planks in both party platforms differ merely in grain these days, and that a tax cut auction may neutralise the hip-picket vote, he will be busy describing the New Zealand he wants his children to still want to live in.

Indeed, he’s been plucking this string for a while now. It was the major theme behind the contrived folksiness of the afforementioned “Ambitious for New Zealand” DVD last year, and it crops up routinely in interviews, including a charming soft-focus open home he and wife Bronagh granted the Australian Women’s Weekly. Styled and groomed in smart-casual hues, Key waffled genially about his life to date, his happy marriage and his dream of making a “positive difference, especially with the tragic situation we have of young New Zealanders who simply don’t see themselves as having a long-term future in this country. Our brain drain is the worst in the developed world.”

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This week the University of Canterbury will release the final implementation plan for "changes" to its College of Arts -- after a review panel has spent three and a half weeks considering some three hundred submissions on the original Change Proposal. As you may know, the most disturbing aspects of this proposal were plans to disestablish Theatre and Film Studies, as well as this country's only American Studies programme. So a good number of students, academics and general staff around the University are nervously awaiting this week's announcement.

Coinciding with that announcement, down at the Dunedin Fringe Festival, the Christchurch Free Theatre will be performing Faust Chroma, their stunning interpretation of the drama by German writer and film maker, Werner Fritsch.

The connection? Well, the Free Theatre is intimately involved with Theatre and Film Studies at Canterbury: for over 25 years it has basically been the ongoing research project of creative director and academic, Peter Falkenberg, providing rigorous, intelligent, and modern alternatives to the usual Shakespeare-in-the-park-type theatrical offerings. Run on a shoe-string, largely by way of Falkenberg's research grants, Free Theatre productions involve both staff and students from Theatre and Film Studies: everyone on stage at the Mary Hopewell Theatre on Tuesday night will understand that the next day's announcement will impact massively on their employment and/or creative futures.

I only hope that this invigorates their performances.

I've seen Faust Chroma twice in Christchurch over the past week, and I'm emphatically recommending it. Of course there are numerous great offerings at the Fringe Festival, and no-one can get to everything; but I'm encouraging people to go along to Faust Chroma not simply out of sentiment or do-goodishness. I'm encouraging people to go along because it stimulates and entertains; because it's sensual, relevant and rich; because it's damn good theatre.

The setting is the death-bed of Gustaf Gründgens (Ryan Reynolds), German actor and director, famous for his productions of Goethe's Faust and for his performances as Faust's antagonist Mephistopheles. In the figure of Gründgens, playwright Fritsch has identified one of those bit-players in history whose overdetermined biographies bristle with ethical implications. Bisexual or gay, Gründgens was nonetheless made (by Hermann Göring) head of state-run theatres in Nazi Germany, thus making a Faustian pact of his own and providing thereby the central conceit of this play.

Most of the action on stage constitutes representations or interpretations of the dying dreams or hallucinations of Gründgens, shot through with imagination and memory: this is not a didactic play, and it eschews the simplistic, linear narrative that is commonly in the service of equally simplistic moralising. It is in a sense episodic, but the power of the episodes lies in their manifesting as no more than forms for the expression of thoughts, emotions, history, and conflict -- in a creative coalescence of movement and speech.

Important touchstones in this are the decadent coalescences that we associate with the Nazi mind, where seemingly incompatible elements of an amorphous transcendent sublime are forcibly fused: art and the state; repression and the erotic; sadism and sentimentalism; discipline and obsession; abstraction and the concrete; and of course that defining irony within all public manipulation, including that of the theatre -- performance and authenticity.

(Such mutually discomforting dualisms operate at the heart of any zeitgeist I suspect: in Western democracy, for example, we witness a narrative of human rights entwined with a privileging of the unencumbered mobility of capital, while in fact it is the latter that underwrites the massive global inequalities that render the former little more than an ideological farce.)

Perhaps it was an awareness of these dualisms that inspired Falkenberg to introduce a new character into Fritsch's play: the God/Pianist figure around whom the action takes place and through whose musical creations the Devil (Marian McCurdy & Sophie Lee) seems to manipulate proceedings. God is played by the sculptor and musician, Chris Reddington, who recently joined Theatre and Film Studies as their theatre designer. He created the outstandingly efficient set, but he also put together a fantastic score, and his increasingly dissipated playing throughout the performance is alone worth the ticket price.

This music, along with Emma Johnston's amazing singing, underlines the clear rhythm and shape of the play, which, in the absence of narrative, is defined by a progression of moods.

A further addition that the Free Theatre makes to Fritsch's script is Hermann Göring (George Parker) rising from the dead to condemn the theatre as "faddy". This directly references University of Canterbury Vice-Chancellor, Professor Roy Sharp, who was quoted in the Christchurch Press using the same term to devalue courses offered in Theatre and Film and American Studies.

Leaving aside the multiply-outrageous nature of Sharp's claim, the reference in the play directs us to what is arguably its central concern for audiences in Aotearoa New Zealand in 2008. I'm referring to the unease and conflict that surround accusations of, say, "fascism" within the context of this country. By focusing on the ambiguous moral situations of minor and not-so-minor historical figures from Nazi Germany -- who are depicted as shifting between caricature, entrapment, and denial -- Faust Chroma highlights what is actually at issue when we are inclined to decry authoritarian actions or attitudes as fascist: frustrated protest at our own sense of helpless complicity within patently unacceptable, yet seemingly inexorable, progressions of history. Seen in this way, such accusations are not belittling insults to the victims of Nazism, but are symptoms of our distress at the failures of ourselves and our world.

This was the distress that Barack Obama (while staying conveniently on-message) tapped into with his "A More Perfect Union" speech. It was great rhetoric because it spoke to the very real anxiety and self-loathing that attends individuals' inabilities to emulate Hollywood models of pure righteousness, pure self-determination, pure humanism.

And Obama was right: the only way through this impasse is by addressing it with thoughtfulness and imagination.

Capitalism (influenced, I hate to say, by science and technology) believes in another false coalescence -- between creative intelligence and measurable utility (reducible, ultimately, to capital itself). The absurdity of this should be obvious -- so when the institutions that are charged with fostering and supporting creative thought make their own Faustian pacts with conservatism and mediocrity, we should all be concerned. The Free Theatre's Faust Chroma at once explores, symbolises and embodies what is at stake.

The Free Theatre's Faust Chroma plays at the Mary Hopewell Theatre, Dunedin from Monday 7th April to Thursday 10th April, 8 pm.

You know somebody has become a pretty big deal when they fly their own couches from California to Sydney for a one hour presentation. Either that, or Freedom Furniture is now selling items in 'Facebook Blue'. Which is equally likely, given the site's astounding popularity. Whatever the reason, they looked very impressive up on stage in between the four large presentation screens.

Ad:tech Sydney marked the first time that anyone from Facebook had spoken in Australia. As you would expect, the room was packed with marketers eager to hear from Mike Murphy, VP of Facebook media sales. Not that I am looking down on them, mind you. I was second row, centre. And I got there early.

Gotta say, Mike painted a fascinating picture of the web's pace of change. Here are a few fun Facebook facts: They get two hundred thousand new members a day, thirty five million people (half of the total userbase) return daily and one in five Australians are Facebook members. At that point, he paused, smiled, and said "we love Australia".

New Zealand has three hundred and seventy thousand members, which is a bit under one in ten. I guess that means he likes us rather than loves us. This are still some serious numbers and were I Bebo or Myspace I would be reasonably concerned.

This, it turned out, was the real value of attending a digital media conference. It gives you a kind of snapshot of the web, like a chart hanging at the end of a hospital bed. How we use it, how quickly we change our uses and how much time we are spending there. One of the speakers pointed out that in two or five years time, given the sheer volume of user submitted information on sites like Facebook, the aggregate of information about yourself and your friends will be astronomical. And available to anyone. We have no precedence to determine what sort of social change this might bring.

And this is something companies, governments and individuals need to look seriously at –- even if they don't consider this phenomenon relevant to them. Mike made an excellent point that "you can't choose to 'sit out' of social media. You can choose to ignore it, but I don't recommend it." People are talking about you, your business, your government in social media right now. Just because you aren't there doesn't mean there aren't photos of you on Bebo and whole discussions about how much better your competitors are on blogs and in Facebook groups.

The other issue that really struck me in the web's 'health check' was access –particularly broadband access. At the moment only 20% of the world's population are online, which almost exactly matches the total population living in developed countries. Three hundred thousand people access the web for the first time every day, mostly in the developing world. There is no way to tell what influence this huge population will have on the shape of the web.

Speaking of access, it appears that Australians like to moan about broadband speeds just as much as we do. In fact, on the first day they showed a graph of broadband speeds by country and New Zealand was ahead of Australia by four places. Now, I am blogging from a hotel room in Sydney and I have to tell you that my speeds are fairly zippy compared to what I get in Auckland. The data was from March 2008 but either we or the Australians are lying here and I cannot work out why. The presenter actually suggested that Australia needs to "take their lead from New Zealand". I kept my mouth shut. (Why did I sit in the second row??)

The final piece of data that was released for the conference was that –for the first time- in the last couple of months, Australians have spent more time online than watching television. This is apparently the mystical tipping point that web media people like myself have been waiting for but I ain't buying it. Nobody mentioned the writers strike which took everything good off the TV. If this really were a check up for the web, I would just tell the patient to wait and see.

Back in January, I had plans for the 22nd of February. My partner and I were ditching the kids and heading to the one-dayer to watch the Black Caps spank England. It was cricket: there was bound to be some kind of spanking.

That was before I got an email from Zita Joyce, of the Aotearoa Digital Arts Network and the Audio Foundation, and long-time PA System lurker. And it wasn't a weird joke: she really did want me to join a panel discussion on Tending Networks and Building Communities, to talk about Bardic Web. At the ADA Symposium. On the 22nd of February. And it didn't seem to be the kind of symposium that was going to provide me with a krater of wine and a well-oiled adolescent. Given that it might well provide me with some handy feedback and tips on running online communities, though, I couldn't say no.

I should point out, rather guiltily, that I couldn't make the second day of the Symposium. Family commitments and knackeredness. But I know there are people reading this right now who were there. They should really pull finger and comment before I just start making stuff up. The symposium is excellently live-blogged here for those who are interested. These are my personal impressions, not a comprehensive round-up.

Keynote speaker the first morning was Adam Hyde, currently of Floss Manuals, previously of BFM, Static TV, the Frequency Clock, and countless other collaborative media projects. Once I got over feeling like I'd entirely wasted my life, I was fascinated by what he had to say about the dynamic between open participation and controlling the quality of content. In terms of Floss Manuals, their end users need to be able to trust the product, but I think there's another dimension to it as well. The higher-quality the content, the more cautious new users are about contributing.

He was also interesting on the curly question of paying for your users' work. The idea that paying someone to do something they were doing voluntarily can actually decrease their motivation is a tricky and seemingly-illogical one.

Then it was on to our panel: me, Zita, and Julian Priest of consume.net, expertly chaired by Caro McGraw, a senior lecturer in Communication Design at Otago Polytech. The idea was to draw together people who ran communities with very different dynamics and degrees of on-line and real-world interconnectedness. When I talk about Bardic Web to any kind of audience, I get a gauge of how clued-up they are by how long it takes for someone to ask me about intellectual property and copyright issues. It was the second question I fielded. We talked about issues of participation thresh-holds, lurker to poster ratios, and the nature of Quake as a bonding tool. Julian was particularly fascinating talking about the way people have come to see bandwidth as a physical commodity, like water, that needs to be purchased from a provider.

One thing that really struck me was that, in my talk, I'd mentioned that we hadn't consciously set out to create an environment that was female-friendly at Bardic Web. For the rest of the day, people came up to me wanting to talk about making communities female-friendly. I'm not sure what was more telling: people wanting to phrase the issue in gender terms, or how uncomfortable I was doing it. To me it's a matter of making communities feel safe for people, which I feel is particularly important for shared artistic endeavours. At some point in the conversation I'd say, 'well, you know Public Address System?', and they would. It made a useful shorthand example of a web community that isn't a bear pit, and then you can talk about the how. (Seeding. Mods. Peer Pressure is Your Friend.)

Still, the girl thing makes an interesting, easy branding exercise, and maybe that's something we should be thinking about at work. 'Bardic Web: Good for Girls!' No, wait a minute, I'm sensing 'dodgy'...

After a quick Vegan lunch and an extended play at the Geekosystem (80s Omni magazines have an astonishing number of cigarette ads) the afternoon was given over to short presentations. These were all varying degrees of great. Stand-outs for me were Aaron and Hannah Beehre, whose Winter Rose I'd seen when they were allowed to commit near-sacrilege and display their work on the Cathedral, and Douglas Bagnall. His Te Tuhi game system turns drawings into video games with a satisfying degree of surrealism.

There's no way I can do justice to all of the stuff I was there for, and certainly not the stuff I wasn't there for. That lack of justice goes double for Young Hae Chang Heavy Industries, who were the keynote on the Sunday.

By the time I staggered out of the foyer on Saturday evening, I was already suffering from information overload-induced exhaustion. When my partner arrived to pick me up, I was standing on the footpath talking about setting up communities for women with Lucy from Felt. His preparedness to sit in the car and wait for ten minutes while I did this was explained when I got in. "Ha," he said, "you just missed the last ball."

It rained at the cricket anyway.

The Fundy Post reminded me that I'd forgotten to write anything for the 25th anniversary of the TCP/IP cutover: day one of the proper internet, which was January 1. It's a bit late now, but I though it might be nice to haul out the interview I did with the so-called "father of the internet" Vint Cerf, shortly after the 20th anniversary in 2003.

It's fairly self-explanatory, but there is more background on what we're talking about here. You may feel free to share stories of how TCP/IP changed your life in the discussion for this post.

--

Even Vint Cerf can't quite understand why he didn't organise a party to mark the anniversary of the day he changed the world.

January 1 this year marked 20 years since the day of the TCP/IP cutover: "That was the day that the Internet was born in terms of becoming palpable, even though it had been an 18-year labour. And we didn't do anything for the anniversary. We all looked at each other and thought, well, that was silly …"

Cerf is, as the publicity for the recent Knowledge Wave conference promised, "the Father of the Internet". It's no mere flattery, and it's the reason young men seek his autograph as if he were some snowy-haired, even-tempered rockstar.

In 1983, Cerf and his friend and collaborator Bob Kahn were at the Advanced Research Projects Agency (Arpa), a military research group operated by the US Department of Defence. For more than nine years they had been in charge of the design of a new kind of network: one that had no single point of failure, that would allow physically different networks to connect - to internetwork.

Few inventions prosper the way theirs has. The TCP/IP protocols (see panel) they devised not only now join more than half a billion people on the Internet, they're basically the only game in data networking. TCP/IP, which nobody actually owns, has seen off the commercial offerings of large companies. It ploughed right on while the US government and the United Nations blessed a competing technology that never got off the ground. So, why did it win?

"Thank you for asking - because a lot of people think it just happened and that was it," smiles Cerf. "It wasn't a slamdunk."

First, Cerf and his friends had to convince the scientists. The Internet's predecessor, Arpanet, had spread to universities, usually when they took up research contracts with Arpa. The researchers liked it - so much so that as the first day of January approached, many of them saw no need to change to the new TCP/IP network. But Cerf held an advantage: the purse strings.

"We had a few people saying, the hell with you, and we said, fine, don't come around wanting research funding next year because you won't get any," says Cerf. "There was more than moral suasion involved."

The remaining TCP/IP refuseniks simply had the plug pulled on them that first day of 1983. There were other factors: Cerf and Kahn had decided "that we would put no restrictions or constraints on information about this protocol," it was public and open. They had smart people on their side, including the late Jon Postel, who having been dubbed "God", possibly outranks even Cerf in the firmament.

"Jon was just a phenomenal technologist. He had really good taste - good engineering judgement about the choices he made. And he held everyone to a very high standard. I wouldn't want to argue that I had any particular skill in that regard, but at least I was smart enough to know that I should call on the talents of some incredibly smart people."

This was Cerf's other great contribution - as not a joiner, but a former of committees. In 1979, he set up the network's first governing body: the Internet Configuration Control Board. That became the Internet Engineering Taskforce, which still gathers to debate and anoint new technologies. In 1992, he formed the Internet Society, becoming its first president and later chairman. He chairs the new Internet Societal Task Force.

Cerf was also in on the ground floor of Icann, the body set up to administer the Internet's names and addresses after a Clinton task force decided that government agencies should withdraw from administration of the now-global Internet in 1998. Icann has been enmeshed in controversy for five years, accused of being secretive, arbitrary and arrogant. The age of the benevolent dictators has passed, but it hasn't gone smoothly.

"Oh no!" Cerf agrees. "And I must say, some of your fellow countrymen have been quite vocal in their criticism of Icann. A lot of is probably deserved. When you start trying to do anything of the sort that Icann is doing, you're hit by a variety of forces and motivations."

Cerf's role at Icann (he became chairman last year) brought him into conflict with his friend John Gilmore, the libertarian "cyber-rights" campaigner and founder of the Electronic Freedom Frontier. Gilmore emailed Cerf a letter last year: "I have absolutely no idea what you are doing leading that megalomaniac, unaccountable, unresponsive, anti-expression, anti-public-interest organisation. Did they take your kids hostage?"

Cerf doesn't return the fire. He's a pragmatist, he says. If he and others hadn't stepped in and formed the new body, the Internet would have been vulnerable to "people who were thinking of monetising almost anything to do with the Internet."

Cerf also shies away from Gilmore's latest crusade: against the Bush government's rollback of electronic privacy, and in particular Admiral John Poindexter's Total Information Awareness project, which aims to capture, slice and dice almost every electronic trace Americans leave, as part of the fight against terrorism.

"Oh, I know John has gone berserk on this subject," says Cerf. "I think that's a huge overreaction. Remember that I used to work at Darpa (Arpa's current name) and I had a chance to talk to John Poindexter. What was going on there, honestly, was just a technology exploration: how could we take a lot of very diverse information and discover patterns in it?

"So even if the technology never got used for the purposes that have caused Gilmore and others to become very exercised, it could become very useful technology, in, for example in understanding how economies work, which is something we really don't understand. I'm a technologist at heart, and I'd hate to see the baby thrown out with the bathwater in this particular dispute."

The apparent lack of a reflexive concern for privacy and liberty from government might seem odd in an Internet luminary, but, remember, this is a man who did his best work for the US military. An establishment man. He does, however, ponder the social impact of the Internet and its many voices.

"That diversity of voices places a burden on you, because you have to be even more thoughtful about the significance of the input that you’re getting. Critical thinking becomes an even more important skill in this environment of so many sources of information. So one of the things I would look for in teaching children would be to do everything possible to help them understand that they really have to think about the information that they get, because they're going to get a lot of it and some of it's not going to be very good."

The technologist is, as ever, looking ahead. He recently began working at Nasa's jet propulsion laboratory on a new project, again funded by DARPA: Interplanetary Internet. It's tricky.

"The speed of light is part of the problem," he says. "It's too slow. It's so hard to realise that the speed of light is so slow that in the worst case, going from Earth to Mars takes 20 minutes. So all the intuitions that we had in building the network and all the protocols that go with it - you throw 'em out the window."

Russell Brown, 2003