Cryptonomicon

Their host is trying to be appropriately sultanic: providing vision and direction without getting sucked down into the quicksand of management. The basic vision (or so it seems at first) is that Kinakuta has always been a crossroads, a meeting-place of cultures: the original Malays. Foote and his dynasty of White Sultans. Filipinos with their Spanish, American and Nipponese governors to the east. Muslims to the west. Anglos to the south. Numerous Southeast Asian cultures to the north. Chinese everywhere as usual. Nipponese whenever they are in one of their adventurous moods, and (for what it's worth) the neolithic tribesmen who inhabit the interior of the island.

Hence nothing is more natural than that the present-day Kinakutans should run big fat optical fiber cables in every direction, patch into every major national telco within reach, and become a sort of digital bazaar.

All of the guests nod soberly at the sultan's insight, his masterful ability to meld the ancient ways of his country with modern technology.

But this is nothing more than a superficial analogy, the sultan confesses. Everyone nods somewhat more vigorously than they did before: indeed, everything that the sultan was just saying was, in fact, horseshit. Several people jot down notes, lest they lose the Sultan's thread.

After all, the sultan says, physical location no longer matters in a digitized, networked world. Cyberspace knows no boundaries.

Everyone nods vigorously except for, on the one hand, John Cantrell, and, on the other, the grizzled Chinese guys.

But hey, the sultan continues, that's just dizzy-headed cyber-cheerleading! What bullshit! Of course locations and boundaries matter!

At this point the room is plunged into dimness as the light pouring in through the window-wall is throttled by some kind of invisible mechanism built into the glass: liquid-crystal shutters or something. Screens descend from slots cunningly hidden in the room's ceiling. This diversion saves the cervical vertebrae of many guests, who are about to whiplash themselves by nodding even more vigorously at the sultan's latest hairpin turn. Goddamn it, does location matter in cyberspace or doesn't it? What's the bottom line here? This isn't some Oxford debating society! Get to the point!

The sultan is whipping some graphics on them: a map of the world in one of those politically correct projections that makes America and Europe look like icebound reefs in the high Arctic. A pattern of straight lines is superimposed on the map, each joining two major cities. The web of lines gets denser and denser as the sultan talks, nearly obscuring the land masses, and the oceans as well.

This, the sultan explains, is the conventional understanding of the Internet: a decentralized web connecting each place with all the other places, with no bottlenecks or, if you will, choke-points.

But it's more bullshit! A new graphic comes up: same map, different pattern of lines. Now we have webs within countries, sometimes within continents. But between countries, and especially between continents, there are only a few lines. It's not weblike at all.

Randy looks at Cantrell, who's nodding slyly.

"Many Net partisans are convinced that the Net is robust because its lines of communication are spread evenly across the planet. In fact, as you can see from this graphic, nearly all intercontinental Web traffic passes through a small number of choke-points. Typically these choke-points are controlled and monitored by local governments. Clearly, then, any Internet application that wants to stand free of governmental interference is undermined, from the very beginning, by a fundamental structure problem."

free of governmental interference.Randy can't believe he's hearing this. If the sultan was a scruffy hacker talking to a room full of crypto anarchists, that'd be one thing. But the sultan isa government, for god's sake, and the room is full of card-carrying Establishment types.

Like those Chinese buzz-cuts! Who the hell are they? Don't try to tell Randy those guys aren't part of the Chinese government, in some sense.

"Bottlenecks are only one of the structural barriers to the creation of a free, sovereign, location-independent cyberspace," the sultan continues blithely.

Sovereign!?

"Another is the heterogeneous patchwork of laws, and indeed of legal systems, that address privacy, free speech, and telecoms policy."

Another map graphic appears. Each country is colored, shaded, and patterned according to a scheme of intimidating complexity. A half-assed stab at explaining it is made by a complex legend underneath. Instant migraine. That, of course, is the whole point.

"The policy of any given legal system toward privacy issues is typically the result of incremental changes made over centuries by courts and legislative bodies," the sultan says. "With all due respect, very little of it is relevant to modern privacy issues.