"I have to admit I felt a certain intense interest, perhaps even amounting to a potential enthusiasm, when this tech was first being discussed. I'd read Gibson like the rest of us, and I certainly understood his dystopian point, but nevertheless , when Tim Leary and people like that began to get enthusiastic, I had to investigate on that level. I haven't seen much evidence that what Uncle Tim thought was going to happen is really happening. Once again, any technology could be democratic if it were distributed, you know what I mean? It's a simple Marxist thing about means of production. There's nothing inherently authoritarian-- at least at first glance-- to any technology, although one could argue about how technology then shapes the society that has already shaped the technology in a kind of feedback loop that can move towards greater and greater authoritarianism/lack of autonomy. And in fact, I think that something like that is what's happening with communications technology. The potential for what, back in the '50s and '60s, people were calling electronic democracy, is obviously still there as a potential structure, and you can see certain elements of it in the Net, but when you're talking about the high tech involved in virtual reality you're really talking about something that is not accessible to most people. And I think it probably never will be. There's never going to be any cheap VR kit that's going to allow a dock worker in Manila to get on some kind of cyberspace Internet, much less a dock worker in Atlanta- - or me, for example. So to talk about electronic democracy when you're still dealing within a capitalist framework that deliberately prices things along class lines, you know, we're going to have an information highway but it's going to be policed by the likes of the Democrats and the Republicans. It's not going to be any more of an electronic democracy than America is now a legislative democracy."