16 November, 1995

"Windows are the best crime-prevention devices of all, if you only bother to look out of them. The virtual windows on a computer screen could serve the same function, linking distant places into a distributed neighborhood."

- Neal Stephenson, "Global Neighborhood Watch"

Neal Stephenson, cyberpunk visionary and author of Snow Crash and The Diamond Age, contributed the essay "Global Neighborhood Watch" to Scenarios: The Future of the Future. The article is a call to arms for concerned, techno-savvy citizens; Stephenson outlays a plan to prototype a home-computer-networked surveillance system to track crime at strategic points across the globe. kadrey says: Welcome to another interview in our series with writers and thinkers who contributed to Wired's *Scenario: The Future of the Future* special issue. Tonight's guest is Neal Stephenson, best known as the author of such heavy-weight science fiction novels Snowcrash and The Diamond Age. kadrey asks: In the Scenarios issue, Neal contributed an essay/proposal entitled "Global Neighborhood Watch." For anyone who might have missed it, can you explain the basic concept of the Global Neighborhood Watch project?

Okay

It is an electronic extension of existing, traditional neighborhoods.

The idea is that just as we currently keep an eye on our nieghbors' houses by looking out of our windows, we can keep an eye on a virtual neighbor's house on the other side of the world by looking through a window on a computer screen. rossum asks: How do you define a "virtual neighbor"?

The key to this idea would be creating sibling-neighborhood relationships with neighborhoods in other parts of the world - preferably in different time zones so that someone in the extended neighborhood is always awake. Just as I don't want to have total strangers (e.g., cops or rent-a-cops) in my neighborhood doing surveillance on me, I don't want strangers on the Net doing it either.