The Future in Cyberspace: Utopia or Blade Runner?

Four visionaries discuss and debate the looming impact of cyberspace on culture. Each panelists is a provocative thinker and gifted creator. They are Douglas Adams, irreverent author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (novels, radio and TV series, computer game, and bath towel), who makes cosmic precepts comic and is currently "chief fantasist" at the Digital Village, a new multiple media publishing company; John Perry Barlow, the self-described "cognitive dissident" of cyberspace, who brashly challenges old ways of thinking in the digital age and is cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a songwriter for the Grateful Dead, and a former cattle rancher; Paulina Borsook, Wired magazine's only regular "feminist/humanist/Luddite/skeptic" contributor, who sparked controversy with her Mother Jones critique of "cyberlibertarianism" and is the author of the novella Love over the Wires; and William Gibson, the father of cyberspace who created the seminal vision that shaped and accelerated its development, whose other novels include Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive, Virtual Light and Idoru. The panel will be moderated by Peter Broderick, author of Independents in Cyberspace and an Internet consultant.