The Harvard Conference on the Internet and Society was about, well, the
Internet and Society. Most of the speakers promoted their companies'
products, but there was a really interesting closing debate about Cultural
Imperialism moderated by Arthur Miller. At one point, Jacques Attali (the
well-known conservative Franco-American academic) claimed that the Internet
is just a tool, an empty vessel into which we pour our cultural traditions,
and that no art had yet been created specifically for the Internet. I
interrupted him to say that in fact there *is* a great deal of new art being
made on the Internet, and that it's not dominated by Americans, giving
Moscow, Tokyo and Ljubljana as examples.