But still. And after all. It's boring here. And somehow it's the same
ennui that lies in wait in any theme park, put particularly in those that
are somehow in too agressively spiffy a state of repair. Everything
painted so recently that it positively creaks with niceness, and even the
odd rare police car sliding past starts to look like something out of a
Chuck E. Cheese franchise... And you come to suspect that the reason you
see so few actual police is that people here all have, to quote William
Burroughs, "the policeman inside."

And what will it be like when these folks, as they so manifestly intend to
do, bring themselves online as the Intelligent Island, a single giant
data-node whose computational architecture is more than a match for their
Swiss-watch infrastructure? While there's no doubt that this is the
current national project, one can't help but wonder how they plan to
handle all that stuff without actually getting any on them? How will a
society founded on parental (well, paternal, mainly) guidance cope with
the wilds of X-rated cyberspace? Or would they simply find ways not to
have to? What if, while information elsewhere might be said to want to be
free, the average Singaporean might be said to want, mainly, not to rock
the boat? And to do very nicely, thank you, by not doing so?

Are the faceless functionaries who keep Shonen Knife and Cosmo
anti-feminism out of straying local hands going to allow access to the
geography-smashing highways and byways of whatever the Internet is
becoming? More important, will denial of such access, in the coming
century, be considered even a remotely viable possibility by even the
dumbest of policemen?