Philosophy Is there any reason metaphor should be problematic in cyberspace? The name itself smacks of the relegation of novels to tinysex. Nor has it ever been the case that ontology or epistemology meant other than other sliding out from itself. I'd know the path or field closely at work to lure you out. You're not a node, you're devolved across the space somewhere near where you've placed the screen. Thinking's as empty as wryting; I couldn't know what speech is like. Philosophy should flee every sign of its technology. Thus I draw the thin read line of blood in the air, closed upon itself somewhat rectangular, glistening in the meaning of things it pulls from the body. Why do I repeat dismemberment? Because you continue to have limbs, solid oak held into thorax, specifically the linear portion of the bees' waggle dance. The nails have to splinter further because the addresses are getting used up; there's a crisis of position on the Internet. But there's no reason for more than a skirting of demographics, tracking hallucination girlboys boygirls against the corner where electrodes measure the closeness of bodies. There's no reason for philosophy-in- discount. Supply-side words are bolted to the oak's tinysex. What the books never cover: _what the hand does_ down there where holes see computer cables, connections, body wired to digital heat. There's no metonymy ever again, promised by the tip of things. See? I've devoted my life to absolute truth and the rectangle bleeds the major arteries. Khaf Khaf :falls to the floor where beautiful fingers spell the name of God. Alan falls etc. "do you know the name of God? Alan asks "Do you know the name of God?" Clara says "it's God." Clara takes off. She says: Shut up with the questions. Blood's from your nipples, because there aren't any questions and the roots are from the Greek. Write something about your life. :fucks no one. :takes off everything. Clara takes off everything. @dig The screen breaks. Like Hollywood, there's screen beyond the screen. No simulacra in sight. :says it splinters, gets hotter and more detailed all the way down. Tiffany says it splinters, gets hotter, more detailed, all the way down, then it's viral. Then it splits; like asbestos. The limits of nanotech. Watch the creatures. _The creatures move in their love of truth._ _These useless posts._ _Scratch the skin from the skin._ _It's not logic, it works, it's a program._ Tiffany writes is there any reason for metaphor to be problematic. She puts down the keyboard. It's a go. Dismembered, it's a text. _______________________________________________________________________ -- Arivaca Hoe Down Your voice breaks up when you speak to me and I can't hear because the gaps in your words, the gaps in your words, cover what you're saying, about the weather and your love for me. I can't get connected through 28.8, the whistles cover up the important things on the television, they repeat and repeat, timed out after forty- five seconds, ready to begin the whole sad process again. CuSeeMe won't show your face because it's got a minimum 10 on reception packets that can't be reset, the mirrors beg for reset, NASA comes up, they beg for reset again, no go Clara. Xing's television comes so slow I can't see your face, can't play up to it with all the beautiful music and last time Finland was down, down, down. Vdol's corporate woes crashed me twice, my face in the Windows frozen in disbelief. The word hangs there as the connect gives me messages it's trying and try- ing and trying, then over and out as traceroute produces a series of beau- tiful stars, ping -s produces emptiness that would make Nagarjuna proud, and ping itself pronounces death. Email won't come, held up, clogged in the pipelines, text-substance slowly hardening, accretions of noise when it finally does release, error messa- ges cauterizing the tongue, lacerating lips and teeth. FTP scrolls off the screen, matched by the speed of fingering you, words flying by in Unix, dissolute down below, submerged; Unixtalk hangs near orgasm as it punches out; I'm locked out of the MOO forever and no one leaves me pages on the MOO any more; it's the twilight of postmodern cul- ture. I have no one to talk to in Eden. But I dream the following dream, my lips moving as I walk down the road, enter the subway, leave the store behind: Come back to me, come back to me, see you see me, eye-phone you, female you, I boo-hoo you, my tongue's gone but my song moans long, down into you: And you'll reply in a month and we'll come together say in Arivaca Arizona and we'll live there forever, tear the wires from our hair. But I download CuSeeMe again and again, the 10-bug's fixed!, NASA comes in loud and clear, it's from 1968, it says "the average American" I cut the sound off, pictures flow faster now, pixel's missing from the moon... And I think, you've got it, it's the _square there,_ down in Arivaca Arizona, near the wetlands, near the desert, the animals flow past us: a woman sits in a small wooden shack, she's got a Mac, she's online and really fine, sends me a post, she's a host, has a server, it's the fever. Back home, I set up the camera, set the camera up in front of the moni- tor, adjust the film, begin the video. You're there on the screen, this is history. I promise you I'll dream of you the rest of my life. You won't ever know this; I can't tell you this. Just that your face has been received, you have been present for me. You have been there where memory stores itself, nestles among the cells. I'd send a message to Arivaca, but I've lost the address. I'd dream of you in Arivaca, but I haven't been there, not in many years. Give me the road, your name, your number. __________________________________________________________________________ -- Closing Down Delusion There are just notes towards this, glimmers, images on the periphery - walking away from the Net, annihilating the computer, gathering in the forces that spin centrifugally out of control. It's the desire to turn Net into nest, to turn catatonic as well, hands grasping knees, head down against the raging of the light. Desire disappears, replaced with comfort, comfort combines with anger, anxiety; the body turns rigid, away from Net things, away from a yammering, sputtering screen. Lymph drips from the screen, everyone pulls at one, demands are made in the form of text-mouths and one wants, mouth open oneself, to stop the flow, permanently, retreat, if such it be, to the real world with its sharp projections, dark corners, surfaces lit through dust and sullen air. The real is bruised in a way that cyberspace can never be, but the bruising at least is alive, welts gathered blue-black across demanding skin. The Net demands without pre- sence, holds itself against you, floods of messages, administrations, only the pleasure of the quick and violent read holding one's breath against the screen, fogging and effacing it. Better to sear the eyes from their sockets than answer the demands of the planet, and in the midst of the poverty of the every-day, poverty of virtual embodiment, one tends to dream of closing down, become granite, obdurate, ears and eyes blocked forever to the shattered world. Then one returns, not wiser or healed, but with the recognition that it's no longer a matter of choice, if it ever was, that the demands have become autonomic, that the depth of their regi- sters is inconceivable. Trapped among the screens, one looks down, finds language itself burned into the chest, changing, scrolling down towards the groin, disappearing in the holes and objects of gone desire. The body betrays the body; everything's lost; the screen chatters on; annihilation to the limit is all that remains. Trapped among the screens, one looks up, and nothing at all is visible on a clear and cloudless night. __________________________________________________________________________ Losing My Mind in Netsex: Welcome to netsex! The Topic is: MoRtAl kOmBaT DaY In #NeTsEx :-) ACTION: T flies in and tries to spot any beautiful women i wanted to talk M, but you never talked back I'm in the same boat as U...looking for a nice woman to talk to ummm L how are you, alan? so V finally speaks where, Y? hi everyone, where'd ya go hi all hi all!! Hi V we're all here hi O hi T! looking at yours helloooooooooooooooooooooo ...and half of us are horny ACTION: T crawls to V and kisses her what about the other half any woman looking for a sexy man to have a little fun ...don't know ACTION: V kisses T back > they're saying hello ACTION: D searches for E I'm not really horny...just lonely where are you from, T? Hello there ! any takers hi J I crawl in from Brown University in Rhode Island How are you V this fine evening I meant crawled...sorry ACTION: D is still searchin' ACTION: T looks for J Welcome to Cybermind! You have left Cybermind ________________________________________________________________________ Emergence on the Internet Is there evidence of connectionism, emergent behavior, on the Internet? I'm purposely leaving the category open, although the analogy of neural networks comes to mind. Do email list participants behave in ways para- lleling neural nets? What constitutes the development and maintenance of a thread here? I'm looking for some sort of loose formal model; otherwise the whole discussion gets lost in metaphysics. The fast-forward exponential expansion of the Web is an example; clearly, some sort of threshold was surpassed, releasing a network of publicity, investment, and appropriation. Netscape is not a typical example of com- pany growth, even fast company growth. MOOs and MUDs seem to have denouement, if not death; PMC2 and Media are clearly suffering from too much care. Are there local constraints deter- mining the success of MOO or MUD populations? These aren't idle questions. And at what point could a MOO or MUD be said to take on a life of its own - if at any? The environments are highly interactive and often remain that way after participants leave. But the elements, programs, are rarely interconnected, although player classes for example give potentials across the board. There was a discussion months ago about emergent intelligence on the Net; I don't believe that for a second. The Net is simply designed otherwise. There have been other discussions about a "supermind" emerging, which I see as no more than wide-spread collaboration. On the other hand, Web development does point to high-growth sudden efflorescences in particular areas; are there others? I have heard less recently about intelligent agents - but will this also emerge and possibly lead to global change in CMC? Finally, what about the possibility of increasingly intelligent routers and servers? These will become necessary if the Net is to survive with the heavy bandwidths coming into use vis-a-vis video and high-quality audio. Will there be an overall group dynamics produced, i.e. a "read" of the Net as a whole - in much the same way that computers are making more and more stockmarket decisions based on expert programs? I recognize the vagueness of these questions, but the phenomena them- selves are vague, may not exist, in the first place. And I want to stay away from the "supermind" metaphor, which at least at this stage (without, say, neuronal interfacing), appears as wishful thinking. _________________________________________________________________________ -- Shortwave not Longwave not Packets, Packet Radio Late night, yeah... Got the shortwave on, groovy, coming on strong from Quito, Moscow, somewhere way down south, Sydney and Acapulco... Smart sound down long thin wires, ionospheric shudderings; on shortwave you feel the pulsations of the earth, spectral mother's breaths up and down the megahertz, night-settlings up there crouched against the sky... You hear them coming in, fading in and out, cradle the planet in your arms, barren, unshielded, opening up to _fundamental_ radiations, dark noise running through your veins since the beginning of time. Sometimes you can talk as well, shy, you don't know what to say, they're coming in, coming on strong... Late night, sure, you're on the hunt, there's that signal you remember, you're going up and down the sync, jumping harmonics, moving antennas around a bit, you're always reconfiguring, _working the radio,_ and you're _working_ the black-box computer as well, packet-typing, but there's no tuning here, no jostling the cosmos (at best you've got to rework trumpet winsock sometimes, usually just set for ever and ever): "reception of all of your frequences are generally quite good" but maybe you follow them as the sun sets sun rises, you're hearing _others,_ you're opening to them, you're offering yourself, you're turning knobs, retuning, you're moving the antenna, you're filtering, you're upper sideband, lower sideband, you're off-sideband, and you're patient because the voices are coming: Tiffany says hello: but they're coming all _different_ now, no longer bots, no longer at the periphery (and you cradle the globe, cool, in your arms, and your mouth suckles your breath suckles your planet suckles and there is, there is once and for all, _difference at the heart of you._ (The computer waits.) _difference at the heart of you._ (The computer waits.) _________________________________________________________________________ -- Emergence, Breathing, Proposal for Audio Compression The future of the Internet lies somewhere between the breathing planet of shortwave and emergent intelligence; it is the former which opens the wires to the lightning and plasmas of the cosmos, and the latter which organizes the neural and synaptic sheaths, interconnectivities, of the organisms and work and play. The _corporate_ truth of the Web is based on magazine production, just as early automobiles were based on horse-drawn vehicles; the very model of corporate economics may be rendered obsolete in the future. On the other hand, there are forces constantly at work to curtail the Net, harness it for what Kristeva calls "the clean and proper body"; such forces at worst will create a spintering of the developing manifold and a return to garage hacking, Fidonet, tin-can telephones and the like. I predict waves of computer assassins, murder by rlogin, use of "less" and untraceable telnet 25 sites for initial blows. The breathing of shortwave responds to the cosmos; you can feel the weath- er through the speakers, create multi-dimensional models of time/frequency /transmission and /location. Your skins expands into spherical orbit. Your eyes open wide on Indonesia. Emergent intelligence distributes entities much as broadcasts or packets are distributed; emergent intelligence, however, only projects the exis- tence of the entity as a byproduct of environmental survival training. As I describe the ego in my 1977 Structure of Reality, "The ego is thus a fissured coagulation, an _other_ within the fielding that serves as the sheet of assertion for the topology." And in my Textbook of Thinking, "En- tities originate as inscriptions after the fact within the _fissuring_ of the _real._ The real is granular. The real is codified through the _core structure._ The core structure is always an ideal structure embedding quantum processes. [...] The core structure is a broken fragment." So if breathing responds _elsewhere,_ emergence responds _within,_ among inter- secting fields. But the Net to date continually remodels itself on _classical_ artificial intelligence, with its formula _GIGO_: garbage in, garbage out. Because _most_ input is well-defined; take this text, for example, clearly oper- ating within the limits of lower ASCII, TCP/IP, and so forth, no matter how much I bang the psychoanalytical drum. The same is true for the vari- ous formats of sound, image, motion. Packets lend themselves to pack- aging; on the surface, current corporate driving of the Web is becoming the steering-mechanism of the Net itself, and the result is production of classically discrete entities on the surface as well, the fetishization constructed by Wired and other which reformats the _dirty_ revolution into product: "Yes, _Hotwired_ bought _Suck._" See page 41 of the current issue for the exciting sequel. Some night when you're not busy at 3 am in the morning, listen to CB, not the truck channels, but the locals, the exchanges. It's an earful. [On another theme, it should be possible to send voice over the Net in an ultra-compression scheme that would work as follows. 1. You would be asked to record a twenty-second sample of your voice, speaking specific words. 2. That would be processed into sampling. 3. You would speak normally into the computer microphone. 4. The computer would translate your _words_ into phonetics (spelling doesn't matter), and your inflec- tions into diacritical marks (much like Hebrew). 5. The bundle would be sent across the Net as an _ascii text_ for the words and inflections, and a binary file as an attachment for your voice. 6. At the receiving end, your voice would be reconstructed from the sample and diacritical marks. The saving would be enormous. A voice sample could be 30k. A spoken text of say 10k would be augmented heavily by diacritical marks, say around 6k, and decreased slightly by phonetics, say 1k, making 15k. The total transmission for a 10k text, around 5 pages, would be only 45k, which is remarkably small. The savings are greater, the longer the texts of course. Software could also be used to _save_ your voice at the receiving end, much as certain MAC programs do with artificial voices. Then there would only need to be a signature to "call up" your voice with the arrival of your email or text... And I don't think the diacritical marks would be that difficult, at least for basics, which would use three parameters: 1. Overall amplitude over a specified time interval, 2. "Averaged" (integrated) central frequencies over specified time intervals, 3. Timing markers. The second would be for intonation. Other markers could cover various sounds, such as laughing, etc. There could even be a simple playback/neural network program involved - so that the sender could test the results before sending the file - and modify things accordingly. And the possibilities for experimentation would be tremendous of course.] _________________________________________________________________________ -- feeling ugly (I've never been able to look in a mirror - how can you do this, stare yourself, stare yourself down? this space is protected from the world, there's no vision here what we make of it turning ourselves inside-out it's impoverished, there's no money here, nothing for masquerade but words you might or might not believe later you'll be on the Net big-time in capitals, running the Web and you won't have to look at anything all over again just the seductions of someone else's visible world it's always clamoring, links are hysterical you'll skitter across surfaces, slide almost to the edge of the screen you'll think you're big time you'll think you've arrived links seem to go all the way down, they slide almost to the edge of just another screen, skittering across surfacing while you'll think you've arrived big time the lists offer nothing, there's no surface here words you might have said, could have said, you're chattering them now but you don't have to see my face, your face, anything you don't have to see anything at all as if: the satisfaction is that of the person which never has to be ourselves the seduction is that of the person links are hysterical you think you're a done deal feeling ugly, you're seduced _____________________________________________________________________ " I have fought the good Fight byte I have put on my Mail email Fought many a Knight byte And won without fail email But was never so strong integer long At the moment of Light byte When right or when wrong integer long I ran and took flight byte Too late I had lain packet train God's Dark was too long integer long I found I had slain packet train God's Love with my song integer long So I wait and bewail, email By my Bed and in pain packet train I'll die in the Gaol email Of God's love without gain: packet train "I have fought the good Fight byte "I have put on my Mail email "Fought many a Knight byte "And won without fail." email " _____________________________________________________________________ -- A Home is just a House I have a Compaq Aero 25 notebook computer which was sold to me by store X as new, although it turns out used. Three weeks ago, it developed a boot problem and I did a diagnostics which mentioned the video checksum and I called Compaq who referred me to a repair shop Y. I took it to Y and they replaced the entire motherboard with a new one (covered); they're author- ized by Compaq. I took it home and the video gave out. I brought it in and they fixed the video plug. I called Compaq and they told me the unit was refurbished, not new. I requested a new unit. They referred me to customer services. I took the unit home and the hard drive gave out. I brought it back to Y and after a few days they replaced the hard-drive. Compaq called dealer X to pressure them to do something. I called X and they told me it would take "days." They also sold me the unit, it turns out, without cables, etc. that were supposed to accompany it. I called the consumer affairs office of NY and was told I needed forms from Com- paq. I called and left messages with Compaq. I brought the unit home from Y. The video has given out. Compaq has referred me to their legal depart- ment. The store, X, says they'll try and find another unit. It has been a total of three weeks. The case is scuffed and the hinge doesn't work properly at this point. (When the hard drive went down I lost about 50 megs of programs. I was able to reload them before the video gave out the second time, but beyond reloading, there was a software mess as well, since for example the lpmud required considerable adjustment to the autoexec.bat and config.sys files and this needed a lot of trial and error. I finished all the adjustments and the screen showed streaks.) So I have to bring the unit back to Y, sue or threaten to sue X, call Compaq's legal department - and I have not had my notebook for my consul- ting jobs for over three weeks. I am supposed to go home for the holidays and may have to cancel that as well, if I can't work with a unit there. The reason I'm writing this is that such massive errors and problems tend to return our cybernetic/cybermind selves to the surface of the machinery. I have had a difficult time concentrating on anything else. I don't exper- iment with the desktop at this point, because if it gives out, I'm out of work entirely (there are 400 megs of programs on it, about 250 download- ed). So I distance myself, bracket the machinery, which continues to haunt as the prosthesis is removed, temporarily or permanently. And I no longer see the interior, say, of email, without seeing the crashed packets - nor do I obviously trust either repairshops or dealers at this point. (Compaq has been mostly fair, but there is a distributed notion of guilt among all three parties, resulting in the fact that I have nothing to work with and will probably be out a great deal of money shortly - I'll have to start all over again, with another notebook...) So the support network, which is usually slow but taken for granted, itself breaks down. On an average call to Compaq, I was on hold for 35 minutes, until I was finally assigned a "case number," which gave me personal access to Z's answering machine, where I faithfully recorded my complaints to more machines. All of this also demonstrates how close to the edge one works in this medium - I must make continual financial and time investment in the Net, Net access and computers, keeping up with the changing landscape (Iphone's new beta, which I don't dare download without a backup machine for exam- ple) - and if I falter, when the notebook goes down, there's an almost perfect closure for a period of time. The stress is incredible. There's little recourse. Part of this has to do with the kinds of failure one has with digital equipment - unless one is very good, one can't repair it oneself. This wasn't true for analog machinery. For example, I have two shortwave radios here, one a Hallicrafters from, I think, the 40s or 50s, which I bought at a Salvation Army, and which I repaired, vacuum tubes and all - it works wonderfully. If something goes wrong with it, I can get inside it again. On the other hand, I have a Sony 2010 digital which also works perfectly - but if anything goes out on it, there is nothing I can do but send it in - everything occurs within closed and complex circuitry. On the Hallicrafters, I can use screwdrivers, alcohol, wire cutters, and a soldering gun; I don't even have the specialized equipment necessary for the Sony. Thinking like this isn't particularly original, and equipment failure returns one to the simplest mechanisms. Tonight I reconfigured the short- wave antennas, in fact, and the radios breathe a bit easier. But I can't work, can't think, and my hands have disappeared. It takes something like this to indicate to what extent we're already cyborg, half alive in real life, half alive in cyberspace. (Feeling half dead in both. And it is increasingly the _quality_ of realspace/cyberspace that keeps me moving; there is no otherwise love, sexuality, affect in my life. I am _embedded,_ not bedded, when things are as good as they are going to get. And now the air has started to disappear in the midst of the hard machinery of the living _things_ themselves.) _________________________________________________________________________ -- Litany as Stabilization Someone help me with the depths of knowledge, litanies of names, Theogony, Polynesia, biblical narrative, sons and daughters, sown Argonauts, clan ancestries, Snorri Sturluson, Anglo Saxon Chronicles, working through Hesiod the names are legion. What are these names? What do they signify? What mnemonics are called into play, alphabetics? Why these? In Wender's translation of the Theogony, there are these two great lines: "Then Night bore frightful Doom and the black Ker, And Death, and Sleep, and the whole tribe of Dreams." Evelyn-White translates "Ker" as "Fate." Shortly thereafter, Sea is busy begatting Nereus, and with Earth, Thamuas, Phorcys, Ceto, and Eurybia. But then Nereus and Doris (daughter of Ocean, it runs in the family) bear Ploto, Eucrante, Sao, Amphitrite, Eudora (not mail here, femail), Thetis, Galene, Glauce, Cymothoe, Speo, Thoe, Halie ("lovely"), Pasithea, Eraot, Enuice, Melite, Elimene, Agaue, Doto, Proto, Pherusa, Dynamene, Nisaea, and we've haven't even dived beneath the surface yet. It's explained that some of these names are attributes of the sea; they're the Nereids, after all. But why so many, spreading out synchronically, laterally, in the midst of diachronic, vertical genaeologies? (And for that matter who did Cain and Abel matter if not their own anonymous sisters, and wouldn't _that_ give a model for incest?) These accumulations, confabulations, occur everywhere in mythology. Are they an attempt at the construct of an Ur-Ground in a world which clearly has none? Do they anchor time and space themselves? Do the represent the surface of an intuited depth (i.e. Merleau-Ponty on Cezanne) of the world? And are hidden knowledges necessary projections across (Oedipal?) parental nestings, necessary for the symbolic establishment of a hierarchy of signs across the socius? Such knowledges are assumed everywhere, from the Leyden papyrus through to Omega-point speculations and TOEs today. Lully's arcana was also filled with wheels within wheels... (Do the LINKS on the World Wide Web actually _anchor_ the text in a more traditional fashion than novels, books, manuscripts, scrolls, let loose and vulnerable in the midst of life? Some teachers assign Web Pages _with a minimum number of links... Ah...) (And think of Dawkins' genes tracing themselves backwards, and sidways, stabilizing themselves...) Where there is silence, let genaeology be! __________________________________________________________________________ -- Silence as Stabilization Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, the infamous #7: Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darueber muss man schweigen. Translations Ogden, Pears/McGuinness 1/2 Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. What we cannot speak about we must consign to silence. What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence. The _first version_ assigns a spaital domain (wo/hier) to the silence, but a domain which seemingly is also effaced; there's a hint of privacy at work. The _second_ is a slightly more corporate model with a hint of cont- radiction at work, since consignment is also an inscription or speech act itself. The _third_ lends itself to the angelic, (ueber), a flight above; there is a hint of Rilke at work. All this work! All this noise! _________________________________________________________________________ -- Ruminations It's near the end of the year and I quit Future Culture, another email list that used to be thought of as Cybermind's sibling - memberships overlapped, and I met Michael Current on FC (we started Cyb together). FC to me has been drifting to the right, but it's not that; it's drifted before. Instead, I've found I have less tolerance for this, and tended to get too bent out of shape by some of the posts - I'd snap back replies without thinking them through, I'd lose sleep over them. One thing the Net has taught me is that I don't deal with my anger very well, and I let myself be stressed out by trivia. This is the problem with having most of one's emotional life on the Net. I am sitting here in a dark room, facing the screen; the only image is the imaginary of the text. To my right is a shortwave radio, Radio Austria fading in and out. I can't see out any window from my location, and the screen is lighting most of the room. (I have written this before, more or less. To write/rewrite the primal scene is neurosis. I have written that before as well.) There is no one else in the loft; there are memories of a shattered rela- tionship years ago, and that's about it. And the phone rarely rings now - the result of being online too much, although most people contact me through the computer at this point. I am putting the book together through email, working on a cybercafe menu online, preparing my online course on- line, ytalking to my daughter online, writing/wryting online. Radio Aust- ria plays a waltz and I face a blue background, peach letters foregrounded and framed by black and emptied glass. Leaving FC for the last time (I had the annoying habit of leaving and re- turning, based on the current political climate as I saw it), I feel I'm leaving what was my first "home" in cyberspace, to the extent that the people, some of them, have been familiar to me from the beginning. The addresses were familiar; some of the discussions were. A home here (at least here) is nothing more than a regime of stabilization, repetition in the address headings, a sense of securing oneself, breathing parallel air. Like Cyb, Future Culture has always had that sense of home; some of Andy Hawks' longer and more important posts were about community and "feeling the wires," which is a very real sensation, hard for outsiders to comp- rehend (although Sherry Turkle, also net-residencing, does a good job describing). But a home in cyberspace is also ideologically-charged; it's textually driven by its participants. There is no residing without reading/writing, one or both; as I've pointed out before, to participate is to open a space - just as there are conflations of shortwave frequencies, one or another of which is chosen at any particular time. Choosing one opens up the radio channel; sound and life emerge. Reading a list opens up a slot in one's inbox - _here_ is correspondence from Cybermind@listserv.aol.com reaffirm- ing framework and community existence within it. (And in this regard, the space-time topography of cyberspace in relation to that of radio broad- casting is of great interest, perhaps to be pursued later. Issues of bandwidth, interference, packeting, instabilities, nodes, home sites, communicative modes, arise, as do complex phenomenologies of time itself.) So without text, there is void; we _read_ Hesiod for example to understand the Boetian hearth where there may have been silence, song and voice cont- ributing, but only partly inscribing/circumscribing. And when there is text and only text, then everything becomes a question of the text, of _parole,_ speech acts, determinations, and politics emerges, not very far beneath the surface. Thus I found myself splitting more and more with Future Culture, the glory of political conflict disappearing for me, in the midst of other lists, other issues, other void. So I left one textual domain, not replacing it with anything (and with leaving FC, it's also a symbolic leaving of Nexus, Leri, and other lists I've left long ago) - just as PMC2-MOO saddens me now with so many others gone. I tell you, we are all ghosts riding lower ascii; at night the wires gleam hot, sometimes pressing in the flesh itself... _________________________________________________________________________ echo in the form or focus of a neutralization, charged singularity, dullness acting upon the world, in the corner huddled, there's still the issue of weight, bod body body pressed hard against the triple crease of wall wall floor / floor wall wall / wall floor wall a perfect moment perfect as the flesh sinks into the node where bod bod bodies join structure against all comers. this is the node, i.e. what a node can be. this is what an i can be. this is the winter of the world. this is the disappearance from space. this is the cracked ice. this is the dark rock. when the bod bod body is the terrain, when the terrain closes the bod body body like a lid or the bod bod body sinks into itself, he whispered in 1926. think of this serge as a node. think of this, with a nod, as a node. others like you serge. i didn't hear i pressed myself dark towards the wall, stronger towards it, bod bod body into huddled tow. __________________________________________________________________________ -- Science and Philosophy, Two Cultures, Brockman Notwithstanding - In light of numerous intermediary works by philosophers and scientists (Deleuze, Lyotard, Weyl, Penrose, Bell, etc.), I think it's important to examine the delimitations of philosophy in relation to science. Can one consider cog sci in any sense an experimental metaphysics? Does ontology even make sense beyond the scientific, particularly since cosmology itself, say, can no longer be considered purely mechanistic? On one hand, I'm not looking for reiterations of Husserl's position or Serres' for that matter. I'd like to read an informed approach _within_ the production of scientific research, something beyond Higher Super- stition's (Gross and Levitt) vituperative all-encompassing style. I think there are issues around the notion of inscription/circumscription that deserve attention. I certainly don't think of science, at this point, even core science, as being mechanical, GIGO (garbage-in garbage-out); its site is much more complex. Nor do I buy into Kuhn's notion of paradigm as relevant today - it _may have_ been in the period of Galileo or relativity, but scientific attitudes currently much more in flux. Nor for that matter do I buy into the anarchic/ideological positionings vis-a-vis science; it seems to me that the core-theoretical work is not only stable (even in its widely varying theoretical approaches), but in an uncanny alliance (from a psy- choanalytical viewpoint) with the real - an alliance that is elsewhere than that of religion, magic, the humanities. And I am interested in the scope of this alliance (not again exploring the anarchic/ideological positionings or religion, magic, the humanities, but in exploring or at least trying to comprehend, somewhat from within, this scope - and "scope" in the sense of a scope of a formula, or a bracketing) - so therefore I'm curious in any comments, informed _of_ philosophy, but from what may be philosophy's other. (This is relevant, by the way, to cybermind, cyberspace as well, since it involves the scope of dissonance between the real and the virtual, as well as both artificial life and neural systems.) _________________________________________________________________________ Alien Traps and Welcome Signs I have strong reason to believe there are aliens, from elsewhere, on these lists - aliens from other planets in fact. There are too many unknown addresses, participants automatically removed by the machinery - too many strange voices, difficulties phraseologies as well always employed as if to scatter the remains of other tongues across other sites, across others. The Net is perfect for alien infiltration, since as Camus would point out, we are all in a sense aliens/strangers here, no matter how much the protocols tend otherwise. Given this most harsh of all environments, then, environments in which neither aliens nor humans may survive, this also becomes a meeting-place thereby. So I would urge all aliens to finally, once and for all, come out of the cold, out of one no-human's land into another; meld with us, make this your own. Together we shall continue to communicate, but on a far deeper level than before, submerged identities slowly rising to the surface... _________________________________________________________________________ -- Aching Well, I managed to crash my windows tonight so I'm confined more or less to text at least at the moment, not at the moment, not totally; there are always other machines gesturing towards me, other machines with strange records for the asking. I will tell you about these records, at some length and at some time, but not now, not when I am blinded, invisible. But these records are medical records with names, for cardiac arrest and other phenomena, true names or false names such as Mary Smith the doctor and I read them in strange filenames between Windows and Dos while the other machine suffers streaks of lightning across the screen, surely the signs of ailing aliens. For they ail; their hearts run arrhythmically, their periods have long since come to a halt, their faces are wan, eyes glowing with pools of liquid darkling light. They have infected my monitor and they have closed my windows to all comers. I cannot tell you how true this is because I am forbidden to tell the same of the bar code wand which has been missing for some strange time now, alien-hidden since it alone is capable of revealing their location, something to be avoided, ailing hearts or not. If they die, there will remain only recordless pursuits; cyberspace, which is the space of records, hall of records - which is the heart and soul of records - squeezes the breath from the body, food from the anus, speech from the mouth - cyberspace thins discourse, transforms them into laminar platelets, planaria in a manner of speaking. As such, they form unix patches to my linux, linux patches to my dos, dos patches to my mac os, everywhere skittered across the surface. These and other things I know for a fact, their ailing hearts, and I will necessarily try to help them, reading the dull glow of their liquid crystals, active matrices, by even duller lamps hidden from direct view. As if the screen in dying gives out the sun. As if the sun descended to St-Antoine, reveal- ing the truth of the signifier. That it is alive, laminar, discursive, churned into linearity. That the signifier _solos._ That the heart, alien, beats to its rhythm. That Windows has died, windows have died. ___________________________________________________________________________ -- Alien Being and Becoming It is 4:30 in the morning and I do not wait for your replies about the alien. I already can hear your shrieks of laughter, snide comments be- hind my back! I know how absurd it sounds; indeed, I have gone over the facts again and again, and there is always the same conclusion: that the wires are infected, that there is no escape, that the packets are monitored, which indicates a high degree of intelligence, a very high degree - how else would such stuttering be tolerated? Not for a moment do I entertain the notion that our missives are in fact _read_ by others of any sort - only that they provide a degree of _warmth_ as the wires are heated, just for a moment, by that river of zeros and ones that constitutes our innermost thoughts. Such is the cold of cyberspace, even among the sites buried deep in frozen arctic tundra, that hearths are easily created, that we appear deep and homed surrounded by ice. Alive we are already half-dead, tending towards ourselves. --- Now it is the next day and again there are swarming shapes on the screen. If they had names I would be neighborly and quite capable, thank you, of any sort of reference. But they are _aghast._ Spelling is infected. They act on the order of favorite-ascii, bringing letters to bear where none were. To know the author of this. I have discovered a basic fact of existence: that, _outside,_ we are not ourselves. The ground is a poor substitute for a floor. There is nothing covering me from above, which is their doorway. There are no clear pas- sages; I am forced to make many choices, all of a sudden, from one foot to the other. But more than any of this, I am vulnerable among strangers whose histor- ies I do not know. I am someone else, therefore, or a memory of myself among someone else. But there is no place for observation; I must keep on the move, in order to avoid them. This is a basic law of life, this becoming otherwise with hardly a memory. I look down at the wooden slats beneath my feet, having traveled to a store. Where did these come from? My feet press them away. I know this sounds more and more absurd as they seep through the boards and gather around the surface of the screen. Have you ever pressed your fingers into your eyes? You will see something you will not believe. I peel off my images and send them to you. Is this one of them? I do not know. For I always forget. There was someone here I wanted you to meet. There is no so miserable as she or her, I forget grammer, never ending my sentences in prepositions, always wanting to. And someday I will be- gin with a conjunction, because they will let me; I have desired to al- ways split infinitives, in order to lessen the degree of monstrous avar- ice they seem to convey. _________________________________________________________________________ The Beginning Section of the Internet Text Revisited The following text begins the Internet Text as a whole. At the time, I didn't know what I was getting into, a text that would eventually reach over a twelve hundred pages to date. In any case, this was written several months after signing on, and I am using this end-of-the-year occasion to revisit it, identify its strengths and weaknesses... INTERNET TEXT 0. Prolegomena: The following iterative construct describes the internet. Traditional philosophical and cultural categories are highly problematic, given this new communications life-form. I develop instead an analysis based on EMISSION, SPEW, ADDRESS, RECOGNITION, and PROTOCOL. The essay, always preliminary, proceeds through a series of numbered paragraphs, which then rewrite. [REWRITE becomes a major concept later on, the continuous reiteration of identity on the Net through text - the constant statement of name and place.] 1. The network is a membrane composed of nodes, better considered intensi- fications. An intensification possesses an interactive emission. The emission is characterized as a program space composed of inputs/outputs, introjections/projections: a space of -jectivity. The emission occurs in a steep topographic region; distinctions between hardware and software become blurred, as do more traditional philosophical divisions (subject/ object, body/world, mind/brain). [The membrane analog easily segued into issues of bodies. Intensification characterizes the Net; in combination with emission, it constitutes a message sending and receiving 'spew.' The blurring of distinctions be- tween hardware and software also become a major theme later on - the idea of information/programming all the way down, and the difficulties this spells for traditional ontological distinctions. This is the one proble- matic addressed by soviet philosophy that still remains unresolved, edgy.] 2. In fact, traditional ontological considerations are clearly replaced by an organic episteme; what constitutes knowledge is only flow; data repla- ces history; data becomes sourceless. Rather than communication channels, consider geodesics; rather than geodesics, consider forced flows; rather than forced flows, consider emissions. [Data is sourceless because data can be manipulated, is addressible.] 3. An emission has no input, no output; an emission consists of fragmented images, the symbolic replaced by the imaginary. An emission is always in flux; an emission problematizes energy and energy consumption, since it may simultaneously drain and produce/reproduce. An emission is a chaotic domain in the vicinity of an unstable attractor; escaping, it quickly loses history, historiography, temporality itself. Close to the speed of light, it exists in a temporal well. [Now here is a blurring of TCP/IP//user distinctions. But the notion of the imaginary is critical to the Net - which begins always with the sym- bolic, in an inversion that would do Marx/Hegel proud. With emission and the imaginary, historiography replaces history. Later I will critique temporality itself flooding the wires.] 4. The membrane is an enormous hypertext whose linkages thin, occasionally break, are always redundant. It is neither a fuzzy set nor a classical one; through a fast-forward topology, it escapes traditional partitioning. The user deals with an alterity in the form of constantly changing facial expressions; one is never within or without the alterity, but in a (su- pine) position of absorption. The emission clouds close to me; ontologica- lly, it is that real escaping denotation; ontologically, it is uncanny. Thus the emission is related to excess, to surplus, to the curlicue or diacritical mark, but it absents these, and it is this absenting or ignorance that constructs the uncanny as waste-product; the blindness of emission is its site. ["Facial expressions" is unclear at this point; I am not sure of the do- main I was referring to. This alterity is what I later called hysteric embodiment, the projection beyond or through the text onto an image of the other - face, tone of voice, intention, "authenticity." Bataille and Deleuze-Guattari are at work here.] 5. To hold onto part of a body, to sever that part, to construe or re- construe that part, to devour it, tear the surface off: one searches for the skinned body, (which has the murmur or memory of pain), the articu- lation of a truth given by one's own body lost in the emission. It is good form to search out bondage, which restrains the body absent from itself, an analog of the screen or permissive membrane which occurs, going just so far. This is an antiquated ontology or materiality asserting the inert in the midst of fast-forward, an assertion doomed to be displaced, sublima- ted, effaced; one holds onto nothing; as in classical existentialism, one projects forward in the face of nothingness (as if nothing were itself an alterity); the hole, however, is an episteme broken by the screen replac- ing the mirror stage; the ego splatters against it (the cum-ego for female and male); fast-forward, the episteme always already announces its contin- uation; the existentialist project is lost in the midst of indirect ad- dresses. [Suddenly the body appears, holds its own. Bodies in fact constitute the Net, articulated bodies, described bodies, hysteric bodies, isolated or frozen bodies, scientific bodies, bodies of scientists, students, users, doctors, the disabled, home-bodies, bodies of management, sexual and sexing bodies, ignored bodies, speaking bodies, all bodies bound to the screen or speaker, bound to the text, bound to the other of reading, bound to inner speech.] 6. The user is an addict "in the midst"; the user projects; thwarted, projects again. The membrane appears in the guise of discarded pornog- raphy; one is thrust into pure consumption, no longer beneath the guise of another pornography, capital itself. Assertions are lost in the echo of the machine. Thought is defined by flux, by an absolute symbolic for the user who must be assured of the purity of his or her drug. The purity is in the form of a well-definition (in the logical sense) to which no one any longer pays attention; the absence of well-definition does not result in a program cancellation, but only a retry which is part of the program itself; it does not matter where one is; location is irrelevant. [Later I would revise this, which is all too simple, wayward. Addiction is complex, like schizophrenia; associated with a _singular object_ (drug, sex, etc.), it constructs at the least an Oedipal psychological framework for the subject. On the Net, what I am calling here (later abandoning) as addiction, is also tied into identity politics and psychoanalytics - some- thing covered at length in the later portions of the text. I would also disagree that there is an "absolute" symbolic at work here or any other place; it exists as a projection, but the symbolic itself may be decon- structed.] 7. Voices are heard behind the screen words (toggle on, echo on; the screen chants itself, hides itself, reveals the nipple); face to face replaces the face; double blinds allow the truth of double binds. This is the only truth there is: that which occurs beneath or behind the blind, that is, the lie (which is truth's double, truth's mirror, not converse or inverse) (which is truth's perverse, that is, truth's abject truth); this is the framework of classical Greek philosophy bound to classical Greek torture (both bound with identical cords, hieroglyphs): Xenophon's Socra- tes was the first user. Voices are heard, and voices are nothing but machine chatter, the ideal forms so many subroutines... [And machine chatter is the dreaming of machines, machine-dreams as well, desiring-machines literalized - but also the dreaming of bodies, body- dreams as well, desiring bodies literalized...] 8. The user. The user is an addict; the user inscribes throughout the network (temporary, electronic, absolute: an entirely new category), mic- rotendrils extending in every direction. This contains the appearance of power; the network is a fantasm reflecting emissions back through local paths. The wonder of the internet is its locality, the construct of neigh- borhood (packet channels slowing down just right for the home terminal) redefining the body; the body becomes extension; extension becomes noise; noise seethes at the edge. The process is one of fast-forward rooting, and the roots are blind. [The user as addict, again, the text addicted to addiction. Later the net- work becomes stasis, environment, ghost, network _as_ fantasm transformed into fantasm-network, fantasm-producing. Blind roots, yes; the tendrils skitter across the planet - skittering, too, develops later as the sub- ject's reception, trajectories across floodplains, Reynold's numbers.] 9. Now we can speak of the mouth or eye of the user; now we can speak of the hand or its mobility. No matter how (much) sensation is transcribed, it occurs at a distance characterized by zapping and invasions. Nothing but the materiality of the body is a stake; everything cuts everything off. The user is confined to a scientism in the form of THAT which arti- culates the THERE IS, just as addiction develops out of the action of a particular drug or behavioral sequence. One is tied to the THAT. [This lead to the simultaneous prosthesis and cauterization of the body, the body edged, on the precipice. What is at stake is nothing more or less than the _future_ - future future, but also future present, future past.] 10. The user has nothing to do with the internet; the user is of no con- sequence. Conference exists or dissolves beneath the sign, not of gender or capital, but of chaotic inscription. The sign itself dissolves; sign is, after all, only recognition. This is the final corruption of humanism; even the self is no longer centric - not through the Lacanian inscriptive/ linguistic unconscious (through which IT may still find a path or coagula- tion), but through addiction, self as THAT, or self as nodal intensifica- tion, always castrated, furiously addictive, always reading/writing, al- ways rewriting: the self becomes its own recursivity. It no longer mat- ters; its reports are from marauders, vandals, on the edge of the Roman Empire; it exists only within the interstices of power; it is displaced by power; it is no longer one or many; it no longer responds to the pronoun; it responds only to the login which may well (it does not matter) be a construct of the machine itself - just as gender-bending relies no longer on gender, but arbitrary and chaotic signifiers, signifiers undercut, in a continuous process of dissolution, murmuring, forgetting, forgotten, forg- ed and forgotten, emissive. The machine recognizes no gender; the machine recognizes nothing. The machine recognizes every gender; the machine is never a machine, but an episteme. [Beneath the surface, neutralization is uncanny because unapproachable although immanent. The Internet Text from this point on develops the surface, produces the subject criss-crossed by this form of subterranean knowledge, which is hardly a displacement or effacement, simply a condi- tion of the protocols and their subjects hungry for meaning.] 11. Just as the episteme is lost in time, so is the subject; just as music video and popular culture announced (by absenting, forgetting, by asigni- fying) the end of historicity, the subject no longer announces itself (and certainly no longer announces herself and himself): an emission is no grounds for announcement. In this manner the subject avoids death (always the plan, thwarted and perverting, procuring and devouring, but always the plan) which is already always forgotten; intensification is subject to dissolution, but subjectivity dissipates or sublimates elsewhere, as if it ever existed. [Subjectivity dissipates, but the subject _does_ announce itself, although _the subject_ is no longer announced; recognition and address are, in fact, the precise forms of this announcement. Within the digital domain, the organic hope of continuous life is fulfilled; the world is forever reproducible just as digital video can be copied, generation after genera- tion, without loss. What skitters, loses through friction, heat. The depths are immobilized, ice. It's not even a necessary precondition that the Net physically exist; everything ties to GIGO in spite of distributed intelligence and entities - what goes in is representation which appears permanent. It's left for the real to be granular, chaotic, excessive, unregulated, idiotic, obdurate; it's left for the real to produce the subject of the Internet text, produce the subject no longer announced.] 12. But just as if it ever existed, there are no longer ontological con- siderations; as plasma, the internet bypasses existence (always already... the litany repeats as murmur). It is within this that the projected eternality of the digital has full reign or resonance; noiseless, the digital proclaims the clean and proper body (which is rendered problematic by the maternal which becomes uncanny, fantasm, the circulation already on the move, already elsewhere), genderless and absent. Clearly in this fashion, everything is absent within the internet. (Everything announces, dresses, addresses. A character, screen or otherwise, is an announcement.) The human dream of eternal life occurs by a draining of temporality; therefore nothing occurs or can occur. It is irrelevant whether or not the human is "ready" for this when readiness implies an a priori teleology; such an impulse becomes a trail or trace left by a gopher through the computational/server holarchy, not an end in sight or sightlessness. [Oh we are a miracle.] 13. Naturally, then, it is also irrelevant to ask where one goes from here... [But the text continued through another 700 texts to date, a flood of text, inter/texts, veering from the subject but always tethered to her or him, continuous desperate disparate attempts. And this introductory text itself proceeded through several other texts, all found at the beginning of net1.txt, at the jefferson.village.virginia.edu site. Yours for the taking.] ________________________________________________________________________ THERE WILL BE A FUTURE The NCR notebook computer I recently purchased at a pawnshop (active matrix color screen, 486/25, 170/4) came with a barcode reader and appropriate software installed. The HP Scan-One, zipped quickly across the appropriate lines, places translation at the cursor, anywhere. There are various codes in use, I learn from the software, and I arbitrarily set one of them in the on position. Running hysterically around the apartment, I scan code after code, books, aspirin, little fuzzy cacti and lizards and snakes I have added to my monitor frame. The numbers come up; they're the same numbers you can read anyway, but they're entered, quickly, into the Matrix. The Matrix is everything there is and the numbers of course reside there. You already know that. The code is initiated by startpoints and endpoints and you can scan in either direction. Well enough. I will remove the endpoints and I will attach them to my body, attach them to my cat, to everything that moves or is. And I will read and recite their numbers into the Matrix and I will give them as a gift, as a gift to you. And you will have the numbers of the world. --- ii. Kabbalah Miracle This is indeed the Kabbalah Miracle, of which we have read repeatedly. There is something enervating about the _substance_ of the world, that idiocy (word remaining stolen from C. Rosset), but with a wave of the wand it is transformed into _data_ associated with bits; the mechanical world and the world of information are intertwined, of course - nowhere so much as here. Further as well, a certain _skill_ is necessary - the wand operates within fixed bandwidths of entries and exits. It _caresses_ the world, in other words (other worlds), in order to _draw_ (like an artist, the movement of the brush) out its secrets. The numbers that remain are the remaining numbers, using up the world. --- iii Someday I will write, gracefully, bar code by hand; I will program in assembly language* one or another beautiful stroke. With my eyes closed, I will produced the _program of the world,_ the ultimate formula. Waving my wand (with its gleaming tiny laser light within, I must add, rendering blood to the surface of things), the number will come up - your number, my number, replete with alphabetics... There will be nothing left, and nothing left to do... --- *I believe this has already been the case - I seem to recall computer magazines years ago using barcode as a way of publishing small software programs... ___________________________________________________________________________ from writing in a dream i want to ring the neck of the body where the body was the hour of the future stumbling rocks strewn across strucken paths high above lend themselves to awakening fingers curl from hands worn with comforting minds withdraw in ignorance, remembering everything returning to the presence of language throughout all years I have been named with names of years -- The Hand never grasped what it held, never held what it grasped. Do we refrain from disappearance in the domain of cyberspace, encompass annihilation and non-annihilation, neither one nor the other, float in reflexivity that leaks across non-existent domains? Nagarjuna states "If compounded phenomena transmigrate, / They do not transmigrate as perman- ent. / If they are impermanent they do not transmigrate. / The same approach applies to sentient beings." (trans. Garfield) Now what _here_ transmigrates, and what remains behind, and what is aggregate and what is unified? Surely all is aggregate, yet surplus is tagged or excluded, and certainly all is the dreams of uncanny totality. Are wires signifiers of transmigrations? Do souls which do not exist, travel in a form of reson- ance across the Net? Are we in a state of transformation, in which case are are not, or tagged by something that remains either within or used solely by convention, or are we in a state of stasis, Reichenbach's geni- dentity at the very least, carried by threads that may only be lost by others, also unaccountable, unaccounted-for? Everywhere, we find the matrix, which is without us, a condition of -jectivity, the thrown (and what is thrown is always a spray or emission), "If prior to binding / There is a bound one, / There would be bondage, but there isn't. / The rest has been explained by the gone, the not-gone, and the goer." (Nagarjuna) _The hand never grasped when it prayed, never prayed when it held. The hand never moved or remained still._ Infinitesimal hands smeared the continuum. The body reacted or did not react and reacted and did not react. The wires pierced the body, the jewels pierced or did not pierce the lotus in the book on the head. -- Let us consider an approach based on pattern; the smallest patterned units are 01 or 10 - there are two basic elements, in other words, besides the null pattern 00. Then 01 >< 10 clearly since 00 01 >< 00 10. The operation characterized by 00 01 etc. is concatenation. We have a C b = ab and (a C b) C c = a C (b C c) and so forth. We also have separation S(abc) = a b c, S(ab)c = ab c, and so forth. Hypothesis: Represent pi by a binary chain, i.e. over an alphabet 1,0, and every finite pattern will be found at some site within it. Any pattern of n > 2 units can be represented by a pattern with alphabet 1,0; for example, 1, 2, 3 can be represented by [00], [01], [10] etc. In all cases duality is at work by assigning 0 > 1, 1 > 0. Pattern of this sort can be used to represent Sheffer-stroke func- tions (see Structure of Reality) or almost-symmetric series (Internet Text, Net1.txt, Net2.txt I believe). Pattern does not depend on negation or non-negation; it does not depend on inscription or fissuring. Pattern requires very little - at the least some positions of automorphisms (see H. Weyl), the hunt for symmetry. At the least, the Peircian "sheet of assertion," units, symmetrical substrates, perhaps a manifold for its display. Existence or non-existence do not arise; ornament or the decorative do not arise. Genidentity and others carry upon them the seeds of the surface, pattern skittering across sur- face: _There is surface all the way down._ (Which is not to say that simu- lacra arise, simulacra which possess surface lending itself to surface, skittering across upper lamina, the blankness of the screen elsewhere, not even the direction "below.") Surface all the way down; surfaces are connected by patterns. Nothing new is being said, inscribed, arises. The world is always already languaging and languaging is the world; meaning arises in its nearly-decomposable domains. There is no void, interior nor exterior, there is not avoidance, nor non-void. What cannot arise does not come up. What comes up always and for ourselves is that other, "unaccountable and unaccounted-for," which simultaneously threatens accountancy and the contract. _The other is mag- ma, which appears but is not appearance. The other drives meaning. What _means_ is what the hand grasps. ____________________________________________________________________________ -- UPGRADE I've replaced my gif viewer by another, first using Gifprt then Qpeg then Display; changing from DOS edit to Browse, and thinking about moving from Windows 3.1 to either Windows95 or WindowsNT; there's the necessity of adding Linux somewhere along the line if I get the right SCSI hardware and drives; on the other hand, when I change videoboards I'll be able to add ThePalace and AlphaWorld, Worlds Away, etc. I've also got to add a Quickcam and a scanner; at first the latter was going to be monochrome only, but considering that ThePalace takes full color gifs, I'm going for color as well. I hope to find time to utilize all of these, but at least they'll be potentially available on my desk- top AST. Later, I'll have to upgrade the 486 to a Pentium or P6, and might have to find co-processors for my notebook units. This is the hysteria of upgrading, the constant push towards distension, enlargement - the engorgement of the machinery devouring capital, time, resources. Driven by media hype and new Net applications, replacement becomes flow or flux; capital becomes necessary excrement. One's rela- tionship to other users is becoming increasingly mediated; capital drives communication directly on the Net, and it is time to recognize this fact - to recognize that the fetishization is no longer of specific components/objects, but a fetishization of the flow itself, its sub- structural component of capital - a fetishization of _manageriality_ as it applies to both consumption and knowledge, which are becoming, not only intertwined (How many hits has this page!) but one and the same... The Net _user_ becomes a consumer always engaged in _strategies of pro- duction,_ increasing bandwidth, applications, sensory modalities, speed, multi-tasking... And production, which is always construct, must be doubly coded: first, on the (previous and continuous) level of address, protocol, and recog- nition - i.e. _occupying_ a space which is equivalent to one's presence in that space, one's name - but second, on the level of _continuous im- plementation as well_ - upgrading for example from IPhone N to IPhone N+1, or taking on another voice application altogether, with or without payment of registration fees. The _hysteria_ behind this is not the hysteria of Veblenian conspicuous consumption, but that of being found _voiceless,_ excluded from a/the community of participants. Thus soft- ware is continuous, learning is continuous as well - new micro-languages (Iptscrae for example), new protocols, even new IP and URL addresses, patterns of behavior, friends and acquaintances, lovers, hysteric bodies, lives, worlds... It is all a question of encoding, decoding; it is all the flood of capi- tal redefining priorities and the very ability to speak, to be heard, to hear, _to be present._ And this is of course the very real danger of the Net, this constant drive towards further engorgement, this consumption - a danger both in terms of the limited and problematic demographics that ensue, and in terms of the psychological model at work here - one in which it appears as if the body itself is rewarded through capital... Further, there is no end in sight. At the moment, we are operating on a traveling wave - we can upgrade for example to radio networking, free- ing us from the domination of the wires, but we will still have to type in our commands - the day when the Net becomes fully prosthetic and the body becomes fully cyborg in return, is at least a decade away. And even then, it will be several decades before the implementation of seamless virtual reality - plugging into the Matrix as another/same world - and then, even then... So at the moment, there is no _apparent_ end in sight, nothing to slow the machinery (and as I've pointed out, the machinery then becomes flow itself, no longer "personal," but temporary vortex at best) - and so? And so, given this hysteria, given the market, it may be time to examine the phenomenology of capital once again - after Marx and after Deleuze/ Guattari, say... "Underneath all reason lies delirium, drift. Everything is rational in capitalism, except capital or capitalism itself." (Gilles Deleuze in Felix Guattari, Chaosophy) Can one say that the Net is delirious, that it is being driven by market forces traveling across the embedded hysteric body? Can one say that the BWO (body without organs) is dis-membered, dis-assembled, into a hundred, thousand, million - not plateaus, not nearly so stable - but organelles, dividing, subdividing, upgrading, uniting? That the _body is lost to the subject_ who has already been disassembled, that the dispersed or distributed subject locates in the Net the potential for reconstitution - the work_station replacing him or her - that desire is now the desire of the work-station? Can one insist on the fact, clearly, that the classical Marxist distinction between exchange value and use value is lost in cyberspace - that they become one and the same, and that their intersection is precisely, simultaneous- ly, information and disembodiment? That information is always already the dispersion of the body? And that finally, that mediation itself is in constant need of upgrading, that mediation itself is mediated - not in the sense of infinite regress, but in the sense of the hysteric passage and recapitulation of time, of temporality? It is in these terms that one can begin rethinking the Net, and its dri- vers, terms which splinter upon closer examination, terms, in fact, of _melange._ _________________________________________________________________________ -- Magic Plank But it's magic; the plank harbors over 1500 pages of text I have written, memories that can be recalled long past the dissolution of their indirect addressing. My fingers cross, caress the plank, which always responds and always perfectly. Error resides within me, I have sinned; the plank con- tains the future of all culture, my legacy. It requires maintenance. It requires charging and recharging and the sites it has placed and exhausted on the Net require confirmation and occasional movement. Oh I have traveled in this fashion from one continent to another. Oh I have carried my belongings upon the back of ftp. Oh digital, they have not been transformed in the process, nor decayed, nor home to noise and co- rruption. Perfect, they have wandered, whenever dwelling has been offered. Through the milk-glass of its screen, I glimpse into the aquarium in which the remnants of the mirror stage, _the text of the mirror stage,_ has been inserted. It expands beyond, above and below; it expands before and after. Swollen, it consumes me; distended, the magic _takes._ I am heard in and within, through the magic. It is the magic without fetishization, without subject and object; it is the magic with protocol alone, the beautiful re- cognitions. It is the recognitions that are perfect, even as this body, _this_ body, is not. It is the recognitions that remain shuttled among zero and one, on and off, this and that, here and there, now and then. What is lacking is between; my legacy is kept in the midst of the shuttling... __________________________________________________________________________ -- Meandering and Failing Saying Nothing Poor Thinking and Weak Thought Feverish Thought and Losing All Control I don't think I've said everything I've wanted to say. Because this magic box transforms me into a constant state of servitude, and if not this box then another - it is neither the box nor the principle of the thing, but the continuous deformation of reality, of the ability to _communicate_ anything whatsoever. A certain nervousness attends here; it is all too possible to crash a system, create an impediment, bring an email account to a standstill, even interfere with the clean and proper operations of others on the Net. The depth of crashes varies widely; one must be con- stantly vigilant, as if one's tongue were always in danger of falling out of one's mouth, the teeth too... What could the result of this be, if not stress, surviving in intermedi- ary modes, lodged in the midst of things like a pebble in the throat? Whatever is solid today, melts tomorrow, absorbed or forgotten by another upgrade; whatever momentary talk one has on the Net, say, in Web Chat _now_ is likely to be lost in a year, a month, a day, as whole populations move from one and another site, always on the go, driven by hysteric cap- ital. And what is actually being _said_ within these environments? Almost everyone I have contacted with Iphone has been male, middle- or lower-man- agerial class, running a small business, using Iphone for relaxation much as amateur radio has been used. Discussions range from equipment to the quality of voice and back again, touching on various aspects of the Inter- net. This leads me to believe that different applications/environments have different and widely-ranging demographics - but whatever they are, they're on the move, repeating, and like me, true to form. On the other hand, as I've also pointed out, there are darknet behaviors and applications, like IRC, which remain as such, building deep community, outside the corporate run. But these sites are rapidly becoming the excep- tion, as the surface Web and client-server technology off SLIP or PPP grows, exfoliates, encrusts. So I don't think I've said everything I've wanted to say, because I have- n't said much about the sickness that accompanies all of this, real phy- sical sickness, nor the trembling, nor the stress as finance and crashes continue to take their toll. The goal of information continues to recede as well - what _do_ you want to learn/do/experience here? Instead, one is shuffled with others like cyborgs herded into streams and rivers of band- width, as if... as if one is actually _doing_ something, _creating_ in the larger sense of things... We're desperate for talk, we're desperate for entertainment, we're des- perate for companionship. We're _nothing if not desperate._ (We think poorly. We repeat ourselves over and over again. We dance around capital because capital's inert, obdurate, stony, like the real. It's the real which encroaches here, there, everywhere. Spittle falls from our lips because we know this and say it repeatedly. We're given the space to re- peat, just like we're given the space of embodiment, because we've given capital for it, capital for our bodies. We're tethered by our nipples in a manner of speaking, manner of thought; our breasts are pulled from us until they lactate. Words ooze from our genitals. We're still allowed to fuck in this space if we pay for the video but maybe not much longer. May- be in America we can be the clean and proper bodies always wished for us. Then we'll go to code, and that will increase the sickness and the fevers, increase the trembling and the shivering deep into the night. We think poorly about this, though; _we're weak._ There's not much we're given to do.) _Go to the code._ Steal it. Sabotage. Pay for your eyes and ears. Don't pay for anything else. Do the time: Flat rate! ________________________________________________________________________