Memories of MUD I remember the MUD landscape I designed, where it was always the winter of the broken twig, the summer of heated abjection; there was the cooling sea where Clara might go, smeared with shit, piss, and cum, mixing with the tepid waters; there was the neophyte Alan, hysterically picking up coins and menses in any combination, delving into tunnels, falling into the vag- inal opening in the floor, labial opening in the wall, the clock bleeding second after second. Nothing happened that couldn't be corrected by prayer as Death and Tiffany fucked murderously, returning the unstable world to where it used to be. There were Man to be fought in this world where ever- yone is naked, crawling, where the Pub offered female and male cum, as well as piss to drink, where delirium is the order of the night. I could fight with Honey there, and violated I could die piecemeal. I never pro- grammed the eating of corpses, but the possibility was there, running rag- ged through the body of the other in the midst of bodies. Everyone sexed everyone else, every hole offered itself, the mazes crashed against im- possible topologies, and there were prisons from which it was impossible to escape, ever, before the shutdown-closure of the world. But most of all I remember wandering within all of this, things dripping, stumbling about at the debris of my own creation built upon the structure of a clean eco- nomy, clean game, with foreclosed though wounded bodies. Here one slid with every hole filled with fingers and other proturberances, with burb- ling or mewling mouths, with insatiable hungers for bodies among bodies. I remember returning in my dreams to dissolute programming, walking along the path strewn with feces, the two of us covered in menstrual blood, the blood-red sun crashed hard against horizon of the text. Build one yourself she said, motion begets motion. __________________________________________________________________________ Near There In the back of the current 2600, The Hacker Quarterly, although any issue will do, announcements of meetings, including: "Buffalo, Eastern Hills Mall (Clarence) by lockers near food court," and "New York City, Citicorp Center, in the lobby, near the payphones, 153 E 53rd St, between Lexington & 3rd." The meetings are surrounded by fast food, telephony, quick moves by ground or car or subway - they're face to face of course, lest likely for infiltration, not that anything illegal might occur. But consider the difference between f2f/lowtech/fastfood and hacking _through_ the lines, perfect image of darknet behavior, movement out of sight, blind movement. You can think of Brownian irregularity in fact, skittering across the sur- face/beneath the surface of _things,_ channels, communities. It coheres. Physicality of the world intrudes, shuffles as mud covers wires, connects break, short out. Hacker to the world moves on, again nomadic only to the extent of escape-route/trade-route. She walks across axon-dendrites like bulbous ballooned among viral implants. Hi tech to low tech capn crunch. Meet her by the TAZ. Over out. _______________________________________________________________________ Perfume Two nights ago, working, I put perfume behind my ears, slightly around my eyes, around my nose. The heavy and subtle smell lasted and lasted for hours, so associated with body, pleasure, the glance of someone down the street and the girl on the subway car; later the same night, sleeping, it was as if all the you in the world were there beside me, and I would say this, not wanting to sound so formal, but nonetheless - that my space was reconfigured, blossoming with convexity and softness, the subtle thrill of satin, hint of moisture in its crevices which remember infolding forever, even past down into the harshness of the day. Such blossoming in the form of voice and murmurs as well, softening my exterior as I slid into dreams and memories rising like slow and tepid lava to the surface... The whole night was such an ellipsis... no longer the point or node of the telephone headset or computer screen, but everywhere, everywhere... So that there were nothing to be said but the soft Joycean saying of it, this odor which flowered, defined the real, this very real flowing... ___________________________________________________________________________ Taste Walking through the angry streets at dawn not yet asleep, I would taste her on my hands, intermingled scents and flavors, cum, lubricant, menses, piss, and shit; I wouldn't clean for the day, keeping her to myself, the sustenance of memory. Earlier, I would lie for hours, my tongue between her legs, tasting everywhere; I'd beg her to remain unshowered, unbathed, unwiped for a day or longer. Our tastes blended together, became one; we were tied by the same pheromes to every degree, haranassed to the same wilted clothing, exchanging underwear as well. People _knew_ and would step aside, avoiding barely-separated twins at birth, death, and desire. On the keyboard, stains would begin to appear, white, red, yellow, brown, the keys sticky to the touch, hungering for more memory to convey into the tasteless world beyond their portal. Remember, we would whisper to one another, my mouth has tasted you _everywhere,_ beyond all notions of decency and etiquette, because it is only beyond this that our tissues begin, melting together. Her waste was my gift of food, and mine hers. No formal degree of differentiation could complete this circuit, no ascii could do anything but report on the _conditions_ of life, bodies shudder- ing in the dusk of the twentieth century. Absorbed in each other, we absorbed each other as well; her liquids were my own, more powerful than the voltages travelling through this circuitry. Taste like scent defines its own interior, interpenetrated, its own spatiality, everywhere missing from the _flood_ of ascii text. _________________________________________________________________________ Listdeath iii Clearly a list doesn't die; a list is made up of subscribers, moderators, and machinery. The notion of "listdeath" is at best metaphoric for what may happen to one or another member, nothing more - feelings of fatigue, fallout, and so forth. Only at the beginning of a list is there a sudden flurry of new-found interest, with, very often, enormous numbers of subs as the word spreads; things then settle down into routines with smaller peaks. So listdeath is burnout, the feeling that one has ridden the cycles already, that moves are predictable, that the return isn't there. We float in and out of this; our eyes closed, we see the unix prompt waiting reso- lutely for new input, returning the old, for trajectories that will in fact swerve off the groove instead of hardening and reaffirming one or another projection of personality, true-real or fictional construct. It is the throughput that characterizes all of this, both for those discovering subject and object simultaneously, and for those who cross paths with pre- defined neural energy. We move across trajectories of attention and perso- na harbored within us. Bracketing the list as a _bundle of messages_ is healthy. Paraphrasing badly, lists don't die, desire does. The result can be a sensation of _sloughing off._ ___________________________________________________________________________ - Community and Lag writing through telnet telnet telnet I'd realy like to get to know you, Cynthis said to Tom waiting in the wings by the MOO fountain. This is terrific, that we're all on the same email list, I can't read you said tom to Cynthia as things got really weird becaue of lag lag alg lag lag .... Nothing made any sense to the two of them witnessing hte mosnter coming up in their midst, these weird spelling, did Cynthis say that as the screen lied to the eyes, returned nothing whatsoever that would give credence to the coherence of the world. Community foundered and produced on the same equivocations, said Travis who nhad just wantered by to see, rather to "tiwithness" the goings-on. Lag entered like the virus, in fact it was , no _was- the virus of what occurred in Cybermspace, Tiffany added. Where are you from? The words returned to her, she hadn's spoken them. Along came Cynthial and in fact it was her. Wait a minute, is this a community or not? It's more likea machine for reverbaration mechanics. Traavis watched the scren as Tom typed and typed never seeing what he was hearing or vice versa, but it was Tiffany runnning the show. Define community, la la. Define community, lalala. It was always the noie that was disturbing, call it THEORY_NOISE that just went on and on, humming background and foreground "to the extent that something was occurring, "w chih never seemed to be the case.... What kind of a thing is this when there's no alterity face-to-face, when everything takes the persepctve of construction along with it, Honey asked, but no one seemed to be listening? The faces are always dislaced from one another, Tom said to Tiffay.And besides, there's more, because, morphing into Honey, Travis replied to Cynthis echoing Tom's words, not only no alterity but no, what reichenbach called genidentity, that IS spelled correctly at that point, without rocorrection to be sure... genidentity being the idenityt that occurs when tereh the the coherence of substance accompanying the content, objects are genidentical with themselves and there ar repercussions developed in quantum and relativity theory by among others reichenbach himself. he was something, but then can ou have community without genidenitty, what in fact can you have? Tiffany didn't know, forgeting that @al would have given information available to her about all of them, without their knowing in fac,t just like the wizard Cynthia could have been in there at this very moment altering descriptions and genders with an @gender that transformed surfaces without consensent or words echoing back as they were wont to do, weren't they? (a community of information perhaps or a community constructed through writing or a community indicative of construction or constructive, a gramatological comunity, or a community one takes with herself or himself off the terminal, harboring it dreamlike or a real community of waiting for the next line to appear lag or no lag, waiting by the screen, active, engaged, _active_) But community of interest, of affect, attribute-community tagged to the moo or the mud or the talker or irc channel to be sure, newgroup or email list to be sure, worldschat and thepalace to be sure, iphone even on one to one but communicating by or through transitive relationships, not to mentio all the whiteboardin/conferencing systems out there. Community which doesn't depende on genidetntity and which further routes across or through lag which characterizes it: give someone time to think! for example which is always hte case in these matters... but lag which places the last foot forward, Tom said to Travis as CYnthia and Tiffany coupled listening in but simultaneously beneath the surface paging one another through sexual abandonment. in cyberspace community there are alawyas prommises to keep and send to one another, contacts to be made, photographs exchanged throgh irc dcc. what doesn't get corrected HERE becomes a form of _splat_ or corrosion, but that is the truth of the thing, isn't it? I'm here, I'm part of you. I belong with you. I really love all of you. I am who I am and that's what God said to be and you sometime I think in front of the @burning bush. We do love and care for one another, lag. You mayhave died between one word and the next. On a good day I will cons- truct/ person/pesonality forever. Could this be such a good day? Surely it could be, because of he corrosion. ___________________________________________________________________________ HE-ZU-AM! Marduk-IMAGE is taken by the Elamites; Marduk is retrieved and Marduk is elevated. The fortunes of empires rise and fall; there are centuries in- volved, far more than meets the eye, fields of grain, irrigation ditches. This is the way the world is. he-zu-am in the Exaltation of Inanna, be it known! But listen to the description of the demons in Dumuzi's Dream: Those who moved against the king [Dumuzi] were a mixed group of men, Who know not food, know not drink, Eat no sprinkled flour, Drink no poured out water, Accept no pleasant gifts, Enjoy no spouse in embrace, Kiss not the very sweet children, Taste not the bitter garlic, They eat no fish, they eat no leek. Like ninjas or freemen they wander the landscape of violence. Dumuzi's sister Gestinanna waits; he says: "Sister, go up upon the hill, sister, go up upon the hill! Sister, when you go up upn the hill, Do not go up like a noble man! (But) after you have [scratched] your "heart" and your "liver", After you have [scratched] your clothes and your crotch, Sister, go up upon the hill! Sister, when you have gone up upon the hill, Raise your eyes! The evil ones, hated by men, [Are coming] on the boat of the river! They [hold] in their hands the wood to bind the hands, They are to be known from the wood to bind the neck - [no man can] loosen it!" Statues are taken back and forth among the kingdoms, seats of power. The demons are ordinary men who are described here at least by negation, by absence, not by the paraphernalia of secondary attributes. Gestinanna waits and scratches her body, including her crotch. Anatomy is a matter of genuflection. These scattered among myths and towns are three parts of a puzzle. Cer- tainly there is a lot against the idea of bicameral mind here, but that is another puzzle and another story. Meanwhile, it is not clear what the puzzle is; the sprinkled flour may or may not be a clue, an early form of "sand" painting or dispersal perhaps. But I choose to think here of everything imbued to the extent that the demons pass among us, as we would in actuality pass among them; they are also described in fact as somewhat historic personages. The sense of imbuing here seems unrelated _thank Dumuzi_ to traditional notions of the numinous or fetishistic. Instead, in this meander I am reminded of Michael Oppitz' four-hour film, Shamans of the Blind Coun- try, which simultaneously is a recounting of Nepalese shamanism and a real-time documentary of a young woman's initiation on the tree/pole, during which the villagers, at the base, haggle over costs. I imagine Marduk rolled one way or another, or carried on ceremonial carts, much like Juggernaut. I imagine strangers with lowered eyes, refusing sus- tenance, trance-women like Medea walking in their midst. I have met them on the Net, all of them, the statue or objet petit a somewhere else in fact or fiction. The rest surrond us in a simulacrum of exchange. MEDEA KALI PHAEDRA LISTEN Enheduanna speaks the Exaltation of Inanna: "That you are as lofty as Heaven (An) - be it known! That you are broad as the earth - be it known! That you devastate the rebellious land - be it known! That you roar at the land - be it known! That you smite the heads - be it known! That you devour cadavers like a dog - be it known! That your glance is terrible - be it known! That you lift your terrible glance - be it known! That your glance is flashing - be it known! That you are ill-disposed toward the ... - be it known! That you attain victory - be it known!" he-zu-am! ------------------| Hallo and van Dijk, The Exaltation of Inanna Alster, Dumuzi's Dream, Aspects of Oral Poetry in a Sumerian Myth ________________________________________________________________________ - Stale Text on Community and Lag So _we know_ that we can have community distended by time, lagging behind itself, constructed beyond the natural flow of everyday life. Now let us think this through on synchronous applications as well, noting for example how MUDs often imitate, like Habitat, village life, how MOOs like Media base themselves on physical universities. They're grounded, unlike others operating out of fantasy/theory/childhood/spasm (almost all of which none- theless have libraries, museums, theaters, the debris of classical agora). What can we say about friendships or community/governance, except that there are wide varieties and styles; the friendships I've found from MOO for example are those which were reaffirmed in real-life situations, where gender-jumping and morphing are more difficult. /I've already described this; where do we go from here?/ There are no firm answers to description of community, and one only notes that in fact gender and morphing, transformation in general, plays a role in relation to construct; that governance occurs with undertows of anarch- ism; that desire is channeled in ways I've already described; that sexual- ity fills imaginary spaces; that proper names are never what they seem to be (and the theory of proper names needs to be withdrawn); that forthcom- ing modalities of video and audio for specifically community-oriented applications will change things; that as usual, class demographics will play a larger role than one would want; that one will never die, that one will never die... /http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/internet_txt.html goes over and over this ground/ There is everything and nothing to say. On one hand, every conceivable analysis is applicable, from psychoanalytical through marxist, decon, pomo, etc. On the other, framework analysis may be more necessary than ever, especially since effects such as lag, first/third person, rites of passage (login/password), etc. are global in character; even god/wizard rights are well-defined and differentiated from other user classes. /The same URL gives a measure of work on this as well. However, think of _rights_ of classes and there may be something left to work on./ Sometimes it is not so clear as to the point, beyond strictly academic contributions. One would want to know, for example, about the political ramifications of Usenet, the social and personal consequences of net sex, the economic consequences of addictive MOOing, and even the physiological consequences of uninterrupted IRC. Is Net community a replacement commu- nity, an adjunct, a simulacrum of community, a form of literary disposi- tion, all or none of these? While I do not think these questions are ans- werable in the abstract, individual testimonials are valuable, at least hinting of a certain human future in the midst of otherwise-chaos. /It's too vague. If you want to know what a village is, check out Hodder on The Domestication of Europe for example. If you want to define commu- nity, for whatever reason, there are all sorts of statistical methods, phenomenologies of identity and identification that may be brought into play. Suit yourself. What might be of immediate use, given Bosnia, Chia- pas, forthcoming elections in the United States and elsewhere - that geo- political, Realpolitik, analysis we've all been waiting for. What's going down in the world, what's being reported, what difference the reports are making, what sorts of net communities organize themselves around all of this, their interaction with everyday life as well./ I'm going over old ground once again... ________________________________________________________________________ - S "But let us go back to the division of the subject, the division between the 'I' of the utterance and the psychic reality it represents by the al- ternation of presence and absence. It will be noted that it is the exter- iority of the subject to the Other (language for Lacan) which will insti- tute the unconscious. 'It is in the reduplication of the subject of speech that the unconscious finds the means to articulate itself.'" (Ecrits, 26). (Anika Lemaire, Jacques Lacan.) And if there is only speech, only echo and reduplication within word-pro- cessing online software that in fact mimics the mathematical operations of the grotesque, arithmetic as well? If the subject of speech is always already speech? If word-processing mimics the uncanny and its (in)coher- encies? If the screen by virtue of lag and onset/offset, erases itself within and without? If t = 0? Is the "signifier a subject for another signifier"? No! Are there herme- neutic cycles or circuits, regressions within the interpretive framework? No! Does Bateson's meta-learning hierarchy continue indefinitely? No! Is the subject always a subject for another subject, object for another ob- ject, object for another subject, subject for another object? No! Does t = 0? Yes it does! It always does! "Horkheimer and Adorno argued that at the heart of Enlightenment there was a secularized version of the belief that God controlled the world. People thus confronted nature as an inferior, external other, a world of life- less, fungible atoms, open to manipulation, and without conceiving of an interpenetration of subject and object. In one sense, then, cyberspace may be seen as the final act of the Enlightenment, in which the interface of nature disappears, replaced by a more evidently divine other. Although subject and object are most certainly entwined, the subject's attributes become definitely open to exchange." (Julian Stallabrass, Gargantua, manufactured mass culture.) _________________________________________________________________________ When nighttime falls, I crawl the walls, Miss all that I hold dear; I drop a tear, my crying stalls, Because I walk the sphere. I walk the left, I walk the right; I walk both far and near. I am bereft, an ugly sight, Because I walk the sphere. The sphere is big, it has no eyes, It has no ears to hear my cries; It is a nightmare in disguise - I walk it in great fear. I never know where I have been In spite of mourning and of sin, Because I walk the sphere. __________________________________________________________________________ <@kill children> we're so involved with one another, i can't see the daylight between our legs. i wanted to write you and say sweetness falls from _this_ fruit. i don't want to be a virgin anymore; mommy help me. the i's are swollen shut. the children need to be protected from people who want to protect them. there are no right-thinking adults. a dancer once said to me he couldn't do at 26 what he could do at 5. she kept her hands between her legs even when we went out, constantly rubbing her clit. life revolving around a syzygy of holes and objects is no life at all. when i close my eyes they swell. you must realize this is about puffed faces, protected children, distended adults; no one is there to make or break connection. router. the order-assemblage presupposes one, 1, peirce's sheet of asser- tion. every substructure has a proper name and origin. emp- ties out children . again t = 0 state. but really there are the children to consider. the world is a comfort zone. a single blinded child is worth more than all the animals in africa. animals are only "so-called" wild anyway. children should drop like rain into puddles of population. men must stretch their penises, milk their dried testes to produce that extra kilogram of sperm. distended adults should never have sex, not even on sheets of assertion. that i hate them all is of no con- sequence. only consequences are of consequence. _________________________________________________________________________ Lag (Again) Ag (L) In 1961 I was working in an East Harlem settlement house on 116th that's probably not there anymore, doing the confusion I do best; down the street in a basement there was a secret lab run by the US Army I visited several times as subject/object of their desire. They were running ex- periments to test for hearing and response time; I had the fastest re- sponse of anyone, no surprise to me, since I always wanted to be a race- car driver. There would be a sound and a switch to close and I closed it ahead of all the other volunteers, although I think we were paid some- thing or other for our time and nervous systems. Later the tests expanded and I collapsed; we were to speak, our words coming back at us, with specific delays - and later still I found out this was done to catch people faking deafness to stay out of the armed forces - a ruse I didn't have to go through although others. I couldn't speak freely, I found; the lag ruined the conversation, confused me, and I couldn't tune it out. My pride in response time collapsed as my inab- ility to continue without the proper feedback from the world took over. I've written since then about lag in CMC and notice that the windows open are always of variable width, ranging from a split-second to close to a minute, before I log out, log in again. This variation throws things off even more, breaking concentration as the screen moves from subject to object, from experience of transcription of experience to an experienced indexicality, the cursor suddenly propelled, arriving at the end of a series of new words: everything waiting in the queue has arrived, things are back to normal. The lifeworld repeatedly shatters and re-coheres in this fashion, and thought becomes anxiety-ridden, fragmented. The instan- taneity of lived-words, the inhabiting of language, crumbles into that moment when cuneiform no longer makes sense, one realizing that the transcription is incorrect, variations going down the wrong path, router. Later I used electronic lag in my film/video work, for example singing with Damaged Life, the feedback seconds later so that the voice draws/ drawls/drowns itself out; before that, I worked with language-processing pieces - for example, speaking two sentences simultaneously, altering words. In the former, the singing centers adjusted, the sound in harmony with itself, but how much information is carried, as inteference becmes conjunctive, not necessarily dysfunctional, even though words and meanings slow to a crawl.? In the latter, everything was awkward, impenetrable; thinking/speaking/writing isn't linear at all but the construct of a word/ world, an inhabitation inundated and scoured by submergence/emergence. So writing to you with lag, establishing community through lag, contra- dicts itself, blurs the politics, as I found out naively in 1961 in the midst of banks of equipment where I outsped them all. Or not contradicts, but creates the _contrary,_ in the sense of someone _contrary or wayward,_ and this too has formed the subject/object of a series of texts I wrote later in 1987 on deconstruction. (_Now_ I am just beginning to understand a few things.) Beyond anxiety, the contrary is the locus of desire, pro- jection, fulfillment, part-objects, the sloughed-off; one senses this in an almost murderous fashion, thwarted and sustained like the lead in a detective novel. Or think of those highschool stories: Mary's had an ac- cident, can't speak, the doctors take her for dead; her eyes can't even move, the grave glorious beckons, she's still alive, she's still alive, the sheet's lowered over her eyes, la la la, lag lag lag.... _________________________________________________________________________ - SQRL Squirrels have no history and they have no time. There are no squirrel events. Squirrels remember everything which becomes forgotten; squirrels are not forgetful. They remember where nuts are, primeval culture as well to be sure, learning as done. The symbolic eludes them. There is no writing. They would not recognize plus or minus five years. The world has no surprises that awaken the curious to an extensive degree. Watching a squirrel is watching one part of the human. Squirrels watch squirrels and are on guard in the paleolithic. There were several squirrels that were hunted down one April 9th, towards evening, in central Europe, 24354 BC, by carnivores unknown. Tiny squirrels were left without mothers. I don't know what happens to squirrel fathers. Some tiny squirrels were also eaten. A tiny several square yards of nests in trees and just around the place was devastated. Note the grammar that was neces- sary to present this sadness: "_a_ [..] yards," indicative of a tiny rough totality, little region of contentment before the carnivores struck. Squirrels in living their pasts and futures, which they are quite aware of, give credence to t = 0. You should see them! Everything is origin. It is as if they own their tiny nestings and as if they have already given the lie to nature. They know better, cracking seeds and nuts in their tiny hands. It is all culture because it is all there for them to _pick up._ They have tiny manners too! You can tell because they eat so much in private and are so caring. These squirrels were running around this afternoon at precisely the same time the Ukraine was broadcasting into my tiny radio, about their terrible lack of telecommunications, and how much their nation must do to catch up with their bigger nestlings. __________________________________________________________________________ - Community - RFC ..."to function successfully, the virtual community demands that a real one lie behind it. The propensity for trying to make virtual communities is comment enough on the debility of real ones, but also on the need for them. If virtual communities flourish now, this is due to the relatively closed nature of the Net, which means that it is hardly the identity-free utopia that some claim. People are defined at least by the fact they are there." (Julian Stallanbrass, Gargantua, manufactured mass culture.) And what can be done to stop virtual communities from becoming a source of debility as well? In a real life community, once out of the feudal, there is little necessity for totality except that which may be generated from within according to custom, or without, according to nation, etc. (I realize I am simplifying.) On the Net, the territory is constructed and maintained, and would not exist otherwise; there are always shadow insti- tutions, ownerships, and capital at work. Should there be a community RFC (request for comments) dealing with these issues? Is there anything to be learned from experience? Is net community always destined to remain chaotic, ad hoc, hacked, overwrought, over-de- termined? Is there a way around all of this? Perhaps the Perth cybermind conference can deal with some of these issues; perhaps they should be considered on the lists as well. _________________________________________________________________________ - ALARM LAG ALPHA ALA: alarm lag alpha: the condition of the Net this afternoon (see last file below): Panix reachable for split-second sparking out: jammed routes everywhere: nothing to do but bail/slash back again: inandout/ inandout: the old/: lag gone to +60 seconds/letter: get the hell out: this future- world: YOU SLAM YOUR FIST INTO MY MOUTH: TEETH SPLINTER: WE'RE SO USED TO BLOOD: throat caught on your fingers: MAYDAY MAYDAY: can't speak: CAN'T SPEAK: !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! k:> last sondheim > zz produces the following; each log-off was a _crash_ out of the system, as it stopped responding to me. Connection was through netcom.com in Wilkes-Barre, Penna or through net.com. Almost nothing was accomplished. This is becoming more and more common, so tired, your fin- gers kill the words in my my mouth... sondheim ttyq2 205.187.210.42 Mon Jun 3 18:04 still logged in sondheim ttyp8 192.100.81.100 Mon Jun 3 16:56 - 17:11 (00:15) sondheim ttyp8 205.187.210.47 Mon Jun 3 16:54 - 16:54 (00:00) sondheim ttyp8 205.187.210.47 Mon Jun 3 16:48 - 16:53 (00:05) sondheim ttyq8 205.187.210.49 Mon Jun 3 16:27 - 16:37 (00:10) sondheim ttyr8 205.187.210.42 Mon Jun 3 15:34 - 15:39 (00:05) sondheim ttys5 205.187.210.55 Mon Jun 3 15:20 - 15:22 (00:01) sondheim ttypb 205.187.210.55 Mon Jun 3 15:15 - 15:17 (00:01) sondheim ftp wbr-pa1-23.ix.ne Mon Jun 3 15:11 - 15:12 (00:00) sondheim ftp wbr-pa1-23.ix.ne Mon Jun 3 15:10 - 15:11 (00:01) sondheim ttyp8 205.187.210.55 Mon Jun 3 15:08 - 15:09 (00:01) sondheim ftp wbr-pa1-15.ix.ne Mon Jun 3 15:04 - 15:10 (00:05) sondheim ftp wbr-pa1-15.ix.ne Mon Jun 3 15:01 - 15:01 (00:00) sondheim ttypb 205.187.210.47 Mon Jun 3 14:56 - 15:00 (00:04) sondheim ttyp8 205.187.210.47 Mon Jun 3 14:52 - 14:55 (00:02) sondheim ttypa 205.187.210.47 Mon Jun 3 14:48 - 14:51 (00:02) sondheim ttyrd 205.187.210.44 Mon Jun 3 14:02 - 14:02 (00:00) sondheim ttype 205.187.210.44 Mon Jun 3 14:00 - 14:10 (00:09) sondheim ttyr4 205.187.210.44 Mon Jun 3 13:58 - 14:00 (00:02) sondheim ttyp3 205.187.210.44 Mon Jun 3 13:53 - 13:57 (00:03) sondheim ttys1 205.187.210.44 Mon Jun 3 13:48 - 13:49 (00:00) sondheim ttypf 205.187.210.44 Mon Jun 3 13:44 - 13:47 (00:03) sondheim ttyp2 205.187.210.44 Mon Jun 3 13:42 - 13:52 (00:09) sondheim ttyp2 205.187.210.44 Mon Jun 3 13:39 - 13:41 (00:01) sondheim ttyp2 205.187.210.44 Mon Jun 3 13:39 - 13:39 (00:00) sondheim ttyr6 205.187.210.44 Mon Jun 3 13:38 - 13:39 (00:00) sondheim ttyp2 205.187.210.44 Mon Jun 3 13:36 - 13:37 (00:01) sondheim ttyp2 205.187.210.44 Mon Jun 3 13:31 - 13:35 (00:04) sondheim ttyp2 205.187.210.44 Mon Jun 3 13:28 - 13:30 (00:02) sondheim ttyqe 205.187.210.44 Mon Jun 3 13:19 - 13:22 (00:03) sondheim ttyqe 205.187.210.44 Mon Jun 3 13:05 - 13:18 (00:13) _______________________________________________________________________ Lag Lag killed it. I can't think anymore. Time zero is time smeared. Anyone can have me. No one can reach me. I come cheap. I don't come at all. I'm next to you. I'm inaccessible. Inside my mind: nothing. Lag is a nipple. Milk me. There isn't any. Lag-crack. Hold my breasts. My holes are vases for your flowers for your fingers. I slam into the earth at one hundred sixty five miles an hour. I don't slam at all. Time zero is unmeasured. Stoned cold. Inside me: nothing. Lag kills. When you are there I am not there. ________________________________________________________________________ Talent Clara will try very hard. She has only twenty points out of a possible twenty-five. She wants to take her future into her own hands. She uses performance sparkplugs. She has more horsepower than the competition. The question is, can she keep control? That left hand of hers on the throttle works for no ordinary races! The possibility of six carburetors dual in- line gave her room for thought. She rides one big bike! She preferred supercross to anything else. She has a lot at stake, but she has motiva- tion. She's just about wrapped up the championship, big money. She's got plenty of talent, that's for sure! She needs a good start in her thir- teenth race! She'll give it everything she's got! She's going to ride tight! Clara wants to get published and this is her way to get published. Tonight, Tiffany told her: She has talent! Clara needs cyberspace because in cyberspace everyone has talent! That makes her feel good and bad because she can't stand out. The woman's got what it takes! She's got to want it and want it bad enough! Supercross gives her something to do. "I just take the bike and aim it; it does the rest!" Writing gives her nothing to do at all but she can write a novel! I love the characters! She and the machine are one! She fits the bike perfectly! Her skill level is wonderful as she consistently wins in whatever class she rides in. She started young and can easily intimidate the older riders. She's got a good position. Her riding's pretty im- pressive. She's proved to have so much valor. She never says die. She's pushed her bike across the finish line. She's still in the lead. She won't settle for second. Clara doesn't need cyberspace like she needs the track. She's got a knack for the groove. Later she'll write about how great sport is because it tells her what to do and what the goal should be. The rest is fill, and she's got the deter- mination. She's got the talent and the crew. She rarely goes down. She'll alsos write about the hell of writing because she always has to decide what to do by herself, write from the word go! Tendrils twist green around her neck. She wonders if someone will kill her. __________________________________________________________________________ - Sports On an absurd level, one might argue there's a tradeoff between intellect- ual artworking in "open" domains (non rule-governed, at least not ostensi- bly) and physical-intellectual work in constricted domains. The latter, at least the sports subset, allow for specific rule-bases (as do board games of course); the former is more free-form. Rules create foundation, origin, security; the lack of rules creates fragmentation, construct, the proble- matic. On MOOs, rules govern programming in its entirety, as well as the overall trajectories of action; the absence of rules is felt most strong- ly in the domain of description. Inscription itself, however "primitive," is rule governed, knowledge-based (see Karlin and Julien, "Prehistoric technology: a cognitive science?" in Renfrew and Zubrow, The ancient mind, Elements of cognitive archaeology). In other words, I'm arguing for a dialectic between a domain or field of potential semiosis, and rules; if the rules are explicit, the domain tends towards gaming, and if they are implicit, they may be considered somewhat constitutive of a "language" of art production. The distinction, crude as it is, might be of use in thinking of user behavior in various CMC appli- cations. But it's also interesting to think of the _comfort_ of sports, the mater- nal function inherent in them - the verification potential, for example - in the sense that there are _records which are made to be broken,_ that measurement and statistics provide an uneasy relationship with science (which is becoming more and more important in, say, Olympic training). The arts and humanities have almost nothing of these temporary certain- ties, no matter how much theory dominates. (Look at the changing fortunes of the Pre-Raphaelites on one hand, Chaucer on the other.) Instead, their domain is haunted by dwelling and doing (making Shakespeare "live," and "doing" Swift); without foundation, there is a turn toward tradition or tradition's problematic. _________________________________________________________________________ - On Worshipping Siva: "4. One should kick the earth thrice with the right heels and enter the place of worship after leaping across the threshold holding the left door frame." (Agni Purana, 74, trans Gangadharan.) This fascinates me. Why "heels," except as a mistake in translation? And is there also a "right door frame"? I assume the reference is to the left side of the frame. Again, does one take the frame with him/her? Does one ever let go? There is something ferocious about the image, pawing the ground, leaping and charging into the temple. "6. Then he should go to the river Ganges silently carrying pure golden pitchers by means of searching instruments, after having obtained per- mission from Siva." The _telescopic_ appears, not as an act of magnification, but as double- tubed portage. In Column XXXII of The Temple Scroll, here is a descrip- tion of part of the sanctuary: "You shall make a channel all around the laver within the building. The channel runs [from the building] of the laver to a shaft, goes down and disappears in the middle of the earth so that the water flows and runs through it and is lost in the middle of the earth and no-one should touch it because it is mixed with the blood of the holocaust." Leaping and sacrificing in and out of buildings and places, human beings then lose themselves in the middle of the earth, disappearing suddenly and dissolving as blood, water, _reason_ and remains become interstitial, ob- durate, and granular. The exactitute of the rite is lost in the realm of the chora. Here in the loft, the cat has been chasing a water bug (large flying cockroach) all evening. A vector connects the two of them. The roach lands on a wall or portal, doorframe, and doesn't move; the cat lo- ses sight/site, and suddenly everything returns to the chthonic and incho- ate of the chora. She wails and wails; it is Mourning once again, be/com- ing Electric. __________________________________________________________________________ Empathy and Magic A squirrel can tell a nut from a slut. If there is an object X with attributes and another object Y with attributes <1,2,3,...>, and if there is an equivalence such that a subset of matches a subset of <1,2,3,...>, then there is the possibility that Y can be used in empathetic magic for X and X can be used in empathetic magic for Y. This is satisfyingly crude. Let ~ be used for equivalence. Then say for example that 2 ~ c. Note that this would only be true within the following framework: definitions of fuzzy bandwidth; defi- nitions of "neighborliness"; definitions of circumstance and adhesion. If the attribute is "black," then _black_ must refer to a _range_ or band- width of possibilities, which is fuzzy; both 2 and c must be "neighbors" within the bandwidth; both 2 and c must "adhere" to X and Y; and this ad- herence will be mitigated by circumstance (at night all things are black). (Think of adherence, ad-herence, coherence, co-herence, coher-ence.) If empathetic magic is taken as "primeval," "primitive," there remain further questions. A dog can tell a bone from a phone. Clearly, the categories of the world would not, upon appearance, be that of entities, but of attributes inscribing them. Thus black is part of the inscription of X and Y, entities that are emergent upon the concaten- ation or union of inscriptions. In fact, it is relevant to consider sets of unions of inscriptions, and their intersections; I have used this as a means of circumscribing or defining entities. But there is also coher-ence; the sets are not arbitrary, but intercon- nected. A blackberry for example mutually circumscribes a color with ripe- ness with time of ripening with fruit with edible with... So there are circulations of descriptions, inscriptions, coherencies, intersections, swirls. In the midst of this: empathetic magic. But where do entities come from? They come from the discovery of coher-encies, surely, in relation to the extraction of attributes from the world, those very coher-encies perhaps, perhaps not. Such an ex-traction deserves further consideration; it in- volves the active models of vision (Pribram, Marr), cognitive processing, not a passive relationship to the givens of the world. In fundamental particle physics, all the way down, the coher-encies are interrelated, as the four fundamental (possibly five fundamental) forces are also interrelated. Processing, always active, emerges emergences; co-herence on the classical (Aristotelian/Newtonian) level implies equiv- alences among likes; partial coher-encies lend themselves to? Empathetic magic, which may not be so far off the (inscription of the) mark, after all. _________________________________________________________________________ From sondheim@panix.comWed Jun 5 23:56:59 1996 Date: Wed, 5 Jun 1996 23:56:38 -0400 (EDT) From: Alan Sondheim To: -- Cyb , Fop Bcc: u -- Judith , Matthew Gary Kirschenbaum , Lee Murray , Mike Metz , Paula Davidson , Peter Kelk , Steven Meinking Subject: Empathy and Magic It was necessary to make subtle changes to the empathetic magic post, creating a simulacrum or equivalence between two versions; "black" for "dark," for example, the addition of two commas, the indication that "blackberry" does not "connect" anything, but that there are mutual circumscriptions... These changes have found their way into the file _an,_ to be added in a week or so when reaching the requisite number of kilobytes, arbitrarily set at between 60-85, to the rest of the text, at the URL ~spoons site. This text will be included as well, referring to the earlier version, which you have received, but which will not be located there. Neverthe- less, these changes, subtle as they are, attempt to draw off critique at the past, for what can only be an inordinately difficult subject, to be drawn, withdrawn, redrawn, in the course of several paragraphs. Alan _________________________________________________________________________ [revised version of an older text for publication] --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Voyeur On the Internet, there are devices for Net sex that permit the same space to be used simultaneously for action and otherwise conversation. On PMC, I participated in Net sex while engaging in a theoretical discussion of postmodernism, in someone's homespace. In other spaces, there are situa- tions where virtual individuals watch virtual sex. In real life, I have been watched only a few times in my life. A woman and I lived in Copenhagen for a month; we'd make love in a window at night, someone across the way looking and looking. Sometimes we fucked naked in a high-speed car, what about this? Bodies hurtling across the world here, there, everywhere. Now _you,_ I imagine your piss-words on the screen, you flooding your panties, liquid running through the theater, anonymous audi- ence drinking you up. (I don't imagine this; you _are_ pissing, liquid typing _to me._) But I've never done a pornographic film, sex show, public display. And it's not that I would object to this; it would be something to slide into, meanwhile explore on the Net, watch the explorations of others, tabulate them. But I'm a coward; I've seen, in fact, very little, almost nothing at all. Fantasy: In real life masturbating in front of you. Net: Burrowing through each other's bodies, send out the texts, working them into some- thing, doing just that with the woman from Australia. Why is the _gaze_ so persistent, in its absence, in this space? I can't sleep at nights, imagining our legs splayed open, an infinity of organs intersecting, anonymous eyes prying us apart; we devour each other's shit, suck out eyes, clamp breasts so tight we bleed _everywhere._ They dismem- ber us, take our flesh back to their dominions, swallow us whole from the seed. I'm just letters; dcc me fast! #sondheim back and forth, +o @Alan! In my dream I'm a stain on your cunt, wall, door, viral slough crawl- through, organic alleys, slab of daylight leaving/lifting the room. I can see everything. In my dream I imagine myself displayed, ruptured cock, you @create me over and over, coordinate x/y/z motion through time /t anything for the databanks, anything holding back death. If I can hold my breath I can hold your motion. In my dream I'm available, always available. I'm available. I don't have to think. My text oozes cum, menses, piss. I don't belong in textual you, gnawing my way through, proscenium flashing useless enema lights, there's no more belonging. Nothing belongs if there's no belonging. Things stick, split like static electricity. My hair's blown off. I don't have to think because you do all my thinking for me. You're looking at me through the window; I can see you. I perform for your pleasure and you tell me what to do. I can't hear you but I know, what will please. I finger myself, sondheim@panix.com, deep finger, shit licked clean as well. My body's your text. I open my body so you'll read me. If you read me, I'll live forever. You can read anywhere across the tits, lots of space. You can read down the arms, the legs; you can read the blood. You can read between the legs while the writing lasts. You can read the trail of the two of knotted two of us, wrapped like wire around each other. There's no space; my eye's sucked out. You required that. You said no space and we heard. We're splayed just for you. It's as if: We're opened on the out- side, not the inside. It's as if: You give us names, you make us. Oh there's some truth to this. Oh, Oh! "remaining nude, clad in torn dress, covered with oil, besmeared with mud, falling from a great height, one's marriage, embracing the girls boys, climbing into the pyre, fucking the flesh-eaters - better not mess with that!" So you can put your arms up into me, pull me inside out. You can do this: @create $thing called stain. You can give it nothing. @describe as if that were all there is. Once I slept with two women together and when it came time to cum it was so complicated the room dissolved. No one, no one was watching. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Voyeurism Beyond hacking, and the aspects of voyeurism entailed in searching through someone else's personal files, voyeurism is constituted on one hand by private-channel or room snooping, and on the other, by willing exhibition- ism. The latter plays out through public mirror sites, MOO theaters, pub- lic talker and IRC sites as well. As with sadism/masochism (vis-a-vis De- leuze), I wouldn't place exhibitionism/voyeurism in inverse equivalence, or even necessitating one another; the gaze is active in both, just as po- wer (and the power of the gaze, gaze of power, etc.) is articulated in s/m. There is tremendous freedom in exhibitionism, of course, both in real and virtual life - controlling the appearance of one's body, controlling the potential audience as well, subverting various forms of sexual censor- ships. But voyeurism implies a prying apart, the splaying of the image of someone else, singular or scenario. Sometimes a dialectic is established; a young woman, for several weeks, exposed herself in her window across the street from me, several years ago. Was she aware of what she was doing? Was she deliberately establishing a proscenium for voyeurism, knowing she would be watched (and therefore carefully in control by virtual of her casualness), or was she simply careless? There was no effort on my part at all; she was _there,_ naked, in front of the glass, always looking away, however, tow- ards the interior of the apartment. Beyond automatic arousal, the meaning of the act remains unknown - if there were anything. The more that is re- vealed in such a situation, the more obdurate the situation may appear. On the Net, voyeurism of the hacking or snooping sort almost always in- volves crossing a boundary; there is little of the involuntary sort. One uses one's power as god or wizard in CMC, one hacks into IRC - breaking in implies actions and intentions that may be absent elsewhere. As in real life, the uneasy dialectic may also occur; I remember watching a couple on CuSeeMe expose themselves to each other - surely they realized they were on a public site? Or did they? The fact, again, that intentions were unclear increased the seductive aspects of the display... All of this is occasioned by an upcoming panel I was invited to join. The subject is voyeurism; my topic is cyberspace-and. I have written far more on exhibitionism, which is legitimized in Net sex in a way that voyeurism is not. Exhibitionism is all-around consensual in most cyberspaces; voy- eurism implies at the least a presumed unwillingness... While the former touches on group/grope, the latter touches on visual violation (not rape, which has its own phenomenology). Both are concerned with a breakdown of barriers, the establishment of equivalences, incandescent arousal to the nth degree. I imagine sitting naked behind the table... I imagine you in the audience, without underwear, legs slightly parted... __________________________________________________________________________ - Voyeur(3) Actions invert topologically in cyberspace, become extreme; cannibalism is not uncommon, limbs entering limbs, sudden fistings followed by arms and legs swallowed in holes opening up everywhere on naked writ(h) ing bodies. Is there no limit! Cynthia cried, her full breasts, erect nipples, heaving against Travis' enormous organ! A thin smile crossed his lips, as his head found her womb's lusciousness, and fully entered in a passionate replay of the birth process in reverse! Fluids flow smoothly among unprotected lovers splayed wide for sprays of eternal cum, sweat, menses, tears, piss, shit, lymph, saliva. Lovers bathe in one another's liquids, effluvia, debris, lubrications, vomits, pounding terminal glass uselessly in order to make it all _real,_ penetrate the silicon valleyed hardness of indolent transparency. Nothing gives in cyb- erspace, cried Travis in return, searching for _anything_ to place his member in, _anything_ that called forth Cynthia's presence from vast dis- tances across the galaxy. The farther the distance, Cynthia mused, the greater the perversions committed in the scree of text wobbling down the screen-slopes as the two of them typed uselessly onto one another, reaching across the desk, turning off the monitor, proceeding further and further entanglement, pushing the boundaries of the galaxy it- self, convulsively, out of Cynthia's throbbing womb, a few nebula hanging uselessly on Travis' enormous organ! __________________________________________________________________________ - The Good Old Days of March 1995 Here is the NSFNET Backbone Services Acceptable Use Policy section 10/11: Unacceptable Uses: (10) Use for for-profit activities (consulting for pay, sales or adminis- tration of campus stores, sale of tickets to sports events, and so on) or use by for-profit institutions unless covered by the General Principle or as a specifically acceptable use. (11) Extensive use for private or personal business. Here is the General Principle: (1) NSFNET backbone services are provided to support open research and ed- ucation in and among U.S. research and instructional institutions, plus research arms of for-profit firms when engaged in open scholarly communic- ation and research. Use for other purposes is not acceptable. ------- NSF, the National Science Foundation, ran the U.S. Internet backbone until last year when the machines and cables were taken over by corporations. The result has been a thickening and clotting of the Net; by the year 2000 investment will be at 5 billion U.S. dollars per annum. If it weren't for the darknet, many of us would be long gone; we hardly recognize the envir- onment, which has been aggressively pursued by business as if it were open territory - which it is. The U.S. broadcast television structure pales in comparison. ___________________________________________________________________________ - YZ Why they can't have their freedom without taking it out on others as part of this human family. Why they have to move in on the others in the hills moving in back on them sweeping over the same plains more often than not: "'!Nemi Zapata! !Nemi Zapata! Nian ca namotata; ayemo miqui. !Nemi Zapata!'" "'Zapata is alive! Zapata is alive! Your father is here. He is not dead! Zapata is alive!'" [...] "The Zapatistas and Carrancistas met in the middle of the wilderness. And there they killed one another." [...] "And one day the men of Carranza dragged the men from their houses - the fifteen-year-old boys, those of twelve or thirteen, the old, the young, the strong - and they killed them all in the village square before the church." [...] "Pigs and dogs fed upon the dead." [...] "For a while day, neither the men of Carranza or Zapata moved. They per- mitted the dead to be buried." [...] "Then in the month of July the Carrancistas came again. They came to turn us out. They said, 'You will have to leave your homes soon. And if you refuse to leave, that means that you are on the side of Zapata. Then our men will come to kill you!'" [...] "Before our return, our homes had been scattered, apart from each other, and the inhabitants were always frightened by cries of 'The Zapatistas are coming!' or 'The Carrancistas are coming!' But those days are gone." [...] "Achtocopa zan huehueca caltin oyeya, ihuan otlamamauhtiloaya ica occepa. '!Ye huitze _zapatistas_!' nozo '!Ye huitze carrancistas!' Yotlan." (Life and Death in Milpa Alta, A Nahuatl Chronicle of Diaz and Zapata, trans. and ed. Fernando Horcasitas from the Nahuatl Recollections of Dona Luz Jimenez.) [...]"but this is a culture in arrestment"[...] (Charles Olson, Mayan Letters.) Which is what when people walk through? Which is what when people walk through? Net? Radio? Which is why they are always good or which is why they are always bad? Why do people kill each other? Why do people hate each other? Why do people kill each other < >? Why do people hate each other < >? Is the reason that there is more bad than good because people always die and that is a sign of bad but that people are always born is not always a sign of good? Nian ca namotata; ayemo miqui. __________________________________________________________________________ - The Last Fuck Clara Hielo made her mind up as fast as he saw it was made up. Timing was absolutely synchronous, resulting in conclusions about identity and inde- pendence unsuited to any medium, always outside the fact. He pressed his nipples hard against the screen, leaving good impressions thick and thin across the glass. Nipple tips flattened out as she grabbed him from be- hind, her arms clawing at his breasts, pulling them apart and away from the terminal. He fell backward; the chair collapsed bringing the keyboard down as well, smashed plastic letters disconnected ed from their sockets. She had her hands on his pants now, unzipping the fly, tearing buttons, ripping cloth and skin apart, underpants following suit. He tried to stand, clumsily, tripped over himself, crashing the mon- itor to the floor; there was a sudden sound as the tube cracked and crack- led, glass shards everywhere, cutting his skin into random patterns incit- ing the two of them to incandescent levels of sexual fury. Clara put her hand in the burning chassis as thunder struck her from head to cunt, hair scorched or standing on end; Travis, attached to her sizzled body, found his burned cock thrust into her. Somewhere the two of them heard remnants of hard drive still running after all these years, heads flailed uselessly tracking into magnetic sur- face erasing memory and always more. They turned their heads, saw curtains where none had been before, lit curtain flames roaring with movieset dis- aster, the whole computer room twisted in hurricane dry agony. Her drip- ping snatch gobbled his throbbing rod; his mouth surrounded her huge erect nipples, one, another, both together. Her eager fingers found his asshole and plunged in; his hand filled hers, as his tongue went deep into her mouth, organ into honeypot, rippling twat and balls. Together they plunged as mother-board mama-board split and fell, RAM scraped his back raw, crack bleeding with ICs and transistor leads pricking his smoothly flailing skin. The power supply blew off, hot transformers shuddering into Clara's perineum as she splayed her legs wide with pain and pleasure - modem-board making easy entrance, joining members and fingers as holes opened up ev- erywhere among the two of them. They screamed in the tangle of wires, hot female cum coating and shorting out remnants of floppy drives salutations, flexidisk male cum stuck flat between their mouths, swallowing 1.44 mega- bytes of furious final information. Mangled Clara mangled Travis besieged Clara and Travis split open head to toe, fiery bodies heaving and convulsing in and out of cyberspace, the last fuck closing Net stalkings down forever, garment holes filled with packets disturbed from ordinary orbitals, nothing left but broken machines - in one eye of Travis a jack in one eye of Clara a socket, sock it to 'em one-eyed Jack! _________________________________________________________________________ Correct, Is Anything Ever? When I write my texts, I reread them once, do a spell-check on them, and reread them again, all after numerous rewrites. So any errors that accrue often have psychoanalytical overtones, or at the least, blind _spotting_ that cannot be removed by any amount of effort, at first, second, third glance. Such is the case with the last post, that of Zapata; one of the sentences begins "Why is why" which clearly does not hold parallel to the "which is why" that follows; in fact "Which is why" is the correct version, _what I heard,_ in spite of the row of Why's immediately following thereafter. It is the _row_ that dominated my vision, and it wasn't _until I saw parts of the same post in carets/quoted,_ hence _remade, returned, recuperated,_ that I realized something was amiss. So again I stand corrected; this never-ending cycle is more of interest to me than to you - nonetheless, the _draw of the row of wise..._ _________________________________________________________________________ HTML Guide Still another O'Reilly recommendation - HTML, The Definitive Guide, Chuck Musciano and Bill Kennedy. I recommended O'Reilly books before, and some- one from the company got in touch with me; I got to tech review Running Linux. I like their texts which don't outdate for the most part and seem ecologically valuable - the HTML Guide for example constantly deals with issues of access, tabs, bandwidth eating by http-equiv="Refresh" and so forth. In fact it recommends caution with "dynamic documents" in general. The idea of Net ecology (my term here) fascinates me - perhaps someone would write a Green document for the Net in general. In any case, I recommend the book; one can learn html in a couple of hours, and it's the best laid out work on the standard that I've seen. Alan _______________________________________________________________________ - Writing for the EcoNet* EcoNet: Ecologically-viable Internet - conserving resources as much as possible. Obviously there are exceptions to everything here - I'm re- ferencing "normal" forms of Internet data-streaming. Other suggestions? --------------------------------- Web pages: Little bandwidth as possible Standardization of indices Cross-platform vital information Specific platform information for all platforms No bitmapping unless absolutely necessary 16-bit applications as well as Java+ Standardized bullets if possible Repeated use of similar cached images High compression for audio/video Jpegs and gifs under 35k if possible No overdoing of page links Image content repeated in text content Email addresses for return comments Quick-loading backgrounds Priority given to text loading over image loading No duplication of FM/AM radio, Cable television Updating and elimination of outdated links Clearly marked button structures Talkers/MOOs/MUDs: Simplified command structures On-line time limits of three hours without relogging in Protection against fork-bombing? Disk swapping wherever possible (RAM/hard drive) IRC: On-line time limits of three hours without relogging in Spam limits and filters Email lists, Usenet: Limited requoting Limited or no one-line "I agree" etc. posts No chain letters No advertising spams Clearly written info sheets and FAQs (for Usenet) Cross-posting only when relevant Reposting only with permission Reposting only "reasonably" short texts (i.e. below 25k) Giving URLs whenever relevant and easily accessible Email: No chain letters No advertising spams Requoting kept to a minimum FTP: The .txt extension available for all text files Compression with .zip etc. as much as possible Use of popular compression protocols as much as possible Indices to all directory contents Gopher: Indices to all directory contents Updating and elimination of outdated links Telnet: Use of standard port numbers as much as possible __________________________________________________________________________ - The Ordure Of Trolls In No Particular Ordure Guns don't kill people; people do! Gun owners should be shot! All races are created more equal than others! Israel should never be called Palestine! MACs rule and PCs suck, don't you think? Bill Gates is God because he rules! People who kill people should be killed, don't you think? Courtney love killed her husband because Hole's not as good as Nirvana! This morning I had soup for breakfast, what about you? Would you have net sex with me? Women don't really understand the Net! Abortion, anyone? I'm writing a term paper and want to know what you think about the Net! Net communities don't really exist! If you're not a Christian believer, you won't be saved! This is the best place in the world to make money! You should NEVER unsub anyone from a list, no matter what! You're not really a woman; I can tell by your writing! The United States is the best country in the world! English is the best language in the world! (thanks, Future Culture!) I want to kill myself because I'm so unhappy! The Jews rule the world-wide media and own 73% of the Internet! What makes you think you have ANY IDEA who I am? I'll use FUCK COCK CUNT SUCK and no CDA will stop me! Hi, I'm a twelve-year-old girl and I really like this list! The best think you can do with a white panther is eat it! All Germans are responsible for the concentration camps, even today! Guns are the only thing separating me from the barbarians! Madonna rules! __________________________________________________________________________ Rumor There's so much rumor everywhere in my cyberneighborhood about who's in love with whom, who's in hate, who's doing just about everything but giv- ing birth and dying, maybe not in that order. I think all of this should come out in the open; everyone should know everyone else's business. And everyone should _participate_ in everyone else's business. This should come with the territory, i.e. with the info sheet. Lots of "should" here. A long time ago I wrote about list "aura," taking the word from its usual television meaning, the time/space surrounding a particular program, which gains/loses by virtue of that. By list "aura" I mean the private email, telephone calls, panty exchanges, snail mail letters, packages and private or public/private photographs, fleshmeets, everything and anything that doesn't appear _directly_ on the list, or isn't a part of software give- and-take such as set Cybermind NOMAIL please please please. As lists age, aura becomes more and more important. I have heard of such incredibly baroque interrelationships among list members that soap opera pales in comparison. I have heard of opportunities and missed opportuni- ties and honest and dishonest consummations, failures and conquests and meetings gone by the wayside. I have not heard of larceny, rape, murder, armed robbery, kidnapping, or parking violations, but nothing would sur- prise me at this point. Is aura threatening to topple the lists? On one hand, everyone writes in about "pain," anonymous or not, hints at seductions - messages carefully placed to be garnered by one or another lover. On the other, everyone writes in about not being able to write in about one or another lover - because there isn't any perhaps, and there are few complaints about real- life spouses or lovers for that matter. On the third, but there is no third, theory leaking in, perhaps in the guise of love letters, romantic innuendos, rumors? Surely cyberspace is more than that, less that that? Of course, by "everyone," I do not mean everyone, and suspect that there will be new encodings and decodings, subtextual gamings, misconstrued si- lences. And of course we all envy people who meet on the Net, marry, and/ or end up living together. These people, however, are becoming more of the urban myth "friend of a friend" variety, happenings perhaps necessar- ily on the periphery, because if one spends too much time in cyberspace, real life could only be an interference... one reason, perhaps, why Net relationships seem to take over enormous distances, almost never local, which would require putting the keyboard away for a while maybe, or actu- ally facing someone in real life, breathing the same damn air. So as time goes on, I hear more fables over the wires - true or not, they pass for wired fables. And I remember a student of mine, D. M., who later worked with/for Warhol, publicly displaying a tape at the Rhode Island School of Design, detailing, _in French,_ every rumor or dirty secret he could think of at the school... But I'm not suggesting that we literally _tell._ __________________________________________________________________________ - Lest lust last, lost lists... I start the text below, following the quotes from Nancy Wilson Kitchel. Or rather, I start the text before employing the quotes, which bracket and diffuse, as if they were a list _header,_ as in: INDEX0.txt or README.1st. So that: I start the text below. I stop. There are reasons. I enumerate them. Nancy Kitchel wrote: "The fragility of the boundaries that make one entity sepa- rate from another ... the inviolability of them. Extending my boundaries, physical and mental, to encompass, assimilate, control, others. Internal- ize as a method of assimilating others." Nancy _worked_ with lists that never worked. I start the text below. I stop. She wrote: "Instantaneous information, what can be seen at one time (without turn- ing one's head), and understood apart from a study of its parts. Additive information, what takes time to be understood. Sequential development, adding on, accumulations of information, the uses of time, precedent, juxtaposition." Her work _accumulated,_ often no beginning, ending, cycles, no _pieces,_ but notations, annotations, a feminist consciousness problematizing the cohesive totality of _form._ "Open systems, infinitely referential, radial, linear, not circular (en- closed), in which all aspects of one's concerns relate to all others and form a continuous pattern in which many directions are equally possible and choices depend upon personal necessity (and are not irreversible). Perhaps some fleeting thought, already gone." And: "Zone system: I operate somewhere between the appearance of the first black and the disappearance of the last white, but closer to the last white and sometimes beyond. Between the lines. Pieces as segments, without beginning or end, some- thing from which to imagine a whole." (Nancy Wilson Kitchel, Visible and Invisible, in Sondheim, Individuals: Post-Movement Art in America.) From dreams, lists emerge, ruled information, unordered like my resume, tolerant of nothing, characteristic of the Net. The world transforms in- to databases; there's no doubt of this movement of parallel waves and chiasms. Naive set theory takes over, fuzzy to be sure, but valuable to libertarian anarchists among others; remember on the net t = 0. From dreams, protocols and signoffs as well, quantified and assorted. Cunei- form itself transformed from vertical to horizontal; you can trace the effects on the signs, reflecting older symbolic ideograms. Sometimes but not always there were lines, and earlier, grids, according spaces to signs, each encased, the speaking of a mouth or other wonder. The ten- dency was towards flow, however, as well as scribal expediency; on the Net, lists remain just that, html tables, bookmark lists, commands in CMC, everything in its _proper, privileged, and proprietary form._ I have had arguments about this, seeing these forms as primary, subtextual, not sec- ondary - there's a huge difference between Peirce's sheet of assertion and the necessary well-defined placement of symbols upon it. And well-defini- tion seeps into content as well; from purity, mirrors shatter, reflecting the universe in fragments. There is also the issue of modernism, home of bureaucrats, typifications, and tallies. In no way do I see the _substructure_ of CMC as postmodern - all the surface effect ripples rely on deeper purified elements which have zero tolerance to scribal error. The surface structure is something else, of course, as Turkle points out; she finds it postmodern all the way, ski- ttering, lateral, and she's right to an extent. But one can think of the surface as a wound with cavities; lists emerge, directories from one's own and other machines - these pour out like so much blood, temporary struc- tures, agents. Even with hypertext, there is before and after; there is forward and backward, even without history. The lists pour out, coagulate, half interior and half exterior. They suf- focate both surface and depth. They organize what is forgotten, forget what is unorganized. _Lists have no memory._ They are perfect redeemers. They are to the top with a bullet. Whatever is there is index, indexical, to the top. Whatever is there is t = 0. But what is a list? A list is a _concatenation,_ seriation - the first characterized by order which may or may not be addressible, and the second, characterized by one or another form of _capital._ A list occurs _beneath the sign of capital,_ (carrying Sartre's characterization one step forward or backward), econ- omic, cultural, grammatological, physico-mathematical. As such it is a distillation, Kristevan clean and proper body, prepared for _insertion._ Intra-insertion: Insertion _within the list_ of lists, sublists, terms. Inter-insertion: Insertion _of the list,_ within lists, sublists, texts. A list is always _found._ After finishing, Nancy Wilson Kitchel: "(An undercurrent of violence) That sense of underlying violence - the potential of violence - under the apparent blandness, flatness, silence of things, under the controlled voice, behind a smile." And: "There is always the possibility that I am not making sense, that this is not clear (etc.). However, to be sure that I am as clear as possible, I form the letters carefully, by hand. I add a certain distance, an appear- ance of objectivity (that helps)." (ibid.) __________________________________________________________________________