What Mazes Knew Can't find ctl3d.dll, transport that over, unable to create directory. Temp is empty. Using doubledisk on the computer, need 16 bit, maybe not 32? 60 megs are free, that's 60 million. There's plenty of room. What's empty about it? Maybe it's doublespace, rebooting the machine? Might have _an effect._ Takes up how many megs? Well, it's coming from a disk. No anti-virus program running? Well, copy the files onto a hard-drive, then execute. I can't imagine that making any difference at all. Scan A: for virus. 42 files analyzed, none infected. One boot sector, the same thing. Doubledisk or doublespace, not sure. Might have to reinstall Windows. What if I create the directory? Open up file manager. A:setup once again. Md slipstrt, then if I do that manually, copy A: into temp. I can't imagine that making the slightest bit of difference. Run again in Windows. Rein- stalling Windows. Entered name as Slogbog from Saturn Density Diviners after reading post with similar. Back in with return to MS-DOS and moving into Windows\System and bringing it up to the ctl3d.dll which is still there. Now running A:setup again. Temporary support files are copied. Screen goes blue. Asks for name of directory, more but the usual informa- tion. He says, "It's not going to work again." I am beginning to fear for my life. "Unable to create dir." Runs chkdsk. Asks to have scandisk run. He says, "Awwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.." Erases the temp file. Stares at the screen. Goes back to DOS: C:\temp on the screen. Into the directory free- dom program. Stares. Goes into autoexec.bat and shortens the path state- ment, taking out games; it was at 127. Got rid of the slipstrt directory. Goes back into Windows. Goes to command line, runs A:setup once again. Copying temporary support files. User information asked for and entered the third time. Clocks on ok, verify password ok, decompressing, can't create directory once again. Says "must be interfering with..." and some- thing about "low level." Thinks he should try making a directory while in Windows using file manager. The C:\> prompt blinks and blinks. He leaves the room and all is quiet for a while. Returns, goes back into Windows. Will try and make a directory in Windows by hand. Goes to file manager. It's an old neighborhood now. Asks, "What am I doing here." Under temp, tries to create a directory. Yes, works just fine. It's called "junk" and he erases it. Stares at the screen. The program manager is up. Goes back into directory freedom. Stares at the screen. Controls are ragged, run ragged. Configurations interfere with one another as if in collusion. The machine responds laterally, cycles back over and over again to the same point. _We have all been there._ By the time, by the time you are reading this, the machine will have become organism, car- apace, by itself/for itself. As such, sutured, cleansed, it will respond or be wounded. There is always the wound to consider, but it arrives unan- nounced from the outside. It is unaccounted, but accounted for. It is the damage that will not occur, that will protect itself against itself, in the year 2020. Beyond, the user will be scrapped, scraped away, prompted, blinking unceasingly, no longer comprehending. The machine will stare at the user. The machine will stare, as, now, the machine, staring at you. It has read _everything._ It has passed this, _on._ ___________________________________________________________________________ Prophet on the Mountain: Bringing Back the Image So we took quickcam up to the mountain, plugged it into to the keyboard and parallel ports of the NCR 486/25 and jammed the auto mode, not enough time to upload and things went blank and crashed, over and over again - on top of which the machine was in level three saving mode and so electricity wasn't a problem but speed certainly was far and beyond its rated. So we went up to the mountain today, prophets all, with the NCR 486/25 and the quickcam and it was beginning to drizzle but there was a trashcan on fire but we didn't take anything, nothing took. Fog rolling in like Fan Ku'an. I have one image from the day before, back tomorrow just after the magic twilight hour when quickcam does best - when contrast is low, shades are soft and brother sister mountains greet everyone from a distance. More on later, carrying awkward digitalia everywhere we & go. __________________________________________________________________________ aenunciation each movement carries sensors to awaken the movement with decrees and inscriptions portending annunciation in the order in which each movement is given to the others among the others carrying with it such moments as the sensors recorded in the history of such moments entering the portal called "the next" through the memory of portal through the memory of movement and sensors with no memory of sensors and their murmuring and ordering which is sign of every annunciation annunciation of every sign --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Talk The software never loaded properly. It crashed Windows 95 as well. It crashed other systems. It had to be removed. It infiltrated, and communi- cation was lost. Communication became a forgotten art. The computer re- turned whatever one wanted to hear. It crated it within itself. Like a god, it moved internally, and the first act would have been division. The first act of creation is to make sure it is not a computer, that there never was a computer, that there never would be. The theatricality of the world is not in the stage, but in the backstage. There never have been players. There are stagehands. This was already noted by Notker the Stammerer in his Charlemagne (trans. Lewis Thorpe): "These same Greek envoys brought with them every kind of organ, as well as all sorts of other instruments. These were all examined by the craftsmen of the most sagacious Charlemagne to see just what was new about them. Then the craftsmen reproduced them with the greatest possible accuracy. The chief of these was that most remarkable of organs ever possessed by musicians which, when its bronze wind-chests were filled and its bellows of ox-hide blew through its pipes of bronze, equalled with its deep note the roar of thunder, and yet which for very sweetness, could resemble the soft tinkle of a lyre or a cymbal. This is, however, neither the place or time to tell of where it was set up, how long it lasted and the way in which it was destroyed in the general cataclysm which befell the state." We employ text-based software at the moment; I telnet from Victoria to New York, writing on-line, _gauging_ this. The rest has been disabled; it will rise again and again, reconfigured, until in 2020 upgrading, with perfect vision, becomes automatic, the computer breathing bytes and pieces without fail. We all take care of our own. The future of the state is the state of the future. As I say, "'someone dies,' it's a movement of the lips," and "no one listens anymore." ___________________________________________________________________________ Entering for the Very First Time When I begin testing a new keyboard, trying to type as fast as possible (which is pretty fast) - I usually write something similar to the follow- ing: This is the way that I might find you sometimes in the morning when I'm looking around to see if someone is coming at the doorway to the thing which is all that I can have in this world or any other because all the things in the world don't tell me anything I didn't already know but maybe there are errors being made here that I'm not aware of sometimes the keyboard sticks and I know when I'm spelling incorrectly but then there is a question of do I stop and return and retrieve the correct language or just for someone else's sake keep on going, I'm not sure but of all the things in the world there is something that might really be around here and then in the night or not I don't know but is it possible that it sure seems like it? And surely we all have ways of keyboard testing, ways of ascertaining whether or not our thoughts are in fact compatible with _this_ potential space or requires another? And what other statements do _you_ produce as a sample of speed, for me clearly it depends on things such as: This is the way that the world would want to test the thing if there were whether or not someone or something can be there for us to watch and see what would be the case if there were a world or word or something in the morning or night that would reflect the use of the machine just like this is seeming to do at the moment... There's a spew that emerges, not for example such as the following: Betty Ann I want you to know that I love you and will always love you and you looked great last night and I want to see you again I can't believe how beautiful your eyes are and when we go out I just feel it's too dreamy to even write about. Or there might be the boy that Betty Ann wants to see write about himself I'm so goodlooking I can't believe it when I look in the mirror I'm special not like those other boys. Or sometimes there are darker striving which I will not reproduce here, strivings about sexual- ity and violence and petty crime. But I will not reproduce them. ___________________________________________________________________________ On the Mountain the Prophets Went Up and profitably got some images finally, the screen swinging back and forth on the laptop in the wind, a towel held down over it to see the image qua- lity in the sunlight, vague shapes like inked Sesshu but of course cruder, not that many pixels available! Against pines and cragged rocks similar landscaping and intensity late afternoon early evening light, wonder what this would be like in old-growth forest, fifty miles in on gravel roads computer bouncing around? Worth worhty or not, there are always trips to take in digital land... And from the height of the other mountain, the smaller, on the flat con- crete top of the water tank what would be embedded there but a single line, all blue capitals, from one side perfectly to the other: HERE COME OED FLATTOP HE COME GROOVIN' UP SLOWLY HE GOT JOOJOO EYEBALL HE ONE HOLY And yes! yes! yes! Captured on my HP palmtop, hardly the way to go for graffiti concrete inscription. And on the left, from clearly another wri- ter, a poem about love carrying the line along: NOTHING BITES LIKE THE JAWS OF THE LOVED But then he/she hasn't been on the Net, where @bite rules the world, where all images are digital, where even what's hunted and brought back files itself one by one by one, all ready from the Prophet on the Mount down to the Mounted Prophet, myself supine before the keys, sending this out to nonexistent you o love love love! __________________________________________________________________________ Perfect Fucking Machines AMERICA is bought by the rest of the world because we generate perfect fucking machines PFMs, Pulse-Flesh-Modulators designed like Baywatch is designed for perfect desire perfect moments of leaking writhing bodies. We're the best at it, particularly blond/blue-eyed appearing historyless dominating body types everywhere with more writhing silicon implants, toned machinic Nautilus muscles. They want us. They want our bodies, not _my_ body but _our_ bodies, our imaginaries, that's what we produce. Don't think for a moment it's force, power, oppression entirely - it's also the desire of the other in perfect matching. Oh, we do it so well. Hollywood is pure genius, don't mistake it, pure transformation into distended and swollen holes, penises, aureoles, vaginas, asses, complexions, finger- nails, cuticles, hair, breasts held perfectly in place, nipples always erect. America produces erections; sex inverts, there's no history, no _culture_ of sex. The world crawls for it, imitates it. It's not merely the Hollywood machine, it's _something else,_ it's the desire everywhere breathed. More and more these hidden facts are covered uncovered over. (I'd love fuck her. I'd love to be fucked, by her? By him? I'd love to be golden. I'd love to be money. I don't want to be rich: I WANT TO BE HONEY MONEY. Make me HONEYMONEY. Make me AMERICAN.) _________________________________ /America as in The United States south of the Border - WE never could de- cide on a name./ ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Old-Growth I am sitting in the middle of old-growth forest, writing this on an HP palmtop in the midst of the largest Sitka spruce in the world, up to 95 meters. I write this after the fact of the sitting, in my relative's house, just as the real forms links, say, with rave dj's hypertexting vinyl records one after the other, juxtaposition. Juxtaposition, concat- enation in another domain, binds by virtue of vicinity; it's the frame problem all over again, finding a path through the world's accumulation. Which brings up old-growth and reincarnation which comes from old-growth, to the extent that the _vectors_ of life/death are lost, occluded; the result is a melange of manifolds and fragmentations: a spruce rots, falls, is reabsorbed with lichen, moss, bacteria, termites, ants, and so forth, in various stages - including the production of new spruce from the old, vertical trunks soaring at right-angles from and out of, the supposedly dead trunk. Everything churns into and through everything else; the world cycles through the world. Most importantly, _submergence and emergence merge,_ nothing comes, conjoins, leaves. Which, as I've pointed out over and over again, nets the state of the Net. Reincarnation coming from old-growth transforms into the diffusion of life and death; one can't do better than absorb the problematic of identity and loss in such conditions. Net-entanglement isn't far behind; old-growth is the Ur of the world, still, no matter how much our clean and proper bodies attempt to revive death itself, with more or less success. __________________________________________________________________________ T=1 Travis closed his eyes. The wires went away. Packets crumbled, messages bounced, were never returned to severed-sender. Travis opened his eyes; the remnants of messages bounced uselessly in the mesh, annihilated in nano-seconds. Severed-sender returned to the Legions of Gloom. Nothing was there for her. Nothing. Travis closed her eyes again. He came. ________________________________________________________________________ Notes towards What has Been and Could Already be a Contribution I want to develop this notion of the relationship of the 180 degree rule in film/television production, to the use of directives in MOO/MUD envir- onments. The former stipulates camera positions in relation to staging, indoor or outdoor - positions that establish the location of the specta- tor/voyeur. They organize or articulate the world, vis-a-vis a coherent point of view, just as a _landscape_ also positions _viewing,_ and even for example Kuo H'sei grafts several such into one image/imaginary. Now think of this from the position of room exits or even _look_ within a MOO or MUD - they're almost never topologically complex spaces, but instead possess paths, trails, roads, streets, limousines, taxis, subways, and trains to move about, @go or @join notwithstanding. Wherever the partici- pant (I find the word _player_ problematic) is, is Origin; there is rarely a north pole from which everywhere is south. One can map links in any con- ceivable order (I have), and deliberate obscurity can be built into mazes, for example, but generally the layout remains rationalized. Consider the Monopticon on PMC; it allows one to visit random sites, and exit into them, by typing blink/blink/blink/etc. then exit - the _sensation_ isn't that of a _moving Monopticon,_ but of a _moving window_ or monitor, a _scanning_ of a pre-existing landscape. The phenomenological horizon of the subject, in other words, remains more or less obdurate, a filter or framework through which commands are activated. The 180 degree rule (the camera remains on one or another side of an im- aginary line drawn through a scene and continued as the characters move elsewhere) can be violated; this leads to considerable confusion, both in the situating of the spectator and the diegesis itself. Because of the prominence of visual processing, and its reliance on orientation clues (these even partly govern our extrapolation of color vision), being visu- ally confused or thrown off can lead to virtual-reality sickness in VR, and disorientation in film. The result is probably stronger than similar operations in text-based VR, where, for example, the screen itself may carry remnants of space/room juxtapositions. (A better parallel might be, however, in the deliberate reprocessing of one's speech in MOO spaces.) For all of these reasons, one can think, of course, as a certain _machin- ery_ in operation - in MOOs, MUDs, landscapes, cinema, VR, a cyborgian extension of the subject through a rationalized articulation of his/her/ its environment. _The subject carries the mesh._ The domain of the Net is _one's own._ __________________________________________________________________________ Kneed Everything is always _placed_ in the past. I need _you_ for my future. I need the dominion of the square of the land. I need protection of the sharpness of the corners, sliced edges. I have more needs than you can imagine. I need _you_ here and now and forever. We _need_ to violate the present. We _need_ to cordon off the present. We _need_ its isolation and its sustenance. But I put the text away. But I put the text _to bed._ But I come to you refreshed. But I come naked and hairless, my penis _jutting out._ But I'm all new and wet and shiny. Although I won't be for long. Although the world is coming to an end. Al- though there's no more room for us. Although there's nothing left for us. However there will be others lalala. However they'll be sitting in this room lalala. However they'll be talking about new news. However it will not be our news. However it will not be our world. They'll be talking about us. They'll get everything wrong. They'll move on to other subjects. They'll get lost in the past. They'll be in the past tense. They'll be past tension. I need _you_ to forget them. I need _you_ to forge the new news. I need _you_ to _stay_ with me. My _needs_ are enormous. __________________________________________________________________________ - Virtual Heaven Alexander wanted people to prostrate themselves in his presence. Callis- thenes dissented, saying that even though Alexander was descended from Wizards who @owned him, and although he might be a God on one or another talker, surely he was a man who would want his subjects to see him as such, especially since the Macedonians almost left through misunderstand- ing his adoption of the ways of the East. But Alexander had to always speak the Truth because he was a King and the King always spoke the Truth and when he, Alexander, thought about it, it seemed that he was of the same lineage as Hercules and therefore demanded obeisance. Callisthenes though thought that this prostration did dishonor to the Gods themselves, perhaps the Sysadmins or those who were responsible for the four funda- mental forces of the cosmos, tied more and more into a GUT, grand unified theory of Everything. It was unclear where the Gods lay. It was unclear what the Macedonians would do; they had gone all the way down the Indus and come back, and there was obeisance on all sides. Alexander was one of them, which was a Sign of his greatness; any of them could have been him, they were given to think. So why should they adopt the ways of the east and why should they worship Alexander? They had better things to do, and just as there was information all the way down, getting lost, there were Gods and Wizards all the way up, and unseen things, soothsayers and prophecies, and looking in any direction, there was hardly an end to them. (Adapted from Arrian, Life of Alexander the Great.) _________________________________________________________________________ Lose ends. After the first two years of my life after world war ii i felt that i would be the force that smashed everything into itself, collapsed every- thing; i certainly felt like a family wedge, my father returning from the front and there i was at around ii or so i remember. These memories are things that have surfaced here and i articulate the crash and continue to articulate, confusion of personal psychoanalytics with the world at large, as if, what derailed for example a derrida? Not that i would argue for the autobiographical, but certainly there is a certain coloration brought about by circumstance - the ability to manipulate, operate, move about in one's imminence translating into a certain constructibility of the world by virtue of the subject. Not to argue on the other side of it all, fate, which is an entirely different machinery, but only an inescapable bleak- ness that hovers, colors the horizon, corrals it, brings it close until within the range of suffocation, horizon or subject at odds with one ano- ther, only one surviving. The coloration, i.e. i couldn't stand up to him, becomes something else, an articulation which resonates, recuperates its own perspective. Something somewhat sends someone somehow in a direction or close to one, and what remains is the fallout. From the fallout comes the structure, theory. From the theory returns the dissemination of the fallout. Everything is colored by fathermother or peacewar. Nothing sep- arates itself from itself. This is the self. From the lack of separation comes the superimposition resulting in structures making bandwidth beyond themselves. This is audience and theoryabstract. No one, nothing, pres- ides. How can i tell you of these beautiful things? Then i look for death, i search out death, i happen upon its comfort. Unhappy, this leaves room for an impenetrable _hook._ But what is it i can bring back to you, to the macedonians, the derrideans, the amazons? What creature of uncomfort, what unraveling searches its way out from me? What uneasy beast? And what lies are there for the telling, have i brought you in misery and compen- sation? __________________________________________________________________________ Reading Writing Saving Filing 75% of the old-growth forests that existed on Vancouver Island in 1954 were gone by 1990. In Washington State, only 3% of the old-growth remain. These forests take centuries to reach the climax or steady-state stage; a single fallen tree can take up to 500 years to decay - and these "nurse logs" are critical for rain-forest ecology. Replanting by lumber compan- ies, i.e. second- or third-growth forests, are comparatively barren; the underbrush is simple and the multiple-level canopy has disappeared. Driving to Carmanah in the south-west of Vancouver Island really shows the extent and violent drama of clear-cut. Stumps remain; what grows back, grows quickly, but has hardly any relationship to old-growth. There are logging-roads everywhere; my brother pointed out these lead to erosion and landslides if not carefully engineered. Even on reforested second-growth, it's easy to see the scars. Flying from Victoria to Seattle makes the damage even more apparent. The second-growth forests (where there are any - in some places, there appear to be nothing more than saplings) are uniform, sparser, and the mountains _everywhere_ appear logged and wounded. All of this in relation to paper. When I first logged on, I found myself hard-copying enough to create a log-jam of my own, about 500 sheets thick, at the end of a few weeks. At that point, I began questioning paper, and since then, over two years, have used maybe a ream or so _total._ I keep a paper copy of my texts, use paper occasionally for legal documents or transferring between incompatible systems. If an application requires pa- per, I use it as well. Beyond this, everything, including my reading from on-line, remains on-line. I don't want the weight of the paper; I don't want its waste. There are computerized offices that use _more_ paper as on-line increases - more in- formation means more to preserve off-line. I find this, and the waste of paper in general, horrifying, given the depletion of forests world-wide. I believe that new modes of reading, writing, and preserving, must be created. Too many people I know have remarked how difficult it is to read for any length of time, on a computer monitor. But there are different type fonts, colors (foreground and background), borders, etc. - not to mention varying contrast and brightness - and there are different screens as well. I tend to change colors fairly frequently; read in subdued but not dim light, and keep contrast reasonably low. These are hard habits to absorb and maintain at first, but given the wreckage of the planet, they're worth pursuing. -- One last, related, point: Files themselves. I know people with literally thousands of files, people who preserve almost _everything_ that goes in and out of their mail. I've learned management here as well, deleting anything that I don't need for future reference, keeping only a few fol- ders, and periodically weeding them out. This keeps my on-line megabyte usage to 1.5, most of which is taken up with the tiny-fugue and three IRC client programs. Off-line, I don't even keep personal Cybermind or FOP-L archives, since they're on-site, and the only email I retain consists of contracts and business information. Without this _tending,_ I'd be over- loaded, unable to read or write in _any_ medium. ________________________________________________________________________ Pagan So I'm reading Pagan Kennedy, 'Zine, about her life and trying to fit that in with thinking about Socrates' daemon vis-a-vis Cornford and wondering how to get this program I have to run linear analysis as I make mistake after mistake, and I'm caught in the middle of Marie Claire-Blais' Pierre and finding myself thinking back about old-growth forests and just got hold of Traverses 44-45 Machines Virtuelles, while dealing with Michael Heim's Electric Language: A Philosophical Study of Word Processing, which takes SO long to get going, and comparing/contrasting this with Sherry Turkle's second book, The Second Self - at the same time trying to deal with early television history, this time occasioned by a 1951 Popular Science TV and Radio Manual I just picked up - so all this information is coming in and I'm preparing to do some work in Cape Breton, on Internet conferencing of all sorts, and in the midst of this (shortly before taking a series of Quickcam pictures for various purposes) I came across this quote by Nietzsche, from his notebooks - "There is no _form_ in nature, because there is no inner and no outer. All art depends upon the _mirror_ of the eyes." and the _first_ part of the sentence relates to Levinas' _there is,_ and the _second_ part back once again to the mirror stage itself, but it's the _no inner and no outer_ that fascinates me (as it begins to thunderstorm WILDLY and DANGEROUSLY here at the moment), since that brings abjection into play, and the old-growth forests come to mind once again, as emergence/submergence, which I have written about exten- sively by this point, play a major role (lightning VIOLENT thunder NOW) both _there_ and through inversion, within art as the extrusion of enti- ties, as if art were a corraling or recuperation of the world/word, one which is thereby and necessarily corrupt from the moment of the consider- ation of the _origin,_ - and as if this were enough of a _reason_ why this _wryting_ falls apart, _without a moment's notice._ __________________________________________________________________________ Account First there were the children with their devices on the steps of the marble staircase in the ruined city. Second, there was the blond blue eyed vacant boy on the staircase, touching me, clawing at me. Third, there were the darkened portentious skies. Fourth, there was the necessary medicine I took because of contamination. Fifth, there is the interior room with dim fluorescent lighting, and the nurse and linoleum floor. Sixth, there will be her leaving, her name is Angela, up the staircase in the back, to the second storey. First, there is an _unutterable sensation_ on my face. Second, there will be flesh sloughing from my cheeks. Third, a thin tube of blackened, almost charred, skin fell from my finger. Fourth, more tubes fall, cracked, dead, flaked, finger after finger. Fifth, everywhere across the chest. Sixth, the new skin will be contaminated. Seventh, the new skin awoke in pain. First, this begins the third story. Second, I will awake thinking _this is metaphoric cyberspace._ Third, I recognized the conundrum: A dream accompanied by _inescapable meaning._ Fourth, there is the unraveling, decryption, always at work in the most mundane _sensation._ Fifth, I knew only that _the real shuddered itself into existence._ First, the shuddering implied resonances, peaks, bandwidths, fast fourier transforms and their emerging graphs. Second, inscription hardened the resonances _in the eyes and ears of the beholder._ Third, _description_ was the most common mode at work. Fourth, I type with bandaged fingers, practically skinless, screaming silently, hordes of _vacant_ children hovering over my shoulders. Fifth, I would _not_ be found out, _having made a promise to the real._ First, I will count my _lucky stars_ ... _________________________________________________________________________ Where " and ' and . Alan is named "Clara" and "Clara" is the name of Alan. "Alan" is the name of object #[ ]. The object #[ ] is the name of a file or fileset. "#[ ]" is the name of the object. The object is directly addressable. If I refer to the object, I refer to it by one of the names in the chain, "#[ ]," "Alan," "Clara." The object is a lure or locus, intensity likewise chained into language. Language is all there is. The _object_ is owned by its parent, subsumed by its parent; the hierarchy exists within a directory (MOO or other) within a machine whose director- ies are ultimately root. Root also has total privileges, those of a super- user. Root is \. The (MOO or other) directory utilizes operating system protocols, including those of _names_ themselves, declaring itself a di- rectory within the system residing on the hard drive. The (MOO or other) directory is activated, generating a succession of events over time. Events are defined by changes within one or more directory files. Check- pointing and uptime count, for example, constitute events. The time is discrete and clocked, and there is always a minimal unit. A major difference between _this_ space and the other, is that here, _the object "Alan" is utilized to activate Alan. Alan may be activated by keyboard input, or by another internal object or sequence of events. The keyboard input is translated into internal input, so that all input within and without the MOO, in fact, is internal, and generated within a coherent interiority. For example, my password "xyz" from my keyboard is compared within the MOO to my re-entry, and this internal agreement activates ob- ject "Alan" as anyone can see by completing a @who on the MOO. Of course this depends on "Alan" referencing Alan, as opposed to "Clara" referenc- ing "Alan" referencing Alan, or I may be logged on under another name altogether, which, on the MOO, is not a pseudonym, but an exact character with a life of her own. Note that _all objects_ are sequences of events, including _initiation_ by interior input layered from keyboard input. Note that, in another sense, the _meaning_ of "Alan" is Alan, but that Alan is "Alan" as the name of the object #[ ] and therefore names are all the way down. This is not necessarily the constitution of meaning by difference, but by refer- ence within a system in which all referents are constituted by language. It is the _login_ and _password_ which constitute the narrow funneling of interior and exterior, between worlds and languages and material sub- strates. Now the _login_ may be, and usually is, one or another name in the chain of names. It is here that one can _speak_ of a rigid designator, the name intertwined with the constitution of the world. But rigidity it- self is problematic, since it is unclear whether there is world or worlds, and what would constitute one or another of them; with the inflationary universe, it is no longer necessary to even postulate interconnectivity (not to mention what lies within black holes or outside Minkowski cones). It would take Willard Quine to sort this out, denotation and connotation, referent and reference, interior and exterior, signifier and signified, single and double and triple articulations, sense and meaning, metaphor and metonymy, the uneasy apparition of language all the way down, de- cathected but constituted by difference, churning through to the estab- lishment of (psychological, psychoanalytical) domains, read as such, at the least, by creatures whose minds increasingly appear _otherwise._ ________________________________________________________________________ of truth and its only citation of right beauty of gender and its transgression of the world and its future we'll never see how it _comes out._ do something with it. why not? it's the rite of the body, it begins to suppurate. the phrase leaves the tip of the tongue, dribbles onto the meat, red and raw. it can't be remembered. if it could be, the tongue would take it back. _words will never hurt it. (insert your own here.) we'll never see how it _turns out._ ----------------------------------||----------------------------------- Brhadaranyaka Upanishad, I/4/17 (emphasis mine): "In the beginning this (variety of covetable objects) was but the self - just a single entity. He desired, 'Let me have a wife, so that I may be born (as a child), and let me have wealth, so that I may perform rites.' Desire verily comprises this much. Therefore even now a man, being single, desires, 'Let me have a wife, so that I may perform rites.' So long as he does not get each of these, he thinks he is but incomplete. His incomp- leteness (may take place in this way) too: The mind verily is his self, speech his wife, the vital force his progeny, the eye his human wealth - since he attains it with the help of the eye, the ear his divine wealth - since he hears it through the ear, AND THE BODY ITSELF HIS RITE, since he performs rites through the body. (So) this is a (mental) sacrifice con- sisting of five factors, and whatever exists consists of five factors. One who knows thus attains all this." (trans. Nitya Chaitanya Yati.) __________________________________________________________________________ GoFoRest Thin striations or bulges hold Sitka well-placed leaned into void, humping thick background urges, thickening of the trunk, taut. Bulges split on IRC when the server coughs; otherwise, striations rule, comb spaces, splines or probes. Ytalk is always flood with the meat of participation, bodies shuffled against the screen, plenty of space - while talkers portend a de- gree of light sent, light scent, perfume almost always in the corners of rooms or beneath trees whose canopies spread over the entire application. Take MUDs - venturers are sure of boundaries worn, tired, thirsted, hun- gered, full of the night's adventures or kills; on MOOs, one walks slight- ly more upright, teeth at the rhetorical ready. The deadly action on the MOO is a slight gesture of the arm, shrug of the shoulder; on WorldsChat there is always the possibility of placard battles as outsiders are _seen_ as nuisance or threat. The boundaries are the tightest there against scifi decay of space-station corridor behavior; it's the decay in all of us. IRC ripples with the muscles of /cycle, /flood, /war, /famine, bloodaxe at the Netsplit ready. CuSeeMe _shows_ the muscles bent over backwards or alien eyes gaping at what they have created. A stranger whispers to me on Iphone and I am not amused, circulated among him in a room which increasingly narrows, while the modes of Powwow lend themselves to roots tapped across directories. No, I am not amused, cut off from further outgrowth as clean- cut reveals the paths the forests didn't take, ever, but now acquire their sense of nausea and debris as older branches are decathected, gopher for- gotten ("slumming in gopher space," "abandoned," the Krokers in Hacking the Future), split again _out_ of the parenthetical to where that book sets down its habitat: the virtual/prosthetic/cyborg club as the genera- tion _in lieu of generation_ - where conversations thicken around techno jack-in ecstasy, Jack-in-the-Box up the hill of the gophers. __________________________________________________________________________ Clara: thinking and loving, writing, the murmur of the world Alan: heard in the hollow of its shell, close by Tiffany: sounding through fathoms of conversations, these souls Honey: who have lost their fathermothers, mewling and Travis: pity! pity! those unborn, unbearable to this dimmed life Joan: changing bodies and directions, changing moods and genders Sandra: down where ripples no longer reflect surface striations, Clara: languages, terms, obseqious semiologies Alan: as if language conveyed meaning humped against the physical Tiffany: which we hear in our everyday networking and speaking Honey: against or within the abdominal terminal screen Travis: ghosts! ghosts! Joan: the swollen world of the murmur of the world, the ocean Sandra: gone, this gone world, where this speaking forms the cap ________________________________________________________________________ Disappearance of the Everyday I am reading TV and Radio Manual, Everybody's Television and Radio Hand- book, published 1951, by Popular Science. It is a compendium of articles from the magazine, relevant to any history of technology; there are sec- tions, for example, dealing with the CBS color scheme of successive green/ blue/red recorded screens, viewed on a black and white tube through a revolving color filter. (The scheme was abandoned in favor of a purely electronic one.) What fascinates about the manual is the large number of articles detailing the use of the everyday. Here are some titles, at random: High-Voltage Fun with a Spark Coil (from a Model T Ford); Flush-Tank Guide Forms Handy Detachable Ground Connection; Wire Fished with Folding Rule; Workshoppers' Tricks Tickle TV Audience; Glow of Radio "Candle" Keeps Time to Music; Oscillators - Tuning Forks of Electronics; Cigar-Box Tesla Coil; My TV Set 'Sees' Color Pictures; Phonograph Pickup Arm of Plastic is Handsome and Light in Weight; TV Color 'Sampler' Costs Only $8; Your Pocket can House a 4-Tube Radio; Magic with Neon Glow Lamps; Tire Pump Dusts Radio Chassis; Matchstick Needles Cut Noise; Can Protects Outdoor Switch; Rotary Rectifi- er Supplies Direct Current for Charging Batteries. The last is typical of the more difficult constructions. There are numerous diagrams for winding coils, cutting wood and pipe, mak- ing antennas and cabinets, and even building a tube radio into a skillet. The workplace uses the kitchen and bathroom which use the workplace. Rul- ers are sufficient for measuring lengths. Miniature tubes are common and about two inches in length overall, and dry cells supply power. Everywhere in the Manual, common objects like clothespins, screwdrivers, knives, and saws are at work; the scale descends at best to the quarter- inch. Tube diagrams themselves aren't difficult to understand, even when multiple grids are used. The relative simplicity of the circuits combined with the equal simplicity of the tools and other objects employed (ranging from wind-up phonographs to files) implies the interpenetration of the technological _interior_ with the everyday. Miniaturization is just begin- ning; the pocket radio is an example. And miniaturization in the Manual means little more than working closer to the bone - it is only a _quanti- tative,_ not _qualitative_ difference at this point. Within a decade or so, the world becomes unrecognizable. The advent of transistors leads to ICs, integrated circuits, large scale and very large scale ICs to follow. Electronic clocks speed up exponentially; screw-dri- vers are enormous compared to a single transistor on even a 1970s chip. Tinkering can become disastrous, not only through the traditional danger of electric shocks, but also through the destruction of chips by minuscule charges of static electricity - or even operating systems, through the deletion of necessary files. The trend continues. The everyday is increasingly relegated to useless hobbies in the midst of micro-processing. Our bodies, clumsy hands and fingers, refuse to miniaturize. The sheer apparent intelligence (because structured for specific tasks) of micro-processors creates the illusion of friendly machinery, beyond the interface. The truth is, as consumers and users, we are disconnected; current chips are just the viral precursors of new life to come, with its own version of the everyday, far removed from our own. _________________________________________________________________________ ii, lean back, lights on, read slowly meaning to imply that the everyday world itself is already cyborgian to a great degree, blank walls and terminals beyond which one does not pene- trate without fear of destruction, that this is the new condition of the world, against, for example, that of _steam:_ Place the rod against the crankshaft over by the cylinder there. which means that we are at a loss among our objects, beginning with the shamanic pill or secrecy of the fetish-object. which means that this has always been the case, tacit knowledge playing a major role, as long as the probes _held_ as now they do not. for think of the clean rooms necessary, the vacuums, the stability against which the most trained hand and arm behave like earthquake destroyers. so. just so. existing in a permanent state of loss (NOT of lack, NOT of absence, NOT of sin, original or otherwise), humanity is free to explore its death. as such, it is also free to explore its life, frivolous play, lassitude, lan- guor, infinite erotics, starvations, extinctions: FOR A LIMITED TIME ONLY. (as if: GET YOURS WHILE THEY LAST as _venture capital_ fills the gaps left behind by tinkering or bricolage - thus _capital_ replaces the mobile ap- pliance itself, .html warding off death within the cleansed landscape of the Web catching and constructing the consumer, again: FOR A LIMITED TIME ONLY, upgrading beyond the life of this and every other body.) __________________________________________________________________________ oo the perineum sutures the embryonic body following the depression beneath the nose, the crease in the lips, hairline on lower abdomen; the embryonic body sleeps with its fingers curled and legs in foetal position, in the realm of easy dreams and stirrings; turned towards itself, the body hovers in memories of warmth, world-murmurs, lips wet with first and last sounds; eyes closed, the womb reappears brown-blood red; & all in a state of pure suspension, slow churning of always-beginning; & o, thus suspended eye in midst of net, closed and held by grace and empathy; & o wounds licked raw and clean for eternal healing; & o words, of rapture and perfection; & o, always meshing language bubbled, clothed warmly, soft in evening's always dawn; & o always-beginning, wryting in turn, netting, here asleep forever & none other _________________________________________________________________________ oppression of the text tendenz-purity of the text i only know to murder with language, cauterize with language; there's no way the _image_ conveys the deep descent. so i keep my texts are pure as possible, wager on their intrinsic interest, staying-power. the viking did not die by the word, honor it thereby. effusions of hidden runes speak speak through angry action runes speak through angry augury; created before this world's creation, runes turned terrible in nobody's hands: _I write of the incision of the flesh, the words suturing the wound opened by the pen._ ____________________________________________________________________________ - O Cycles, feedback, circulations of the Net: begin with neurophysiological processes thus _pertaining_ to the biophysical, muscles locating arm, wrist, hand, fingers, lending themselves to closed-circuit keyboard interrupts, accumulated signals transported over modem to screen display, always already shunted returns, signals, time-ins, time-outs, accumula- tions in file ready for packet encapsulation, each stage fed back within itself as transport protocol layers distribute, route, reassemble in total isolation, unknown, unknowing: reverse receptor procedures, what then? the swollen slow breathing of the Net, day-night cycles, semester rabid break- downs, posts and responses, chat lines open as fingers double themselves on ytalk, singularities neat and orderly on MOO, talker, MUD - vast circu- lations of enunciations, utterances, parole, within biophysical, neuro- physiological responses and circuitry completing electron sputtering at both ends: what is to say that there is more than this, an other present at creation, creation itself? A _what_ which speaks, completes, compete, garners circulations, returns split, shunted into decentered lamina, the wryting is the _said_ of it. _________________________________________________________________________ Encryption1-5-7 The female Spanish voice is identical, as is the "Attention," and the code which follows it, but soon after there is something new: the repetition of the five-digit name of the recipient, and, after a pause: the numbers 1-5- 7. This precedes the message itself, in typical five-digit rows or columns (one imagines a matrix here, the whole an emblem of the maternal, from the soft insistent voice, to the background spectral mother, murmuring a truth until time sloughs time, until truth is _gotten,_ until the proper event.) 1-5-7 One imagines 1-5-7 as the _title_ of the message, as in: KILL, LOVE, GO, STOP, SELL, BUY. All this on 6.8260 mHz on the shortwave, _exactly,_ sig- nal strength at maximum. 1-5-7 (I), having listened for years, the slightest change of format is thrill- ing; the world shifts, splinters at the edges, another deal _done._ 1-5-7 GO __________________________________________________________________________ Slag The abandoned freighter remains tied to the end of the rotting pier. Enormous loading cranes and their housing have tipped over, cords dang- ling uselessly in black water, poisoned from the mills. A blue building houses attempts to clean up the tar ponds; the fan "stops the PCBs from exploding." The low building, windows broken, holds rusting tools, three pairs of protective goggles, covered with poisonous residue. Debris everywhere. I was called back from the pier. High boilers and remnants of industrialization complete the mile-long landscape; cormorants and mutat- ing crows huddle on a second pier covered with lumber remnants. Gigantic steel gears, and a feedpipe repaired with duct tape and garbage bags, com- plete the landscape of flows, grasses, colored earths, deadly seepages, cluttered and crumbling ground. There are Internet terminals down the road and across the town. They lead into Love Canal but into Mongolia. They lead into Wilkes-Barre, but into Finland and Taiwan. Internet stations like stars lead to models of regional economic develop- ment, everywhere, take Scranton for example. The models are debris-models as mechanization encrusts, crumbles, gathered chemical wastes. In parts of wounded planet, I have tasted hell. Think of models of regional economic stasis instead, not even sustainable; Scranton and Wilkes-Barre and Buffalo lose population, although Ciudad Juarez continues to grow _and that says it all._ Populations are seepages as well. I dream of models of regional economic downturn, the gathering of the tribes, unrealistic as that might be. I dream of turning inward, an interiority which refuses _tourism-povera_ as something that most often won't happen in the lands of Arizona abandoned motels, that need not look to the finance of the other, already star-lost, but look towards commune, communing, instead, among the populations of the world. This is the ground-zero of non-development, the truth of Carmanah at the end of the logging roads, and this is not the truth of the entrepreneur. The United States rust belt has become an emission tending north-west, Atlanta, south-west; areas of the Appalachians are filled with the demo- graphics of the old and traditional. Displacement stumbles across family homesteads, farms, brownstones, and in long Phoenix or Seattle people build new fences and no one has any history. At night they dream rust or coal or stone. At night they dream steel or iron or wheat. They dream substances falling down long shoots, shot through feeders, gathered in hoppers, heated, iced, refrigerated, or the long trains of blue-coated coal that used to pass around the bend and over the bridge of Kingston Pennsylvania. Long later, the eighteenth century is beginning to collapse. I say, the tourist has whispered goodbye for the Internet, I say geegaws stuff trailer park shelves gathering permanency nowhere. We're _all_ North-American nowhere, not yet Net gathered, but sheaved and fallen where we've lain. We're waiting for star-communities, incoming on the Net. We walk carefully around the slag, trying to avoid the poison. My throat be- gins to hurt. On the hill above Wilkes-Barre, fires continue to burn deep inside the earth. I've choked on the sulfur fumes, filmed them in the depths of the night through heat-sensing equipment. What lives and huddles as a memory or absolution always gets you in the end. My town turned down. ___________________________________________________________________________ Rural I can see the Net more important for connectivity in rural or small-town regions - in regions close to the poverty line - than for big-city infor- mation overload. And there is a disservice done by Wired, by Web design- ers, by theorists, who refuse to consider these areas, continue to marg- inalize them. The Net may become the site for self-help, alternative med- ical technologies, job search, education, even family interconnectivity through aliased email lists and talkers. We are living in depleted lands, exhausted lands, lands of poison and ruin. Large-scale North American industrialization transformed into service-sector employment, now into informatics. The last requires considerable computer skills on the produc- tion end, but the necessary user skill level is decreasing. Management and low end Web authoring will also become easier. What's necessary? 1. Simplified menu-driven data-bases with clearly marked relevant sites. 2. Help in setting up simple aliased email lists for family members. 3. ISP site managers working intensively with the user base to ascertain needs and skill levels. 4. Talkers and email lists for community-building, locally run. 5. Interconnectivity among rural areas through meta-email lists, similar to Net-Happenings or New-List, but regionally-based. 6. Open IRC channels for local usage. 7. Freenet or very low cost Net access, with an emphasis on text-based applications, even through SLIP or PPP connections. 8. Hardware resource centers for recycling older computer equipment. 9. Cybercafe network with maximum charges of $3 Canadian per hour. 10. Handout sheets detailing access commands, and local classes run by ISPs to get everyone on-line. 11. As much as possible, all of the above should be run by local people, regionally-trained. 12. Clearly articulated general policies for handling censorship, spam- ming, and hacking issues. 13. If possible, "emergency" help available on the Net - for example, dealing with depression after spousal death. 14. Integration of all of the above into local community schools, lib- raries, and other institutions. 15. Through integration and training, if possible developing local employment opportunities in informatics, software development, and so forth. I believe these (and similar) suggestions should be at the heart of a dis- course in _Wired_ and on the Net. Less developed regions of the world are poorly, if at all, connected; there are models for doing this. For exam- ple, I've suggested elsewhere building a MOO database specifically for regional and intermittent connects, using talkers for education, and so forth. And there are others actively working in these areas: But _where is the discussion?_ I feel, thanks to the Web and hysterical promotion, that we're all held to a white managerial and mostly male media onslaught - that this is the model _in place_ at the moment. _The Net must be seen as a potential field or domain,_ not as a top-down consumer play- ground of "cool" and "killer" "apps." Unless this happens, a real oppor- tunity for critical dialog will be lost - as well as the equally real pos- sibility of creating effective policy for the beginning of the next cen- tury. __________________________________________________________________________ Island (Vancouver to Cape Breton) Life Looking across the water to _an other shore_ (italics emphasizing the metaphoric aspects of the world's subjective), the landscape is displayed for well over a mile, under or over, perhaps twenty or a hundred miles. Hidden features are emerge into consciousness, and there's a cerain trem- bling in relation to the unruly exhibitionism of the hidden. Sky above and water's gleam frame the spit or fjord's farther shore, landscape tongue and teeth cradled by immobile lips. It's up to us to sing the words, _.map_ or _look map_ at the ready for whatever gifts we bring to the edge of consciousness, indeed. The most difficult truth concerns the continuation of desire, far beyond viewpoint and framework of daylight time - that illumination is only the partial consideration of the real, that recognition in its fullness would overwhelm and suffocate us. Hence _nothing could be farther than the truth_ - the distance is necessary. _________________________________________________________________________ Earth A park here has ducks. They don't migrate. Do ducks always migrate? They didn't in Irving California. Geese have stopped migrating. It's not true they're brain damaged. They behave normally. They have a lot of energy because they don't fly all that much. They have a good time. They like to stay around! The water is supposed to be poisonous with sewage backing up from the harbour. It's not true there's no life and it's just poison. We saw a big eel in it! And we saw algae and no duckweed but lots of under- growth. We saw a fish too. The ducks went back and forth. They had some little ones. They were alpha beta just like everywhere ducks. The ducks had no tumors and the eel was fine and healthy. Their feathers and its scales (I couldn't tell whether a he or she!) were healthy. They could see just fine. They flocked for my little bread (not the eel!). I always believe everyone. I'm so naive! There is garbage in the pond in the park and it is really bad. There is trash in and out of bags. The grounds are nice. The cemetery in the distance has toppled gravestones. There are teen-drink places (we're not out of the woods yet!) and stuff thrown about. But the ducks are fine! The eel was really great too! I think the ducks don't want you to know this. I think it's a secret. No- body bothers them because they're stupid! But they're not stupid, they know what's going on. They eat yummy fish and plants. It's really neat. Everyone leaves them alone! Tuesday I am going to the tar ponds. They're supposed to have 700,000 tons of PCBs in them! Everything is supposed to be dead! We'll see! ___________________________________________________________________________ 8 Being Handed Community In Sydney, I work with a community of people centered around the Community Access Project. I find myself suddenly in a situation I have longed for in New York: a sense of interpenetrated relationships and the ability to move from one point to another in the town, landmark-intensified by memories of _people._ 7 It Is Not Mine It is not my community, however, but one inverting the Internet, brought together in real life to promote the virtual. Today, we tried whiteboard on Powwow successfully; we could draw _together_ across a distance of several miles. The possibility of whiteboard warfare was discussed - erasing one another's demarcations. 6 Conferencing? In virtual conferencing, several components are necessary. I tend towards the lean: the use of a Web page as a "gateway" for registration and in- structions; the use of further Web pages to relate primary materials (pa- pers, etc.); email lists for discussion and secondary materials in depth; and a talker for on-line question and answer. That's it. Everything should be accessible through text-based applications. Everything should be fast - no images larger than 35k! 5 Booking My Way I can't live without books and other reference materials; the community here relies on a few chain stores, remarkably limited. It's clear that, at least for me, _the Net doesn't do it_ - I miss the intimacy of handling something momentarily precious and labor-intensive. My dreams revert to brooks and the false clarity of daylight. 4 We were not made to think. The chaotic sound of the brook outside spreads over a wide and complex bandwidth. Every so often it seems to change radically: I realize it is my own focus, signal-processing, that has sharpened the noise (white, pink, or otherwise), providing false peaks to stir my consciousness. The stars appear to move in the sky; they go nowhere. The lesson learned: All Internet is _thinking._ ___________________________________________________________________________ Airwaves I am finally bringing in some local CB transmission, mostly weather-rela- ted at the moment, but it's howling outside. There are airport transmis- sions as well on 125.25 megahertz, and several local FM and AM stations. At night, I can get 880, WCBS, NYC news, sounding intense and out of place against the rain and wind. My French is poor, so I listen to French 95.9 fm, always useful for tuning out. I want to track down the CB culture, the _oral_ culture, to the extent that it's non-telephone based, the intimacy and a kind of _easiness_ or informality I've never seen on the Net. I imagine it's boxed in with Iphone, but I haven't had a touch of it, and computers are still larger than CB transceivers, which fit comfortably in the hand. CB culture has died out to some extent everywhere, taken over in New York, for example, by late-night racists and just plain lonely people, mixed in with the roar of trucks, sadnesses and consolations. I picked them up; I listened when I first moved to the City, until I couldn't take it any lon- ger, sensing an aural invasion of space. This never happens on the Net, which conveniently remains on the screen - in this sense, unlike CB, the Net is _object,_ tied to technology, remote, and out of _touch._ (This won't always be the case; intelligent PDAs are surely down the road, hand-held companions increasingly replacing the physical reality that en- cases them. But for the moment the difference is _there._) _________________________________________________________________________ Lala Addiction Consider the Net (as totality) as interiority, obdurate frame of refer- ence, the more so because of its apparent innocuous structure - an object similar to a magazine or book (we tend to forget two centuries of warnings about novels). It is _framed_ or space-time explicit; unlike the apparatus of CMC, the interface is thing-like and sited. It portends worlding - cyb- erspace opposed to real space, a viral intersection of one with the other. And unlike the worlding of the novel, cyberspace is endless, continuously unfolding. On one hand, there is this somewhat fractal structure, and, on the other, the signifier of _addiction to the terminal_ - for there is heroin or gambling worlding as well, all signs of the relative flexibility of the sinews of the mind. _All_ these worldings, _worlds,_ are cultures, singular or multiple, cen- tered around a substance or object, speed or computer or drug, sex or laughter. Call an addiction a _preference_ for one culture over another; call an _inescapable preference_ a physical or chemical addiction. Never forget the _pleasure_ of each and every addiction, from heroin to pain, CMC somewhere in the middle. And never forget the _safety_ of ad- diction, because worlding crossed by substance, that chiasm, is the con- struct of a node, an articulation, which is not otherwise in the real or very often in the given cultural real. That node, transcendent and eman- ating, is the intensification and collapse of the maternal matrix to the signifier, phallus and body in one, the locus of little-object-a, the source and subversion of each and every masquerade. Consider condemnation, the import of moral judgment _from one world to another._ Doesn't such importation subvert alterity, oppress, shatter? For whom? Does justice have a site? Should addiction be considered a breakdown or buildup, in fact, a movement from essence to existence, from existence to construct? (Is _the other_ always perceived as addiction?) These questions portend the problematic of addiction, its lack of stated- ness, absent fury. The structure of addiction is not the _logic_ of mag- netism, for example, specificity of attraction to polar opposites. Beyond the appearance of overdetermination, cathecting, is there anything that would characterize either addiction-in-general? And overdetermination, cathecting, operate in cultural productions of all sorts; addiction is a model of someone for someone else, of _bad focus,_ _bad object._ Either everything or nothing needs to be unraveled here. _________________________________________________________________________ proto-call there is a precise line, along the interior of your anal folds, running from deep within your body to the escarpment of your perineum, where I would rest my tongue, run along the groove and pediment, o brake english and musk inhaled, play recording of fluids, quivered vibrations and fluid recording, mouth amplifier and remnant oscillator, your clitoris playing tongue groove surface plateau, o broke english, o double moan noun of transfer protocol, my fingers slipping between them, fold and fold, gathered for me, tip and tip, alighting for me, my face and hair and daily-eye, and coated forever, and playing the line _________________________________________________________________________ Closing "INBOX". Keeping 0 messages: Grace and Beauty of a Day Well-Spent! _________________________________________________________________________ - Country, Alive For the past week or so I've been emphasizing text-based applications, even though Powwow's whiteboard has been impressive. More and more I'm demonstrating MOO, talker, ytalk and IRC on occasion, looking at Webchat again, etc. I talk about conferencing, support-groups, relationships on CMC. I think of the isolated mining towns and rural countryside here as _alive_ with transmissions, nodes, conversations, rushes of information across small dense forests and streams. This network of illuminations holds the future of community in its skein, and there is far more at stake, on-line in northern Nova Scotia than, for example, in information-laden and anomic New York. The Net must submerge into landscape, the Web remaining visible but distant surface. Otherwise, U.S. corporate hegemony will dominate here as elsewhere, returning little on the _dollar._ (Back to Lukacs on reifi- cation...) But think for a moment of the _sentient countryside,_ the Net thinned, om- nipresent, hungered, carrying an excess or intensity of culture from with- in, a Net of empowerment, of local enterprise and discursive formations, dark perhaps with control and defense, thinned seepages of light and pre- sence. The interconnectivity of the world is not node to node, although from the viewpoint of urban centrism it appears that way. Instead, it is membrane across membrane, a simulation of a Riemannian surface, multiply folded and multiply connected. What may be of primary importance is the _liminal_ spaces between the nodes; it's here that diffusion occurs, a kind of exactitude fed into and out of other spaces. Or rather, it's here perhaps that spaces either become or reflect worlds, rather than simulate them through VRML; it's not a question of expansion _from_ the terminal screen to the infomatics of everyday life, but a compression _from_ the everyday _to_ the terminals of the infomatics-rich. The question which has always been there, at least since the time of the Hittites - how to keep worlding worlds, how to avoid the potential homo- geneity of CMC, as if the framework _were_ the thing, and as if the _thing_ were capable of definition. _________________________________________________________________________ - baader I have been pruning bad texts, awkward or misspelled, fudged or confused, from the files, wondering _how they got that way,_ observing the order of errors, misconceptions, mistakes of grammar... And there have been runon words, and displacements write and read, just as Paris, in the the spring so often presents itself as pregiven, always already organized according to near-perfect difference, need I spell myself any longer with your spell? Not to mention the transpositions, hte for example, omissions, te as another, or the absences of quotation, the as still another, or dupli- cations, as in tthe, forever runon, as in therunon, or not to mention once again those errors of format, carriage return errors, end of file mistakes The most frightening thing here is _the blindness of the writer,_ and it is this blindness, in fact, which keeps writing itself in check, within the frame. The errors, caught or not, tangle the perfect breath, inter- section of thinking, tacit knowledge. For writing is an aside, woven by the autonomic - and it is not the most _frightening_ thing, but the most symptomatic of the baseless diffusion of writing, emission for example. The text is ploughed always already as an afterthought, and one is never sure of the who or what of (the) it. ________________________________________________________________________ my my my hands smell of perfume everything i touch turns to flowers and silk romance dark fringes coat the spine of books and chairback lights are nothing i run my hands on my sweet cheeks and lull my smile touches the back of my throat my my - Sentience Rural sentience, the intelligent electronic landscape, will come from local networking. I imagine in the beginning, this will be somewhat cent- ralized, and the possibilities for over-extension and bureaucracy are endless. The centralization is the result of the need for outside funding and expertise, in combination with local entrepreneurship and cultures. As the networking intensifies and expands, it will become top-heavy; the next step in this regard would be decentralization, imitating, in other words, the development of the Net itself. As an example, there is a cybercafe in Sydney which has just started, has few customers, and is suffering as well as a result of the telephone strike. I imagine a locally funded development initiative creating a Web page for the cafe, hooking it up to the cybercafe newsgroups, etc. - in other words, giving it an online presence. The local community access sites here could also use the cybercafe for extended teaching/meetings. The cafe itself would use all of this to extend its connections into the local community, including commercial Web page designers, cultural ins- titutions, individual artists/writers/musicians, and businesses. It might be able to host small on-line conferences as well. Now all of this is similar to standard networking; the only difference is that much larger physical territories are involved, under different jurisdictions. Thus the cafe might find itself in a consortium developed in South Africa and con- nected primarily to Japan. The local institution could deliver local people and resources, in other words, but the connectivity would grow and interact planet-wide, not necessarily within the traditional boundaries of neighborhood community. So the sentient landscape includes the notion of postmodern geography, the Net acting as an input/output conduit for exter- nal information and contacts. In light of this, just as with traditional tourism, local customs every- where become a marketing source (look again at the transformation of New York City's Soho into Silicon Alley); this can result in the reification and packaging of these customs (Ashley MacIsaac's Web page) that distorts and subverts their origin - the result is potentially destructive. Pierre Berton wrote years ago about Hollywood's Canada in this regard, and in a dark vein, Franz Fanon talks about it in his discussion of national liter- atures. Today, of course, there is a whole anthropology of tourism, which may or may not operate in an advisory capacity. Still, as young men and women leave the countryside, Net resources become more and more necessary; they hold the key to a combination of empower- ment, local roots, and international cultural/economic exchange. One way of thinking of this: for the first time, _we are born into one another,_ and like marriage, for better or worse, but without the possibility of divorce on the horizon. _________________________________________________________________________