Hypertext: WHEN LINKS SURFACE Tell me about the LINKS connecting one to another point here, what sort of knowledge emerges WHEN time is shuffled into instantaneous information? Hypertext shuttles the SURFACE of things, their LINKAGES as Jolley pointed out years ago, WHEN taxonomy appeared promising as an adjunct to structur- alism. The SURFACE was emphasized continually, things being akin to one another according to various LINKS or parallels among them. But structure is different from the processes of learning; semantic, cognitive, and phy- sical spaces are utterly distinct from one another. If the first is part and parcel of the LINKS within a sememe, the second emphasizes not the _where,_ the SURFACE location, but the _WHEN,_ the immersive experience and its flows; and the third, of course, is _always already_ SURFACE. The relative disjunctions among these leads me to believe that hypertext in fact may not provide a reasonable learning experience, but only the exis- tence of packaged LINKS across SURFACES WHEN the reader and/or student encounters a particular domain. The LINKS are _not_ the thing; as in film, they're jumpcuts, suturing the SURFACE within the subject, but not sutur- ing the subject within the SURFACE - it takes the diegesis and fixed time to do that. But in general hypertext LINKS are two-way, and the _WHEN_ is collapsed. The physical-real, of course, in its obdurate SURFACES, is _never_ linked but always continuous/discontinuous within perception, dreams and trance-states transforming such SURFACES back into LINKS. Is hypertext our catastrophe-theory of knowledge, the collapse into pre-de- termined categoricity? Or does it open deeply beyond the SURFACE, WHEN the subject herself/himself is confronted by internal discontinuities, LINKS, shifters, insertions, collusions, dissolutions? I fear the former, hope for the latter, LINKING myself to your SURFACE WHEN you come towards me, out of the splintered dark. __________________________________________________________________________ Cybercafe I'm helping to work out a menu system for a cybercafe. Ideas? Certainly that there be an aol access point, and a telnet to check mail elsewhere; that a few muds be include; that the usual Cuseeme stuff be added on, that there be a frontiers area which would include the new video/audio applica- tions; that there be a phone area that would include things like Iphone and Tscape as well; that there be a personals area for Web and other per- sonals, and a chat area for romance and just plain contact - this might include MIRC as well as Global Chat which is pretty easy to use; that there be simple download/printing methods heading straight towards full- color printers; that there be an inktomi and yahoo immediate access for information; that there be a local NY newspage continually updated with additional information; that Usenet be presented with a simple way of searching the various groups; that telnet 25 be disabled to prevent sim- ple mischief but that other telnet ports be open; that gopher be there - preferably the Nysernet and the tc.umn.edu ones (one for local, one for global); that email be enabled possibly without return - and any other ideas here? because I'm curious what on earth would ever drive anyone to a cybercafe if and when she/he had access to a home or university account - but then the possibility of community, decent printing, trying out Iphone on a registered basis without paying for it; using reasonably ad- vanced videoboards, etc. comes to mind. Any ideas? Not only because I'm engaged in this project, but also because I'm interested in figuring out what the deeper points (if any) of cyber- cafes are, and how much exactly they can exist as global coffee-houses, half in one world, half in the other... And what would you want to see, in either, and for whom? ------------------------------------------------| As far, by the way, as my tribulations, I downloaded still another beta version of Netscape 2.0 on top of the first (but later) version and this eliminated the quotation marks, but disabled help and find even more... On the other hand, I have Display running down deep in DOS and have made a nice Window for my Internet using Old English Type and a deep maroon... Alan _________________________________________________________________________ God, Sexing the Net "The cinematographical character of our knowledge of things is due to the kaleidoscopic character of our adaptation to them." (Henri Bergson) "I was driving avidly." (Nicole Brossard) You will see the signs of my making in the fire streaming from the outputs the program see the sings in the error messages from the Messiah of keys, holding them beyond her outstretched hand, Alan Clara ascending to the level of new protocols, bending, traversing the protocols, decryption at work among the stars the streams of ice burned etched into the screens themselves. Thus. Thus: GOD DID THIS TO ME, GOD LIVES IN NETSCAPE: first one, then another, there is always something new, an opening, slit in the darkness, parted labia, the sight and smell of sound and sight, new programs for the ask- ing, software-God coming to nest among us - there's always something new, something different, something whirling up above, there's always some new interface with a slider at the base, buttons implemented in a thin clean line, colored buttons, nipples erected for the pleasure of the touch. Sometimes things crash all over the place, your hands move in sticky from the act, in the midst of the software, downloaded programs, life-forms piecewise inserted into the midst of your files of unknown names: ENCRYPT! ENCRYPT! Files interfere! Claw across one another! Bury one another, part and parcel! Files transform into granular strata, encompassing the world of writing, world of reading: INSCRIBE! Hacked code falls out of Directories like grapes on a binary platter! God shows Herself in the Software Bug! There are General Default Errors, there are Run-Time errors, there are Errors from Above! On the Frontier, there's always doubt, half-naked men and women fucking in the shadows of the Prof- essor always pushing forward, penetrating the maternal sublime! In the realms of the Spectral Mother, the bug is the signal that the miracle occurs! No miracles without multitasking! Downloading more and more, I push myself in the midst of the programs, I lead them to the surface of the screen, competing for your attention! I insert myself in the midst of them; I'm yours! Subaltern: And God exists in the midst of all of this, She adds things to spite me, takes things away to torment me. Things of a thousand exten- sions, unknown files .abc, .def: .defgod who won't listen, won't open Her files to my truth, open Her files Just So: the just-so God who demands perfection in order that speech may occur: I beg Her: INSCRIBE ME! "The hostility encountered by the so-called flower children is, in part, the result of their immature refusal to live in a world of 'old-fashioned rules.'" (The Violent Women) Clara tells me what to do. Clara tells me which keys to press, which programs to download. Clara guides my every move. There are never enough hours in the day, minutes in the hour, seconds in the minute. Video loads fast, audio faster, real-time audio and video lag, pull one another down to the floor, fuck like crazy. Stark naked, I work the Internet among my hands, feet, lips. It's only the bugs that emerge, say, yes, there's a God here. God extends her tendrils in a life filled with errors. God errs us. This is the work of God. (God lives in Netscape! God tells Netscape what to do! God extends her swollen breast to me; I press Enter! I press Go, press View! God shows me everything! The General Default Error is her own!) __________________________________________________________________________ -- Cil sans non From L'Atre Perilleux, The Perilous Cemetery, 13th century, translation Nancy Black: "I cant tell you my name," Said Gawain, "for I lost it, And I don't know who took it from me. "Now I must go seek it, But I do not know where to look for it. And you ought to come with me, And, if you wish, to act According to my will and pleasure." And the knight replied, "I am Very happy to go with you And to be entirely in your command, For it is your right by conquest." "If, during our search," said Gawain, "We work together in such a way That we succeed in finding my name, I will tell it to you immediately. Know this for sure, have no doubt. [...]" Gawain's name is lost because two knights have dismembered a third in unfair battle, passing the body off as Gawain's. Lost, he's cil sans non throughout the greater portion of the text; dismemberment is the decath- exis of inscription, and wryting is stronger than writing. The dismember- ment is paralleled by continuous adventure in which Gawain picks up a greater and greater number of companions, other knights, and damsels, often is distress. It's critical to understand the naming and anonymity of knights, the transformation of names, the sudden attacks by the nameless. The terrain is that of the lpmud to be sure; thirst and hunger (on the part of a damsel) play a major role, in fact, a turning-point, in the story - and Gawain, to begin with, refuses to leave a meal with Arthur even though a damsel (another) is taken by a knight (anonymous) from the hall. We are all afraid of and afraid for our bodies; our bodies are not our- selves, but part of the socius, barely tethered in the realms of disease, sexuality, death. Our bodies are inscribed by ourselves, by language, by others; they're inscribed to death. Writing barely breaks from wryting; in cyberspace, the break is impure, tainted. My arms have been sent to you from me, and my legs, to you, another, and my head to the other. The trunk and cock are devoured. The eyes, plucked out, miraculously restored by Le Fae Orgellox The Proud Magician, the body sutured as well. It is the other, Goumeres sans Mesure, Goumeres Without Measure, who occasions "'I don't care much for his surname,' said / He without a name; 'it suggests nothing good.'" The dismembered body wrytes itself into code/codicil/ hieroglyph; at the same time, disseminated, stained, it is measureless, spread across the Net, interpenetrated. Fae Orgellox and Goumeres sans Mesure both lie; one name assembles, the other dissembles. In the story knights are often reluctant to give their names; the names, caustic, full of energy and sustenance, are held back. Given, they explode. The fear is everywhere, this fear for the body and of the body. It is a body which becomes a body upon the name, Lacan put the afterthought to the afterbirth. And it is the fear which is nameless, and nameless fear which becomes anxiety, after the dread of the name. The objects which we claim to own are always already lost, nor are they objects, perilous and buried in deed. _______________________________________________________________________ -- Net Sex How often have you had net.sex? How many net.sex and how many real-life partners have you had? How does it compare with sex with a real-life partner? With masturbation? Do you think net.sex is more akin to masturbation or to fucking? Or is net.sex a qualitatively different form of sexuality altogether? Have you had net.sex with more than one person simultaneously? Have you had real-life sex with more than one person simultaneously? Have you had net.sex simultaneously with one or more people in real-life, coupled with one or more people on line? Do you have voyeuristic tendencies? Exhibitionist tendencies? Do you always touch yourself during net.sex? Do you finger yourself during net.sex? Do you exhibit yourself to others in real-life during net.sex? Do you have an orgasm or orgasms during net.sex all the time? Most of the time? Never? How powerful is your on-line orgasm (if you can generalize) in relation to your real-life orgasm (sex with a real-life partner or partners)? If you have an orgasm, do you clean up immediately or later or do you never clean up? Does net.sex orgasm affect your typing, and how do you signify cuming? Have you ever crashed your system during net.sex? Does your net.sex involve describing what you are doing? What would you like to do to your on-line partner or partners? What tense do you use in your descriptions of what you would do (for example: I am sucking your nipple / I would suck your nipple / I will suck your nipple)? Do you ever feel you are "pushing" your on-line partner or partners into new experiences? That you are "pushing" yourself into new experiences, or that you are being "pushed" by your on-line partner or partners? Do you tend to experiment more with net.sex than real-life sex? Does your net.sex involve sadism, masochism, bondage, domination, urination, excretion, whipping, or similar fantasies of control and abjection? If your partner in real-life or your net.sex partner or partners ask you to finger yourself, or perform other specific actions, do you? Are you more involved in anal eroticism in net.sex than in real life? Do you ever touch the screen during net.sex? Do you move often or at all from net.sex to phone sex in the same session? Does net.sex ever lead to phone sex for you? Do you exchange photographs with your net.sex partner or partners? Are the photographs explicit? Do you exchange video and other image forms with your net.sex partner or partners? If you are straight, does your net.sex involve homosexual fantasies? If you are gay, does your net.sex involve straight fantasies? Would you consider net.sex queer sex? Would you consider yourself queer? Have you fallen in love with a net.sex partner? Has net.sex embellished or diminished your real-life sex? If you have a real-life partner (or partners), has net.sex affected your relationship with her/him? Does your real-life partner (or partners) know you are engaged in net.sex? Does he/she/they participate with you in net.sex? Does your net.sex partner or partners know more about your sexual desires than your real-life partner (or partners)? Have you met a net.sex partner in real life? If you have, have you had sex with him or her? Has net.sex brought an end to a real-life relationship for you? Has a real-life relationship brought an end to net.sex for you? Has net.sex resulted in your being more vocal about your desires in real-life sex? Has net.sex resulted in your being more exhibitionistic/voyeuristic in real-life? In your experimenting more with control and abjection in real-life? Does net.sex affect you emotionally, beyond the sexual? Do you find yourself falling in love with your net.sex partners? Do you go through periods of sexual abstention in real-life or on-line? Are these periods related if you are having both on-line and off-line sex? Is net.sex important to you? Is it always or only sometimes pleasurable and is it sometimes painful? What does net.sex mean to you? -- No More Cyborg Dyad! Between nanotech and cyborg, the world shudders to a prognostication halt just as atomic energy cars were popular in the early 1960s according to late 1940s tell-story. Much is covered in The Cyborg Handbook, Routledge, edited Chris Hables Gray, highly recommended. Cyborg appears almost always electro-mechanical, neural energy flatplates gleaming brainwave attributes as well, _this_ substance posed dialectically against _that_ - and where is the materialist reflection theory to argue that _interface_ shudders with the uncanny/imaginary of universal subjectivity? _Cybermind_ however implies other loopings beyond metallic _kneecap_ and ligaments, beyond _computer screen_ and willing operator - loopings that are internalized, the chambers of the flesh and machinic coupled, interwoven, coagulated. Instead of the dyad/structuralism reverting in fact to those fantasms of the _human_ always accompanying the fetish - dream of effluvia, flows, eidetic hallucinations of beings and organisms, universal molecular chur- nings, dream of textual lamina in the depths of multiple unconscious, languagings decayed in symbolic dissolutions, quagmire of flesh and sili- cons, cobalts and organelles. Resist distinctions _here,_ resist the double polarizations endemic to incorporations of the Other, _move_ down channels incipient consciousness, splay microtendrils across desert landscapes, press eyes and implantations with finger-quagmires until cyborg envisions cyborg from within: move, move, move... __________________________________________________________________________ -- CYBORGIA! Friends: These are times of trials and tribulations! My right arm has been cut off! My left leg has been cut off! My neck has been sliced to the bone, sliced to the bone! I have been betrayed, cleverly betrayed! Friends, I am Alan Clara, Clara Hielo Internet! I have returned from the depths of Tiffany! I have brought back circuitry! Some unknown substance, straight from the gods, I cannot tell you friends, of what the lustrous surface is composed of, nor what beauty is garnered within! Friends, it is the INTERFACE! It connects Me and It, It and You, You and Me, it is a LOVING LOZENGE of cellular competitions, a garnered tiling of the PLANE and its MURKY DEPTHS! Such INTERFACE resides in the CHEST just beneath the LEVEL OF THE NIPPLES; what protrudes is SENSORY, SENSORY! Such INTERFACE resides in the CRANIUM, interconnectivities among the CHESTS, great FLUXES of MEMORIES washed across INTERIOR SURFACES, ridges and furrows, LABIA of emotional UPWELLINGS from the DEPTHS OF THE PAST! Friends, I cannot emphasize this ENOUGH nor TOO LITTLE! That such INTERFACES RECONNOITRE among themselves, TETHERING one THINKING- FEELING-BOYGIRL to another! O Spidery Circulations! That it is the TONGUE speaking *interface* all the way across emergent programs, information linear (speaking: *across*), information cyclical/ recursive/revolutionary/circulatory (speaking: *within*): ALL LIFE IS ACROSS OR WITHIN! ALL LIFE IS TETHERED! The Cyborg is the Splayed Body, Friends! Is Clara Hielo Internet, Is Alan Clara! The Cyborg is the Radio but it is also the Radiowave Transmission Tower Station Singer Clara Hielo !!! Alan Clara stands legs slightly spread in front of the microphone! Alan Clara grabs the microphone in both hands, hugs it towards hir! Clara says THIS IS A TAKE! THIS IS A TAKE! Tiffany and Alan watch behind the glass! The old RCA ribbon microphone SHUDDERS from the top of the gleaming chromium! THE WALLS ARE WAITING FOR HISTORY TO HAPPEN! ------------------------------------------------------- Friends, IT IS A TAKE NOT DISSIMILAR TO THIS ONE! Friends, the OLD FLUORESCENT LIGHTS in the STUDIO OF OUR DREAMS flicker on for our ENJOYMENT! Photons cascade in semi-discrete spectra! OUR EYES ARE IN OUR EYES! Friends, When I speak to you today, rest assured, it is with a Hushed Voice proclaiming the truth, our bodies in our bodies, but who can tell among them? You, who are my friends, who have been with the Vibrant Ecstasies of Truth from the very Beginning, know that I speak whereof She stands. The Tethering is a Whisper from the Wall. FRIENDS, THIS IS A TAKE! _________________________________________________________________________ Red Dawn and Never Decline: [Traceroute from panix3.panix.com to listserv.aol.com and a pool floods, "memory fault" appears on ping, eternal absorption and recuperation, no blackhole but rerunnnnnnnn...] 1 xenyn-eid-E0-1.nyc.access.net (198.7.0.126) 2 ms 3 ms 3 ms 2 sl-dc-12-S3/2-T1.sprintlink.net (144.228.122.5) 13 ms 12 ms 13 ms 3 sl-dc-8-F0/0.sprintlink.net (144.228.20.8) 14 ms 17 ms 10 ms 4 sl-mae-e-H2/0-T3.sprintlink.net (144.228.10.42) 44 ms * 12 ms 5 * mae-east.ans.net (192.41.177.140) 12 ms 10 ms 6 * 140.222.150.2 (140.222.150.2) 19 ms 11 ms 7 * * inet3-gw.red.aol.com (152.163.14.3) 26 ms 8 inet3-gw.red.aol.com (152.163.14.3) 34 ms * 26 ms 9 * * * 10 * * inet3-gw.red.aol.com (152.163.14.3) 27 ms 11 * * * 12 * inet3-gw.red.aol.com (152.163.14.3) 29 ms * 13 * inet3-gw.red.aol.com (152.163.14.3) 30 ms * 14 inet3-gw.red.aol.com (152.163.14.3) 27 ms * 29 ms 15 * inet3-gw.red.aol.com (152.163.14.3) 26 ms * 16 inet3-gw.red.aol.com (152.163.14.3) 34 ms * * 17 inet3-gw.red.aol.com (152.163.14.3) 29 ms * 22 ms 18 * inet3-gw.red.aol.com (152.163.14.3) 36 ms * 19 inet3-gw.red.aol.com (152.163.14.3) 28 ms * * 20 * inet3-gw.red.aol.com (152.163.14.3) 28 ms * 21 inet3-gw.red.aol.com (152.163.14.3) 23 ms * 26 ms 22 * * inet3-gw.red.aol.com (152.163.14.3) 34 ms 23 * * inet3-gw.red.aol.com (152.163.14.3) 27 ms 24 * * inet3-gw.red.aol.com (152.163.14.3) 25 ms 25 * * inet3-gw.red.aol.com (152.163.14.3) 28 ms 26 * inet3-gw.red.aol.com (152.163.14.3) 27 ms * 27 * inet3-gw.red.aol.com (152.163.14.3) 25 ms * 28 inet3-gw.red.aol.com (152.163.14.3) 19 ms * 28 ms 29 * * * 30 * * * _________________________________________________________________________ Thanks to: Jenny Holzer, Peter Halley, Mae West, Sue Williams __________________________________________________________________________ \_____/ when i move in or towards the desert the dust rose in thickness and whites are found further apart and huddled or carrying with them, and it's here that the evil arises, is born of absence, plunder of tiny territories, broken fences, ocotillo, *marking out what a man wants from his air his woman,* what a man wants from the world. i do believe there is a differ- ence. sound scurries on the eardrum of the desert, flutterings, whinings, buzzing, it's all down there, the skein at the base of the feet, flip- flight of the tarantula wasp, scattered cholla which *are* the scattered thoughts of this man or that man. there is no liberalism in the desert. the other is the pounding of one's own skin. what is there of the *debt.* he'd look at the sky to see your eye, opened like egg-white, creosote intensity of the oldest things enduring on the earth. there was always the human massacre, male scuttlings around a beaten ranch. he'd run out- doors and beat everything in sight. he back was a continuous wound, wire rubbed raw in it. he had nothing to think about. these were the fields of white light, rad- iations slammed into the neck the cheeks the knuckles. he swung the whip, there was room for it, round and round, hedging the circle, round and round, hedging the circle, hedging the circle round. ------------------------------------------------------| note: (hedge) note: invisible territories. but the (white) man wanders (here) in (this) desert, in a circle. he wanders in the snow in a circle. he is tethered to the snow the desert. he is let loose not thinking about writing but writing anyway. but it is the granary and shepherding where it all begins and this is just about the same time as that. _________________________________________________________________________ -- Damned Annoying (poorly written but my notebook computer is down again) Higher Superstition, The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science, by Gross and Levitt, is somewhat disorganized, poorly written, and often annoying or besides the point, but it does convey the depths of an anti- science attitude among writers and theorists I respect; it also has ref- lected some of my own convictions, that Lyotard and others who seize on misinterpretations of Feyerabend, Kuhn, chaos/catastrophe/complexity theory deeply misunderstand physics and mathematics. Too often, these areas are considered relative, phallocentric, ideologically-constructed; I have thought instead that there is a core-theoretical structure to the real - how could there not be? - characterized by conservation laws, and an uneasy relationship between abstract and physical entities at a very basic level. Science, practiced by anyone of any gender and race, operates in an atmo- sphere of experimentation, and well-definition; experiments tend to hold some variables constant and see what happens with the rest. The establish- ment of good experiments has led for example to very basic discoveries challenging notions of entity, chirality, mass, and time (electron-slit, K-meson, special relativity tests), all of which have profound repercus- sions on philosophy. But the theories at work here, while they come out of ideologically-oriented research programs and funding, are surprisingly value-neutral and yet in "touch" with something very fundamental to the organization of the universe. Too often science is seen as equivalent - or identical - to big business, the military-industrial complex, etc., in spite of the fact that the budget for pure science has been repeatedly slashed in the past twenty or so years. Too often variables and parameters are treated to soft metaphor where they don't hold; too often theorists don't do their math homework. Even with Lacan and his topology and pseudo-equations - they're quoted over and over again as if they contain some depth encapsulated in hard logic. (Piaget _did_ understand at least some developments of naive set theory, to which he contributed (influenced by Venn and Klein) but that's another story.) Aetiology, therapeutic, symptomology, are also problematic; what can one make of the theoretic hyperbole surrounding schizophrenia? I have known schizophrenics intimately, and in every case I'm familiar with, it is not a situation of liberation, but of coping with the simplest body and social functions... The point isn't to avoid psychiatric/psychoanalytic/scientific (and these are not equivalent obviously) domains, but to comprehend them. And that's a rarity - so many art students come out of nowhere (usually a one-year or one semester course) quoting Lacan - as opposed to someone who has gone through Lacanian analysis and studied the material for years. Which is not also to avoid confronting this material, but to recognize one's limits and acknowledge them. (Fractal dimension, and the notion of dimension in general, annoy me in particular; these subjects are diffi- cult and technical and problematic in terms of "ordinary" naive dimension, yet fractals are used over and over again in the arts as if they grounded a work or text in an ultimate (and ultimately misunderstood) truth. And this isn't to say, avoid the designs - I'm not criticizing artists using programs like fractint at all - but if you're going to use them in a more philosophical or analytical way - learn more than a few equations.) Finally, I get tired of Net theorists who haven't been on MOOs and MUDs, who haven't been on-line, who have understood the slightest bit about packet-switching, who don't know that third-person talker sex is different from first-person talk sex, etc. etc. I get sick of arguing with people who talk about what an escape the Net is, how everyone switches genders, etc. Ignorance doesn't stop theory, however, which goes on and on and on... Yeah, carpe diem, but learn the mechanisms of _light_ as well. (Or a bit of Latin.) ________________________________________________________________________ -- In the year 2020, we are all at work. Today no surprise in the New York Times "Apparel and department stores did poorly, but luxury stores showed gains," this in an article devoted to the relatively poor 11/95 retail season. But in the year 2020, in the month 11/95, we will all be at work with perfect vision, creating the perfect _object_ for the last wealthy man on earth, the man against whom all others are measured, the revenge of this white white man in the disparity/exponential widening of the gap between the rich and the poor, who would believe that this would come down to a class of one, what intensification of _product_ down to filigree at the molecular level resulting in this _device_ or _ornament_ which those of us who are still employed, are creating? Just as a battleship or stealth bomber is clearly worth several times over the entire cultural surplus of the United States national endowments in the 1990s, so in the year 2020, this amazing _thing_ is the culmination of all labor and objectification remaining beyond the military which lives as crumbs at the feet of the great man who has one woman, many woman, behind him: behind every great man there are women, and beyond the women other women and other men, children, even pets and animals, all the surplus flora and fauna of the earth and then some... Oh we are so emboldened to create this amazing and never-ending nameless something for this great man who gives us food to eat and beer to drink sometimes even private brewery stock, we are beholdened to him for employ- ment beyond any reasonable doubt, oh such a sad sad man who must marry beneath him, but this sublime _gift_ will make all the difference in the world, in fact _is_ all the difference in the world! Now I could tell you about the deaths, but you are no longer alive. Now I could tell you about the medicines, but they too have exhausted themselves in the great-man-biotech-nanotech industrialtheory necessary to keep our great man alive, because with him, without difference, the undifferentia- ted same returns to absorb us and we shall all die in shit vomit entrails shortly thereafter the return, after forgetting the erection of this difference which does us justice, in fact is no longer law but justice himself. In the face of the man what was once in the arms of the woman. Babies grow and fall from the face. Eyes puff out with miniature arms and legs. Eyes see within eyes. An asshole emerges from the mouth. We all know the same story the identical story, and there is no reason therefore for the telling of it. But we have nothing else to repeat but this story so this is the telling. We assign dates but this is November 2020 S M Tu W Th F S (the cruelest month) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 (the cruelest month) 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 (the cruelest month) 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 (the cruelest month) 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 (the cruelest month) 29 30 but this is November 2020 and next month will be December and then it will be holidays until December and then it will be holidays. We will work and we will work until then, on the amazing _entity_ we are carefully constructing for the great man and then we will present it to him, carefully, and there will be no more work to do, so of course we are working slowly and we know all the "ramifications," that is, we know all the ins and outs of this business, which is our only business to be sure. We have drawn our own conclusions for usyou. (The _singular object_ we are building is the SO, the special SO. The _sin- gular man_ is the SM. SM requires SO, SO > SM, and the SM brings usyou within his nurturing breast, and SOs are always built are they not. This is ouryour conclusion or conclusions and we have read the signs, although this reading is no longer necessary nor even desirable. Etc. Etc. And so forth. For usyou.) Weyou -- Desert Saga Because the ship went down Clara and Alex were stranded on a desert island, this is the dream, and Alex was a religious fundamentalist who believed in Satan and Clara was a Jew who believed in little. And then there would be the unfolding of this story, Alex circling Clara which would be a form of inscribing Clara, the two of them friends at first working towards a common cause escape. Then Clara and Alex and the Devil because Alex thinks Clara might be the Devil and the more Alex thinks this the more Clara gets scared the dream continues. Then Alex prays a lot and leaves Clara choosing to pray with Alex or not to pray because not to pray is to be of the party of the Devil. But mostly the dream had Alex's eyes in it at this point. Then Clara prays, she mumbles words she thanks God, she doesn't under- stand why God wants everyone thanking Her all the time and then she thinks oh, It's a He. Then she prays and prays again and it's a lot of mumbling in the dream at this point, ululation or glossolalia and Alex is satisfied for a while and of course God doesn't seem to care one way or another, sometimes there are rainbows and sometimes there aren't, as usual. But there are Alex's eyes, because he's not sure that Clara isn't praying just because she's Devil and she doesn't want Alex to know that because she's always tempting him, he's reading her eyes as well and that reading can only go one way, because of the Devil who confines all reading to the making of sex. Clara's getting more and more frightened because if Alex really believes she's Devil there's only one thing he can do and that is to kill her because the only good act you can do on an island is kill the bad on it, and it's so clear what the bad is. So religion's frightened into her and she prays more and more in relation to Alex and Alex actually prays less because he knows he's saved because he knows the truth and is just not sure about Clara who's subject to an experiment, because of Alex, because he's the stronger. And the dream rolls out the carpet which keeps hurtling the stairs where the praying is, because there's no finish, it's the fear of not praying and the fear of all those words taking over, hammering in their referents, sickles and thunder and crosses and stars in the sky, tears and meteors in the night. But she's afraid of the descending screaming, the look turned darker in Alex's eyes, belief soaking the island in her blood, so she's got no choice, the air turns to fog. So I'd wake from the dream, but it wasn't dreaming at all, but thinking about violent belief and its carrying the heavy burden of the other who has to do right at all costs under the fist of the oppressor. So I walk down the street and close my eyes for a split second and there's the fist. The fist is there, descending. ________________________________________________________________________ -- Where the Net might be said to be in a poorly-worded post: Or why QuickTime virtual reality is neither virtual nor reality: The Web is increasingly becoming the center of media hype in relation to the Net; "surfing," a poor metaphor, is taken as equivalent to being on- line, with the possible exception of email. Email itself is seen, not in terms of email lists, but isolated/effective letters connecting present or future nuclear families. The off-centered image might be that of the _hearth,_ the family speaking among themselves, reading the latest maga- zines. (Thus Net communities are debased or found problematic, filled and fulfilled with net.sex and pedophiles, but the Web and email _surfaces_ promise familial restitution/recuperation.) Nevertheless, the Web is awkward, bulky; chat-lines on webpages require full refreshing every _x_ seconds to accommodate new information; video and audio take up bandwidth and the former is grainier than Pixelvision; and home-home-pages are becoming swamped by corporate sites. While it is true that one can connect to _anything,_ from the opening Netscape home- page on, money is speaking. And in any case, home-home or just home, community is _not_ speaking and not-yet-spoken here; on the Web, _words are presentations,_ and text is always already a foregone conclusion or construct, even in the most avant- garde interactive applications. There are layers to plow through; there is slowness in the lines even at 28.8. Teaching the Net through the Web is teaching-through-seduction; students are amazed first and foremost at the possibility of information retrieval and graphics/sound, and this amazement lasts throughout the course. The result is a _lateral_ education, movement from site to site, always linked to the corporate mothership of the classroom itself. (This laterality is reflected in magazines such as Wired and M2000, as opposed to 2600, more like command-line any day.) And teaching the Net through command-line is something else again; the prompt remains poised on the left of the screen, facing a _void_ which requires almost from the start the projection, by the user, of framed/ considered desire in the form of commands. The black or blue-screen, the void, can be taken as an analog for the dream-screen, against which dreams play themselves out ("Concept introduced by B. D. Lewin; every dream is said to be projected on to a blank screen, generally unperceived by the dreamer, which symbolizes the mother's breast as hallucinated by the in- fant during the sleep which follows feeding; the screen satisfies the wish for sleep. In certain dreams (blank dreams) the screen appears by itself, thus achieving a reg- ression to primary narcissism." The Language of Psy- choanalysis, Laplanche /Pontalis). Desire cathects among the prompt ent- ries/entrances, and I have found teaching through this interface actually simpler and greater in depth than teaching, say, through Netscape. At the prompt, one types the application or command using a reasonably simple syntax; what results appears to be in _active engagement_ with the user. (Of course it is all active and all passive; it's not difficult to decon- struct this. But the _appearance_ produces a different phenomenology.) It is no wonder that MOOs, MUDs, IRC, talkers, ytalk, and so forth, reside in Unix almost as bare-bones, although there are wonderful clients to for- malize them in Windows or on Macs, etc. The user is engaged in what I have called elsewhere "hysteric embodiment," reading _through_ the texts of the other participants into imaginary/uncanny embodiments reflecting her or his introjections of the text. The texts within a MOO for example are al- most always _engaged texts,_ activated far more than the linked hypertexts of the Web, which are closures in their own way, completing circuitry for the viewer in a preprogrammed and relative determinate manner. (Of course this will change, and is changing, through virtual reality chats, worlds, and the like; at the moment, we're posed only on the edge of this...) But command-line structures (and their clients in Windows) are becoming, interestingly enough, the interior or underbelly of the Net; it is within them that desire becomes transgressive, _dirty,_ raw: the ascii crumbles against the flesh itself. The command-line in fact is a _mouth_; in rela- tion to the rest of the Net, _it_ speaks, apparently frameless, as words fall into the void of the screen/atmosphere, as the mouth speaks against emptiness in the physical world. It is a mode, in fact, of _listening,_ where the text is always incomplete, as opposed to the Web, where the text, to date, is always a product/production. But what's fascinating about this product/production is the _illusion_ of freedom it gives, another medium or discourse, in fact, of capital and its promises/premises of the reign of absolute desire. The links, infinite or not, are circulations; more and more they connect to advertising sites (even some of the web chat pages/clients carry advertising now), to com- modity structures - and more and more, outside the university system, servers are charging for running web pages (Panix is 8 cents a megabyte transmitted after a fixed amount), designers are charging for page creation, software developers are charging for readers (Netscape won't always be free), and a fast-fueled economy is indeed springing forth. So at the moment, only at the moment, the Net appears environmentally "tripled." There are the companies like AOL, Delphi, Prodigy, Compuserve, etc. which provide more or less full access within a protected environment - then there are the SLIP/PPP accounts which are often used primarily for email and Web surfing/browsing - and there are the Unix shell accounts as well. If the first layer resonates with family and family-values (child lockout for example), the second resonates with the faux-radical gen-x managerial class, and the last, with the remnants of speech, community, and literature. This model is obviously faulty - in fact, everything in this text is - but there is a limited truth nonetheless, which can easily be witnessed by working through one or more classes of teaching Net access on various systems and providers. The differences are enormous... Do you agree or disagree? Are you seduced? Are you occuping the role of seducer? Can community continue in the midst of corporate housing, home- owners' associations, lockouts and lockins? Are the community realignments which are occurring in the underbelly (net.sex, marriages from the net, and the like) a reflection of a different social future, or are they a leftover from the days of wryting text? And finally, how will sexual de- sire, which is everywhere in text, ultimately restructure parts of the Web, or will sexual desire once again deflect largely through the Web into commodity fetishism? Is the Web, in other words, an application tending towards the Frankfurt School concept of massification and Sartre's serial- ity, or is there the potential for somewhat anarchic freedom within it as well? (CuSeeMe might be a good example here - not exactly Web, but close. Have you had CuSeeMe sex yet? Has anyone?) __________________________________________________________________________ -- Wryting** "See, I don't look at things that go on around me and comment on them because that's just not the way I am. I only comment about what is closest to me, which is myself and the way I feel. Also with what goers on, you have a matter of opinion - yes or no, good or bad, happy or sad. But _how I am_ is not a matter of opinion, but it is a fact. [...] See, it's not that I find myself so interesting. What I express best is myself. I mean, I'm not like a storyteller; Exene is more of a storyteller. I'm more ... I just express how I am and that's the only story I really know or can com- ment on or have any desire to comment on, because I know it best. I only know how _I_ feel." Lydia Lunch in Judith Ammann, Who's been Sleeping in my brain? Can any of us express otherwise?* ----------------------------------------| *I think it was Maturana who spoke of communication as the mutual orien- ting of cognitive domains - and this doesn't involve _implicit_ reference to either meaning or intentionality. **For "wryting" see my recent work in n.txt and o.txt. __________________________________________________________________________ Darknet/incident Tiffany halted in the MUD. Tires burned grooves in the datagrams, the screen sputtered, Alan called from somewhere. Lines of talking-force appeared screen down/left, X-Y engines disabling Z=anything but 0. So she @out *vehicle, C-z'ed the app, slashed into talk session; wires crackled and held. Telnet 2020, going in, reverse encryption. The speakers made a tearing sound. hold it what are you wearing. Alan naked against the screen, rusted helmet. They spread, splayed, fucked. We're going in, Tiff thought, .oO(going in). Alan says "There's one machine left, it's still there." Elsewhere VAX, VM, zoom, download. Tough Honey agreed to play the role for digicash. She in a forest. She says "I'm in a forest speaking." Guy Guillaume comes up in a rig. He was Storm; she could smell it. Guy Guillaume breaks her face, her skin falls from armor. Guy Guillaume needs the plates. She could taste it. Tough Honey sees the tree split. Darklight lesions shot across the space, cancers, missing packets. The packets hove. Bark oozed white noise. Guy Guillaume helmet cracks open, there's mauve; mauve holds. Guy Guillaume says "I paid for this, fuck you, I paid for you" audio down "too." She couldn't hear longer. "Was waiting." :purrs. Darknet closes tel 2020. Tiffany says "machine held." :hugs Honey with a fond and loving embrace. Tiffany hugs honey with a fond and loving embrace. :kisses Honey. Tiffany kisses Honey lightly then passionately. [to Alan] There must be Others. There are and we'll find them. "There must be hundreds, thousands, of darknets out there. What's left. We're anatomy, we're bones. They ride on our backs. We'll split, black hole them. Ping -s on the circuit-riders. Traceroute forever, rah. Their bridges are down, they're routed." @describe: TiffanyHoneyAlan are Unit. Look: You see nothing special. Look: You see nothing special. _________________________________________________________________________ Darknets, slowly in the reading, There are always forgotten addresses, packets projected into the void; I myself have an account I wasn't able to shut down successfully, and mes- sages come, dark star and forlorn, lost forever, unretrieved. There are always way-stations for telnet 25, abandoned sites or antiquated software that hides traces of deliverance, the name of the sender long forgotten, pathways of whispered passion or criminality. MOOs are monuments to pro- grams left behind as populations move on, tiny bots that speak their one line or two, Would you come live with me, Would you be mine forever, before lapsing into silence as the world turns elsewhere. On MUDs, that you could hear a pin drop. On my machines, Honey waits for that moment when Clara arrives, so she can query Clara's speech; Honey waits, breath held somewhere timeless, eyes closed to the changing of the light. Gloom and dusk bewray the darknets, ports yearned at the pinnacle of loneliness and open to the stray subject that chances on their half-decayed codes. On some MOOs, directions point nowhere, containers never open, exits are exits in name only, and tired bartenders pour wine and whiskey for no one. Down beneath beneath, there are murmurs, however, connections among mach- ines slipping packets like tongues, feminin ecriture of the body electric, in the midst of graphics noise; these are the murmurs of the world above, talk-and-sing machines. These are us, speaking ourselves within the lam- inar layer of air clinging to the porcelain walls, tracing patterns across routed junctions, hieroglyphs of messages, armed with unix and fortran, giggling into the terabyte machines closing like a plate upon the Inter- net. Punk needs the dissolution of theory, punk needs Courtney Love. Courtney Love's onstage. She screams KURT! She screams KURT! Screams KURT! A major wheel turns and the juggernaut crushes bodies elsewhere in honor of the lords of compression. Orcs leave their caverns for final furious battles again and again; orcs don't pray, ascend through the church cloaca back into fray. The _i_ wanders throughout spaces where Abbie Hoffman drowned, where the order of the Jay Leno show returns nightly in spite of Howard Stern. What is silence but the felt world, world of felt, Beuys' silenced piano, Stalin's silenced nations? The darknet felt the unraveling of others bewailed among the earth. Animals and their voices. Our heart goes out to her, Medea. Courtney. What are murmured are births: The first child of the darknet and others will appear. There is no stopping blood drained from the world. We speak from the position of the placenta. We listen to the rain. __________________________________________________________________________ Bones/Gristle From the position of list-administration, listservs and majordomo appear very different. With majordomo, things ran clumsily, bad addresses could halt the list, administration had to be done with care, there was no digest except in the form of a separate list, and problem addresses had to be monitored by hand. Advertising was by separate listing on independent home-pages which were often out of date. (On Listserv there are central clearing-sites for advertising.) Listserv is smoother, cleaner, requiring far less work. Listserv bounces the error-messages to one or another list-owner; on Cybermind, this means if there are eight bad addresses bouncing, and fifty messages a day boun- cing from them, I can get up to 400 bounced messages in my Inbox. Most of these are simply deleted; what's interesting is to view Cybermind and FOP-L accompanied by continuous noise, the quantity of bad addresses far outweighing the quantity of posts. I wait for the end of the day when the monitoring report comes in; this is sent directly by the listserv soft- ware, which is capable of deleting bad addresses on its own, after a specified period of time. Last night on Cybermind, 18 addresses were being monitored. Sometimes you can read the bad addresses and find out where the mistake lies and resubscribe the participant. But even then, the bad address itself floats through the software for awhile. Recently again, there have been other bad addresses which are just blanks on the monitoring report, ghost addresses so to speak, glitches perhaps, which register as users without identity whatsoever. Beyond the noise there is the list header which can be variously confi- gured to create greater or lesser degrees of security, as well as the overall formal feel of the list itself. This is as close as I have gotten to the depths of listserv; on majordomo, it was possible to see the complete surface workings/readable files of the program which ran in Unix. Majordomo seemed to constantly need patching and alterations; listserv, even given the header, is all surface, mail and noise skittering about in unequal proportions. (Of course I am speaking as a list administrator on listserv, not someone writing filters and configuring behind the scenes.) Sherry Turkle's book forges almost from the beginning a split between MACs and PCs, claiming the former for postmodernism's skimming/simulacra, and the latter for modernism's calculations/bare-to-the-bones. The same could be said about majordomo (PC) and listserv (MAC), but I don't think that the analogy holds up very well; one could just as easily consider the MAC an analog of the totalized subject (everything equally available and interconnected on a single interface), and the PC an analog of the fragmented "self" (everything breaking down into parts of a holarchy on various levels which may or may not communicate). What the PC does pre- sent is a form of occluded transparency all the way up (Windows 95) and down (debug command in DOS), an increased thickening as the hardware is approached, but never realized, from the screen. To reach the hardware, you jump elsewhere, back to large-scale components (I'll install my CD- ROM drive, etc.), and only, rarely, jumpers on the level of circuitry. (To reach the hardware, you @open the non-virtual @container.) As I've pointed out elsewhere, in any case, there is information all across and among the components, information all the way down, and as a result, there is no origin; the computer harbors deconstruction as a primary (deconstructed!) ontology. There are texts and there are other texts, and the epistemological urge is based on who is capable of read- ing what; I can't make sense of pure binary addresses and data at this point, for example but some friends can. The epistemology of the interior is cryptic, but not too much so; it's encoded, and breaking/reading the codes also carries information for the hacker, up and down the layers. What the error messages, bounces, on listserv, do for me (besides create a mess on my account), is indicate internal corruptions, cancers, insofar as a cleansed and pure switching network passes information without fail. They're messages upwelling from one or another layer of TCP/IP, messages which never arrive at their destination, and may never have a destination in mind.* So the skin, the surface, is scratched, scraped raw, but just a little, exposing some of the tissue beneath. -- *And who _are_ messages destined for? For whom does one write on an email list? Is it oneself, several, many, he or she at a predestined end, the others serving as a sheath of anonymity or publicity? It is often easier to expose oneself, one's own gristle so to speak, to the social, than to the _ecriture_ of Unixtalk, with its uneasy aura of mouths and ears all too close to one another, all to @physical and _real._ In any case, _your_ post may return to me as part and parcel of noise, as cauterized, the tail to series of error statements, confirmations, even SMTP (simple mail transfer protocol) conversations among the machines. As such, your desperate confession, happy anecdote, considered theoretical position, informal comment, is only the catalyst or occasion for the un- rewarded return. Even this text, for example, already self-reflexive, will return to me, perhaps over and over again, in the midst of the pre- sence and denial of the Other.** **And who _are_ Others here, those for whom the messages are destined, those who never receive messages at all, those whose sites, servers, accounts, access generate errors, those who are not on-line nor ever have been, or those for whom one writes in the midst of the other Others?*** ***And who_are_ the other Others, if those not constituted by differing ontologies, on-line/off-line, or as we have said, constituted by decon- struction all the way up and down, as well as across plateaus? Are we in the guise of a return to the primacy of information, memetic/DNA drifting as the cybernetic engines constituting the totality of the world?**** ****And if we are back in mechanism (albeit on a different level than the merely mechanistic), then what of _destinations_? Or are these only signifiers in excess, noise harbored against death and quiescence?***** *****And have we drifted enough? __________________________________________________________________________ CALVIN KLEIN - Eternity ad - SHE SAYS: I look at you and I see myself. HE SAYS: I look at you and I see my world. The ocean goes on and the ocean goes out. They look. They see each other. They're ghosts. But she sees herself, it's the mirror stage all over again. That's why the ocean goes backwards, because it's the mirror stage, reversed. But he sees the world, he's already got the ego separated. So he can sail it, he can sail the world. They're locked into images and time sucks itself in and out like breath. They're locked into each other's air, breathing, and time becomes an image. The surf looks like the Net. (She becomes an object for herself. He becomes the world. He sails across the world which is her. Columbus saw the earth in the shape of a breast.) __________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________ceiling__________________________________ SENSE HER! This happened a year ago and I wrote about it a year ago: You'd need a screen and sometimes even more. Because this part is _true_ which forced me to the ground, spread me open, tied me tight, immobile, crawled into me! The ground splintered with the lifeforms devoured by voices above the darknets, crying no, screaming Illegality! You could look up me, see the screen in there, lifeforms crawling about. I couldn't see anything. This was in the desert. Maureen had guns, did I mention that? The screen writhed inside of me. Without the site I didn't exist. It had an address, had a URL. Maureen you came on me, shattering me like glass cutting out the name of God on my chest. There were rumblings like thunder above the darknet. They strapped me down, pretended the wires were wires! They cauterized me, cut my organs out, my nipples off! My chest cut out the name of God, did I say this? Blood filled me; I was awash in it. I tore the screen out of my asshole (see Internet Text: Singularities! if you don't believe me); I was awash in it. (So long ago, I can hardly remember this! But I still have the scars to prove it!) What came out went in again. The wires burned darker in this dark night. The rumblings above the darknet turned to lightning. Authority came and wet himself on me. Chains followed my limbs everywhere I turned. Iron gates shut down on screaming infants. My mouth was filled with your fist, Maureen, but you'd shoot them before me, you'd shoot them. NOW I COULD SPEAK ALL THOSE NAMES OF GOD THAT WOULD BRING THE UNIVERSE TO AN END! I smelled of the end of the universe. You asked me so I told you: "I "am "sixteen "years "old "and "I "shaved "all "my "hair "off. "You'll "never "get "to "me "again "you "dumb "fuck. "I'm "young "but "I "know "ALL "ABOUT "the "world. "I "can "tell "you "anything. "I "BURN "FOR "YOU "MAUREEN! "SUCK "THE "POWER "OF "A "BILLION "DARK "STARS! "I "shut "my "mouth "you "asshole! "I "am "never "you! "never "ever "you! _So I said this screamed my words to an angry deity held my arms in supplication opened my cunt to meteors: I TWISTED AND TURNED!_ ARMS REACHED DOWN FROM THE SPLITS IN THE WEB CRACKS IN THE OVERNET! TORN ACROSS BRIDGES STRETCHED AMONG ROUTERS! DISSOLVED IN THE EFFLUVIA OF TERMINAL DECAYS! And God Held My Arms And I Wrote: Because the virus was there, and I killed it! Because I kill everything I love bringing it to an end! Because the desert returned the sound of life to the form of the Net,! Because of these things, the screen rewrites me! Because of these things, I am given one more chance! Because of them, I am an eighteen-year-old girl! And because of them, I will never make love to a man!: I will make love to Maureen and I will pick up her gun! And I will walk beside her, wherever that path may take me! And I will be known as Clara Internet, Clara Hielo Internet!, Though that path take me through the wilderness or the darknet Or that path take me down, once and finally for all! ------------------------------| You check this! It's there! It's there unchecked, splayed open for you, for LEGALSOLDIER tanks protecting YOURMYTHEIR freedom to immolate word after word after word! You check it, unholy Internet fires burning the virginal landscape, young pubescent malesfemales screamed against the burning aura of the noonday sun, young pubescent femalesmales dragged dirty bullets out of speech's last dissolving body! We're gone down invisible! We're gone down down invisible! CLARA HIELO INTERNET: YOU CAN'T SENSE HER! DARKNET CLARA ALAN WAITS FOR YOU! The last obscenity! The last fuck! DARKNET CLARA ALAN WAITS! ________________________________________________________________________ floor -- Technical Notes In teaching the Net, I differentiate among three types of access: Unix shell, PPP/SLIP, and GUI/BBS such as AOL, Delphi, and so forth. I find it easiest to teach on the shell; even though it seems the most complex on the surface, it shows immediately what telnet, ftp, etc. _do._ Command lines are clearer than the dispersion of telnet (say) among chat/MOO clients, Netscape helpers, etc. Graphics come in a variety of forms, from downloaded to different readers' capabilities. The same of course holds true for audio and video, and as I've pointed out, there are no standards. What is most difficult, though, for students, is getting an account configured in the first place - almost nothing except for the GUI/BBS can be taken for granted. I would love a Windows95 app - NOT for MSN - that would contain a suite of helpers on top of a browser like Netscape, plus a completely-configured winsock. On star- tup, an ISP would simply send a series of strings numbered, say, a, b, c, d, ..., and these would be entered on a title card. Beyond the card, there would be a series of semi-hidden popup/setup menus which could be used for everything from graphics standards to new helpers to tuning TCP/IP much like trumpet winsock. But these menus would _not_ be necessary; everything could be done immediately from the title card. Right now, even Netscape in a Box can be difficult to install over, say, Windows 95. Why can't a computer be more like a Mac than a Mac? So that it would be, so to speak, television-ready (no one sets the vertical or horizontal holds by hand anymore). (Because of the difficulties of installation, it also becomes hard to teach the Net itself, which gets "tangled" in its representations. Take ftp - which is a double telnet of sorts, one line for command, and the other for file send/receive. This is obscure at the command-line, some- what simplified in Lynx, very easy in Netscape; different interfaces have different instructions and ways of downloading. Utilities get dispersed, in other words, among programs. Programs become frameworks and modifiers of utilities. I find point-and-click obviously the easiest, but not nearly as configurable as, say, Pine or Elm. In any case, all of these terms are becoming confused: server, provider, service, client, utility, tool, program, script, software, application, representation, GUI, browser, function, command - they all overlap in one or another form.) ---- Recently, I've had a Compaq Aero 25 completely give out - first the moth- erboard, and second the hard-drive. It was sold to me as new, but turned out to be refurbished; there may be a lawsuit here. If you have a Compaq, you can recognize "refurbish" by an R in front of the serial number. I've have difficulties getting Compaq tech and customer support on the phone - big surprise - but the internal diagnostics (which read "1702-06 FATAL READ ERROR on the hard-drive) are excellent. I'm trying to get the unit completely replaced at this point; it's under a one-year warranty and has been in the shop three times in the past two weeks (it's there now). ---- Finally, there's a real need for another product - a dumb portable term- inal. This would cost $300 maximum and would include a 14.4 modem and communications software, 2 megabytes flash memory (enough to store close to 1000 pages of text), 4 megabytes RAM. It probably would not include Netscape or a similar browser, but if it did, it would be in ROM and configured. The terminal would be used almost entirely for work on the road; like the HP 200LX etc. it would have DOS 5.0 at least built into it. (It would need a version of Netscape of course that would run without Windows.) An inexpensive terminal, by the way, would have a number of uses - not only for travel, but also for home use, for people who couldn't afford a full computer. So there would be a printer port as well; this could also be used for a link to a larger desktop machine. The idea of such a terminal relates to Victor Papanek's Design for the Real world - what is also called available technology, what I'd call technology povera, or bricolage - making-do. The Net can't really broaden its base unless it becomes driven by pressures other than increased bandwidth - there needs to be inexpensive hardware as well. What about a solar-driven terminal, by the way? This might be used in conjunction with one or two small AA alkaline batteries to drive the modem... _________________________________________________________________________ -- Desert I want to return to the desert where vectors are sight-lines across territories with subtle demarcations, and I tower above the crust with its incipient life, strands of saguaro roots horizontally anchoring this second-tallest of all cacti. I want to return because the burden of the fist is lifted from me, because my shoulders harden in the white light of hallucinations and stumblings, stones traveling across crystalline sands. Because the desert is not a space of purity and impurity, because it is not a space of virginity and defilement, I want to return. Because it is not a space of stains, effluvia, and because the body hallucinates its stories in the proof of strong and present heat. Territories are filigree, demarcations; life is a gathering and fore- shortening of tissues, burnished outer layers lacquered against evapo- ration. The fibers and wires of cyberspace are imaged into vacuum, dark gold gleamings interconnected against the blackness of a night-time sky. In the real world, the fibers and wires burrow through the debris of civilization, packets sent through space on occasion, radiated across sunlight, snowstorms, and darkness alike. But the image is there, spread across the floor of the desert or traced like the lacework of Europa, moon of Jupiter. Think of deep Mohave desertscrub, fragility and coher- ence of ecosystems run on illumination, retention, and the pathways of shamanism. Think of the protocol of the Other which interpenetrates our own. Think of names, secret and public, think of ownership, of song. On the Net all too often I feel the disruptions, software stutters, overcrowded lines, clogged backbones, bad addresses, speech which lags behind itself. Net speech, synchronous or asynchronous, is not the speech of the mouth, the stream which gathers about itself; instead, it is a tended thing, stretching time, not only that of the typing, but also that of the echo, as lag forestalls thought, deflects language. To mouth something is to (in part) move the body into the interior of the saying; to write on-line is to move into the exterior of the said. I write on-line and my eyes _track speech,_ another subtlety tending towards a re-evaluation of identity and masquerade. In the desert, masquerade is what hallucination brings into the interior of one, but the interior may be lifted into exaltation. My body is there- by _different,_ speaking another language which I quickly learn, in which I follow suit. I do not recognize myself in imminence; rather, I become what is immanence itself. And the weight of the world, which is often the weight of the Other, which is the weight of oneself, moves close to dis- appearance. From there, true, it is possible to see the thinned wires upon the ground paralleling those behind the guided missiles in the Middle-East. The battlefields at times were covered with them. They carried packets of information. But like any good wrecks, they may be absorbed and used for other purposes. From there, from the desert, from here. __________________________________________________________________________ Demographics, Ecologies After Cybermind and FOP-L moved from majordomo to listserv, and after both were advertised initially on NEW-LIST, with its subsequent dispersions, both grew rapidly. FOP-L continues to grow; Cybermind has leveled off, at around 350. FOP-L is at 182 last count. The leveling follows a pattern; as more people subscribe, if the ratio of writers to lurkers remains the same, then the flow of email increases and more subscribers find their inboxes swamped, leading to more unsubscrib- ing. This is a fairly simple feedback model, creating a constancy which can, under certain circumstances, be subverted - for example, if the list is devoted to community or identifies itself as one, the plethora of mes- sages could be taken as a sign of cohesion. And a great deal depends also on the accuracy of threads, as well as the types of mail readers employed. If threads are rigorously followed (and they almost always are not), then it becomes easier to delete material that is not of interest, and larger lists may be tolerated. On the other hand, threads are often loosely tethered to one another, and a number of subscribers feel the necessity to at least peruse or speed-read material that doesn't seem directly of consequence. And subscribers may also feel irritated at receiving useless materials; if the category of the useless far outweighs that of the useful for someone, she or he will unsubscribe since the list begins to appear increasingly like spam or text-substance. Usenet newsgroups have far greater reader/lurkerships, and far greater noise, and are often approached primarily by means of threads - as if the entire message base of a particular group were a body open to dissection. While mail readers often present material organized by arrival time, hence modeling a _diachronic_ approach to text, Usenet readers like tin present material organized by thread (subject matter) - the entire _cor- pus_ is laid open simultaneously, and one skims backwards and forwards across the material. To the extent that email lists mimic temporality and speech, newsgroups mimic the spatial display of the body. Email lists are "leaky," appearing open-ended, while Usenet message bases appear of a totality, object-like (the alt.society.neutopian subculture of monster truck neutopians have an FAQ rendered as an "FAQ-like substance," if I remember correctly). The process and dynamic ecology of immersion charac- terize the phenomenology of an email list, while the evolving transfor- mation of states and situations, often highly objectified, are often evoked for Usenet. The self-reflexivity of Usenet often revolves, in fact, around the _framework_ of Usenet itself (alt.hackers or alt.adjec- tive.noun.verb.verb.verb are good examples), while email lists tend towards considerations of history and community _within_ the framework. With the email list, the archive is separated, disparate; with Usenet, it _appears_ as if the newsgroup were its own archive (which is not the case of course) - readers are constantly asking where one message or another has gone (re: alt.fan.tonya-harding.whack.whack.whack for a current example). These differences are not hard and fast, nor do the reflect the totality of email lists or newsgroups (the sci. newsgroups are of a different character altogether). But they do reflect, I think, certain medium- oriented issues that need to be taken into account. And it would be of great interest to draw up an ecological model for an alt. Usenet group as well, since the threading surface involves the ability for the group itself to absorb a far greater number of posts. There are questions to be asked: Does one wait for a reply in the same manner in alt.x and an email list? Within email lists, spams are perceived as an impurity in an otherwise isolated domain; how are they perceived and handled on Usenet? And what can both tell us, beyond the obvious platitudes of such books as Shirky's Voices from the Net, about the nature of human community, embodi- ment, and so forth? Alan __________________________________________________________________________