Pynchon and computers

[Steelhead]

Penny notes:

>I note that no one responded to my suggestion that we list members
>are all attached to a Tube, even as we read/write these notes.  Given
>the treatment of Tubal devotees in _Vineland_, we might all be in
>trouble.  :-)

Speak for yourself, Penny, I attach myself to a flatpanel display most of
the time:  Mac Powerbook 520.

But are "Tubes" necessarily conduits for Trouble in Pynchon? I would think
nearly, but not always, of course, the opposite.  Tubes and Tunnels (ie,
Lowlands, et al) are potential passages to alternate realities, Orphic
entryways into the Underground, where the Resistance is congealing.

TV may in fact serve as a kind of consensual and communal hallucination. TV
is certainly a surrealist medium, with commercials and the like spliced
abruptly and unexpectedly into what passes for narrative.  Hell, if you're
adept with the remote, you can even design your own Trip, the Watcher can
become something of an auteur, or at the very least an editor, blending and
layering disparate narratives and images, resulting in a kind of Electronic
Ecstasy.  Speaking of which, here's TRP himself on Ecstasy:

"The circuits of the brain which mediate alarm, fear, flight, lust and
territorial paranoia are temporarily disconnected.  You see everything with
total clarity, undistorted by animalistic urges.  You have reached a state
which the ancients have called Nirvana, all seeing bliss."  As quoted in
Ecstasy:  The MDMA Story by Bruce Eisner, Ronin Press 1989.

Of course, TV may well be a pseudo-Tube, a one-way street, a malign
projection of images, a medium of corporate control vamping as liberation,
and, as such, a betrayal of vast and ugly proportions, a wicked
manipulation of the cyber-cortext of consciousness.

Computers, as Larsson notes, are even more problematic, since the "promise"
of liberation is almost infinitely greater (ie., the Chinese Rebellion and
the effort to save Mumia Abu-Jamal_, but the ultimate likelihood of
deepening binary incursions into individual liberty (ie, credit reporting
agencies and FBI files) and, for that matter, the  computer-generated
heat-death of the planet seem nearly absolute.

Further, Penny suggests:

>     The essay "Is It O.K. To Be a Luddite?" seems to support
      generally Ludditic values, among which we can certainly
      number a hostility toward technology in general and computers
      in particular.  Not to mention Pynchon's friendship with
      Kirkpatrick Sale, deep ecologist and Luddite historian.

Pynchon's Luddite piece is hardly Luddite enough. In fact, it's aim to
reconcile or balance CP Snow's Two Culture's, is a tremendous cop out. I'm
sure Mr. P didn't run _that_ piece by Kirk Sale.  Sale's book is good
Luddite material, the Unabomber and John Zerzen are better, but the best is
Edward Abbey, who confronts that bastard Snow (the man should've gotten
outside once in a while, gone for a Sunday constitutional on the Scottish
Moors or paddled a punt on the Avon, for chrissakes) head on in an essay
collected in Abbey's Road, and destroys him in several swift strokes.

Steelhead