Internet & social control

[pynchonoid]

worth rereading re Pynchon's Foreword to _1984_

<http://www.pynchon.pomona.edu/gr/bsto.html>

Brian Stonehill
English/Media Studies
Pomona College
Claremont, California USA
bstonehill at pomona.edu 

Pynchon's Prophecies of Cyberspace 

Delivered at the first international conference on
Pynchon, the University of Warwick, England, November
1994. 

[...] The title of Gravity's Rainbow , finally,
invokes a colored band of light sent as a sign from
God in the Old Testament, a multimedia icon signifying
that God would never again wipe out humanity by a
flood. If the digital domain of on or off is dear only
to bumbling bad guys like Ned Pointsman, then the
novel's title serves to remind us of the colorful
spectrum between the extremes, the analog glories that
hang suspended above the on-&-off of black & white. 

Pynchon specifies, however, a rainbow that is subject
to Gravity -- suggesting, perhaps, a subterranean loop
that would complete the aerial parabola of the rainbow
into an eternally returning cycle of wholeness. I
offer cyberspace as this underground link-connector,
since if you're familiar with the T-1 phone links that
make the Internet possible, then you know that
cyberspace is in fact a subterranean spectrum. The
relay switches of geostationary satellites have been
deemed too slow for the massive data transmissions of
the Internet; and so we are dealing, in cyberspace,
not with the "out-there" that the word cyberspace
would seem to suggest, but with a "down-there," a
nervous system whose links and branches flicker and
spark beneath Earth's skin. 

The Internet came into being, let us not forget, first
as ARPANET and then as DARPANET -- that is, as the
U.S. Government Department of Defense's array of
research communications links among its nuclear
missile sites. The very circuits that signalled the
Cold War's threats of annihilation now make up the
benign and gossipy information superhighway, just as
the colorful sign of God's promise to Man was
suspended on drops of moisture left over from the
Flood. 

For that is what Cyberspace has turned out to be,
after all is said and done: a broadband subterranean
spectrum of light-speed transmissions; in other words,
a gravity's rainbow. 

Thank you very much.



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<http://www.pynchonoid.org/>

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