_1984_ Foreword: Pynchon & the Internet

[pynchonoid]

I'm assuming that Pynchon follows what's happening
with the Internet from:  he wrote about computers and
invasion of privacy in his intro to _Stone Junction_,
made it a plot device in _Vineland_, mentions an array
of computer technologies in the Luddite and Sloth
essays, allusions in Mason & Dixon, etc. It's obvious
that he's been paying attention to computers and the
Internet for a long time, and while  hasn't said a lot
about it, he's said enough to convince me (and not to
boast but it's a fact I've been involved in 
technology business publishing for more than 20 years,
<http://www.online-journalist.com>) he knows what he's
talking about. 

[...] The other day in the street I heard a policeman
in a police car, requesting over his loudspeaker that
a civilian car blocking his way move aside and let him
past, all the while addressing the drive of the car
personally, by name. I was amazed at this, though
people I tried to share it with only shrugged,
assuming that of course the driver's name (along with
height, weight and date of birth) had been obtained
from the Motor Vehicle Department via satellite, as
soon as the offending car's license number had been
tapped into the terminal -- so what?
Stone Junction was first published in 1989, toward the
end of an era still innocent, in its way, of the
cyberworld just ahead about to exponentially explode
upon it. To be sure, there were already plenty of
computers around then, but they were not quite so
connected together as they were shortly to become.
Data available these days to anybody were accessible
then only to the Authorized, who didn't always know
what they had or what to do with it. There was still
room to wiggle -- the Web was primitive country,
inhabited only by a few rugged pioneers, half loco and
wise to the smallest details of their terrain. Honor
prevailed, laws were unwritten, outlaws, as yet
undefinable, were few. The question had only begun to
arise of how to avoid, or, preferably, escape
altogether, the threat, indeed promise, of control
without mercy that lay in wait down the comely vistas
of freedom that computer-folk were imagining then -- a
question we are still asking. Where can you jump in
the rig and head for any more -- who's out there to
grant us asylum? If we stay put, what is left to us
that is not in some way tainted, coopted, and
colonized, by the forces of Control, usually digital
in nature? Does anybody know the way to William
Gibson's "Republic of Desire?" Would they tell if they
knew? So forth.
You will notice in Stone Junction, along with its
gifts of prophecy, a consistent celebration of those
areas of life that tend to remain cash-propelled and
thus mostly beyond the reach of the digital. It may be
nearly the only example of a consciously analog Novel.
Writers since have been obliged to acknowledge and
deal with the ubiquitous cyber-realities that come
more and more to set, and at quite a finely chopped-up
scale too, the terms of our lives, not to mention
calling into question the very traditions of a single
author and a story that proceeds one piece after
another -- a situation Jim Dodge back then must have
seen coming down the freeway, because the novel, ever
contrarian, keeps its faith in the persistence of at
least a niche market -- who knows, maybe even a deep
human need -- for modalities of life whose value lies
in their having resisted and gone the other was,
against the digital storm -- that are likely,
therefore, to include pursuits more honorable that
otherwise.
One popular method of resistance was always just to
keep moving -- seeking, not a place to hide out,
secure and fixed, but a state of dynamic ambiguity
about where one might be any given moment, along the
lines of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. Modern
digital machines, however, managed quickly enough to
focus the blurred ellipsoid of human freedom even more
narrowly than Planck's Constant allows.
Equally difficult for those who might wish to proceed
through life anonymously and without trace has been
the continuing assault against the once-reliable
refuge of the cash or non-plastic economy. There was a
time not so long ago you could stroll down any major
American avenue, collecting anonymous bank checks, get
on some post office line, and send amounts in the
range "hefty to whopping" anywhere, even overseas, no
problem. Now it's down to $750 a pop, and shrinking.
All to catch those Drug Dealers of course, nothing to
do with the grim, simplex desire for more information,
more control, lying at the heart of most exertions of
power, whatever governmental or corporate (if that's a
distinction you believe in).[...] 
<http://www.libyrinth.com/pynchon/pynchon_essays_stone.html>

[...] Perhaps the future of Sloth will lie in sinning
against what now seems increasingly to define us --
technology. Persisting in Luddite sorrow, despite
technology's good intentions, there we'll sit with our
heads in virtual reality, glumly refusing to be
absorbed in its idle, disposable fantasies, even those
about superheroes of Sloth back in Sloth's good old
days, full of leisurely but lethal misadventures with
the ruthless villains of the Acedia Squad.[...] 
<http://www.libyrinth.com/pynchon/pynchon_essays_sloth.html>

At 8:36 PM -0400 5/17/03, Michael Joseph wrote:

>I suspect you see a vital marxist dynamic in
>Pynchon's writing and I'd like to understand this
better.

A political profile does seem to emerge from his
published writings and comments in which Pynchon
condemns war, multinational corporations (especially
war profiteers), Nixon, Reagan, Bush, fascismm
instutionalized religion and other toxic authoritarian
hierarchies, Earth Mother-rapers, -- I could go on.
(Yes, fair and balanced, P also criticizes the failed
60's revolution.) 






=====
<http://www.pynchonoid.blogspot.com/>

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