VL-IV: Moving right along... Chapter 9 (page 130)

[Robin Landseadel]

On Jan 25, 2009, at 12:55 PM, Amy E. Vorro wrote:

> DL wonders about Ralph's FBI connections, speculating that he has  
> access to the NCIC computer.
> http://www.fas.org/irp/agency/doj/fbi/is/ncic.htm

	. . . 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?

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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.

http://www.themodernword.com/Pynchon/pynchon_essays_stone.html