Pynchon's Prophecies of Cyberspace

[Robin Landseadel]

On Sep 24, 2009, at 6:56 PM, Dave Monroe wrote:

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

Wonderful stuff. If you can't find Gaia in GR, then you're avoiding  
her gaze.

	Pynchon articulates here a vision that it has become
	fashionable of late to refer to as the Gaia Hypothesis -- the idea,
	based on theories first put forth by English climatologist James
	Lovelock, that the life forms on Earth help to maintain a steady-	
	state in the climate, and that, by extrapolation, the planet itself
	may best be thought of as a living meta-organism, and one to
	be named after Gaia, the ancient Earth goddess.

	If we are to give this conceit the respect that Pynchon himself
	seems to accord it, then we are led to see analogies between
	such a global organism and an evolving nervous system that
	humans have woven for the planet in what we call cyberspace.
	Gravity's Rainbow's subterranean sense that the planet is alive
	invokes a level of connectedness, that is, that maps rather
	neatly onto a World Wide Web. For if the Earth is indeed
	evolving into what Pynchon's narrator calls "a living critter," then
	the farflung synapses of cyberspace would seem pretty clearly
	to embody that global entity's mind, or its conscience, or even
	its soul.

This line from GR reminded me of that whole Internet/CIA hook-up in  
Inherent Vice. In the context of Brian Stonehill's essay—"Pynchon's  
Prophecies of Cyberspace" it becomes a metaphor for what turned into  
the internet:

	As Byron the Bulb's hours of use continue to climb, threatening to  
throw
	all the capitalist averages out of whack, the Committee on
	Incandescent Anomalies -- whose author knows we can spell that one
	out for ourselves -- the Committee on Incandescent Anomalies sends
	out a Berlin agent to unscrew Byron. The other bulbs watch, in barely
	subdued terror. The word goes out along the Grid. At something close
	to the speed of light, every bulb, Azos looking down the empty Bakelite
	streets, Nitralampen and Wotan Gs at night soccer matches, Just-
	Wolframs, Monowatts and Siriuses, every bulb in Europe knows what's
	happened.(650)

Stonehill:

	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.

I do think he kinda derails in the last two-three lines but who am I  
to argue or to judge?