Chabon on BE

[John Bailey]

Yeah, I'm a bit confused about DeepArcher too... as far as I can tell,
it's a program lodged in the deep web, which as you say is basically
the "place" where IP addresses aren't connected to DNS so won't show
up on any search engine, and you need a direct link or knowledge of
the specific IP address to access it.

So that kind of makes sense - DeepArcher is a program with Second
Life-like aspects that can't be accessed unless you have the key. And
later on the security of the fortress is compromised, and then the
gates are just thrown open and it basically leaves the Deep Web and is
accessible from the surface.

What I really don't get is what the *hell* the program is for. A
Second Life that only a handful of people can get into? And do what?
The descriptions of Maxine's early journeys around the place make it
seem like a point-and-click adventure game with no mystery to it or
reason to play further. Except it has stunning graphics, for the
era...

At first I thought it was a navigation system for travelling through
the Deep Web but that doesn't really seem right, since it would
basically be a search engine with graphical interface for finding the
IP addresses of places that aren't meant to be findable. Which would
be exactly the thing that would pose a threat to the entire meaning of
the Deep Web, even if you could erase your footsteps the way DA
promises.

Anyway, maybe that's the point - that this supposedly subversive
method of total anonymity itself provides the architecture for control
and surveillance and some sweet home shopping.

On Sun, Oct 20, 2013 at 2:04 PM, Michael Bailey
<michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Oct 19, 2013 7:09 PM, "Monte Davis" <montedavis at verizon.net> wrote:
>>
>> Chabon is careless there. Ernie's capsule history is not *historically*
>> baseless: yes, DARPA did fund some of the IT research leading to TCP/IP
>> and
>> packet switching. And yes, the Cold War justification for that funding
>> *was*
>> to develop a network technology that could "work around" servers knocked
>> out
>> by enemy attack, so that government could keep communicating.
>>
>
> One of my other favorite authors, John Crowley, in _The Translator_
> made the female protagonist's dad a darpa dude and evoked those times
> wonderfully.
>
> If we were gonna get crazy and do a non-p group read like we did a few yrs
> back - I guess I finally thought of the one I'd suggest (-:
>
> But getting back to BE, I sort of have a question about this deep web where
> Deep Archer resides - does that correspond to anything nonfictional?  I mean
> are we talking about using a browser to navigate to some bare IP address
> known not to dns at all but only to the cognoscenti? Afaik there were bbses,
> ftp and gopher, and then all of a sudden there was yahoo and aol and urls
> but nowhere was there anything like deep archer which is sophisticated,
> ambiguous - nothing like the games I'm aware of - plus it's more and less
> than a game, possibly even a place that responds to users' emotional and
> spiritual states of mind and even a place where a person can be said to
> reside while accessing it.  Maybe a mmorpg or a Second Life type
> environment?
>
> A development of the angelic realms alluded to at the beginning of Vineland
> and the amazing things computers - the ideal readers with the ideal insomnia
> - can do with mere 1s and 0s by stringing enough of them together.
>
> Also on a different note a compare/contrast between Maxine and March, Maxine
> having the annointing (though somewhat revoked) to do a little something
> about fraud while March is more a John the Baptist voice in the wilderness -
> strictly speaking there's no real need to say they represent stances that an
> author could take in depicting a social scene, but if a choice like that is
> evident in BE, it seems to me Pynchon - whose Sistine Chapel, Gravity's
> Rainbow, could be described as more March-like - is aiming more at a Mona
> Lisa effect in bringing Maxine to the fore.
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l