Chabon on BE

[Fiona Shnapple]

to my reading DA is, on the one hand, the Holy Grail of Geeks, a
Return to what might have been if only, that Subjunctive Space that
Pynchon has been hinting at, the Online Wedge (M&D) that isn't
anyplace on the Map, a Deep Space, over the Arch, over the Rainbow and
into what Brien McHale calls a Zone. So it is not easy to define or
map, but we can say what it is not, or what it is a departure from,
and that is the Land of Ours, the Space we have made, a Wasteland
depthless, dimesnionless, bereft of all Mystery, bleached and blanched
bled of all uncertainty, a corpse of the body politic, a zombie of the
banksters, a Lefty turned Liberal than Right and Straight Lined all
the way to Conspiracy's corrupted theater waiting for Steve Jobs to
send a hammer through the Telescreen and set us all free from the PC
monopoly.    It's a joke. And if all spaces have been mapped, by
Banners, Beta, Big Data, the Cult of Jobs, the Games, the Mobile
Device, the Crowdsourcing, the Carpal Tunneling of Creepers and Ton
Pynchon Peepers, by Kickstarter Microfounders who who worship DARPA,
who long for a System that can have that much vacuum power, that can
erase, forever and ever, for those who get in, those early adopters,
those high risk takers, those Snarky Boys who fantasize of Hacker
Swartz encounters in Beta Testing Paradise. And nobody knows where
you've been or done or dreamed or felt. Total Delete! Ah, the power to
erase it all! To Reboot. Like a Gangster Gatsby or Scarface in Deep
Bit Space.

Meanwhile back in the real world of  Winston Smith erasure, the double
think thought police dictionary project of information control and the
redacting of the lexicon is busy building new towers on the graves of
memory, it is real estate, not that fake estate, 4th, 5th estate, but
REO for meat packers and YOU, your Pynchon fanatics who spin your webs
of conspiracy theories from the pages of counterpunch.

Montauk? A fishing town run over by yahoos and bankers. Oh the conspiracy.

I guess we should take solace in the fact that P nails the Ice with
his sharpest pick, but Ice is fantasy. We, on the other hand, are meat
sitting in front of the screen dreaming of a banner free thought of
our own.

On Sun, Oct 20, 2013 at 3:22 AM, John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com> wrote:
> Here's a (very) light article on people trying to create DeepArchers
> today - online communities that are technically in the dark web.
>
> "‘Wow, this is like the Internet in 1994"...
>
> http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/10/thompson/
>
> On Sun, Oct 20, 2013 at 5:22 PM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I think DA is supposed to be internet Zone, anarchy, a place w/o rules or
>> rulers. Pynchon Paradise. What is it "for?"  Wrong question. What for do you
>> want to make it?
>>
>> David Morris
>>
>>
>> On Saturday, October 19, 2013, John Bailey wrote:
>>>
>>> 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
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l