Chabon on BE

[Fiona Shnapple]

on the other hand, the nostalgia for a Garden, a Utopian deep space
web, where one can venture invisible to the records of history is a
dream of the Deathkingdom, the trip to the lifeless Moon.



On Sun, Oct 20, 2013 at 7:00 AM, Fiona Shnapple <fionashnapple at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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