BEER Ch. 7, part 1: Shall I project a world?

[Monte Davis]

We’re on our way into DeepArcher from the first sentence, but formally we’re
immersed in it with Maxine only from the last line of p. 74 to ¾ of the way
down p. 77 (“She senses dope smoke in the air and Vyrva at her shoulder with
coffee...”) Been there, lost track of time like that.

 

Every bit of the intro and extro, however, makes its own contribution about
imagined spaces:

 

Melanie’s Mall (68), which Otis and Fiona re-invent by turning Credit-Card
Barbie into a mashup of Modesty Blaise, Ginrei and Lara Croft. Their
scenarios tend to end “in the widespread destruction of the Mall
 among
fiercely imagined smoke and wreckage,” which is a hell of a thing to do to a
trade center.

 

And somewhat-unreal places: Stanford, Silicon Valley as it began to sizzle,
and IPO-rich Santa Cruz County, where Vyrva and  Justin almost settled
before the move to NYC (70-73)

 

And Justin’s home workroom (74), which is real and cluttered and prosaic
enough until the joints are rolled, “remotely linked window blinds close
their slats against the secular city, and the lights go down and the screens
light up.” There are many antonyms to secular, and “religious” is only one
of them.

 

69:  DeepArcher is “not a game,” “Though it does have forerunners in the
gaming area.” Having mostly escaped techno-lust for cars, stereo, cameras,
carbon-fiber sporting goods, etc. for the first 30+ years of my life, I fell
hard for online life  with The Well and CompuServe at the beginning of the
1980s, and for “combine bleeding-edge components for your homebrew PC” two
or three years after that. Graphics performance was a major driver – more
pixels, more color, faster rendering. But it was gaming graphics, e.g. that
of id software’s DOOM (1993) and Quake (1996), that drove customer
expectations and generated online shoot ‘em up communities as soon as
bandwidth permitted. Meanwhile the other half of my brain was scripting
industry events with even zoomier big-screen graphics for IBM, Microsoft,
Apple, et al, aimed at business partners and corporate customers. So I can’t
say I was surprised or shocked that GlobalMegaCorp had plans for online
worlds and avatars who could sell you stuff as well as take you out with a
BFG (Big Fucking Gun).

 

70: “Ian Longspoon”  -- that’s how you dine with the devil, natch.

 

71: “The money in play, especially after about 1995, was staggering” –
although the HTML-based Web had been growing briskly since 1990, it was the
Mosaic web browser (1993) and Netscape Navigator (1994) that opened the
floodgates with user interfaces that non-power-users could master quickly.
The numbers of Internet users, Internet uses – and, of course, opportunities
for e-commerce -- went through the roof. Hello, Amazon.com (1995). Snobbish
old-time netheads had already learned to fear September, when a new crop of
clueless newbies started using college accounts. (“the way you get snooted
by those folks in Marin
 Oh, I’m sorry, you’re not Well people, are you?”
(73)) Now it was September all year round. There started to be talk of
creating riffraff-free , popup-ad-free zones in the Deep Web, where AOL
would never take you.

 

71-72: Enterprenerds and rapacious venture capitalists hustling each other:
“Who was less innocent here?” (FX: echoes, bouncing from one end of the
Pynchon canon to the other)

 

73: “bars carpentered into ghost stops on abandoned subway lines” – true
dat. I was there, inhaled but didn’t drink the Zima.

 

73: Lucas “buying into strange [financial] instruments understood only by
sociopathic quants” – foreshadowing, probably  more apt for the 2000s’
mortgage/CDO bubble than the late-1990s dotcom bubble.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

. 

  

 

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