BEER Ch. 7, part 2: point of DeepArcher

[Monte Davis]

74: "A splash screen comes on."

 

No namecheck for the Miller brothers' Myst
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myst>  (1993), but that's as clear a precedent
as any for this "wander around a spectacularly detailed environment"
software - that plus Second Life <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Life>
, which combined multi-user interaction, avatars, and the ability for users
to contribute new elements to the virtual world. Second Life didn't launch
until 2003, but as the Wikipedia article notes:

 

"During a 2001 meeting with investors, Rosedale noticed that the
participants were particularly responsive to the collaborative, creative
potential of Second Life. As a result, the initial objective-driven, gaming
focus of Second Life was shifted to a more user-created, community-driven
experience." 

 

75: "The Archer is poised at [the abyss'] edge, bow fully drawn, aiming
steeply down into the immeasurable uncreated, waiting. What can be seen of
the face from behind, partly turned away, is attentive and unattached."
There are associations here with of both Zen archery
<http://www.dhammawiki.com/index.php?title=Archery_%26_kyudo>  ("attentive
yet unattached") and bowmen from the Hindu epics (Eklavya
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ekalavya> , Shiva as Rudra
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudra> , Arjuna
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arjuna> ). All invoke at times the idea that
one begins by aiming the arrow at a target, and transcends by *becoming* the
arrow - not a bad metaphor for first-person-shooter video games morphing
into immersive virtual worlds. Or for Gottfried (God's Peace) taking off in
the A4.

 

76-77: "She gathers that you're supposed to get on what looks like a shuttle
vehicle of some kind. rolling stock antique and postmodern at the same time
[steampunk, anyone?] vastly coming and going. emerging into soaring
meta-Victorian glass- and iron-modulated light. Serendipities here are
unlikely to be in the cards, only a feeling she recognizes from dreams, a
sense of something not necessarily pleasant just about to happen." As I
noted in August, "Think of the Evacuation at the opening of GR, and of the
later exploration of the Raketenstadt. We've been here
<http://www.shorpy.com/node/11321?size=_original#caption>  before, although
not with so much RAM." Trains, rail lines and signals, and cities at the
edge of night also recur significantly in AtD.  

 

It was during Pynchon's childhood and youth that the automobile displaced
the train as an American omnimetaphor. Certainly he's made repeated use of
the former, e.g. the fogbound car journeys near the end of VL and at the end
of IV - but trains retain a special place in his visions. Is it simply that
a train passenger is part of a group in Their hands, while a driver has more
autonomy? (Perhaps illusory: Oedipa following the printed circuit traces of
San Narciso). I need to get hold of The Railway Journey
<http://www.amazon.com/The-Railway-Journey-Industrialization-Century/dp/0520
059298>  again. Who wants to Google some of that Adorno and Walter Benjamin
for trains and _eisenbahnhofe_?

 

77 [last lines]-79: Stoned, caffeinated tech talk around the kitchen table.
Several kinds of security/secrecy, with very different underpinnings in
code, are invoked: 

 

(1)    Encryption or firewalls against monitoring, which I take to mean "no
one but another user whose avatar is 'with' your avatar can see where you
'are' and what you're 'doing.'"

(2)    "Staying clear of bots and spiders," i.e. the VRML (Virtual Reality
Modeling Language <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VRML> ) does not contain
tags and other code that search engines "crawling" for URLs can recognize,
display as search results, and link to from non-DeepArcher pages. (That's
most of what "deep web" means, BTW - it's not especially inaccessible, it's
just not mapped.)

(3)    "DeepArcher forgets where it's been, forever" - by analogy to secure
emailers (and other file transfer approaches) that deliberately strip away
data about the path they have taken.

 

That last, as Maxine discovered when she saw only "Netscape gray
<http://www.numberplanet.com/tag/netscape-named-color/> " from the back of
the train, means that not only is there no history of your session on the
server, but no local history: you can't retrace your path with your
browser's back arrow. or even by clicking your heels while holding Toto
tight.

 

So if "history is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake," well then.

 

Good morning, all! 

 

      

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