BEER Ch. 7, part 2: point of DeepArcher

[Mark Kohut]

I cannot get many less positive thoughts about DeepArcher out of my head...that word "abyss'...if Lew Archer is referenced then it seems the deep place M has to go for the mystery. (as Ross's Lew always
goes deep into the past for his answers...
if it is a launch into "pure freedom",---no past, no traces---then P seems to be satirizing something...what?
existentialism (as maybe he does in V.?), pure libertarianism?
My most positive associations revolve around absolute privacy, THAT kind of freedom....buried in Upper 

America...but leading to bad shit like death here....
Orpheus" Underground...Hades?....where M. goes and comes back ...changed? where others go and come back changed or don't come back.
And, picking up on Monte's archer allusions and Zen, we think P is some kind of sympathetic (from AtD) but THIS TOO (in that and this book) he might be satirizing, yes?...






On Monday, October 28, 2013 11:19 AM, Monte Davis <montedavis at verizon.net> wrote:
 
74: “A splash screen comes on…”
 
No namecheck for the Miller brothers’ Myst (1993), but that’s as clear a precedent as any for this “wander around a spectacularly detailed environment” software – that plus 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 (“attentive yet unattached”) and bowmen from the Hindu epics (Eklavya, Shiva as Rudra, 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 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 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) 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” 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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