BE chapter 7 summary

[Joseph Tracy]

Questions about chapter 7

1) thoughts on fiona and Otis’s play? I saw an online image of Melanie’s mall, ultra bright plastic pinks, light blues, reds,
very child oriented, like beanie babies. 

2) Why might Justin have a chemistry manual?  What role are drugs playing in P’s picture of high tech culture?

3) I lived in Los Altos hills for several years up to age 12, and remember participating in a scale model version of  a Soap Box Derby. I lost in the first round, only catching on at the event that all the kids I knew whose dads worked at NASA were serious about engineering, aerodynamics, lubrication etc and that my fancy carving and painting( for a kid) didn’t count for shit. So this part of the Stanford backstory rang true. What is the sense others get from this cultural background? 

4) What is the psychological or metaphoric role of Deep Archer other than illustrating the cannibalism of high tech competition. Is the web a place where we are both changing the structure of human life and seeking an escape from those very changes? 

5) If there was ever an analog and digital  hypertext writer, Pynchon has to lead all challengers. As far as I know he is the unchallenged king of the hypertext novel.( text references as important as plot)  Is this a different way of thinking born out of WW2, Post Einstein physics, multiculturalism, psychedelics, jazz, that was inevitable and has the potential of such a model of thought simply been subverted by binary culture wars. The early academic and human scale internet felt so different to me. True I was younger , but there is more to it than that.