BE : More Ch 4 departure

[Joseph Tracy]

 The idea seems to be that Deep Archer will get introduced via “mom-approved first person shooter” game. 

 At this point  it’s still a bit vague as to what Deep Archer is,  as far as I can tell (help me here) it is a visual setting in live time internet space which is unreachable by search engines( how long can that last and doesn’t this require 1 or more(???)  servers somewhere that do have coded addresses?). To get there the user takes on an avatar, a digital persona,  there is no description of how this avatar connects to the actual user’s persona but as we find out later people are recognizable in deep archer. The avatar can move around in this space (“It’s a journey.")
 .The advantage of meeting this way, ghost to ghost, is that you leave no trace and may meet anyone who happens to be in the same terrain. 

It is this leaving no trace that is of great interest to Microsoft, the military…..and Gabriel Ice’s hashslingerz. ( none are interested in “the journey” aspect of the code) 
"It’s the security design—like nothing any of these people’ve ever seen, and it’s makin them all crazy.”
 and hashslingerz has already approached them with a highly generous offer.

Maxine does not disclose her interest in evaluating hashslingerz.

“Yeah . . . think I’ve . . . heard that name. That’s where you were today?”
…...
"Maxine is much too familiar by now, even God forbid intimate, with this cover-your-tracks attitude.”

Vyrva is sending out mixed signals about money, reluctance about big inflow of cash, but hustling beans babies and she seems to be involved in looking for VCs.  Ziggy thinks the beanie babies are a bad investment and Fiona is not into them. So you know, wassssup? 
Are Maxines suspicions about Lucas right  or something else.

Departure? What is Pynchon or the rest of us leaving, and where do we go?

It seems to this not very high tech  reader that this choice of open source availability  of untraceable connectivity vs commercial/military control of communication space really contains the idea of a more radical return to the original sales job of the democratizing effect of the internet. In other words if there was a version of deeparcher able to fend off the state it would be a revolutionary force as long as it lasted. Pynchon seems to be siding with that potential of the hacker world and a kind of secret postal system. Where have we seen that before? 

The setup of deep archer is sort of similar to facebook only no tracking, no traces. Facebook launched in 2003-4 took off big and played hard to get before selling out into the google plan of consumer surveillance capitalism with military options on the table. Carefully avoiding anything you might call evil, at least on the surface. Now they want to rebrand it closer to something like deep archer with avatars and shit.  The fact that  for over a decade it turned into the battleground of the meme wars was not an obvious development but very profitable.