BE : More Ch 4 departure

[Allen Ruch]

Joseph makes some great points, as usual; but just to sound a note of caution— 

The Deep Web certainly has its use for revolution and resistance, especially against regimes that lock down the Internet for citizens at the drop of a hat—see China and Peng Shuai right now, for instance. But it also opens the door to sex trafficking, arms dealing, terrorism, blackmail, extortion, and assassination. Just look at Silk Road. 

And as for hackers—any romanticizing of hackers has to take into account all the mischief and mayhem they cause to most normal people. Sadly, there's a lot less Matrix-style hacking out there as opposed to "let's crash this network because we can," or "let's lock up this hospital until they pay us." I wish there were more politically-motivated hackers (by that I don’t mean international cyber-warfare; I mean he romantic ideal of anarchist collectives devoted to exposing government secrets, etc.)—but the sad truth is most hackers are vile scum who do it solely for the money and/or the mayhem. 

So I'm not completely sold on Pynchon siding with hackers—after all, he does have a large portion of them seduced by hashslingerz, etc. I think he presents hacking similar to the way dynamite is presented in "Against the Day." A useful tool against Plutocrats, perhaps; but one that is also used by various Big Ideologies to maintain their power. 

Connecting this to our earlier discussion about violence—something I always wonder when I read Pynchon—how far is he willing to go? There's a tension between violence-embracing anarchist characters like Webb Traverse and Reverend Moss Gatlin, and more peaceful characters who feel that violence is a path that leads one astray. I mean—that's why he's a great writer, his characters and ideas are complex, yes: but I always wonder, just where does the man himself draw the line? I'm especially thinking of Reverend Moss Gatlin here:

"Being born into this don’t automatically make you innocent. But when you reach a point in your life when you understand who is fucking who—beg pardon, Lord—who’s taking it and who’s not, that’s when you’re obliged to choose how much you’ll go along with. If you are not devoting every breath of every day waking and sleeping to destroying those who slaughter innocent as easy as signing a check, then how innocent are you willing to call yourself? It must be negotiated with the day in those absolute terms."

—Quail


On 11/19/21, 12:41 PM, "Pynchon-l on behalf of Joseph Tracy" <pynchon-l-bounces at waste.org on behalf of brook7 at sover.net> wrote:

     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.

    --
    Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l