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Voices Issue 2.1
**************************
* VOICES FROM THE NET *
Can * VOICES FROM THE NET * ---
you * *
hear * 2.1 * Do
our * VOICES CONTINUE * you
voices * "Where no voice has * read
? * gone before" * us
* * ?
--- * VOICES FROM THE NET *
* VOICES FROM THE NET *
**************************
There are a lot of folks with at least one foot in this complex region we
call (much too simply) "the net." There are a lot of voices on these wires.
- all kinds of voices - loud and quiet, anonymous and well-known. And yet,
it's far from clear what it might mean to be a "voice" from, or on, the
net. Enter "Voices from the Net": one attempt to sample, explore, the
possibilities (or perils) of net.voices. Worrying away at the question.
Running down the meme. Looking/listening, and reporting back to you.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
FULL LIFETIME WARRANTY: FREE REPLACEMENT IF THIS PRODUCT SHOULD
EVER PROVE DEFECTIVE. SEE DETAILS INSIDE.
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_2.1_
ISSN 1072-1908
====
THIS ISSUE:
--VOICES CARRY
--FEATURE: William Gibson Q&A
--SIGNAL/NOISE
virtual personae by Carl Holmberg
--A SHOuT IN THE DARK
--PREVIEWS
--INFO/ARCHIVES/ACCEPTABLE USE
====
VOICES CARRY: If you build it...
Welcome to a new year, and a new volume of Voices. It's been a while, but
you know how holidays are - and some of us had better net access than
others over the break. Coming back to the job of writing one of these
intros after a longer-than-usual break, it's particularly clear to me how
fast, and how far, our voices have carried. The Voices project is not
quite six months old, and this issue will go directly to over 1000
folks(!). And how many of you will stumble over this on an ftp site
somewhere - either one of our 'official' archives or one of those
increasingly numerous sites where we stumble over our own zine?
I imagine for a moment that my classroom held a few thousand folks, and
wonder if I could chat with them as casually as I do with all of you...
.oO(eek!)
The Net - whatever that might be - continues to 'explode' into mainstream
culture here in America. Every term, I have more net.savvy students in my
classes. (and I get more emailed excuses...) A month or so, my parents
got an account on a commercial site. As I have been updating the
subscription list - a task we have not yet turned over to automation - I
have been struck by the increasing number of new addresses: an influx
from America Online, more and more subscribers from outside the US, and
lots more folks sending messages saying 'I saw mention of your zine in...'
Voices has been mentioned in Fringeware Review, Online Access, and a
couple of the new Internet guidebooks. And we have a backlog of folks -
really interesting people - ready, even eager, to talk to us. And even
though I've been here right along - watching the interest manifest itself
as a constantly too-full mailbox - I still find it pretty strange to walk
into a bookstore and find my email address in print, or find Voices
listed on someone's 'pick hit' list of resources. Don't worry, though, I'm
sure I'll adjust.
But...
Once again, it brings home how 'audible' we can be 'out here.' Ladies and
gents, be careful what you start. This old net is still very fertile
ground...
I'm looking forward to '94 and to bringing you all a lot more voices from
the net. I suspect that this year will bring a lot of changes and
challenges 'out here'. But, before we plunge ahead, let's look back about
10 years to a moment when 'cyberspace' was a new word, and there was this
new computer called a Macintosh, and that commercial...
and was I the only one who thought of Neuromancer when those MCI ads ran
on TV this year..?
<'everything will just be ... here,' says the girl>
That's it for me. Happy New Year!
--bookish
==============
FEATURE: _William Gibson Q&A_
A few months ago a couple of the folx who work on Voices were lucky
enough to go to Cincinnati, Ohio and meet William Gibson, grand-daddy of
cyberpunk and the man who coined the term cyberspace (and no, Bill, we
won't let you forget it!). Gibson did a reading out of his, at that time
just released, book Virtual Light, then he took questions from the
audience for a while. Our folx who went down got his permission to tape
the question and answer session and to publish it here in Voices (and of
course we got him to sign all of our copies of his work including that
sweet first print of Neuromancer that bookish has).
We figured "What better way to start out the new year than to begin with
a little William Gibson to wet the appetite of our reader's info hungry
lips?" And since we couldn't think of a good answer to that question,
well, here you go. What follows is a transcript of the question and
answer session with the one and only man with the most sought after
email address on the Net (he doesn't have one by the way, he uses a fax
for most of his correspondence. We asked!) Some of it may be a bit dated
since net.time moves a bit quicker than real time, but we found much of
it interesting, and hope you will as well ....... Ladies and
Gentlemen...... Mr. William Gibson:
Q: You make reference to "Gunhead" [in Virtual Light]. Do you follow the
Japanese manga because obviously you got that from a source that was
familiar with the same type of thing?
gibson: oh before it was manga, it was a movie I think, actually I'm not
sure, but there is at least one "Gunhead" movie that someone made.
Actually Deborah Harry gave me a "Gunhead" tape so I just got all of that
from them.
Q: You seem to really have struck a chord with people who use computers and
stuff, that your vision is an interesting one. Do you use computers
yourself to write?
gibson: well, I use them as a word processor, yeah, but not really as
anything else. But I really like the Mac. It's like a power tool, you
know, it's like who would want to go back to a hand saw?
Q: I was wondering if you'd just tell me sort of what led you up to writing
your book Agrippa, and any problems or any experiences you might have had
in getting it published and things like that.
gibson: I mean, it was going to be a very demented, a very expensive and
actually kind of sadistic project in terms of what it was going to do to
art dealers and collectors. Actually more sadistic than they realized.
The thing that sort of saved it, I mean, it was sort of like a joke that
had gotten way out of hand, and I thought it would really be a very
obscure deal, but it got a lot of publicity and the thing that sort of
saved it for me is a few days after the first couple of these things were
sold in New York, somebody cracked the encryption codes and posted the
text on the Internet. Where it remains till this day, sort of like
Chinese wall newspaper in cyberspace. And if you go on the Internet and
ask around someone will direct you to it and you can make your very own
copy for free, which seems to me like a really great outcome. Well the
other thing that added to the confusion, and I kind of regret having a
subtitle, but it was a piece of writing called Agrippa: The Book of the
Dead. I was thinking of the Book of the Dead in terms of the Tibetan
Book of the Dead or the Egyptian Book of the Dead because there's a lot
of this text that is about my father who died when I was quite a young
child. But because the word "book" was in it a lot of people assumed it
was like a booklength work of some kind, but actually it's about a two
thousand word poem of sorts. The original intention was to publish it on
disk only with an encryption virus also included on the disk so that when
you load the disk into your computer it sort of takes control over the
computer and you can't get any cursor action or any keystrokes or
anything, you just have to sit there and watch this text scroll by at a
predertimined speed, and when it's finished it encrypted itself, but
permanently so it could only be read once, and it could only be read at
the speed we had selected. And it was to be packaged in a very cubicle
intricate sort of hand made box so that you'd have something to keep it
in after you'd ruined it. And I think the relatively inexpensive ones
were about $350.00 and the really expensive ones were about $1500.00, but
there are only three of those and there might have been 80 of the others.
It was gonna sell in art galleries in New York and Tokyo, it wasn't like
a Stephen King bound in asbestos. But then it was given to the world by
anonymous teenage hackers in New York, so that's kind of a cool story,
but I have influenced a lot of the Internet people to read poetry.
Q: A lot of the structure in your novels seems to derive from some tension
between people at the periphery of established society and people in the
center who control a lot of the power, but there seems to be very little
middle and we never see that power center very clearly. It's always seen
sort of from the edges.
gibson: That's certainly true. One of the rather dystopian aspects of this
future, if you can call it that and of course it's not really the future,
but there is no middle class left or at least not very many of them. I
don't necessarily think that that's going to happen, but I do think it's
a tough go of living in an industrialized democracy without a middle class.
Q: Do you think that there's some similarity between the structure of the
novels and some of the work of people like Thomas Pynchon?
gibson: Yeah I suppose there is, but i don't know, I mean I have a B.A.
in English and I sort of know about figuring out the structure of stuff
but I don't try to figure out the structure of my own stuff. Pynchon, on
the other hand, is such a singular fellow that I'd imagine from his books
that he may be totally conscious of the structure throughout his work.
I really try not to think about that stuff too much and I try to avoid
reading academic criticisms of my work.
Q: A few years ago there was a script floating around for the Aliens 3
movie, what's the truth?
gibson: Yeah. That was the first of twentysome screenplays for that and
my version, well you know when the movie came out it wasn't that long
ago, but I did that screenplay so long ago that the Soviet Union played a
major part in it. It was like pre-Gorbachev. So now it's like totally
unmakable. The implied socio-economic world of the first two Alien movies
was this kind of gangbusters big corporate capitalism, and I thought it
would be a really fun thing to have those guys flying around in their
space machines cruising around and kind of slamming up against a bunch of
demented space colonists. And the best set would have been this sort of
neo-Soviet spacestation where all the interior walls are decorated in a
sort of Diego Rivera murals of the triumph of the proletariat in space.
The three guys who control the Aliens franchise just looked at this thing
and went "Oooooooo," they just didn't get it. They weren't angry, but
they just sort of scratched their heads and laughed and that was the end
of that.
Q: Since we're on the subject of movies, the idea of a Neuromancer movie has
been around basically since the book came out. Do you know anything about
that?
gibson: There's nothing going on with Neuromancer right now. There are a
bunch of just about everything I've ever written is under some to someone
or other, but none of those are really things that I'm personally
involved with. You have to remember that if they make these so called
"William Gibson movies" they're liable to have about as much to do with
my work as so called "Stephen King movies" usually have to do with his.
Q: Are you comfortable with that?
gibson: Well, I mean, it sort of indicates to me that it's not the best
of all possible worlds, but there's not too much to be done about it. As
far as I know from my own experiences in Hollywood, in order to change
that, I would have to become either a producer or a director. That's how
you do that. I've written a lot of screenplays based on my fiction, like
four or five of them, and the idea of writers having creative control is
a strange idea. Writers in Hollywood are like very very expensive
plumbers. It's like, it's a union job. It's got a very heavy union which
I belong to so I can work there, but that won't keep you from being fired
at any minute and replaced with somebody else or with six other writers
as is more often the case. When I was doing that Aliens script I was
working with Walter Hill who is one of the three producers who has the
franchise, but he's also a director and he was in Chicago directing a
Schwarzenagger-Jim Belushi vehicle called Red Heat and they were shooting
that movie in Chicago, and back in Hollywood where I was, there were 19
writers working under two sort of senior writers to try to finish the
film like just rewriting. They were already half way through it. I said
"Walter, is it always like this?" and he said "Well, it's a little worse
than usual, but it's frequently like this."
Q: I'm interested in how you came up with the future. You have a lot of
interesting gerry-rigged contraptions and products. How do you envision
what's happening with the emergence of a lot of the new technologies and
such?
gibson: Well, I'm sort of fascinated by, I mean you should always keep in
mind that what I'm giving you in the book isn't necessarily the way I
really envision the future, and paradoxically in my real daily life I
don't think about it very much. Not much beyond the next couple of years
or months. One of the things that has fascinated me looking at how we've
used technology since the industrial revolution, the thing that I find
fun to try to predict, and this is something that science fiction hasn't
really done before too much, is how people will REALLY use technology
once they get ahold of it. So whenever anybody suggests any technology to
me the first thing I think of is how can this be abused? What will
criminals do with this? It's kind of an interesting thing, the guys who
envisioned the video camera never envisioned the homemade pornography
market. The guys who invented the beeper and the cellular phone never
thought that a big sector of their clientele would be urban drug dealers,
or even sub-urban drug dealers. The guys who invent that stuff never
think of that.
Q: Did you happen to see Billy Idol on the tonight show talking about
his new album is going called Cyberpunk?
gibson: Well to me, I'd also consider that Pat Benatar's new album is
called Gravity's Rainbow. It's true.
Q: If you had the means to modify any part of your mind or body using
chemicals, electronics and/or surgery, what would you do?
gibson: Whoa! I don't know, that would take some thought. That's a really
heavy question. Just always keep in mind that old thing about be careful
what you wish for...
[the editorial staff here at Voices would like to thank Mr. Gibson for
allowing to use his words in this forum.]
==============
SIGNAL/NOISE
Signal/noise: the ratio between the useful information in a given
environment and the useless nonsense that inevitably accompanies it, even
threatens to drown it out. It's a useful measure, as long as you don't need
to reduce it to a number or something. But always remember: one
net.entity's signal is another's noise. And an environment which one person
finds objectionably noisy may seem serene to someone else. There are many
voices out there - many kinds of voices - and many environments that affect
how those voices appear to other folks across the wires. What follows is a
dip into the ocean of such voices, presented in such a way as to preserve
the feel of the particular environment. Much of it was generated on the
spot in realtime interactive settings, and it has that mix of exciting
spontenaity and confusion. It's up to you to decide what's signal and
what's noise.
**The following bit of word play was submitted to us from Carl Holmberg,
A professor from the Popular Culture Department at Bowling Green State
University. Yeah, we know, a long stretch for us but hey, we thought it
was quite a good piece that says a lot about some of the reasons we put
together this taco stand in the first place. Well, that's about
enough said for this, it's something you'll have to figure out and
decide upon for yourself.......... so, read on and hopefully enjoy:
virtual personae
"Yes, a meteorite landed in my back yard!" ***VP screams over the phone***
"What do you mean you can't do something about it?" **rto--fading out**
"Oh, I get it. Everyone's got one in their yard too--how long's the list?"
*rto--simultaneous fade in to next seen*
"O.K., 1999's fine."
[but it was finer than anyone thought]
**close up**
Inside each meteorite is a chamber housing something which looks
suspiciously like a floppy disk, albeit a shiney chrome diskette.
***moving on VP***VP did the only thing a self-respecting hacker could
do--putting it in a disk drive to see what happens.
**cto simultaneous fade in/out to next seen, close on ghostly words**
The following data dump occurred real time [rt], 18 August 1993.
*message fades--we now see a green, blank computer screen*
**start scrolling**
subject: human photonic life
concern: real unreality/unreal reality, aka, lost in space
file route: invasion, CE 1999
Some of these humans claim they are the same on Net as they are in their
normal, everyday life.
Debateable.
Our human specialists have observed that some humans indeed behave
remarkably similar in all contexts. Dull few. Even the ones who appear to
behave the same appear to be unaware that their communication behavior is
sometimes different.
History: Our encrypters running word-field analyses of certain human
traditions have reported that the ancient Greek word "persona" is currently
applicable to the situation. Hackers themselves email each other about
their Net persona. Yet they use the word "persona" and appear to know less
about the word than our Encrypters.
Encrypters' advice: personare referred to a device used on the ancient
Greek theatrical stage. It was a mask specifically designed with a
megaphone at the mouth to project the human voice effectively. Literally,
the term meant "for the sounding"--per [for} sonare [sounding]. This tells
us something important about current human usage of morphophonemes related
to the original term "personare." In growing common practice, the term
"person" refers to someone without regard to gender, race, ethnicity or
class, ktl. "Person" is considered by many humans to be a neutral term and
without bias***hah, they don't even read McCluhan!***However, just like the
ancient Greek mask, the term masks the real person behind the generality of
the mask of cleaned-up, politically correct personhood. So, at the same
time, "person" means the real person and the fake person. We believe this
signifies some sort of Kung Fu encryption. The ancient megaphonic voice
was an artificial construct, denuded of the many of the factors which
normatively award individuality to a being.
Similarly, when a human communicates on the Net, s/he masks or is masked in
the process.
They have access to other minds [the Net projects their Voice, covering
their gender, race, ethnicity and class].
They also must receive data which has been generalized from other projected
Voices. There is a long series of human traditions of deliberate masking
of individuals and groups, all couched--incredibly--as a kind of
liberation. This longstanding cultural habit will serve us well, despite
the dullity that humans have proven to be clever in bypassing this mask
function.
There are ways to mitigate the masked quality of Netting--ways just as
useful to ourselves as to the humans.
Included ways to mitigate Net masking:
1 cultivate language usages which are unique to Netting
2 cultivate preferences for conversing over Net which exclude or tend
to exclude new users or insincere ones.
3 apply the two norms whenever applicable
Encrypter 7's report: I have subscribed to any number of bbs's. I used
perfect English and made perfectly reasonable requests. I was shut out of
any number of conversations because I was perceived as a new user (Net
users tend to key in many typographical mistakes and do not correct them).
At first I thought this might be some form of primitive human encrypting
but then abadoned the hypothesis when no analytic we applied produced
anything of value, even the Florian Modex. I later returned to the
hypothesis though since indeed, poor keying is a sign of an advanced
Netter. Go figure.
I also noticed that advanced users employ all sorts of
abbreviations--another sign of their advanced indoctrination into Netmask.
When I too employed abbreviations and typos, I was most often accepted as a
human ***wick id grinnnn***
Finally, one of the most important behaviors to use as a mask on Net
is posing rude comments to some users. Being snide often gains you
acceptance as a regular user ***lip likking***
These two general principles of Netmask, judiciously applied, render
our alien identities into human Net persona.
Final note to the commander: There also appears to be an ongoing debate
over Net about what a "virtual" persona is. Virtual first. Clearly, the
word "virtual" applies to photonically generated communication and data
storage. Apparently though, a growing number of humans seem to think that
"virtual" conveys the meaning of a photonic space that human consciousness
can inhabit, as in their phrase "virtual reality." Again, humans seem to
be unaware of other, more historically laden meanings to the term
"virtual." Which is a ***snort*** because with the use of the term
"person" especially to mask or neutralize gender, the additional use of
"virtual" is **snortable**snort*snort*snort**"Virtual" is of course derived
from "virtue" which many would take to mean upright in the sense of
virtuous. The norm actually is a male gender norm because "virtue" derives
from classical Latin "vir," a morphophoneme which means "man" and
"manliness." "Virtue" issues from a man or woman who is good at performing
manly qualities. Something "virtual" therefore is something manly. Thus,
virtual reality is a male kind of place--and yet it is constantly depicted
as liberated in gender and gender preference. So, based on human historic
usage, the phrase "virtual persona" is self-contradictory, meaning a
[genderless] mask and meaning a male place to wear it. Humans are weird.
All inconsistencies aside, one final note: virtual personae are real in
the sense that they affect humans when they are not on Net. Some have been
observed to be perked up after bbsing, as if the activity were not merely
communication but some sort of drug regimen for pumping energy. Others
appear to be drained during and after Netting. Some appear to enjoy
inventing and maintaining a fictive biography, some of them having dozens
on various Net addresses. Some insist on conveying their real name. Even
then, many of these realists break link peremptorily, without proper
leavetaking which we observe them enact in their daily life. So much for
sameness as a virtual persona with their real persona.
***green screen morphs to bright red***
Recommendation: Create Net opportunities which increase the likelihood of
producing schizophrenia between Net persona and reallife persona.
**infrastructural chaos**
*shock cut, close up of androgynous person reading latest issue of VOICES*
Reading: "Carl B. Holmberg at cholmbe@andy.bgsu.edu found this report at hz
email address and onedered if any1 else had seen it? Won of U sendit?
return address was bl"
**VOICES rolls further as andy person places meteorite in backpack**
***sigh***
Carl B. Holmberg
Department of Popular Culture
B.G.S.U.
Bowling Green, Ohio
=============
A SHOuT IN THE DARK
"The Net - whatever that might be - continues to 'explode' into
mainstream culture here in America."
-- bookish
He's right you know.
It's everywhere now.
It's in every magazine.
It's on every newscast.
Oh my GOD! Is it still kewl?
Yes, I think.
Because there are things we still don't understand.
Because the mainstream media are still just scraping the tip of the
iceberg.
Because the stereotypes aren't going away -- hacker, cyberpunk, compunerd.
Because with all the hype and hoopla and speeches and positions there is
still something that is happening that has so far managed to befuddle,
avoid and quietly tip-toe around the mega-media-multinational-governmental
spin doctors while sneaking into the fabric of society as, according to
William Gibson, "A consensual hallucination experienced daily by
billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being
taught mathematical concepts. . . (Neuromancer, p. 103)
Call it Cyberspace, call it The Matrix, call it Virtual Reality, call it
whatever you want, what we're talking about is what fills that space.
Those voices that we all hear but can't see.
Interactive TV.
500 Channels.
Information Superhighway.
Hackers & Crackers.
Cyber-this & Cyber-that.
The labels are surrounding us.
MCI says pretty soon there will no THERE, and we'll all be HERE.
Where is HERE? Why should we care?
I've never attended a business meeting on a beach, but AT&T says I will.
And of course they will let it happen (and THEY will send ME the bill).
Seems to me all the talk, all the attention is focused on the hardware.
Memory
Speed
Capacity
High-Tech Tech Tech Tech.....
We're here to explore the software that comes with the big info-machine.
The part that really makes the whole thing run. You can have as much
instantaneous and unlimited communication possibilities as you want, but
without the voices there is nothing.
YOU are the one who is going to be billed by AT&T
YOU are the one who is going to inhabit MCI's HERE
What're you gonna do with it?
the journey continues...
--countzero
==========
PREVIEWS _VoicesFromTheNet2.2_
Wow! We're in the unusual position of having too many possibilities for
future issues. But we won't complain, since all of them are pretty cool.
(Trust us ;) So all we're going to promise is that the next issue will be
full of the same kind of wonderful stuff you've come to expect from
Voices - whether it's hackers or novelists, artists or anarchists, or
something else entirely. Just stay tuned...
----
On another note we'd like to tell you that we have a promotional movie
for Voices that we recently created (very cheaply, we might add), but we
think the end product is pretty neat. If you're interested in seeing it,
it's archived on sumex-aim.stanford.edu in:
info-mac/grf/qt/VFTNmovie.sea.hqx
It is a quicktime movie and it's about 2 megs, but it's pretty cool so
download it and share it with your friends and neighbors...
==========
INFO
"Voices from the Net" is an electronic magazine filled with interviews,
and essays presenting the "voices" of folks from a wide variety of online
environments. Its purpose is to be both entertaining and useful -
net-literature and net-ethnography combined. The editors are
committed to an exploration of as many of the odd corners of "cyberspace"
as they can access, and they welcome readers to join them for the ride.
"Voices from the Net" will appear on a more-or-less monthly schedule, and
costs nothing. Subscriptions are available from the editors at:
voices-request@andy.bgsu.edu
Just send email with the subject "Voices" and the message "subscribe."
It's easy.
==============
ARCHIVES
"Voices from the Net", issues are available in text-only and
hypercard-compatible versions.
The archive sites for the text-only version are:
aql.gatech.edu /pub/Zines/Voices_from_the_Net
etext.archive.umich.edu /pub/Zines/Voices
wiretap.spies.com /Library/Zines
Hypercard versions are available at:
aql.gatech.edu /pub/Zines/Voices_from_the_Net
sumex-aim.stanford.edu /info-mac/recent
The current issue (text version) should be available under "Miscellaneous"
on the gopher at Bowling Green State University (Ohio).
We are also available to Mindvox subscribers in the
Archives under the directory CyberPunk/Journals/Voices.
==============
ACCEPTABLE USE
In a perfect world, we could just post this, send it out through the wires
and forget about it. In a perfect world... In this world, we have things
like copyright laws, legal permissions, the need to "own" one's words.
This document is free, but it is not public domain. The individual authors
retain the rights to their work. You may reproduce and distribute it. In
fact, we encourage it. Spreading free information is part of what "Voices
from the Net" is all about. Just keep it FREE. We hope that the zine will
be useful as well as entertaining. If it seems useful to you, then use it.
But be collegial. Cite your sources(*), and don't take liberties with the
text. Respect the voices contained here. [* Thanks to Bruce Sterling for
inspiration, and for support.]
Voices from the Net 2.1 (January, 1994) copyright 1994.
======================================================================
