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I spend my professional life working with the trAce Online Writing Centre, a thriving international community of writers who have made the internet their creative milieu. I owe them a huge debt for the inspiration and energy of their companionship. But this book does not tell the story of trAce, nor does it discuss new media writing. They will be dealt with at another time and quite possibly by other people. Nor is this the story of me, although parts of my life are embedded within it. It is a collection of fragments – my own thoughts and meditations plus items found on and off the web. The experience itself is the journey. As Philip Toshio Sudo writes in his wonderful Zen Computer ‘Many people mistakenly think of the internet as a destination but, like zen, it is merely a pathway. As the zen masters say, “Don’t ask where the path is. You’re on it.”’
Computers have been my muse since the mid-80s, when I became fascinated first by my own intense engagement with my Amstrad 6128 and then by peoples’ emotional responses to machines at a time while the personal computer was fast becoming ubiquitous in homes and offices. In 1992 I published my novel Correspondence , which explored the allure of ‘machineness’ and what it might mean for one human to be connected to one computer, but I had not thought beyond a one-to-one monogamous relationship.
Then in 1995 I discovered the internet and suddenly it was no longer one-to-one but one-to-many and even many-to-many. Overnight, it seemed, I went from being one person with a single name to existing as a number of identities created by me but not always recognisable as me, even by myself. And these bodies inhabited new and varied landscapes, enticing me to spend my days constantly travelling without leaving my desk, moving from websites to message boards to the exotic textual environment of LambdaMOO and back again into the comparatively vanilla world of plain email.
Since the World Wide Web came into widespread use, the internet has prompted passionate advocacy for everyone around the globe to take it up, and equally passionate calls for it to be taken it down (as if that were possible). It is seen by a few as a force for evil and by many as our last best hope, a source of international understanding which just might eventually bring us to our senses. As an entity in itself, it has been analysed, theorised, sexualised, personalised, counted, audited, mapped and generally obsessed over. Network artists roam its highways and habitations, feeding off the code and using its binary physiology as both tool and artefact. Writers are experimenting with hypertext and other types of new media works, and readers everywhere are becoming literate in clicking, browsing and navigating.
I wrote my first book about computers as a novel because it seemed at the time that fiction was the best way to explore the solo human-machine experience. However, fiction is not suitable for this book for the very good reason that, in the connected world, it ceases to apply. If these pages make any argument at all it is that virtuality disables the potency of fiction. In my opinion (and others will no doubt disagree) there is no room for self-conscious storytelling in cyberspace because in that environment everything is essentially not-real anyway. Fiction relies on a pact between the writer and the reader in which the author says something like ‘what I’m about to tell you is being presented in the guise of its not being true even though we both know that parts of it are ‘true’ since they are drawn either from my own life or those of others who you may or may not recognise. But what will hold it all together is not the truthfulness or otherwise (that is largely immaterial) but my artistry in spinning the tale for your reading pleasure and edification’.
Now, in cyberculture, the first part of this contention, regarding the immateriality of ‘truth’, is already taken for granted. For example, I already know that things might not really be as you say they are and so there is no need for any pact or literary convention to flag that up. So the first part is easily declared null and void. The second part, relating to artistry, is changed for a much more interesting reason. Cyberspace is a place, a style, a consciousness that we make together. It is rarely the product of an individual creative act produced by a lone genius novelist. Instead, net life is the outcome of a complex sequencing of the collective imagination. Indeed, its very topography depends on the makings of all those engaged with it.
And so, this book is not a work of fiction – although it would be wrong to call it non-fiction : )
When Henry David Thoreau built a home by Walden Pond in 1845, his intention was to settle himself in a single physical place for a certain period of time and to reflect upon his subsequent thoughts and experiences. It has to be said, however, that what he related did not always wholly match the truth. For example, although he presents himself as something of a practical handyman, historical researchers found an unaccountably large number of bent nails in the earth around his cabin. Baffled, and after much investigation, they eventually concluded that the only possible reason for the presence of so much superfluous hardware was that Thoreau can’t have been much good with a hammer. Well, this notebook is the story of my own sojourn, not in a cabin by a pond, but in the homesteads and wildernesses of the internet, and it too is ringed around with a substantial number of bent nails. With luck, they will prove to be of interest rather than a distraction.
Since I first went online I have struggled to make sense of who and what we are. We? Has the internet created new people? I believe that quite possibly it has. It has certainly brought an entirely new conceptual range into our lives, and we have as yet little idea of the huge social, economic and philosophical changes it will bring about. However, most of the world is not yet wired and possibly never will be. In the year 2000 the continent of Africa accounted for only 0.25% of all internet hosts worldwide, and most of those were in South Africa alone. As I write this in September 2003, the 10% of us with access to the net have little chance of ever being wired to the other 90% and with that kind of differential it’s difficult to see how equity in terms of connection can ever be achieved. But, as geographically confined as it might be, internet culture is still the most global connection humans have yet experienced. The ‘we’ I speak of in this book, therefore, embraces all those who make up the conservative estimate of 580 million people online in 2002 or the estimated 945 million who will be online by 2004.
On 11 September 2001, and again in the Northeast Brownout on 14 August 2003 , the internet held fast. It did what it was supposed to do, remaining operational despite the extensive demands made on its infrastructure. And ironically, this network which was originally designed for military use showed itself to be a hugely significant force for the sharing of individual news, reassurances, and mourning.
We can never be sure what the future holds, but unless there is some inconceivably drastic change it seems inevitable that the internet will continue to function so long as there is a source of power to drive it. But even if the net itself were destroyed, what pathways might it leave behind? How has it changed us, even in the short time since we began to share its infinite space? Could there even evolve a post-internet internet? What would it be like? Now that we are wired, what can unwire us?
The power to connect is where the spirit of the net resides. Every node, every cable, every hub, every packet, is permeated with fragments of the animus of this planet. The internet is indeed alive. It is alive with all of us.
