************************** * 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. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- _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. ======================================================================