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* 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 *
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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.
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FULL LIFETIME WARRANTY: FREE REPLACEMENT IF THIS PRODUCT SHOULD
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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.