The future still isn't what it used to be: Cyberspace

 In the previous post, I said 

Telecommuting and remote work exist, but they don't dominate, they only really make sense for some professions and they don't mean jacking into a Snow Crash or Neuromancer virtual world, even though one of the largest corporations in the world has rebranded itself around exactly that vision.

This very morning, I decided to add David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest to my reading list [not really my jam, but I wanted to see what all the fuss was about -- D.H. Apr 2025]. In the preface to the 20th anniversary edition (in 2015), Tom Bissell writes

Yes, William Gibson and Neal Stephenson may have gotten there first with Neuromancer and Snow Crash, whose Matrix and Metaverse, respectively, more accurately surmised what the internet would look and feel like.

Um, did they? Bissell goes on to say

(Wallace, among other things, failed to anticipate the break from cartridge- and disc- based entertainment)

Fair, but ...

Yes, there is a major difference between on-demand streaming and broadcast streaming, where a broadcaster puts out content according to its schedule. There is also a difference, though it seems like a smaller one, between obtaining a physical object that allows you to view something when you want to and being able to view something more or less instantly via an always-on connection (using "view" in a fairly general sense here that would include listening to audio).

Having the combination of "what you want" and "when you want it" without the friction of obtaining a physical artifact like a book, record, tape or disk does seem like something new and significant (more musings on that here), so in that sense, to the extent Wallace's world is limited to physical media which somehow include DRM that won't work in the real world, it's farther from our reality than one with data flowing freely over networks.

With one exception, though (which I'll get to) the modern web/internet that I'm familiar with has little to do with Neuromancer's matrix or Snow Crash's metaverse either.

Let's start with how you get there (one small disclaimer: While I finally got around to reading Snow Crash a couple of years ago, the last time I read Neuromancer was, um, closer to when it came out, so I'm relying on fairly old memories plus secondary sources for that one; for reference, Neuromancer was published in 1984, Snow Crash nearly a decade later in 1992, Infinite Jest in 1995). 

You get to Gibson's cyberspace by jacking in, that is, connecting your central nervous system to a computer interface that delivers a completely immersive experience. To access Stephenson's metaverse, you need a terminal and googles, either a high-quality private terminal or a free public one which provides only a grainy, black-and-white experience. In either case, the experience in Snow Crash is immersive in that you are generally not aware of the outside world, but it's not the full-sensory experience of Neuromancer.

Back in our world, of course, people generally access the web through their own computing devices, whether a phone, a tablet, a TV set, a laptop or even a desktop computer. There is no scarcity of devices. If you have access to any at all, you probably have easy access to several. You can even visit a public library and use a computer there. You do need an internet connection, but those are nearly everywhere, too. You can get on the internet in a cafe, for example, by connecting to their WiFi (as far as I can tell, actual internet cafes are nearly extinct).

In most cases, you're aware of the world around you, or at least, the internet experience doesn't take over your entire sensorium. The semi-exception is gaming, which in some cases makes an effort to be truly immersive, more or less along the lines of Snow Crash. VR headsets have been around  in some form since the 80s (if not before), and they're a natural fit for applications like FPS games, so this is not exactly a surprise.

Long story short, in much of the world the internet is easy to access with readily available equipment. Going online often means using your phone or watching TV, that is, using something that's recognizably derived from a technology that existed before the internet. Immersive experiences are only a bit harder to get to, but in any case they're not the norm.

In Neuromancer, jacking in requires special equipment on both the human and computer end (though Gibson does speak elsewhere of billions of people having access). The bar is lower in Snow Crash, but it's not something that most people spend much time on. It's interesting that the 1992 version is a bit more mundane than the 1984 version, almost as though computing in the real world had become more commonplace. It's also telling, I think, that access to the virtual worlds of the novels is difficult enough to hang a plot point on, particularly in Gibson's earlier version, almost as though stories were written by writers.

OK, once you're in the virtual world, how do you get around? I'll focus more on Snow Crash here, mainly because memories are fresher. The key point about Cyberspace is that it's a space. In particular, it's a three-dimensional construct centered around a 100-meter-wide road 2¹⁶ (65,536) kilometers long following a great circle on a  virtual sphere.

If you want to meet with someone else online, you arrange to go to the same space by moving your avatars. You can move your avatar around by walking or running, or use a vehicle, or take the transit system, which has 256 express ports, with 256 local ports in between each, at one kilometer intervals. There are special spaces within the metaverse, many with restricted access.

From an immersive gaming perspective, this makes perfect sense. From the perspective of the web, it makes no sense at all. If you chase a link from here to the Wikipedia article on Snow Crash, you just go. This page goes away and you see the Wikipedia page. Or it opens in a separate tab and you can flip back and forth, or whatever. You don't do anything even metaphorically like moving from this page to that. There's no concept of distance. At worst, one or the other of the pages might load slowly, but you don't have a sense of motion while that's happening (well, I don't, at least).

In other words, the key feature of Cyberspace, that it's a space, is at best completely irrelevant to the modern web, and at worst it's actually in the way. As I recall, Gibson's matrix is similar. For example, if you encounter ICE (Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics) you see an actual wall of ice or some other material that you have to get through.

Gibson's matrix, at least, is also spatial in another way: its contents are tied to physical computers in the real world. In particular, the two AIs Wintermute and Neuromancer are physically located in Bern and Rio de Janeiro, respectively. That is, they are presumably running on hardware located in those cities. Wintermute would like to be able to join with Neuromancer, its other half (Neuromancer is less concerned about this).

Data in today's internet is much more distributed. Not everything is in the cloud in the sense that there's no single well-defined physical location for data or the processors that process it, but a lot is, and even when a service or database is single-homed in a particular place, it usually doesn't matter exactly where that is. Even if two servers are located on different continents, they can still communicate easily because of the internet.

In the end, the technology of Neuromancer and Snow Crash isn't particularly prescient. The parts that are still around, such as a data-carrying network that's accessible across the world, or an immersive VR, were already under development in the 1980s. Gibson and Stephenson were drawing on cool and experimental, but real, technology as a jumping-off point for fiction. Moreover, they also copied some of the limitations of the technology of the time, particularly the need for specialized access terminals and on services being hosted on particular equipment located in particular places.

But in the end, Neuromancer and Snow Crash are not really about the technology. Snow Crash is more an exploration of Anarcho-Capitalism in a world where the official government has collapsed and ceded power to a collection of private entities. Neuromancer is in large part a conventional thriller, even including a physical ROM module as a MacGuffin (not withstanding what Bissell says about breaking away from physical media).

But for my money the computing technology and its relation -- or lack thereof -- to today's web isn't the interesting part of either book. Neuromancer is a ripping yarn set in a magical world whose magic happens to be presented narratively as a computerized virtual world. Snow Crash is a philosophical novel that uses an array of inventions, including but very much not limited to the metaverse, to frame its investigations. 

In both cases, the strange but also familiar technology is telling us that the novel's world is a different world from ours. The authors, particularly Stephenson, use those differences to explore our own world. As such, there's no particular need for them to have predicted the actual world of a generation later.

Dear screenwriters: Bits can be copied

There's a new thriller movie out on one of the major streaming services.  I don't think it matters which movie or which service.  If you're reading this years from now, that statement will still probably true, at least to the extent there are still streaming services.  If you're pretty sure you know which 2022 movie this is referring to, but haven't seen it yet and want to, be warned.  There are mild spoilers ahead.

As with many such films, the plot revolves around a MacGuffin, a term apparently coined by Angus MacPhail, which Alfred Hitchcock famously glossed as "the thing that the spies are after, but the audience doesn't care."  In other words, it doesn't really matter what the MacGuffin actually is, only that the characters do care who gets it and so spend the whole film trying to make sure it ends up in the right place and doesn't fall into the wrong hands.

The plot device of a MacGuffin is much older than the term itself, of course.  The Holy Grail of Arthurian legend is one, and the oldest recorded story known so far, The Epic of Gilgamesh, sends its protagonist to the Underworld in search of one.

Clearly there's something in the human brain that likes stories about finding a magic item and keeping it away from the baddies, and in that sense the MacGuffin in the big streaming service movie is a perfectly good MacGuffin.  The protagonists and antagonists vie over it, it changes hands a few times, lots of things explode and eventually the MacGuffin is destroyed, ending its magic powers.

Except ...

The MacGuffin in this case is basically a gussied-up thumb drive containing information certain people do not want to become known.  Our protagonist receives the item early in the film (with suitable explosions all around) and promptly sends it off to a trusted colleague for safekeeping and decipherment.  Later we learn that the trusted colleague has, in fact, received the drive and cracked its encryption, revealing the damning information.

In real life, this is when you would make a backup copy.  Or a few.  Maybe hidden in the insignificant bits of JPEGs of cute kittens on fake cloud accounts with several different services.  Maybe on some confederate's anonymous server somewhere on the dark web.  Or at least on a couple more thumb drives.  For bonus points, swap out the contents of the original thumb drive for a clip of the Dancing Baby or some similar slice of cheese.

(As I understand it, there are some encrypted devices that are tamper-resistant and designed not to be readable without some sort of key, so you can't easily copy the encrypted bits and try to crack the encryption offline, but here we're told that the encryption has already been cracked, so they have the plaintext and can copy it at will.)

The problem with that, of course, is that the drive would then cease to be a MacGuffin.  Why send teams of mercenaries and a few truckloads of explosives after something that might, at best, be one copy of the damning information?  The only real reason is that it makes for an entertaining way to spend an hour or two and screenwriters know all about writing MacGuffin-driven thriller plots.

Which is fine, except ...

If you think about the practicalities, there's still plenty of tension to be had even if the bits are copied.  Our protagonist has reason to want the secret information to remain secret except in case of a dire emergency, but they also want to be able to preserve it so that it can be released even if something happens to them.  How to do this?

If you've uploaded the bits to one of the major services, then who gets access to them?  Do you keep the information in a private file, memorize the account password and hope for the best?  What if you're captured and coerced into giving up the password?  On the other hand, if you die without revealing the information, it will just sit there until the account is closed, unless someone can figure out enough to subpoena the major service into handing over access to a bunch of cat pictures hiding the real information.  Which you encrypted, of course, so who has the key?

Maybe you share the encrypted bits with a journalist (or two, or three ...) with an "in case of my death" cover letter saying where to get the encryption key.  But what if they decide to go public with it anyway?  The more journalists, the better the chance one of them will publish if something happens to you, but also the better the chance that one of them will publish anyway.

Maybe you put the encrypted bits someplace public but write the encryption key on a piece of paper and lock it away in a safe deposit box in a Swiss bank.  Now you've traded one MacGuffin for another.  But maybe someone at a different spy agency has a backdoor into your encryption.  The baddies at your own agency are going to keep the contents to themselves, but maybe one of them has a change of heart, or gets double-crossed and decides to go public as revenge, and they need your copy since they no longer have access to the original bits and didn't make their own copy.

And so forth.  The point is that information doesn't really act like a physical object, even if you have a copy in physical form, but even so there are lots of ways to go, each with its own dramatic possibilities depending on the abilities and motivations of the various characters.  Most of these possibilities are pretty well-used themselves.  Plots driven by who has access to what information have been around forever, though some have paid more attention to the current technology than others -- "Did you destroy the negatives?" "Yes, but I didn't realize they'd left another copy of the photographs in a locker at the bus station ..."

Opting for a bit more realism here gives up the possibility of a "destroy the magic item, destroy the magic" plot, but it opens up a host of other ones that could have been just as interesting.  On the other hand, the movie in question doesn't seem to blink at the possibility of a full-on gun battle and massive explosions in the middle of a European capital in broad daylight.  Maybe realism was never the point to begin with, since that seems pretty unlikely.

Oh, wait ...

Xanadu vs. the web: Part IV - Quotations

The whole concept of Xanadu, particularly transclusion, is based on the idea of taking pieces out of existing texts and re-presenting them in new combinations as new text.  Xanadu as I understand it in no way precludes producing new text -- obviously that has to happen -- but it assumes that quotation is a major activity.

As far as I can tell, it isn't.

That's not to say that there aren't forms and genres that rely on quotation.  Collage, for example, goes back to the beginning of the previous century under that name, entertainment journalism uses quotation extensively, sampling is famously part of the turn-of-the-century music scene, and there are older examples in history.  The Victorian commonplace book comes to mind.  Nonetheless, most works don't rely extensively on quotations.

From a personal perspective, I hardly ever quote in this blog.  I do try to include links where appropriate, but most of those are internal to this blog, and even then they're not dominant.  There are quite a few posts here with no links at all [actually, not so many -- the other blog is less linky, being less webby -- but still, there are relatively few posts that you can't get most of the good out of without ever chasing a link].  In any case, including a link and inviting the reader to chase it is clearly not what Nelson has in mind.  A transclusive Xanadu document is essentially a new literary form, which is great, but most content hews to existing forms because those forms work.  Likewise, most content tries to be original because that's what audiences and creators both want.

That's not to say that most works don't refer to other works.  One one level they do so simply by adhering to existing forms, which are established and modified over time by the works of previous creators.  On a more familiar level, they tend to refer allusively.  If I refer to, say, sampling, as above, I'm not going to paste in a bunch of audio clips from Old School rappers sampling James Brown.  I just mention sampling and assume that you're already familiar with the idea.

This more subtle mesh of allusions and cultural references has always been the sinew that holds literature and culture together.  A too-literal interpretation of this as a mesh of actual quotations seems more limiting than liberating.

Next blog, please

I'm not sure why this is happening just now, but a portion of the visitors of this blog are visiting a link called /?expref=next-blog. My guess is that, rather than searching for this particular next blog link, these folks got here by starting someplace else and clicking on next blog until they saw something they liked or got bored and went off to do something else. Blog surfing, basically. So I thought I'd do the same and see what else was out there. [The Next Blog button disappeared a while ago, at least from this blog's style sheets --D.H. Dec 2015]

I didn't keep a close count, but the breakdown was roughly:

• A few family blogs, as in "here's what my family is up to", including one in Swedish. Sort of a year-round online version of the annual holiday letter to one's far-flung friends and relations.
• A few photo blogs, one linked to flickr and offering to sell prints and send e-cards using the images.
• A craft blog or two, one in Norwegian and English.
• Several poetry blogs
• Nothing technical, whether figuring out the web or anything else.

I have no idea if this is a representative sample, or if not, just how it is selected, or in any case, why the tilt towards Scandinavia. The lack of technical content has an easy and -- to my mind -- encouraging explanation: The web really is accessible to a broad range of people, only a few of whom are interested in its technical workings.

From a purely formal point of view, almost all the blogs hew pretty closely to the prototypical one or several contributors posting sporadically about whatever. That makes perfect sense given that the blog is a form, not a genre, but I was still a bit taken by just how much blogs look and smell like blogs.

One formal experiment that I ran across was Quoted Images, Imaged Quotes, in which a photographer and partner are collaborating to produce a captioned image every day for a year. Rather than writing a caption, the captioner chooses a quote to fit the image (or perhaps vice versa, or both). Even this experiment is not without precedent. Thing a week comes to mind.

Blogging is not a genre

I think this is probably one of those that seems less profound when you start to write it down, but here goes:

A news report this morning introduced one of its subjects as "a blogger" from a country currently in political turmoil. Automatically an image formed of a member of the opposition bravely reporting conditions and advocating for the cause, at considerable personal risk. Salam Pax would be an archetype here.

As it happened, that particular image was basically correct. But as with all snap judgments, it need not have been. Run down the following list of labels and see if a particular image doesn't form involuntarily:

• Political blogger
• Entertainment blogger
• Mommy blogger
• Blogger

If you're like me (and if your mileage varies, great!), all but the last invoke not just the literal meaning but a particular kind of blogger. "Political blogger" suggests a partisan of whatever party. "Entertainment blogger" suggests tabloid-style gossip. "Mommy blogger" suggests a "soccer mom." I would venture to guess that for many people "blogger" in general suggests a particular genre of interest. For example, a politician might equate "political blogger" with "those irresponsible muckrakers making my life miserable" or "those hard-working souls selflessly putting the word out," depending on the day.

Interestingly, those characterizations don't seem a particularly good fit for the handful of blogs I actually read semi-regularly (These in turn are fairly disjoint from the blogs I've referenced here. This blog is about the web, not so much about my reading habits per se). That's not a complete surprise. When I try to decode someone's shorthand description, I'm trying to figure out what they mean, not what I might mean by the same thing.

But blogging is not a particular genre. Blogging is fundamentally a structure. Its distinguishing feature is not that it is about a particular brand of politics, or gossip, or parenting or whatever. Its distinguishing feature is that it is written serially, in small segments.

There does not need to be a great deal of continuity across those segments. The topic can shift with each post. Characters and scenery may or may not recur. Any action described in one post may or may not relate to action in any other post. On the other hand, because a blog is generally written by a single author or at most a small group, there will generally be some continuity of theme and style.

Within those constraints -- short, serialized segments and general continuity of theme and style -- pretty much anything is possible. Just as there are many genres of novel, play, movie, TV show, magazine article or newspaper column (one of the blog's closest relatives), there can be, and are, any number of genres built on the blog structure.

Nope, that wasn't particularly profound, but I guess I had to get it out of my system anyway. What can I say? I used to be an English major (for all of a semester).