The cartoon that started the meme “on the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog” was printed in 1993, but already this is no longer true. If you’re online, you’re probably on Facebook, Linkedin, and other real-life networking services. Everybody you meet online who could possibly know who you really are is probably going to find out.
Question: What happened?
Answer: The popular kids took over the Internet.
When my family got our first computer in 1984 (Apple II+), my desire to talk about it at school was a sign of social awkwardness. Nobody in their right mind discussed technology with a straight face school unless a) they just didn’t get how the social system worked, or b) they had already given up on any hope of ever being even mildly popular. It was understood that computers were for people who were unable to negotiate the more nuanced planes of human relations, and had to take comfort in the “ones and zeroes.”
There was some truth to this. It wasn’t an accident that one of the first computer games to become really popular was Adventure, a text-only fantasy in which the user discovers treasure, fights dwarves, and negotiates labyrinthine cave passages (ironically based on real cave passages). Read the rest of this entry »
For about five months spanning the end of 1998 and the beginning of 1999, I woke up every morning thinking about Kubrick. Lately, here in 2009, I’ve also woken up many mornings thinking about Kubrick. The difference is that ten years ago, it happened because I was in film school, taking a masters-level class on Kubrick at USC. These days, I work in web development, so I’ve been spending a lot of time with Kubrick, the default Wordpress theme on which so many others are based.
Both periods during which I’ve studied Kubrick have turned out to be transitionary periods for Kubrick.
Kubrick the film director died in 1999, toward the end of the semester, shortly before the release of his final film, Eyes Wide Shut. The professor, Dana Polan, came to class the next day dressed all in black, and delivered a eulogy to the class.
When I was in fifth grade, circa 1982, I had one of the hand-held football games pictured above. It was about the size of two iPhones. The game was played by using your thumb to maneuver a player from one end of the field to the other. The opponent’s players were LEDs that were lit up. The user’s player was an LED that was lit up a little bit brighter.
Moving the avatar down meant that the current LED would go out, and the LED just below it would come on. Avoiding the opponents meant maneuvering around them before they had the chance to tackle you. Whether or not they tackled you while you were adjacent to them was purely a function of how long you lingered on any particular spot. The whole screen represented only ten yards; you had move through it ten times in order to run the length of the field.
I loved it. Never was I bothered that the players were represented by LEDs. In fact, the disparity between real football and the little plastic device with the panel of red lights was the whole appeal of the activity. Being good at the game didn’t indicate dexterity or a knowledge of football. It indicated the ability to think abstractly, to imagine a whole world where there wasn’t one. How long could you stare at that little screen before two adjacent lights started to look like nothing more than two adjacent lights? When that happened, you’d hesitate. And that’s when you’d get tackled. Read the rest of this entry »
Recently I watched Dreams With Sharp Teeth, a documentary about the life of Harlan Ellison. Ellison, now 74, is one of the most accomplished living science fiction writers in the English language, and probably in any language.
I once got to see a tape of Ellison being interviewed by my former writing teacher, James Gunn, in the sixties or early seventies. Ellison was resplendant in his indoor sunglasses, musing about why “every chick in L.A. is into astrology right now.” College kids of both genders sit all around him, hanging on his every word, nodding without irony at everything he says. I watched that clip and thought, Wow, that guy was the epitome of cool. Was there ever another person who so clearly understood the nature of his own time, in relation to what came before, and what was coming after?
In Dreams With Sharp Teeth, there is a clip of a more recent Ellison standing before an auditorium of college kids and shouting “If you want your music, pay for it!” And I thought, in spite of myself: The old man just doesn’t get it.
My family was the first on the block to have an Apple II+, and I grew up pirating software left and right. All the kids I knew did it. There was no sense of shame, nor was there any sense that we were doing anything wrong by any standard. Software had come into the world, and it was, by definition, as free as the air around us.
We had no money of our own, so the issue of buying vs. pirating didn’t come into play. Sure, you could always try to talk your parents into buying you a piece of software, but that wasn’t the same because
a) maybe they wouldn’t want you to have it, or
b) they couldn’t afford it either, or
c) they couldn’t get it fast enough.
No matter what the reason, the point is that we, as kids, had not yet been forced to go out into the world and exchange our labor for money, and our money for goods and services. If we wanted something, there were simply degrees of difficulty in receiving it. The scale of desirable things went something like this:
Impossible and far away: unicorns, light cycles, Princess Leia
Seemingly impossible and far away: driver’s license, physical strength, control over one’s own time
Possible but difficult: honor roll, first prize at the science fair, going steady
Possible but requiring marginal effort: desert after broccoli, the big gift from santa, candy from the bank teller
Available on demand with no expectation of difficulty or effort: breathing, eggs for breakfast, an unlimited supply of computer software Read the rest of this entry »
The cartoon that started the meme “on the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog” was printed in 1993, but already this is no longer true. If you’re online, you’re probably on Facebook, Linkedin, and other real-life networking services. Everybody you meet online who could possibly know who you really are is probably going to find out.
For about five months spanning the end of 1998 and the beginning of 1999, I woke up every morning thinking about Kubrick. Lately, here in 2009, I’ve also woken up many mornings thinking about Kubrick. The difference is that ten years ago, it happened because I was in film school, taking a masters-level class on 
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