"But the dreams came on in the Japanese night like livewire voodoo, and he'd cry for it, cry in his sleep, and wake alone in the dark, curled in his capsule in some coffin hotel, his hands clawed into the bedslab, temperfoam bunched between his fingers, trying to reach the console that wasn't there."
- William Gibson, Neuromancer, 1984.
I recently experienced a nontrivial loss - I dropped a shoulderbag containing my laptop and managed to destroy it. Unable and unwilling to pay the $500 I'm told was necessary for data recovery, all of the data on my hard drive was totally lost. This included hundreds of photos taken over the last several years, a few creative works-in-progress, and an inadequately backed up thesis, along with nearly a year's worth of research notes. I accepted my fate, and resolved to spend some time in the library to do what I could to catch up.
However, while I was waiting for my new computer to arrive, I became aware of something which I initially brushed off as being ridiculous: I felt stupid. It seemed like I was somehow less able to deal with my life as it presented itself to me. When I was curious about something, I had no easy way of learning what I wanted to know. When I was given a problem to solve, I had no resources to fall back on other than what I carry around in my head. I was missing the internet, and felt like my functional IQ had dropped by 30 points because of it. The world seemed to literally constrict around me until all that existed was what I could see.
It amazed me how much of a loss it really was. Until it was denied me, I was unaware of just how frequently I turned to Google or Wikipedia for information. I was reminded of this article I read in Halifax's weekly culture paper, The Coast, the first week I lived in that city in 2006 and this novel by Charles Stross which I had read the year before. The pop cultural reference my subconscious came up with the most frequently, though, was the William Gibson quotation I included above, likely because, aside from the fact that my lost thesis is on Gibson, on more than one occasion in the past week I found myself actually starting awake, my hands trying to type into my mattress.
The world we live in may be distressingly less sexy than Gibson's near-future dystopia, with his anarchic technophile culture regulated only by the whims of metanational corporations - ours is still largely influenced by the 19th century, with our dusty foreign wars and dusty bureaucrats, and there is a striking shortage of rain-slicked pavement, neon, and mirrored sunglasses in most places I've visited recently - but his predictive faculties seem to have been spot on when he described the degree to which our lives have become intertwined with communication technology. My life, at any rate, proved to be largely unrecognizable without the ability to get online at my convenience. Combined with the fact that I am at least slightly inclined to regard myself as an antihero, and you could half convince me that I'm living in Gibson's world right now, if a relatively rural and low-tech version of it.
And with this post, I inaugurate a new blog. This seemed an appropriate topic.
I hate the word "blog".
However, while I was waiting for my new computer to arrive, I became aware of something which I initially brushed off as being ridiculous: I felt stupid. It seemed like I was somehow less able to deal with my life as it presented itself to me. When I was curious about something, I had no easy way of learning what I wanted to know. When I was given a problem to solve, I had no resources to fall back on other than what I carry around in my head. I was missing the internet, and felt like my functional IQ had dropped by 30 points because of it. The world seemed to literally constrict around me until all that existed was what I could see.
It amazed me how much of a loss it really was. Until it was denied me, I was unaware of just how frequently I turned to Google or Wikipedia for information. I was reminded of this article I read in Halifax's weekly culture paper, The Coast, the first week I lived in that city in 2006 and this novel by Charles Stross which I had read the year before. The pop cultural reference my subconscious came up with the most frequently, though, was the William Gibson quotation I included above, likely because, aside from the fact that my lost thesis is on Gibson, on more than one occasion in the past week I found myself actually starting awake, my hands trying to type into my mattress.
The world we live in may be distressingly less sexy than Gibson's near-future dystopia, with his anarchic technophile culture regulated only by the whims of metanational corporations - ours is still largely influenced by the 19th century, with our dusty foreign wars and dusty bureaucrats, and there is a striking shortage of rain-slicked pavement, neon, and mirrored sunglasses in most places I've visited recently - but his predictive faculties seem to have been spot on when he described the degree to which our lives have become intertwined with communication technology. My life, at any rate, proved to be largely unrecognizable without the ability to get online at my convenience. Combined with the fact that I am at least slightly inclined to regard myself as an antihero, and you could half convince me that I'm living in Gibson's world right now, if a relatively rural and low-tech version of it.
And with this post, I inaugurate a new blog. This seemed an appropriate topic.
I hate the word "blog".
