Today’s Dead End Kids
Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous
by Gabriella Coleman
Verso, 452 pp., $26.95
William Gibson, who invented the word “cyberspace” for his futuristic 1984 novel Neuromancer, has said that the notion came to him when he watched kids playing video games at an arcade in Vancouver. They stared into their consoles, turning knobs and pounding buttons to manipulate a universe no one else could see. They seemed to want nothing more than to vanish through the looking glass:
It seemed to me that what they wanted was to be inside the games, within the notional space of the machine. The real world had disappeared for them—it had completely lost its importance. They were in that notional space, and the machine in front of them was the brave new world.
“Cyberspace” was a nonsense word. He hoped it would pass muster for his science-fictional purpose: to evoke a domain that might be created by networked computers—“a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation.” Thirty years ago there was no such thing.
Now billions of legitimate (and illegitimate) operators live simultaneously in two worlds, or in two divided and contrasted modes of experience. Terminology is still a problem. On one hand is “cyberspace” or “the online world” or “virtual reality” or, not quite accurately, “the Internet.” On the other hand we speak of “the real world” or “meatspace.” IRL is a standard geek acronym for “in real life,” and Wikipedia, an institution of cyberspace, helpfully explains, “The real world is another term for reality.” Of course the dichotomy is flawed. Billions of people live their entire lives offline; and the smartphone-bearing zombies plodding blindly down our sidewalks still inhabit the real world even if their souls have gone elsewhere. And as for that other place, it may be virtual, it may involve that metaphorical “cloud,” but cyberspace is real, too. It intersects with, and clashes with, the old world.
FOR REST OF STORY:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/dec/18/anonymous-todays-dead-end-kids/?insrc=toc
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/dec/18/anonymous-todays-dead-end-kids/?insrc=toc
No comments:
Post a Comment
Please leave a comment-- or suggestions, particularly of topics and places you'd like to see covered