25_01_27_book_review
theres the net and theres the real world. you got to the net with things like modems and dial tones and plugs in walls and now you get there trivially because it's ambient and in the future elon will be giving it to us direct like.
the author of the cyber gypsies indra sinha describes this cyberspace fka the "net":
"Cyberspace is the name we give to the human imagination when we access it via a modem."
the net is composed of a myriad of slices and some but not all overlap. it's often easier to understand by picturing something simplified like an infinite circle version of Venn's most famous diagram. you're welcome.
social media is an annoying boring shitty and loud slice and is where humans (often) try to connect the real world and the net.
the internet slice is something recommended to you by one of the various algos directly or indirectly via the shitty slice. then there are the connected but unrelated verses called comments. think horsey surprise. the comments are the only relevant part of the internet slice of the 'verse.
the internet proper is already in the llms via the vlookups. open source and vc funded alike. maybe chinese and maybe trained on this chip or that with transistors neural nets what-have-you. compute.
and thus it follows from the prior lemma that what remains of the net operates completely disjoint from the real world.
the rest of the net is a series of shows created by people directly or indirectly in a way that is more intentional and interesting than their regular boring lives in the nashville burbs or their flat in tribeca. think manti teo. and online gaming. and chat rooms and reddit and america online. that's what this book is about.
the book is a book in the dedalus way exploring this cyber world during the nascent of the recreational net. the 90s. slow internet connections and text only. hackers. text based roleplay games. internet boards. green peace. virii. catfishing. irl meetups (tinder).
sinha does this via myriad biblical and eastern religious references. he uses verse and local slang and uk colloquial references and accents. the result is a good amount of the hundreds of pages more acute moments are foreign for americans to read. another related thing is it isn't available for purchase in the colonies.
the political pursuits and his internet friends except for the one tragic bloke looking to trick on any internet girl that gave him attention are not the highlights of this book.
not caring about the marriage because the narrator didn't care and then caring when he started caring was a nice game by the author. likely because this is his life. write what you know.
the better book is a tale of the non-victimless hacker crime chain of characters. connecting assembly code nerd guy and hatian gang killings.
we'll leave here with some context of the net and how it may really be the only new thing under the sun. think baulder's gate roblox or reddit or your bloomberg terminal:
"Until recently we have been alone in our imaginations. However vividly a play, film or book brings characters to life in our minds, we always for an audience of one. We enter the story but have no part in it. Millions of people have experienced the version of Jane Eyre learning Hindustani by candlelight in her moorland cottage, but if Jane was ever aware of ghosts from the future peering in at her through the window, she would have seen that they haunted singly, never in groups. In cyberspace, for the first time, we create imaginary worlds which can truly be shared, in which each of us is fully present, with the power for free and spontaneous action. We no longer have to follow a script. We can play inside each other's imaginations.