how Internet 3.0?

Nearly everyday I make an effort as a dedicated GooglePlus user to read the feed and post some specialized content that my 500+ followers hopefully haven't seen. I've been writing for years, creating original articles & reviews for my blog Dark Entries, cultivating a global audience (thanks again Mother Russia!), and investing alot of time to curate material that I myself would love to see.

But think ahead: When the goggles of Internet 3.0 go on, what happens to Internet 2.0's collections, community associations, expressions of fandom, 140-character blatherings, your unboxing videos, that food photo gallery you made, and especially the network of online professionals/friends/strangers you've built? Will internet 3.0's new paradigm of altered reality & virtual reality interfaces just write those off like a wind into a house of cards, scattering your decade of 2-D wall postings into oblivion?

Granted, there's a majority of user emphasis on the moment, on the post of the now. The backcatalog of content isn't usually gone through, as it seems viewers only want the new postings from the time forward from when they joined or subscribed. (Yet I know I scroll back, feeling like I'm digging for buried treasures when I discover a subject for the first time, playing catch-up to the group's reactions to episodes, or news, or evolutions in that subject.)

And granted, there's alot not to like about the current circle jerk of material, those deformed viral cats, the overposted meme, political/religious outrage, historical fingerpointing, racist interjections, trolls, and a safe anonymity from which to flare out any unintelligible, unfounded, or unmerited thing they please. There are no sacred cows, no respect, and thus no real convincing anyone about anything. Unattributed content is a particular pet peeve of ours as originators of artistic & informational value should always be recognized.

There's a lawlessness that's beyond apology, and a freedom that produces great beauty, and as audiences & authors we suffer one to enjoy the other.

[Where have you gone, ASCII art?]

 Fixtures of Internet 1.0 didn't weather the transition  with the prestige it once had. Large 2.0 social media hubs quickly usurped the attention & content from former giants like The Well, Usenet, LiveJournal, Angelfire, Geocities, and other once-established specialty niche threaded forums with participation ranked user mini-profiles.

Thus it's our concern that our irreplaceable time, our recognitions, and our creative output not be unmade, or left behind in the ignored cyberbasement. We wouldn't have bothered if we hadn't felt they were worth posting in the first place and at this point we feel having them sidelined would be unacceptable.

We would like to trust the current social networks to create an importing tool, something that will transform our postings into galleries or collections that will attach to our avatar or float near our person or decorate our virtual castle to summarize this cyberpublic history of ourselves, perhaps a recognition emblem of legacy content that can still be carried forward & explored by others. Yet watching how companies abandon software & applications with no consideration for the loyalist user who believes in the platform or format more than they do, we fear they may do the same in this newfound digital arena.

[Yes +Google VR , we're specifically asking you on behalf of your 300M social media users & the internet as a whole. And +Magic Leap & +Neal Stephenson , we're curious if you've considered our concerns, as we like your ideas.]

[The Augmented Reality overlay as drafted by Magic Leap.]

  We'd love some sort of Tronscaped interface option, which would clue into the cyberspace aesthetic we've anticipated since William Gibson first wrote & +Steven Lisberger first imagined.

[Map of The Grid!]

So we wonder with 3.0 just over the crest of the digital tomorrow, should we still be bothering to post & look as much as we do if it's all going to be binned? This uncertainty makes us hesitant, the unanswered question disturbing in its consequences.

I've got books to read in the meantime, which aren't going to change anytime soon, and a map to make. Someone do let us know before this continues, yes?

#    #    #

While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.

join the Armada.

Honestly, we voraciously dove into Ernest Cline's new novel Armada (2015) in the sincere belief that it would be an even more awesome sequel to his 1980s inspired videogamepunked Ready Player One (2011).

While that expectation turned out to be wrong (rats!), Cline's literary coding runs a similar program. If one hadn't already read RP1, we'd be introduced to the same precocious classroom prisoner, the hero of all YA, a kid with issues, a too-cool-for-school geek girl love interest, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game that perhaps is more than it seems, and mad gaming skillz that just happen to turn a young nobody into a hero. 

References abound to John Hughes, Conan, Dune, The Twilight Zone, and of course the twin pillars of sci-fi fandom, Star Trek & Star Wars, keeping the dialogue witty and the prose retro-pop fun to read. There's even some guided playlist cassette culture mixtape love, if you actually wanted to soundtrack your reading experience at certain points of the story.

For his second novel, Cline's produced a winning ode in the key of space opera, a homage rewritten from Ender's Game (1985) & "The Last Starfighter" (1984), except set in the very near future, and with far higher stakes than RP1. High school gamer Zack Lightman one day sees a UFO hovering about his small hometown. Weird enough, but the cognitive dissonance is that it's straight out of his favourite game, "Armada", and after discovering his late father's secret journal full of paranoid notes, Zack questions his sanity and wonders if he should lay off the console until his head clears up.

At points the text reads like the best bits of MMORPG flight & ground future combat sims, so if you ever cockpit jocked dogfights in the classic "TIE Fighter Vs. X-Wing" PC game, it'll be especially delightful reading these white knuckle on joystick Earth Defense Alliance passages.

The winning characters elevate this book above a skeletal space action novel with it's central sins of the father-son dynamic, hilarious besties, compassionate mother, all in the shadow of a possible doomsday scenario.

In the inevitable comparison to RP1 many will complain the author's written the same book, or maybe suspect it was the version he didn't use, or even posit that it was an unpublished earlier novel. Yet others would've complained even more if he'd decided to instead write a cheese eating paranormal romance YA novel, a scandi noir pastiche, or something equally divergent instead.

Ernest Cline writes what he knows & loves, sci-fi fandom-inspired prose from the heart, and that honest center is what makes his writing shine. Woven around that, Armada's a mosaic of cult book & film & graphic novel sources, scripture, Tolkien, Shakespeare, and other winning DNA.

And it's more clever than mere adulation as it's a metaliterary "The Cabin In The Woods" (2012)-style examination of alien invasion scenarios. In doing this, however, the twist truncates the end into a Childhood's End (1953) a la Arthur C. Clarke that would seem less of a denouement than one might have expected after all the intensity. We'll see if the upcoming Universal Pictures version sticks with it.

At the end of the day it seems Cline again wants us to find the depth and life-in-art meaning in the medium that is the videogame: One can apply game theory to life, but it's too emotionally deep to pixelate it down into such a coded reduction. It means more than clearing a level or topping a high score, and you don't get three lives for a quarter, you only get one chance. By all means play, but play it like you mean it.

#   #   #

While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.

welcome to The Diamond Age.

Flipping through pages depicting an elegant techno-Victorian society set as a jewel in the crown of a juxtopian east coast China, I wondered exactly why I'd waited 18 years to read Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age.

Presented as 21st Century post-nationalistic collapse cyberpunk (and later firmly retroclaimed by steampunk), the novel opens with a bodymodded & teched out street criminal (à la William Gibson's Sprawl trilogy characters), but the narrative quickly disposes of him as an illustration that this story's subversion's going to be far more intellectual.

To coin perhaps an even more divisive sectarian subgenre label, it's innovatively nanopunk, as technology takes control of matter at the molecular level. Better than the food generators in Star Trek's 24th century, Stephenson has matter compilers that build preset comestibles & household items, eliminating daily needs. The challenging question here is when basic needs & the necessity for work is solved, what do people begin to live for & what purpose does society serve? In a word: Culture. Which then makes the luxurious manifestations of that culture the ascendant form of societal credibility. 

With a world where one's cultural affiliation determines your role, the paradigms of East vs West and how their differences have an ugly history of disconnection in the shadow of Western Imperialism, and how that culture is passed to subsequent generations, becomes crucial. Enter "A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer", the book within the book. While books have always been the ultimate cultural vessels, this particular compilation's a fully interactive (or "ractive" in the novel's parlance) smartpaper text flash-style visual fairytale custom tailored to molecularly bond neurologically with its young recipient, and adapt its lessons to the desires & immediate emotional/physical requirements of the owner. Plus the fairytale, thanks to some of the grim circumstances of the future, is in a ruthlessly Grimmsian vein. All that and it reads out loud, too. Where this unique book ends up is wherein hangs the tale.

In deliberate contrast to the clipped noirtech codelines of cyberpunk, Stephenson's writing style's elegant, every so often paved with subtly beautiful words like gallimaufry, alamodality, callipygous, velleity, farrago, artifex, phyle. (So concinnus!) If Dickens wrote science fiction now, this would be it, replete with his semi-passive comments on class systems accepted for good or ill, but particular to oriental/occidental cultures. While these aren't necessarily critiques, more setpiece observations of differences, it does make you think about status quo, racial bias, and ethnic nurture, and uses these factors as forces in the plot.

Just as Stephenson turned an idea into a virus in the kinetic Snow Crash (1992) and brought memetics to a wider audience, here he implies that the web is an unknowing & unconscious coalescence of data from all who use it to form a greater dynamic & reactive pattern, that the internet itself is an input device that may at some point generate a great answer, or idea, or innovation that will advance the human condition and technology beyond current imagining.

And in a finer point, Stephenson discusses theatre as a metaphor & literal tool for transmission of data between biological entities. The observer effects the observed, and visa-versa. The idea that narrative/stories/myths not only entertain but gift us with lessons/knowledge/perspective in a programming fashion, and by adding live immersive roleplaying aspects & cooperative nanosites into the mix, the audience is not only unseated but stars in its own group composite play.

[A vampire's nanosite gathering sustenance during the day before heading back to its tech savvy master's lair?]

The plus side of my waiting 18 years to read this lands it amidst some of the concepts Stephenson extrapolated on happening, which makes its provocative imaginings now even more relevant: nanotechnology being applied to communications and medicine, the very beginning of multimedia interactive books as apps on tablets for kids, China's revisions of its forced labour manufactories, the encryption processes for data, the idea of virtual currency (i.e. Bitcoin) being able to evade taxes, and especially Ray Kurzweil endeavouring to map the mind, something that will require a printer-style molecular matter compiler by the time he's done. Maybe we can then use the singularity to literally copy people into finely crafted talking smartbooks. (Shut it, blathering Melville! I'm listening to Verne, okay?)

With its concepts so high it nears abstraction, The Diamond Age is an ambitious gem worth cutting into for the wealth of conceits & facets it shines & inspires with.

#  #  #

Addenda from 10/13/2013: 

Only later do I find out that The Diamond Age is a very loose sequel to Stephenson's Snow Crash (but they each stand very much on its own with only one side character crossing forward, having marked differences in tone), and even attached to the rather irreverent prequel short story "The Great Simoleon Caper", but their world is contiguous.

# # #

Further Addenda from 7/9/2018:

Twenty-three years after it's publication, _The Diamond Age_ is still being actively discussed. Attended the Tucson Steampunk Society's July 2018 Book Club meeting, which was livecast here. I arrive fashionably late at 44:35, asked to introduce myself shortly after at 45:12, waggle my first edition hardback at 46:40, declare my love of the Primer at 47:25, make wishful commentary about the matter compilers at 54:05, and my nanopunk neologism springboards post-cyberpunk conversation from 56:30 for quite a good while. The conversation will continue until our own Diamond Age arrives, probably sooner than you think.

# # #

While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.

are you Ready, Player One?

The '80s were the last macrocultural zeitgeist.

After that it all fragments with the media's pronounced non-objective political divisiveness and the internet making endless forum & chat room for every myopic splinter interest, as we went from one shared page where everyone wondered about the same things: whether Coke or Pepsi was better, if Prince or Michael Jackson reigned supreme, what exactly's up with those Goth kids, or when the nukes would drop and justify our unassailable doomsday existentialism. After the web's technological expansion there was no way to keep track of it all, nor at that point would anyone want or even need to.

As such the 1980s will always be relevant.

Which brings us to Ernest Cline's "Ready Player One", an unapologetic 374-page lovesong to the last true pop cultural monolith that is the 1980s.

[Sweet foreign language Tron-inspired cover!]

Sack up, gunter*: Say Bill Gates or Steve Jobs dies/died, themselves competitive ego-products of 1980s greed-is-good corporate raider materialism, and instead of leaving their tech-legacies to friends or family or shareholders, decided to posthumously announce an internet-based contest within the virtual reality network they'd created, allowing the winner not only their personal fortunes of nigh-bottomless billions, but executive ownership of the whole internet itself. Essentially that's the high stakes plot of this near future 2041 cyberpunk modern masterwork.

Unlike most cyberpunk however, instead of grasping forward, Cline's virtual world frames its goggle-net in the rear-view mirror of Tom Cruise's Porsche 928, or Michael J Fox's DeLorean DMC-12: the 1980s context that not only sets our world's watershed reference points for the last agreed upon books, movies, music, and videogames, but the very same earmarks become possibly important clues for the greatest treasure hunt ever devised by a man who grew up in the '80s who was enamoured of all its facets. The conceit sounds like a writer's cop-out, but if you think about it of course we as users would want proverbial lightsabers, or sling a second-gen phaser from our spandexed space-uni hip, smoke the street comp in that unattainable Vector, sport a fierce "Lost Boys" jacket, or rad awesome big teased hair from "Square Pegs". They would pick these, and Cline takes us into the most bitchin' shopping mall of our collective media past with credit cards at the ready, going "Oh yeah! I sooooo wanted that!"

And I can't get over this book. It's so nerd geek gamer retro-wonderful, and payloads John Hughes teen brat pack films, half-remembered TV shows, nascent hacker empowerment ethos, kaiju cinema, classic Star Wars, Saturday morning cartoons, New Wave, Synthpop, hair metal, 8-bit, Radio Shack hardware and so much more into an intellectual atomic bomb signifier that completely levels the irrelevant house of "postmodernism"'s cards into the valueless joke it really is. All the things we have affection for become invaluable, and everything in its way is a miracle we can share, celebrate with each other, and, even more importantly, can be the things we can grow ourselves from, and inspire us to transcend.

Of course there's villainy ex machina and, as with any contest, loopholes & hacks to be had, so Cline builds the tension up, and the seemingly impossible search pulls his world's contestants, and the readers with them, in, trying just as hard to figure out where the clues are hidden.

Good sci-fi tends to be prescient in that egg/chicken, causal/predictive way. Just look at Verne (submarines), Dick (cloning), and Gibson (cyberspace). As we browse right now, convergence technology's busy combining networks down to smaller numbers with more features, whether that's Sony's liberal PS4 over Microsoft's over-regulated Xbox One next-gen consoles, sync service focused Windows 8.1, or multi-app A.I. driven smartphones, all vying to be the preferred user device. It's not too far off to imagine that the world wide web, the cloud, mobile networks, online gaming and video conferencing could also umbrella into one single shared virtual user interface. Recently Cline went and tried out the Oculus VR, deeming their device the looking glass step into his book's OASIS (Ontologically Anthropocentric Sensory Immersive Simulation), the novel's world changing virtual reality.

Cline reveres the tools of technology and the things it can manifest, but indulges in a couple small humanizing moments to remind us not to lose ourselves socially & psychologically within the artifice (albeit pretty hollowly by comparison to the digital grandeur of the brilliant technostalgic world he posits, but point taken). And at the end Cline asks if we are ready to play on this newfound virtual grid where anything is possible, and if so, by whose rules? Will it be by an authority that will limit those possibilities, or by our independent selves with our shared media heritage & no limits save the potential of our imaginations? Either way, Cline's vision is coming. Are you Ready, Player One?

[*Gunter: Easter Egg Hunter]

While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.