Islands In The Clickstream

When I was a kid, we used to watch “Superman” on black-and-white television. We were the last family in our apartment building to own a black-and-white set and – because we won one in a raffle – the first on the block with a color TV.
The immense cabinet contained a huge tube and a [...]

In the human potential movement, we often hear words like, “As you believe, so you can achieve,” that imply that everything in our lives is a function of belief. Of course, anyone who has had a flower pot fall on their head from a window ledge knows there’s more to it than that. Our [...]

“We’re losing ourselves to technology,” they say. As if “technology” is not as old as flint knives and bone tools.
The simple truth is, technology has defined cultures and shaped behaviors forever. The technologies that evolved out of organic molecules we call “nature.” Those that we made we call “culture.” Both kinds are melting [...]

My machinery is wired to move pretty fast, and all my life people have told me – bless their hearts – to slow down. It always comes from people who move more slowly, never from those who are faster, so once in a while I reply, no, YOU speed up. But then they think [...]

I honor your gods,
I drink at your well,
I bring an undefended heart to our meeting place.
I have no cherished outcomes.
I will not negotiate by withholding.
I will not be subject to disappointment.
– Ralph Blum, The Rune Cards
Civilizations – like societies – like individuals within societies – grow organically. They are living systems that propagate a [...]

Thirty years ago the first email message marked the birth of the Internet, so members of our extended family are sharing memories of our digital nativity.
The visions of most Internet pioneers were limited. Most saw trees, not forests, failing to glimpse the distant horizons of new possibility they were creating.
A few, such as [...]

Home is where we start from, T. S. Eliot wrote, and the widening concentric circles that turn into recursive spirals define the trajectories of our lives.
My childhood home was full of love and near-chaos, and so is my life. Now that I am older (“I was always afraid I would die young like my [...]

Back in the old days, it was exciting when new software came out. Every day, we hurried to Computerland, hoping it was there. I remember a new version of WordStar with a million control-everything commands. I remember new interactive fiction games like Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy from Infocom.
I don’t remember the first time [...]

There are more than two, of course, but let’s start with two.
A computer network can look like a collection of stand-alone machines, just as a community of humans can look like a collection of individuals. It depends on the point of view from which you describe the system, whether you see individuals or the [...]

Last week’s column (When Computers are Free to be Computers) was a jazz-like riff using images in words in the search for an image of a world of images beyond words – life as we might live it inside a grid of virtual communication, our thoughts like electrons traveling on interlacing wires.
A reader [...]

No, not THAT web. The REAL web.
Three times this week I awoke with a strong impression of particular people, all of them important to me, all of them distant. I hadn’t heard from any of them in a long time. In each case, the sense of their presence was unmistakable, persistent. And significant email [...]

In the good old days of the Cold War, spy stories by authors like John Le Carre had enough uncertainty about who worked for whom that nested levels of loyalty, duplicity, and loyalty again provided the framework for a good narrative. To engage us, a challenge must be difficult but doable. The bar has [...]

Opening scene in the form of a black-and-white newsreel.
“Israel’s Ethnic Weapon?
A Wired News Report”
says the solemn voice of a male narrator.
Scientists wearing white lab jackets pour liquids into test tubes.
“November 16, 1998,” the narrator continues.
“Israel is reportedly developing a biological weapon that would harm Arabs while
leaving Jews unaffected. The report, citing [...]

Don Quixote Goes Digital appeared last month with editorial modifications under a different title in Salon Magazine (www.salonmagazine.com). By agreement with the publisher, it is not to be published by other venues until sixty days after the publication date.
Much of the email generated by the publication of the article turned on the real [...]

It is one thing (some would say the only thing) to apprehend that clear focus inside our own field of subjectivity that enables us to aim our lives with greater precision and another thing to begin building a different construction of reality based on the modular building blocks provided by our society. But that [...]

Cyberspace hangs by a thread, a tenuous connection not always visible when we focus on chips and switches, the speed of connectivity, the sizes of our drives. The hardware is a visible image of something less tangible that quickens our network life, making us skip and hop like spring lambs.
The ubiquity of electronic connectivity [...]

The themes of the digital world often involve fantasy and reality, illusions and truths, game-playing and “getting real.” In cyberspace, we traffic in abstractions, digital images and symbols that represent printed text – these words, for example – which represent writing which represents speech which represents thoughts and affective states. These images become as [...]

The way the world works when we are ten years old is the way we think the world will work forever.
Once upon a time, I read Mark Twain’s “Tom Sawyer.” That imaginative world became part of my foundation. I didn’t think about it, it just happened. I absorbed his images with unconscious innocence.
A decade [...]

The press coverage of the Black Hat Briefings II and Def Con VI tells part of the story, but the fact that mainstream media covered those cons the way they did tells much of the rest.
Def Con is the biggest and most celebrated convention for computer hackers. The con has grown from sixty to [...]

The evocative power of summer nights in northern latitudes is intense.
Different climates, like different constructions of reality, fuse so completely with how we experience our lives that we are like fish in water.
When I lived in Hawaii, I missed the first chill in the air that came in mid-summer, an intimation that long daylight [...]

There are moments when we find ourselves face-to-face with unmitigated evil and – surrendering our innocence and fantasies of a disneyland life – we see the truth of the human heart.
When I was twenty-one, I lived in Madrid, Spain, in a fascist regime overseen by Francisco Franco, with whose help Hitler had practiced blitzkriegs [...]

Those of us who are called “sir” by people we consider peers recognize sooner or later that the escalator has been moving up for a while now, that generations do come in dog years these days, and that the challenges of life at the forefront of our consciousness are linked to developmental stages.
The [...]

The economy of the next century will in all likelihood be driven from the outside in, that is, from near-earth space, the moon, Mars, the asteroid belt, and a little later, bodies like Europa, Titan, or Triton. Triton is a distant moon of Neptune, but distant ceases to matter when wherever we are is [...]

A funny thing happened on the way to the grave: It disappeared.
But first, as they say, a word from our sponsor.
The primitive brain that has helped us survive does not easily release its grip. As much as we like to think that we live in the outer domain of our brains, we [...]