I said.
Lonnie got up and walked into the bedroom. He returned with a Ritz-Carlton pen and pad.
“There you go.” He slapped it down on the table. “What else?”
“My hand, I—”
“Hook or robot hand,” he said, and drained one of the flutes of mimosa. “Next.”
“I get the feeling there isn’t going to be much give-and-take in this negotiation,” I said.
“Yeah, you’re probably right,” Lonnie agreed. “Why don’t we call it a day? You let me finish my lobster and you go on and get started with your book. Sound good?”
What a dick.
“I need to get back to the hospital,” I said as I stood up.
Something about the position of my arm and the way I was standing gave Lonnie Saunders a very mistaken impression about my body language. His hand shot out and grabbed mine in a powerful and friendly handshake.
Blood exploded from the ruptured grocery bag and rained down on the mimosas and lobster tails. I let out a whimper and collapsed to my knees in agony.
The flash of white hot pain I experienced in that moment proved to be cathartic. The choice was clarified by the pain. It was crystallized by the gore exploding out of my wounds.
I would write the guide about the weirdos. I would write about the vores, and furries, and creeps who put themselves in fan artwork. I would endeavor to write the comprehensive travelogue and guide to the subcultures that make the Internet simultaneously wonderful and terrible. I would need to carefully observe and interview the people who have made those subcultures fascinating.
It wouldn’t be a good guide to the Internet’s weirdos. It would be an awesome guide to the Internet’s weirdos.
Before my adventure could begin I had to have a little talk with Doctor Lian about my robot hand.
CHAPTER ONE
The Matrix Retarded
He’s intelligent, but an under-achiever; alienated from his parents; has few friends. Classic case for recruitment by the Soviets.
—FBI Agent Nigan, War Games
The Internet is a slippery creature that defies description and metaphor.
Sure, the physical Internet can be defined. It can be described as routers and fiber optic lines, megabytes and gigabytes, bleeps and also bloops. That sort of description is too literal. By those rules you could claim a human is a bunch of meat and organs, but then a bucket filled with meat and organs also qualifies as human.
It is the nature, the elusive essence, of the Internet that cannot be easily categorized. What the Internet means.
Thousands of people with intellects vastly superior to mine have tried to describe the Internet. These are people with real college degrees, not the sort you buy for $49.99 from a “university” in a former Soviet state. Their degrees didn’t arrive in an envelope that smelled like salted fish and prominently featured a spelling of “master’s” that included a “k” and no vowels.
Ted Stevens, the disgraced Republican Senator from Alaska, had a bachelor’s degree in political science from UCLA. That is an undergraduate degree and probably around ten IQ points on me. The brutal Darwinism of Alaskan politics ensures no fools ever hold office in that state. Yet, even a man as robustly intellectual as Senator Stevens once infamously warned of the Internet, “It’s not a truck. It’s a series of tubes.”
Thanks?
William Gibson, one of my heroes, described the futuristic Internet of Neuromancer as a “consensual hallucination” consisting of “lines of light ranged in the nospace of the mind.” Gibson’s neon-drenched cyberpunk prose always appealed to me, but that description of the Internet sounds like a bad ride on some spinning playground equipment after huffing glue.
Gibson managed to come up with an extravagant and psychedelic version of dumb. For practical purposes the cyberspace portions of Neuromancer might as well have been a technical manual on how to send an e-mail written by Ted Stevens during a peyote-fueled vision quest. They definitely don’t get anyone any closer to understanding the reality of the Internet.
The Internet is so slippery in large part because it is vast and ever-changing. Gibson might have come closest on the third try in Neuromancer when he referred to cyberspace as something of “unthinkable complexity.”
Another nerd hero, racist horror author H. P. Lovecraft, used this technique frequently. When something was “too scary” or “too otherworldly” he would come right out and admit, “This monster is too scary and otherworldly for me to describe.” Lovecraft was dealing in impossible angles and colors from outer space.
When a writer attempts to cover the topic of the Internet, he or she is dealing with an imaginary world distributed across millions of computers and created simultaneously by hundreds of millions of people. That sounds like some impossible angles or colors from outer space to me.
Anyone who volunteers themselves as an authority on the subject of the Internet is an asshole. Don’t listen to a word they say.
The Internet is too broad; there are too many people filling it up with crap and too many rocks to turn over to ever hope to present a comprehensive picture. Descriptions become obsolescent almost immediately. There are too many tribes, cultures, subcultures, groups, and subgroups to catalog.
Nothing is more cringe-worthy for a frequent Internet user than to see their corner of the Internet described by someone from the outside. Internet subcultures can seem impenetrable to outsiders. They are esoteric, by chance or design, and their denizens communicate using culture-specific jargon and inside references that leave inquisitive outsiders baffled.
When I set out to write this book, I wanted to limit myself to subcultures I had familiarized myself with over nearly a decade of writing for Something Awful. For most of that period our Awful Link of the Day has singled out strange subcultures and weird websites for ridicule. We cruelly mocked everyone from furries yiffing in hotel rooms to miscarriage moms building photo shrines for the bloody corpses of their unborn babies.
It was a rough game we played, maybe even slightly evil, but it was a good sort of evil. Like torturing a terrorist for the location of a bomb or killing a sweet little baby kitten by giving it too many kissy-wissies. That sort of evil.
I hoped that evil experience with the Awful Link of the Day would prepare me for writing this book.
As usual, I was wrong.
Zee Chamber of Horrors
If I were forced at katana-point to offer my best attempt at a metaphor for the Internet I would have to reach for the Bible. I realize that makes me an asshole by my own rules, but trust me on this, Bible metaphors add tons of literary credibility. The Iliad was nothing but a big Jesus metaphor.
I just hope Super God doesn’t find out I’m using Regular Bible. He’s very sensitive about that sort of thing (super apostasy), but he really needs to chill out. Super Bible isn’t all that different from Regular Bible. The Psalms are written in Klingon and Super God might have gone
