Essays. Catscan Columns

CATSCAN 13 "Electronic Text"

In the mid-1980s I bought a modem and began hanging out on local computer bulletin board systems. I found the practice intriguing. There seemed to be a lot of potential online for interesting new forms of cultural agitation and fanzine work. The proto-Net itself was a remarkable technical innovation; a kind of primal soup of unwritten SF scenarios.

After two years I gave up. E-mail from local bulletin board systems was consuming as much time as my regular printed mail, but my printed mail far outclassed anything I could find electronically. My printed mail was much denser and much more informative than anything available to me online, and my printed mail was arriving from all over the world. Electronic text was like a bowl of homemade soup, but what I required was exotic bouillon cubes shipped in from every corner of the compass.

I was writing quite a bit for online discussion groups, but the effort it took to do this well didn't seem to be well repaid. Printed fanzines and SF magazines offered a larger and more demographically varied audience than the computer enthusiasts on local boards. Time constraints, and the limits of the medium in the mid-80s, forced me off the net.

In 1990, a much larger and vastly more sophisticated Net returned with a vengeance and brusquely thrust its tentacles up through my floorboards. I found it necessary to get back up to speed in a hurry.

I have now been online steadily -- mostly on the WELL, CompuServe, and the Internet -- for three years. I've sampled many other systems -- GEnie, America Online, Delphi, dozens of local boards -- but WELL, CIS and Internet seem to best suit my particular interests and activities. I don't consider myself a netguru, because I've met some actual netgurus, and I know I'm certainly not one, because I don't program. But I enjoy the reputation of a minor netguru because I write for the Net and about the Net. The entire texture of my literary enterprise has been altered, probably permanently, by gopher, ftp, WAIS, World Wide Web, and global e-mail.

I now spend shocking amounts of time online. I used to carry out a wide literary correspondence through the mails. That activity is now near death, replaced by faxes and e-mail. I haven't written a personal letter in months that wasn't to some modem-deprived soul in Britain, Russia, Japan, or Mexico.

On-line, however, I'm very active. During 1993, I accumulated about half a megabyte of e-mail every week. Since the net-release of the electronic text of my nonfiction book HACKER CRACKDOWN, that rate has more than doubled. I'm getting thirty messages a day.

Most of my traffic, thankfully, is not personal e-mail but electronic magazines. I read a lot of fairly diffuse local discussion from the EFF-Austin board of directors emailing list, but I also read many online publications such as RISKS DIGEST, BITS & BYTES, COMPUTER UNDERGROUND DIGEST, EFFECTOR, PHRACK, and Arthur Kroker's CANADIAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL AND SOCIAL THEORY.

I spend a great deal of time grappling with these electronic magazines -- these "e-zines." I can't truthfully say I that actually "read" them. I certainly don't read them with the focussed attention that I devote to printed material such as BOARDWATCH or WORLD PRESS REVIEW or BOING BOING.

Of course, it's possible to leaf quickly through a print magazine, and most of the print magazines I receive: SCIENCE, NATURE, SECURITY MANAGEMENT -- receive just that kind of browsing, cursory treatment. But my relationship with electronic text is different -- not just cursory, but cursor-y. I question whether the antique term "reading" is properly applied to the consumption of electronic magazines. Traditionally, reading does not involve scrolling spasmodically down, and occasionally back up, through an endless piano-player roll of intangible verbiage. Electronic text lacks the ritual, sensual elements of print publication: back covers, front covers, typography, italics, convenient stopping places, an impending sense of completion -- what one might call the body language of the printed text. The loss of these sensory clues has subtle but profound effects on one's dealings with the text.

I now spend about as much time reading -- or perhaps "scrolling" is the proper term -- e-zines as I do reading printed magazines. I've become dependent on e- zines. I scarcely see how I got along in life before electronically subscribing to COMPUTER UNDERGROUND DIGEST. This compendium of unorthodox computer activities now seems to me a vital part of the mental armamentarium of every serious-minded adult. The same goes for RISKS DIGEST, that startling assemblage of bizarre engineering anecdotes from all over the planet, concerning "risks to the public in computers and related systems." Reading RISKS is wonderfully revelatory, much like having the Wizard of Oz invite you behind the curtain to confidentially bitch at length that the giant brass bowls of flame have given him emphysema.

It's easy to see the advantages of e-zines. First, subscriptions are free (if you discount the cost of the equipment, that is). Second, as long as you have room on your hard disk, e-zines are easy to store and don't wrinkle or rot. Third, with the proper software, you can word-search all the back issues at once. Fourth, you can give e-zines away to all and sundry at little or no cost and without losing your own copies.

The disadvantages, which are grave, take longer to dawn on you. First, since e-zines don't generate any revenue for the editor or staffers, they remain hobbyist activities. True, the perks of not-for-profit fanzine publication can be very considerable. Jim Thomas and Gordon Meyer, the editors of CuD, have over 80,000 readers, the functional equivalent of a private intelligence network tirelessly investigating the global hacker scene. Jim Thomas and Gordon Meyer are heavy-duty smoffing cybergurus, but CUD nevertheless doesn't make any actual money. The publication is mostly written by its own readers, edited, collated and distributed by Thomas and Meyer. Since CuD lacks serious investigative resources, it can't carry out direct journalistic muckraking. Nor can CuD garner and compile useful statistics from original sources. It's even questionable whether any "e-zine" can depend on First Amendment protection, or on Constitutional freedom for its nonexistent "press."

The same operational difficulties apply to the somewhat more sober RISKS DIGEST. Although RISKS is backed by the venerable and respectable Association for Computing Machinery, it too is an edited compilation of comments from its readership. RISKS often reads more like a lettercol than a publication. And like letter columns everywhere, the reader-written e-zine tends to attract monomaniacs with an axe to grind.

E-zines are easy to store; but also easy to ignore. If you have received an e-zine and successfully stuffed it into a desktop folder somewhere, you somehow feel as if you've successfully dealt with it, whether you've actually read the words in it or not. You can always "get back to it later," although that "later" rarely comes. When you are wrapped in the utter immediacy of an electronic text, the very idea of a "past" is suspect. Instead, you save your mental energy for the deluge of incoming data still lurking there invisibly at the edge of the screen.

E-zines aren't magazines. If they *were* magazines, there would be no conceivable need for print magazines such as BOARDWATCH or INTERNET WORLD or MORPH'S OUTPOST ON THE DIGITAL FRONTIER, and yet print magazines about electronic networks seem to be expanding almost as quickly as the Internet itself. What's more, the print magazines are a lot more fun to read than most of the Internet is.

Word-searching electronic text is a very useful activity, but electronic sieves are peculiarly leaky. Keywording, grepping and such leads to an odd phenomenon: database blindness. If you look up, for instance, the term "toll fraud" on a computer system stuffed with back issues of COMPUTER UNDERGROUND DIGEST, you may come up with an enormous number of responses: say, 4,376 hits. This fantastic bounty of information makes you feel that you must surely have the whole phenomenon well in hand, and therefore need look no further. In point of fact, you can't even manage successfully to fully study the 4,376 electronic references you already have. After thrashing around a bit, you'll settle for a few pebbles off what seems to be a vast Newtonian ocean of information.

In reality, however, much vaster resources of untapped information still exist -- whole alternate oceans. There may, for instance be dozens of articles about the same activity which never use the term "toll fraud." Other sources may treat the subject matter from a radically different point of view. Mired in your instant and easy access, you may not ever see other sources, or even think to look for them.

Copying electronic text is a very simple matter. It's even simpler than copying software, and people feel far less compunction about copying text than they do about software piracy. In my opinion, no textual disclaimers about "site licenses" or "copyright" can stop people from swiftly cutting-and-pasting some bit of juicy gossip and electronically passing or faxing it to a friend. Even the armed might and omnipresent wiretaps of the KGB or the Romanian Securitate couldn't stop street gossip. Giving the reader the powers of editor, publisher and distributor turns all electronic text into potential street gossip.

This fog, this unstoppable miasma of info, may be bad news for tyrants -- or at least for tyrants of an older and creakier breed, anyhow. But no silver lining comes without a cloud. The confidentiality and accuracy of electronic text -- whether private e-mail or a general publication -- cannot be trusted. Even encrypting one's e-mail, a practice growing in popularity, won't stop the receiver from decrypting it, reading the plaintext, and *then* tampering with it and spreading the news to anyone he chooses. Expecting electronic text to retain its form and remain within a narrow channel is like trying to ink a fine line on a paper towel. Everything blots and spreads.

As a corollary, if you have a wide circle of acquaintance in cyberspace -- and a narrow circle of acquaintance isn't much use -- then you are likely to receive the same breaking news fifteen or twenty times through fifteen or twenty different sources. This is annoying. It also tends to overwhelm your native incredulity, for even the goofiest fifth-hand rumor no longer seems incredible if it's repeated fifteen times.

As it travels from hand to hand, electronic text can become corrupted. It's amazing, really, how little deliberate forgery goes on -- it would seem absurdly easy to invent horribly incriminating diatribes and pass them off as the work of others, and yet I've never known this to happen. However, a lot of "editing" of other people's electronic text does goes on, usually well-meant, but often destructive of context and sense.

Let's turn to the pressing peculiarities of online discussion groups and bulletin board systems. "Discussions" on bulletin board systems bear even less relation to actual conversation than e-zines do to actual magazines. I offer as evidence the puzzling fact that there has never been an online discussion of science fiction one tenth so enlightening and interesting as hanging out in the corner of Kate 'n' Damon's living room. In fact, I've never found an online "discussion" of science fiction that was even as tepidly interesting as the usual SFFWA suite at a regional convention. The closest the online world comes to a workable discussion of science fiction is the blather on GEnie, which is as paralyzingly tedious as the SFWA BULLETIN, *without the editing.* And while SF writers spawn like salmon out of regional writing scenes, I'm unaware of any who have emerged from an entirely online writers' circle. There may be some -- I've been expecting them for years -- but I've never seen any. I question whether it's possible.

Since there is no lack of science fiction fans and writers online, and since people online are no stupider than people offline, I attribute this lifelessness in SF online discussion to the inherent limits of the medium. Bulletin board services are best suited to bulletins. They serve best in distributing brief bits of commentary that could fit snugly on a 3X5 index card. In an ongoing bulletin board flurry of commentary, any piece of text longer than a couple of screens produces headachy impatience and a kind of vertigo. Encountering a serious, well-reasoned essay in the flow of more-or-less idle chatter produces an effect like a jetskier hitting an iceberg.

Bulletin boards excel at minor aspects of social housekeeping, such as swapping addresses, spreading headlines, breeding rumors, and, especially, exchanging insults. Bulletin board messages are not genuinely epistolary in nature. They are better compared to answering machine messages, CB radio squibs, souvenir postcards, or stand-up comedy performance complete with hecklers.

This brings us to the matter of "flaming," those sudden eruptions of ranting ill-will so common online. Many online veterans declare flaming to be "juvenile." Flaming, however, knows no age group. Flamers do tend to tone it down after a while, but it's not because of their growing emotional maturity. It's because they've become inured to the socially ulcerating, inherent constraints of the medium. And it's surprising how often a livid, ranting, hateful flame will burst from some previously somnolent user, someone with a lot of experience who seemingly ought to know better.

In many ways it's a source of raw astonishment that anything even resembling a polite community can exist among anonymous strangers who are swapping electronic text on screens. This is social interaction with a desperate flatness of affect. There's no voice, no pitch, stress, timing or emphasis in online commentary. There's no body language, no sight, smell, or touch, no pheromones, no breath of life. The best emotional signal one can send online is the skeletal revenant of a disarming smile: the graphically repugnant "emoticon": :-)

There's supposed to be a lot of difference between the hurtful online statement "You're a moron," and the tastefully facetious statement "You're a moron :-)". I question whether this is really the case, emoticon or no. And even the emoticon doesn't help much in one's halting interaction with the occasional online stranger who is, in fact, gravely sociopathic. Online communication can wonderfully liberate the tender soul of some well-meaning personage who, for whatever reason, is physically uncharismatic. Unfortunately, online communication also fertilizes the eccentricities of hopeless cranks, who at last find themselves in firm possession of a wondrous soapbox that the Trilateral Commission and the Men In Black had previously denied them.

I've never gotten a piece of hate e-mail. I've never been seriously harassed or threatened by e-mail. I don't understand why not, and in fact I fully expect it to happen someday. In the meantime, as with the rarity of e-forgery, I marvel at the winsome goodwill of the online community.

However, I've gotten quite a lot of e-mail that, by all rights, should have been written in crayon by a person whom a kindly society had deprived of sharp objects. It can often take several exchanges of e-mail to bring forth a realization that would have taken perhaps seven seconds of contact in real life: *this person is unhinged.* The effect can be disquieting. (Actually, in my personal experience it's usually more disquieting for the unhappy wretch e-mailing me, as most amateur madfolk fare rather poorly when exposed to a science fiction professional -- but the general principle still holds.)

E-mail has great immediacy. Its movement is very swift, electronically swift, and yet it does not intrude into the texture of one's life the way a phone call too often does. You read e-mail at a time when you are ready to read it, a time when you are mentally prepared for the experience. This is a very great advantage.

However, there is a subtler time problem with e-mail -- a synchronization problem. If User Able log on every day and User Betty logs on once a week, it peculiarly affects the nature of their online relationship. For Betty, Able is a steadying, constant presence, someone who "always sends me mail," while for Able, Betty is a spasmodic interloper who always wants to talk about last week's stale news.

The synchrony problem intensifies if User Cecil is widely distributing text files with his e-mail address attached. Now Cecil will get e-mail from all over the world eager to discuss matters he distributed weeks, months, even years ago. This lack of timeliness on the part of the reader is not the readers' fault. Once released, Cecil's texts can be redistributed again and again by anyone who stumbles across them. Worse yet, any clues about the date of their creation are often lost or edited somewhere in the spidery tatters of the distribution network. Cecil's supposedly lightning-swift electronic texts can travel as slowly, unexpectedly and randomly as a messages in bottles.

Another basic temporal difficulty is the performance crunch. If User Betty has to answer 50 pieces of e-mail in an hour and User Able handles only five, no amount of goodwill or eloquence will allow Able and Betty to communicate on equal terms. Able will feel neglected by Betty's brusque and hasty replies; Betty will feel smothered by Able's discursive, insistent meanderings. Eventually they will come to regard one another as exploitative attention-vampires.

Over the past three years, I've made increasing use of the Internet as a vanity press. My CATSCAN columns are available online; so are my F&SF Science columns. I deliberately pitched them overboard into the seas of cyberspace, and the results have been intriguing. While many people online read the CATSCAN columns -- or at least, I know that they download them off the WELL gopher -- I get little direct response from them. Except, that is, for Catscan Ten, "A Statement of Principle," which involved the computer underground. The online response to that particular article was frantic, with e-mail pouring in from Italy, New Zealand, Singapore, Britain and every techie campus in the USA; all in all, I must have gotten five hundred responses.

The response to the Science columns seems to vary in direct proportion to their relevance to computer science. A column about the space program, which got a lot of printed response, aroused very tepid interest online. But my column "Internet" provoked scores of replies, and seems to have an electronic reprint life entirely its own. It keeps re-surfacing again and again, under a variety of titles and often annoyingly "edited."

On New Years Day 1994, I released the entire text of HACKER CRACKDOWN electronically, including a new foreword and afterword.

At first, very little happened, except for large numbers of timid queries from people who wanted to reproduce the text electronically and were anxious not to be crushed by my publisher. After a month, several of the larger systems had HACKER CRACKDOWN up online and people began to lose their fear. It's now available on the WELL, tic.com, ftp.eff.org., from the Gutenberg Project, and is widely available in Europe. There's a Hypercard version, and a Newton version, and various compacted versions in different data formats, and so forth.

At the moment -- mid-February -- I'm getting three or four direct responses a day, about twenty-five e-mail HACKER fanletters a week. Most of them come from people who say they wanted to buy the printed book but couldn't afford it (teenagers, college students) or who wanted the book but couldn't find it anywhere (Norwegians, Icelanders, Germans, Israelis, vision-impaired online people with electronic readers in their boxes).

I don't know whether distributing the book electronically will damage its commercial prospects as a printed book. People always ask me this question -- as if generating cash-in-hand were my only conceivable reason for writing a book. I doubt there is any real way to judge the effect on sales. The paperback has only been out since November; but even if the print version stopped selling entirely, that wouldn't prove anything. HACKER CRACKDOWN was very topical, involving a contemporary scandal in a community which, though spreading rapidly, is still very limited in scope and influence. Books of that sort tend to have a short shelf-life. In fact, that was the main reason I gave the book away fairly rapidly. There's not much point in giving something away something no longer useful.

I wouldn't recommend that every author should give books away online. It was an experiment on my part, a literateur's way of literarily probing the Net. I do believe that a day must come when online electronic text profoundly changes the structure and economics of print publishing. But I believe that day is still a ways off -- maybe even decades off. The nature of electronic text, and of the networks that distribute it, is so volatile, so full of unknown factors, that I can't make a balanced judgment about the probabilities, and I don't think anyone can. I wouldn't be surprised ten years from now if all books worthy of serious attention were routinely placed on the Internet. And I wouldn't be surprised if the Internet itself ceased to exist and cypherpunks were being grilled in hearings by the House Unamerican Activities Committee circa 2005. The Net could go any of dozens of ways, and though I have some pretty firm ideas of the ways I would like it to go, I don't flatter myself that I have much influence on the vast amoebic movement of this enormous beast.

In the meanwhile, I haven't given away any of my novels, and have no plans to. I might give away a novel on Internet if it seemed a useful gesture, but it doesn't. Frankly, I doubt whether there is any real interest at all on the Net in science fiction novels, by me or by anyone else -- unless those books are somehow intimately and thoroughly involved with the Net. The Net is interested in the Net -- netspiders are, in that sense, much like ham radio people -- people who bounce signals off the ionosphere all the way to Madagascar so as to ask: "Well - - what kinda hamshack ya got?"

I myself would have next-to-no interest in an SF book online, even if it were free, and the idea of paying for one is ludicrous. I have a free copy of Gibson's Voyager books on disk, and though they're said to be elegant examples of electronic publishing, I can't make the time even to load them into the Macintosh and see how they look. If some other colleague offered a novel online, I'm almost certain that I'd wait for a print version before I read it. I can't say why I feel this peculiar repugnance, really; it may be sheer antiquated nonsense on my part. But it's not a "prejudice" by any means -- it's firmly based on years of hands-on judgement. I don't think novels function as electronic text -- I feel this very strongly, and I think it's a very general opinion. It's something to do with the surround -- with the peculiar sense that while consuming electronic text one is missing certain essential vitamins.

I don't want to read novels while I'm sitting at my desk and staring rigidly into a screen. Laptops are little better; they leave you tethered to a wall and/or worried about your battery. Improving the tech may help -- but enthusiasts have been saying that for years. Better display may only illuminate the deeper discords in the nature of electronic text.

I don't read novels and stories online, but I do scroll through unbelievable amounts of electronic text. The difference is in the material. Electronic text is not literature, it's not even genre literature, it's paraliterature, in the way that electronic "conversation" is a peculiar kind of subsensory perception, a human intercourse so antiseptically safe as to have membraned out the entire human body. Speech and e-text and print are "all words," but only in a very basic sense -- like in the way that ice and steam and water are all H2O.

My relationship to my online readers is a relationship of sorts: a narrow and peculiarly restricted kind of relationship. It's very much like the relationship between an author at a bookstore signing and the line of people with his books. Ninety percent of the people who write me online ask for nothing more than a ritual acknowledgement of their existence. They say "thank you for writing this" and I reply "you're quite welcome" and they depart the electronic premises forever, quite satisfied. It's very much like the bookstore fan who wants his copy of ISLANDS IN THE NET inscribed "To Jim." Not because he expects me to remember that his name is Jim, or even that I ever met him; what he wants is a ritual validation of his personhood by someone he regards as a celebrity. Nothing wrong with this; it's part of the game, part of society, and e-mail serves this function very well. In fact, as an author I'd have to say that e- mail is the best method I've ever found for dealing with the public.

I have a hard time maintaining friendships via e-mail alone. Though I get a lot of e-mail from friends, I have no sustained relationship with any person whom I've met only by and through e-mail. I've heard of this being done, but I've never done it myself. I uncharitably speculate that it's because I already have a life.

I can already sense the nature of my next major online challenge. I will have to deal with the consequences of a spectacularly growing Internet and my slowly growing notoriety within it. Increasing traffic on the Information Highway is slowly but surely overwhelming me. Lately, I have begun logging onto my home system, the WELL, every day; not by choice but by necessity. I've become much better at online research, and my use of my online time is much more efficient. But there are limits, and the limits are visibly approaching.

I'll never forget the strange chill I felt when I once logged onto the WELL after a brief absence and found 115 pieces of mail awaiting me -- *every one of which was interesting.* There was simply *nothing left to skip.* I was captivated by all of it, and it was all there right at my fingertips, and I suddenly understood why certain unlucky souls rupture their wrist tendons at the keyboard.

An hour a day online is hard work, but I feel it's worth it; the stuff I get online is no longer soup, I'm getting real cubes of bouillon online, nuggets of information of intense interest that are unattainable anywhere else. But if this goes on I'll be beaten to a pulp; I'll be pelted into a coma with little croutons of incoming data. Somehow I'm going to have to find a way to make it stop. And it's not just dry data that is getting out of hand, but the socialization, the increasing demands online for my personal attention. As more and more people obtain my net-address, my replies must become briefer and briefer. The crush of the virtual crowd will eventually overwhelm me.

When that happens, I believe I'll have to take stern measures. I could simply ignore unsolicited mail. But that seems a stopgap measure. I'll probably have to drop my current online identity, and go back online incognito. It's a pretty problem in virtual etiquette: who will get my new address and who will have to be dropped? How will I convince people to maintain the secrecy of my new ID when the whole raison d'etre of the infobahn is instant access to anybody anywhere anytime?

I don't know yet. But if I keep at it I'm sure I'll learn something.