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A Confederacy of Dunces

(With Apologies to the Memory of John Kennedy Toole)

by MAXINE

Reprinted from December, 1996

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CYBERSPACE - I like so many other people desperate not be behind-the-curve, have spent the last few months doing the hard work of getting myself onto the Information Superhighway. I have heard all the jokes, so don't bother.

One thing I can tell you is that it is no laughing matter to sacrifice hours of your life to be trendy. I have learned arcane concepts like "Server" and VRML(pronounced Vermel or Vermil by the geeks who care about this stuff). I know that Java is not coffee, and Shockwave is not what happens went you past the speed of sound in a jet airplane. I have an IP connection. I surf the Web with the best of them. Unlike some of the cognoscenti, my bookmark list in Netscape is voluminous.

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I know I'll never get the last four months back, I'll never get rid of the stooped shoulders or the bleary eyes from staring at a computer screen. But now me and my Macintosh are hot items in the world of online---I try to keep up with what PubMan, our beloved Rodya, is about. I belong to three BBSes and am on Compuserve and the WELL(so I can see what Rod says about his writers behind our backs.) I use Netscape 2.0 as my World Wide Web('the Web') browser.

When Rod wrote somewhere that SUCK, the Web daily, was the "ombudsmen of the Web", I dutifully went to their page to see what the hell he meant. Now they are owned by HOTWIRED, the Web version of WIRED magazine and I know who John Perry Barlow and Bruce Sterling are.

Has the Web changed my life? Am I part of the new paradigm of the future, and the future of computing? Does asking myself questions in an article to set up my thesis make me sound more like Rod---an accusation Krush readily bandies---than I would like to. No; no; and yes.

The first part of my conundrum is being a thirty-seven year old woman in cyberspace, a "community" dominated by highly competitive males who believe that flaming each other is a participatory sport to be lauded rather than shunned. Most of the men here are bolder than they would be face-to-face, with each other, and with us few women who have gravitated here for our individual, personal reasons. You can imagine the implications in the various areas of online interaction, both intellectual and sexual.

The second is my age, as exposed above. Most of the women here are much younger than I. I know that the standard definition of a generation is 25 years. Not so, says Maxine. The women I meet here mention bands I've never even heard of, food I'd gag over, doing things to their nostrils, ears, eyebrows, and more private parts that I wouldn't dream of, let alone endure. They are not yet veterans of the dating, relationship, career, to-bear-children-or-not, political or involvement wars. "You have not lived until you have been emotionally damaged," Rod writes in one of his novels. These people are just beginning to taste life.

I NEVER PLANNED TO FEEL "OLD" AT 37! DAMMIT!

Third, as a sentient being, I prefer not to believe the thesis presented by Murray and Hernstein in the now-notorious Bell Curve. I do not believe that people with an inclination toward and access to(by way of income) this new information technology are walling themselves off, intellectually, spiritually and physically, from the lumpen masses of people who are deprived by the capitalistic system we endure. I do not want to believe that I will live behind a wall in some "secure community" of elites who no longer want to look at the dispossessed, let alone associate with them. That is a dystopian nightmare, as far as I'm concerned. But too much of the tone and attitude of people I find here in cyberspace supports just those types of elitist, classist assumptions.

And let's not even talk about race. As far as I can determine, cyberspace is 98.9% Caucasian.

Fourth, and the biggest, is that after the investment of my time and brainpower, I have to admit that I've seen some neat things out here. I've laughed at stuff. But in all the newness and neatness, I don't think I've experienced anything as neat as a "butterfly kiss".(That's when someone blinks their eyelash against your cheek---or wherever.) There's been no soul-contact like reading a novel, no shattering revelation like you get the first time you have a good relationship and go into that transcendental stage Charlie the Tuna celebrates in his piece, "The Church of Sex".

I have made contact with more people, but that contact was across great distance and so seems akin to "touching" them and learning their ideas by calling those telephone "party" lines that were so popular five or ten years ago. What do I really KNOW about these people whose Web pages or posts I have chosen?

I feel, sometimes, after spending hours(and dollars) in the CB Simulator of Compuserve, or its Journalism Forum, looking at People or New York Magazine Online, or in their forums, live chatting in one of my BBS's, or "surfing" the net, that I have touched hundreds of people in a less substantial way than the aforementioned "butterfly kiss".

I feel, frankly, that all I have done is joined that confederacy of dunces who have rushed to something which hype, happenstance, boredom and not-so-subtle coercion has made us all feel we need to embrace. And this thought, I believe justifiably, saddens me....