Space Venturi, net.detective

A Ramblin' Gamblin' Willie story by Greg Swann

I pretty much figure there's a micron or two of bullshit in just about everything I hear. Certainly, it's reasonable to hold all claims in doubt until you have to commit to a course of action.

A crack team of 5,000 chimpanzees with 5,000 Pentiums (Pentia?) could produce a convincing email header in only 5,000 years, except it would be neater and more readable.

There are a few net.stars and a few net.black-holes and there is a whale of a lot of net.noise. Like flashing lights on the strip in Vegas, at first there's enough and then there's way too much, and after a while only most colorful emerge from the chaos...


	From: Space Venturi, net.detective <data@risk>
	To: Willie <rgw@[omitted].com>
	Subject: You've been had

	You've been had.

	Space Venturi, net.detective

Like, I'm so sure. I pretty much figure there's a micron or two of bullshit in just about everything I hear. Certainly, it's reasonable to hold all claims in doubt until you have to commit to a course of action. Even then, you can't guarantee that everything you think is true really is true. You just have to behave as though it were and hope for the best. Thus:


	From: Willie <rgw@[omitted].com>
	To: Space Venturi, net.detective <data@risk>
	Subject: Re: You've been had

	>You've been had.

	Indeed. Who hasn't?

	(RGW)

And: you guessed it: I too am a diddling little proto-dweeb. It's one of those obvious things we never talk about, like flatulence and sex among the elderly, but I'm wired, just like you. I'm a little hypocritical, because I've always been hyper-critical of writerly types who affect to believe that technological advancement stopped with the Hansom cab and the cribbage board, but at last I have come clean.

I confess: I TelNet into a commercial InterNet server from FreeNets and CyberCafés all across the fruit-flavored plain. Mostly I do email, but I sometimes lurk in UseNet, and I've noodled around on the World Wide Web on borrowed accounts. You see? I can babble that jabber just as good as the next guy, and neither one of us knows what the hell we're talking about. But: I am quite certain the InterNet will be the secret to my success, if I ever have any.


	From: Space Venturi, net.detective <ill@ease>
	To: Willie <rgw@[omitted].com>
	Subject: Get a clue!

	I mean it, you've been had!

	data@risk is a bogus address, but I captured your
	reply anyway. A reply to ill@ease will bounce, but
	I'll still get it.

	Are you beginning to get a clue?

	Pheel the phlow!,

	Space

I'm omitting all of the email header garbage. A crack team of 5,000 chimpanzees with 5,000 Pentiums (Pentia?) could produce a convincing email header in only 5,000 years, except it would be neater and more readable.

And: I don't know why Space Venturi, mysterious and possibly crazy person, was talking to me. I don't talk to strangers much, so I don't hear from them much, either. Junk mail's the same all over, even if your only address is electronic: if you don't talk to them, they don't talk to you.

I was batting away at a FreeNet machine at a huge and completely urine-soaked public library. Space Venturi and I were trading mail practically in real-time, which is a term of babbling jabber that means "fast compared to a letter and slow compared to a phone call". There is a protocol called InterNet Relay Chat that I've never tried. It's sort of like Ham radio for fast typists, only more complicated. As nearly as I can tell, it's dominated by men pretending to be women. Evidently it tickles their innards that no one will believe they're women. The joke's on them, though, since 5,000 chimpanzees have offered to pretend to be women in exchange for 5,000 ISDN modems and a cappuccino machine.


	From: Willie <rgw@[omitted].com>
	To: Space Venturi, net.detective <ill@ease>
	Subject: Re: Get a clue!

	>Are you beginning to get a clue?

	I'm beginning to get a headache. Would you
	mind telling me what you're talking about? Or
	else you could go away. Wouldn't _that_ be
	mysterious...?

	(RGW)

The reply was virtually instantaneous. Which should have told me something, if I had known anything to begin with.


	From: Space Venturi, net.detective <lonely@the.top>
	To: Willie <rgw@[omitted].com>
	Subject: Jeesh!

	Look! Imagine you're roller-blading at the
	Guggenheim Museum, only it's an infinite
	nautilus. The farther you go, the faster you go.
	The faster you go, the tighter the spiral gets.

	Faster! Tighter! Faster! Tighter! ARRRGH!!

	Space

CyberPorn after all?


	From: Willie <rgw@[omitted].com>
	To: Space Venturi, net.detective <lonely@the.top>
	Subject: Re: Jeesh!

	>Faster! Tighter! Faster! Tighter! ARRRGH!!

	Yeah. So?

	(RGW)

I never said I'm not an idiot, did I?


	From: Space Venturi, net.detective <men@work>
	To: Willie <rgw@[omitted].com>
	Subject: Who dresses you?

	>>Faster! Tighter! Faster! Tighter! ARRRGH!!

	>Yeah. So?

	An infinite nautilus spiral will collapse to a
	single point...

	Get it?!!!

	Space

Oh, sure.


	From: Willie <rgw@[omitted].com>
	To: Space Venturi, net.detective <men@work>
	Subject: Re: Who dresses you?

	>An infinite nautilus spiral will collapse to a
	single point...

	Yeah. So?

	(RGW)

Again the reply was instantaneous, and it was really starting to bug me. Like any virtual metropolis, Netropolis is crawling with net.nuts, but for some reason I was feeling a little bit preyed upon.


	From: Space Venturi, net.detective
	      <sincerely@a.loss.for.words>
	To: Willie <rgw@[omitted].com>
	Subject: Despair...

	>>An infinite nautilus spiral will collapse
	to a single point...

	>Yeah. So?

	So?

	So?!

	So, data spasm!

	So, net spasm!!

	Twisted backbone and incinerated firewalls!!

	Does this mean NOTHING to you?

	Contemptuously,

	Space Venturi, net.detective

This is a true fact: the InterNet is everything it's cracking up to be. We hear all about the promise, about how every proto-revolutionary can be his own Tom Paine and every last little cause, movement, claque or ideology can at last break through the de facto censorious impulses of the for-profit marketplace of ideas, break through and thrive in the concrete gardens of the Information Superhighway.

What the InterNet is really like is this: imagine that you're sitting in a packed stadium, and you can tune in selectively on the conversations going on all around you. In the bleachers behind you, a woman says, "Well, Tammy says she didn't take the pearls, and I can't call her a liar, can I?" In the box seats across the way, an old man says, "Oy! Such gas I'm having!" And at first it seems like such a thrill to peek into the private lives of thousands of unsuspecting strangers. But gradually you come to realize that their private lives are mostly pretty boring, and much of what they have to say is trivial, banal and frequently erroneous.

There are a few net.stars and a few net.black-holes and there is a whale of a lot of net.noise. Like flashing lights on the strip in Vegas, at first there's enough and then there's way too much, and after a while only most colorful emerge from the chaos...


	From: Willie <rgw@[omitted].com>
	To: Space Venturi, net.detective
	    <sincerely@a.loss.for.words>
	Subject: Re: Despair...

	>Does this mean NOTHING to you?

	Absolutely nothing. My ignorance is pristine and
	unblemished.

	(RGW)

Clickety-click, my neck had a crick, the fluorescents flickered, somebody snickered: for some reason or another I looked up. The man to my left was a fine urine-soaked specimen himself. He could have been twenty-five or fifty-five, and his clothes, while filthy, were quality stuff. He didn't smell of liquor, just self-neglect. He sat there at his FreeNet terminal mumbling to himself, and I could pick out a few words every now and then. "Pressure differential," emerged from the chaos, and "at the constriction" and "relative velocity." Pretty fancy vocabulary for a bum, you might think, but the truth is that the shuffling legions of madness shuffle in from all walks of life.

I happened to look at his screen, and at the bottom were these words: "You've been had."

And I looked to my own screen and saw this:


	From: Space Venturi, net.detective <never@peace>
	To: Willie <rgw@[omitted].com>
	Subject: You've been had

	You've been had.

	Space Venturi, net.detective

Like, I'm so sure.


	From: Willie <rgw@[omitted].com>
	To: Space Venturi, net.detective <never@peace>
	Subject: Re: You've been had

	>You've been had.

	Indeed. Who hasn't?

	(RGW)

Ramblin' Gamblin' Willie can be contacted at rgw@[omitted].com, but Space Venturi alone knows where that is...

gswann@presenceofmind.net