A Circle in a Decade: Hope
On one of my journeys between L.A. and Sioux Falls I picked up Wired for some moral support. Wartime malaise has gotten the better of me and I've decided less is more. Less news gathering, less television, fewer wartime updates - more isolation, more peace, more reflection. I've decided on no CNN, no Today Show and no more panels. A weekly session with The Economist, the Sunday L.A. Times, and a visit each day with Arts & Letters Daily (many good links to Arab journals) will suffice for my information.
So in the airport I find myself eying Wired's friendly and buoyant cover in bright yellow with daisies occupying its center. It's an anniversary issue; Wired is 10 years of age. The year I finished high school and came back to the US after yet another decade long hiatus in East Africa, Wired was born. The cover article begins:
'Recession. Iraq. Hard times in Silicon Valley. Hell of a time to be optimistic. Welcome to 1993, the year Wired was born.'
A word lodges itself into my mind: epoch. It makes me think how fragile that hope that was Wired had to be at such a time as that - networks were no more than bulletin boards, the internet was usenet and gray backgrounds, browsed in raw text on Unix servers. It makes me remember my first machine, a small gray Apple Powerbook - asking what was TCP/IP and getting the excited and potent response: it is the language of the internet. What William Gibson saw in his 1984 book Neuromancer - cyberpunks, cowboys, angels, The Net, The Matrix - the same William Gibson whose Johny Mnemonic featured a dolphin running a computer - Mr. William Gibson sci-fi that is too fantastic - what he saw began as people in California's middle north with hope, ideas and no rules.
There have been many palpable culture shifts decorating history with stories like the last decade but as I immerse myself in the Wired I feel a special connection to the events. It was my revolution, it was my story. It was me who sheepishly plugged in my AppleTalk connector in the dorm room and browsed the What's Cool section of Netscape, it was me who made a personal homepage and entertained comments from friends: 'Must have a lot of time on your hands...'. I begged for a ride once to Tower Records on Beach Blvd so that I could buy The Cyberpunk Fakebook. I was in love with St. Jude and I wanted to be R.U. Sirius. I gorged myself on Mondo and dreamt of being a hacker.
As the present year rears its massive, ugly, spirit crushing visage, I gaze it directly in the eye like the kid in that one X-men episode who could concoct the worst nightmares but found out he could also imagine himself as anything. Anything to throttle his self-concocted enemies. He found it was only courage he needed to imagine himself as such, not the fear that his own fantasies would swallow him up.
The memory of a decade is a surprisingly potent precedent upon which to face the present and it takes a bit of courage to trust that it can be seen as such. But maybe, in the bowels of the American prairie, Bastille day was a decade ago and the real infrastructure of a revolution is taking its grip.
12:45:14 AM 
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