Cyberspace

Electrons were launched like scout ships across static oceans, along routes gleaming copper and gold from silicon ports. The human empire had walked on every shore of its planet that it was possible to walk. Space had closed in on it, grown tight around its girth. But still, it needed to advance. So it reasoned the means by which to create space. Infinite space. Those first electron scouts were sent to discover the new Eden, the virgin continent, the new world. They came back to their designers with hope and plausibility. There was a New World. It was Cyberspace.

With a promise and a dream, life rushed in. Eager prospectors who saw the means to profit in it made port, putting cyberspace’s ready resources to use. It had cheap land to store information. A data trade route that bested the fastest roads the world could offer. Pastures in which to play, dangerous dimensions to explore. The ability to speak out across time and space. The more humans needed space, the bigger cyberspace became to fill that need.

But what was cyberspace, really? What set it apart from the real world?

The answer goes back way further than silicon and gold. The primal cyberspace was flesh and sound, then ink and canvas, and only now is it electronic code. Cyberspace is humanity’s oldest companion and greatest asset. It is, by the very nature of the word, ‘A place of guiding systems’. Whenever something holds inside of it information of things that are outside of it, that’s cyberspace. Everything that is real holds only the information that exists within its own form. A tree holds information about chlorophyll and photosynthesis and osmosis - only things about its unique self and the forces that have shaped it. But the abstract can be that same tree mashed and pulped into a book, filled with stories of planets and people, a medium through which information is passed, a language. Cyberspace was there in the savannah when a precursor human spotted a wildcat and ran home with its image inside to tell the tribe. Cyberspace was restive in the caves, splashed across the rocks with tales of birds and beasts and battles, waiting to update a user.

Cyberspace grew, and grew, and ran rampant whenever reality constricted, or broke apart to reveal what was hidden in its own spaces. Until it at last evolved past all former imagining into ones and zeros, photons and electrons, silicon and gold.

They once called it the Republic of Letters.

It was envisioned as a free exchange of information and ideas. A place where philosophies could be presented in abstraction, before selection for use in Reality. A place where information could be accumulated before judgements were passed on their content. A prototype, an imagination.

You want to know what cyberspace is? Shut your eyes and think. That’s cyberspace.

Now imagine everyone else thinking right at this moment. All those humming, drumming, buzzing thoughts, just beyond the real world. The whole planet is pulsating with it. Small notions, grand ideas. Each held in their own little cyber-sole, swimming in a school of cyber-phish. Communicating constantly, reading one another. Each gets drawn up in a network. Each contributes, in some small way, to the mainframe of a single all-inclusive mind. We now call that mind The Internet.

Of course, a very large part of it is devoted to memes and porn. That’s how a mind works, you see. The fleeting whims and jokes and fears and fragmentary notions sit bottom-heavy, rudimentary ruminations pulsing with energy, leaping up to the top and trying to stay there for as long as possible. That’s society. Each little tweet and tumble is a single possibility in a spectrum of possibilities, submitted to the senses and declared true and valid, or not, or a confusion of the two. But it is within our power to select the thoughts that are worth paying attention to; an important memory shared through flashbacks of pictures or video. News that may compromise or assist the network as a whole. Well-expressed ideas which provide the contextual framework for the influx of data.  The possibilities emerge over and over again to assert their probability, demanding attention and explanation.

We are not The Internet. Not its consciousness, not its intention, not what makes its executive decisions. If such a higher function exists in our great, many-headed cyber-brain, it has never revealed itself. What we are as its users are things used; little synapses firing off in cyberspace, forming something intelligible only on a large scale. But to this leviathan, we are also its citizens. And as its citizens we have something of a responsibility to understand its mechanisms. Like any space on Earth, Cyberspace has its own state, ideology, economy and culture.

New Terminology: Differentiating Cyberspaces

If I talked about how cyberspace looked in a one-user mind, the picture would be very different from how it looks in the internet. The way information travels through it is the same, but the information itself varies. It is composed of wholly exotic permutations of fictive structure. In the process of analyzing this structure, it helps to approach each in turn, careful not to muddy issues by running rampant paths from one realm to the next.

Intraspace

[Intra (within, exclusive) + Space (The intersection of dimensions)]

An exclusive intersection of dimensions

Intraspace is the cyberspace of a mind operating on an individual level. It is filled with conceptual patterns that allow us to make sense of what is around us, and perceptual figments or ‘spirits’ that are waiting to be fitted into a pattern, or form a pattern of their own.

Imagine for the moment that the human mind is a novel that you are writing. In a physical sense, it is a book with a leather cover for a skull, blank pages awaiting abstraction and ink to serve as a medium of abstract symbolism.

You start off writing this novel on Chapter One. Word by word, sentence by sentence, it begins to take form. You write the word ‘knife’. You elaborate a little more and write ‘the knife cut’. Already from the spirit of a few words, a conscious reader gets an idea of what kind of novel this is: a slasher thriller.

But then you finish rounding off the sentence into a grounded concept: ‘The knife cut the salmon’s flesh into three edible strips and the smiling sushi chef placed them atop three scrumptious lumps of rice.’

The words – the spiritual figments – are present in each stage of the process, but they can confuse the reader when taken by themselves. They have to be considered with a degree of anticipation for more information if they are to make any sense.

You finish off the page, and reread what you’ve written. Already there’s a pattern emerging. You’ve used the word ‘like’ an inordinate number of times, and the word ‘massive’ at least seven. You could accept this as your literary style, and proceed deeper into the book page by page until the pattern of the novel is complete. This is the equivalent of adopting a worldview based on the things that you know – deciding that it’s the best way to get things done, and continuing to do it. What works on a small scale, works for mass production, right?

But then you decide that maybe this isn’t the best way to go forward. Maybe the style was wrong, and you really should be writing a slasher thriller. Maybe you should just see what it looks like when you remove the unnecessary ‘like’s and find a few synonyms for ‘massive’. You turn the page.

Chapter One, you start again.

This part of the process is lateral, generative thinking, in which you produce a number of competing patterns in order to select the best one. You could fill the whole book with different versions of Chapter One, and still not exhaust all the possibilities. Lateral thinking is often accompanied by observation, or what we can call inductive thought. The more possibilities of pattern you are aware of, the greater chance there is that you will find a naturally superior way in which to stylize information. But without pausing that industrious work at some point, you’ll never get past Chapter One.

After five drafts of the first page, you select what you see as the best. The metaphors are rich, but the vocabulary is simple. It’s the kind of writing that engages the senses, but packs deliberate symbolism behind every sensation. Eagerly, you rush forward.

Page after page, the book gets deeper. The story is simple: you set out the premises on the very first page, and now you’re just following them to their most natural conclusion.

·         The protagonist is Suzie.

·         Suzie likes Sushi.

So it would be pretty odd if in Chapter Three Suzie decided to open up an Italian restaurant. Less believable than if Suzie decided to become a sushi chef, anyway.

This pattern extrapolation moving forward is vertical thinking, or Logic, in which you take the things that you know and squeeze as much information out of them as possible, stacking up the cubes of data block by block to make the story as tall or as ‘deep’ as possible.

But every now and then, just like in real life, you add more lateral possibilities to the novel to bring richness to the story. The main plot – the main pattern – is about Suzie travelling to Japan to learn to be a master sushi chef. But there’s also a subplot about a Japanese wishing tree where Suzie makes an offering to a kami spirit and begs it to help her become the best sushi chef in the world. This happens in Chapter Seven, so you rush ahead and write Chapter Seven, and then know that logically for Suzie to get from Chapter Three to Chapter Seven she has to take a plane across from Jamaica, where she grew up.

We do this all the time in Intraspace. On one level, we’re deepening the story of our day-to-day existence. But then we decide that in the future, we might like the pattern of our life to change. So we begin to construct a pattern between the present and that possible future with a set of concrete changes: learning a language, learning a craft, dealing with emotional barriers. When the two patterns merge, they form a kind of super-concept that makes a new kind of sense we couldn’t possibly have been aware of just by imagining the possibility.

The novel continues. With twenty chapters behind you, you’ve got pretty good at this. Suzie’s kami answered her prayer and took her into the spirit world to be the sushi chef of the gods, where this kami fell in love with her and decided she could never go home. Suzie laces his next meal with a magical poison, and instead of dying he turns into an Oni. She escapes until such a time as she can feed him the cure, which heals his spirit and softens him to the idea of her going back to her own world.

And while the story’s imagined space has broadened dimensions laterally and vertically, so your own configuration of cyberspace has mirrored that expansion. Do I use the word ‘terrified’ here, or ‘frightened’?  you consider laterally. You find synonyms, because there’s one that’ll most accurately portray the emotion in context. You select it, running it up the flagpole vertically, and it can have a dramatic effect on the story. You do this about twenty times a minute in the process of writing, refining your style, editing to break up old patterns and replace them with better ones.

**

We use terms like ‘lateral’ and ‘vertical’ to emphasize that Intraspace is space. Lateral length is a dimension, and vertical height is a dimension. A series of intersecting points between them* form a shape of consciousness we refer to as ‘Ego’. The bigger the Ego is, the more self-conscious it is – the more aware it is of the pattern that has been scrawled across the intraspace by its thoughts**.

* These intersection points can be thought of as memory ‘beacons’; points of awareness within the mind than hold ideas together as though they were constantly being viewed, either episodically or through abstract connections to other ideas that are being viewed.

**Which isn’t to say a person with a big ego is a particularly adept thinker, or has made a sensible pattern across their intraspace. It just means that they are aware of their own ability to think. The consequent metaphors for such people are bound up in Earthling meatspace analogies, where air is often thought of as the basic medium for empty space. People with a big ego and little pattern are thought of as ‘windbags’, or ‘full of hot air’. A person with any ego in an undeveloped intraspace is an ‘airhead’.

But ego doesn’t encompass the whole pattern scrawled by thoughts, because we forget things; sometimes deliberately, but mostly unintentionally. They never really go away, they just reside outside of the shape of the Ego. And because we have eyes and ears and noses we’re getting these little nodes of thought popping up representational images in Intraspace all the time, and there’s no way we can be aware of them all at once. So Intraspace is automatically broadened by inductive data (expands laterally), and some of that data more fluidly yields itself to immediate knowledge of a concept (such as the perception of a clock’s moving gears giving a better understanding of mechanics than the clock’s face), and this is the basic awareness of reality we attribute to the sentience of animals.

But it’s also the grounding for what we call the Id – the unconscious functions of Intraspace that operate outside of memory and outside of directed thought. The mechanism of the mind sorts through data nodes in order to organize them the most effectively. In some cases a perceptual permutation of data may be structurally similar to a conceptual form of another permutation. So they end up being organized in a way that groups them together. So when the conscious center shifts – such as when the Ego expands or behaves in a way that deliberately seeks out an alternative pattern, in dreaming or creative thought – then we end up with a surreal combination of confused symbols. A giant rabbit checks the watch it keeps in little red waistcoat. The hydra rears its head, with many mouths attacking to feed a single corporate body. The Tower looms above, telling its own story in endless cycles revisited.

Part of why these symbols are dragged into the ego is because they are relevant composites of data structures already within conscious awareness.  This means that when consciousness focuses on a pattern in its immediate memory, the unconscious mind prioritizes data that is relevant to that memory. Actively we think ‘loan shark’ and understand what that description represents. But it is likely we will also get an image in our heads of something else, like a businessman in a pinstripe suit and a red tie, smiling with a row of shark teeth. This kind of sympathetic repatterning is how the Ego and Id interact. It’s often described as a ‘bubbling up’, as though there’s been a reaction in the Id that results in a particularly volatile association. But since the brain uses electricity I prefer to see in as a static discharge: as the brain storms, pockets of clouded data get charged with electrons. They are ‘grounded’ by an assembly of thoughts in the ego, and spark them as though pulled to a lightning conductor. Sometimes those thoughts are coherent enough to charge a lightbulb moment.

The Superego is at once similar and different from the Id. Like the Id, it exists in that realm of unconsciousness surrounding the Ego. But unlike it, it doesn’t produce and merge data: It orders it. This is subtly different from what happens when percepts collide in the Id: When the Superego functions correctly it is non-perceptual, focused rather on integrating conceptual information. But concepts have to be generated by first passing through the ego.

There were these stencil spinning tops that were popular when I was a kid, and I think of them as a perceptual image of the Ego-Superego interaction. The spinning top is the ego, moving across a piece of paper that plays the part of surrounding Intraspace. The needle is the accumulated pressure of conscious thought, pressing deeply into the page so as to make a mark. The needle at the tip of the spinning top roves around quite a bit, leaving a complicated trace of pattern that could, under analysis, tell a person everything about the spinning top that they want to know. If the spinning top is the ego, then that pattern is the ego extended to every instant of its existence – consciousness’s profits unrestricted by time and space – The Superego.

The brain is not a stenciled page, so the deeper pattern formed by the roving consciousness is a thought pattern. And the more fixedly the needle of consciousness attends to those patterns, the more difficult it is to get out of them. They form a kind of localized race track in the vicinity of the Ego, though they do not entirely encompassed it. The Ego may have traced an unusual pattern once in a moment of epiphany, only to veer off in another direction.

Id is composed of nodal points: small, localized patterns.

Superego is composed of a nodal network: an extensive, interconnected pattern.

And Ego, to complete the triptych, is pattern recognition and directed pattern formation.

*

Intraspace is a fascinating realm, and arguably the most important of all cyberspace. Every single one of us operates in Intraspace – we can choose to avoid any other platform of existence, but not the platform of existence that allows us to think, and have choice. You have a kind of responsibility to yourself to understand your own mind. Everything done elsewhere is blind grasping until you do.

Socialspace

[Social (Relating to the aggregate of people living in an ordered way) + Space (The intersection of dimensions)]

An intersection of dimensions between people.

The novel you wrote about Suzie and the Kami has come far since where we left it. It’s grown deep and interesting, creative and insightful. But now you want to enable it to do what novels do: you want to share the model of Intraspace you developed with other people.

Socialspace is the cyberspace network held between users in a community, expressed through interaction and conversation. It has some similarities with intraspace, and some very big differences. For starters, nodes of data in intraspace were held as elemental quantities in a formless abyss. In social space, nodes of data are held as people.

Every user functions individually as a percept*, and while it may have deeper concepts and connections running through its Intraspace, the part that they share in Socialspace is two-dimensionally summarized.

*From the perspective of another user.

You aren’t going to try and publish all the drafts of Chapter One that contributed to your novel. You’re going to take out the redundant data and present a concise summary. Just so, when you walk outside wearing a summer hat you don’t announce “This is a hat I am wearing because the sunlight is directly above and I wish to avoid sprouting melanomas.” You just wear the hat, and if that isn’t a clear summary of your actions, you wait for people to ask.

The difficulty with these percepts – these people – is the same as in meatspace and Intraspace. How do you tell which are honestly based in concepts, and which are ‘hallucinatory’ percepts containing very little valuable data? You give the novel to your mother, who reads it. She thinks it’s wonderful. But is that just because she associates it with the percept that is ‘you’ which she nepotistically favors? You decide it’s better to give the novel to an impartial stranger. That stranger thinks it’s awful – but can you rely on the expertise of someone you picked off the street to know good literature?

This specialized function of telling good data from bad is facilitated by a Socialspace operator known as a Maven. Mavens collate sources of data in a social network and analyze them to determine the value of specific sources of data within their field. Should the maven be optimal, they then spread the certainty of their findings to others generously. Mavens aren’t one strange, general profession aside from ordinary life, though in some ways the Otaku fits that description – Mavens are integrated into the functions of everyday society. There are fashion mavens, or coupon mavens, or software mavens. 

There are book mavens who read a lot and would probably be the best choice of person to get an honest opinion about your novel. Quite often their professional life reflects this passion for information, and they become motor experts, or sports commentators, or editors. So this is the function mavens serve to Intraspace innovators: to let them know they’ve made a good summary. To let them know there’s integrity between what they can see in meatspace, and the reams of data encoded into that Intraspace summary.

After finding the right kind of maven, you’re left with the knowledge that your book is actually very good – a literary masterpiece, actually. And while that makes you happy, it hasn’t achieved the very best of what you set out to do. You want your masterpiece to be widely experienced by others, and be considered for a place as a memory beacon in their individual Intraspaces. But the maven can’t help you there. The maven knows what people want – but doesn’t know how people connect.

In Socialspace, intraspace nodes are connected in overarching patterns simply referred to as social networks. Within a social network there are very deeply ingrained paths, just like there are in thought patterns in the mind. The enterprising pioneer (you, the novelist) moves through Socialspace along these paths, trying to find a junction between them. You could ask your friend Arthur to read your book – Arthur is a chatterbox and you know he’ll mention your book to just about anyone he meets in the street. But while Arthur likes spreading information, he doesn’t exactly have many people who consider him a friend, and value his vocalized opinions. However Arthur speaks with a certain reverence about Hildegard, a well-known member of his social network. Hildegard is one of those people who everyone knows and everyone likes – not just in your own social network, but in groups of people you’d never dream of talking to. She is an experienced hiker, and is very active at her community church. And the strange thing about Hildegard that separates her from Arthur is that she’s everyone’s best friend. They are all desperate to get closer to her by sharing experiences with her, like watching a TV series she’s seen or reading a book that she’s read.

Hildegard is what is called a Supersocial, a person adept at forming data node patterns and then filtering data through that network. It’s estimated that the number of close, intimate relationships an average person can have at any one time is 12. For someone like Hildegard, that number is more in the region of 20. This means that on top of that there are hundreds if not thousands of people in Hildegard’s social network, many of whom are bound to be supersocials themselves.

Often when meeting these kinds of people, you get the sense that you’re an extra, and they are the protagonist. Even though most of the time you assume that because you are the all-seeing narrator of your own life, that makes you the protagonist by default. But in a way this is due to a perspective shift. Sharing your novel through Socialspace isn’t about restructuring your own mind at all – that was Writing It, the process of intraspace. Sharing a novel is about society’s mind, and society’s cyberspace. On that level you really are an extra – a blip of Id data on the extending map of human evolution. The mistake many people make is to attempt to be the conscious center of Socialspace and Intraspace. They believe that to get their novel known they have to be a Supersocial, making dozens of friends, learning to manipulate people they don’t like and get favors from those they do. All this wasted energy just means they have less time to operate on the Intra- level, and the only things they have to seed at the end of the exercise are inferior ideas.

Hildegard is the answer to this. You don’t want to approach Hildegard directly, because just having her blindly promoting your book won’t be an honest projection of enthusiasm – it’ll be reluctant, a favour. Instead, you study the 20 closest people in her network. These are the people you want to give the novel to – especially if one of those people is a maven. How it gets to them doesn’t really matter. 

Shove it in their mailboxes, claim to be doing market research, or just honestly say you’re trying everything you can to get the book off the ground. If the novel is good – which the mavens say it is – then there’s a very high probability it’ll reach Hildegard. And if it does, and she likes it so much she wants to share the experience with others – the novel diffuses through society. Suddenly people have Read That. Which was the point of the whole exercise.

So that’s Socialspace:

You, the pioneering data node, set out with the intention of changing Cyberspace.

The Maven acts as Socialspace’s relevancy feed, presenting valuable percept data to Socialspace’s Ego.

The Supersocial is that Ego, a person capable of directing user consciousness. They process the percept and funnel it into a Social Network, the conceptual Superego of society.

Once your data has been passed through the social network – you’re golden. You’re a part of the thinking process of society. You’ve transcended a platform.

Internet

[Inter (Out, Inclusive) + Net (Network: An arrangement of intersecting horizontal and vertical lines)]

A grid embodying the relation between dimensional points.

The Interspace – which I refer to as Internet because otherwise at a glance it could be confused for intraspace – is a growing innovation in the 21^st century linking Socialspace to Intraspace on a digital platform. When we talk of cyberspace generally, we’re referring to the internet. You’ve probably heard of it.

The genius of the internet is in that in using it we become distinctly aware of what is meant by patterns -  how easy it is for data to move in some ways (and for some kinds of data to move) and very difficult for it to move in others. We’ve built artificial constructs that mimic the function of Socialspace user-nodes; Sites like Facebook and MySpace are artificial Supersocials, focused on the automation of the way data spreads within trusted networks and extended interest groups. Sites like Reddit and Tumblr are maven sites, where regular accounts plug choice information. Sites like Youtube, Deviant Art and Wordpress are User sites, designed to exhibit the creations of individual users across a variety of formats. These sites aren’t intended to exist in isolation, but to connect with one another and function in a way that sorts data, exactly as we select information in Intraspace and Socialspace. In a way it can be seen as the next evolutionary step of abstract thinking – a mind the size of a whole planet, each contributing to the focus of our awareness and actions.

Let’s say Hildegard loves your novel. She loves it so much, she finds you and asks you if she can share it with her friends. You give her the nod – the whole point of putting the book out there was to get as many readers as possible. In the bad old days, Hildegard would be forced to traffic the book manually through her Socialspace. But with the internet it’s much easier. Hildegarde has roughly two-thousand friends and nine-hundred followers. So she broadcasts in a single message that she likes your book. Quite a few people pick it up and start reading, hoping to stay relevant to Hildegard through their emotional attachment to her. Then they re-whatever their own review.

By chance you also pick up a Fan. Fans are people who are so in love with a work they are highly motivated to keep it alive in their day-to-day existence. In this regard, you’ve hooked Alice, who likes to make GIF-sets for her Tumblr account. She assembles a group of images that roughly portray the characters and world in your book. In a single collage, she’s depicted a kind of visual ‘blurb’ for your book that’s going to draw in more interest. People who are attracted to visual data more than pure text (let’s face it... that’s practically all of us) are now more inclined to associate your book with sympathetic themes. It’s like having an abstract cover placed over the ideas held within, and put on a bookshelf for people to see it clearly.

Then some mavens in Hildegard’s extended network hear about the book. One of them is an editor, and thinks it has serious publishing potential. The public approval you’ve garnered in the local network proves it. At last, you’ve climbed from simply scrawling the word ‘knife’ to a point of complexity that will affect thousands if not millions of minds, serving as a formal concept in their own ideas and inventions.

The internet managed this by its own lateral and vertical agencies within the server structure. Vertically the book has been promoted by Likes and Shares, which is to say by way of Affirmation. This means that it has a greater presence within a user base. However, that user base itself may be quite small, which accounts for why very good ideas will often get ‘cult’ followings. Even though Hildegarde operates in several different social settings, there are literally thousands of cultures to reach which are beyond the ability of one Supersocial to tap – even a Supersocial like Facebook, which keeps thinking up new ways to get people to communicate across cultural barriers.

The lateral axis of the Internet is seen in an idea’s fan base, and the ways it examines, comments or enriches the experience of an idea. What was originally a small culture can extend into an enormous one by branching off into movies, TV shows, fanfiction, soundtracks – just about any other medium, and its own interpretation of that idea. Lateral generation surrounding a dominant idea and its crucial factors not only extends an idea across the user population, but allows an idea to realize its most effective medium. You wrote a book, but as it turns out Suzie’s life is actually much better understood through the multimedia of a TV series. This doesn’t mean you were wrong to write the book – the series wouldn’t even exist if you hadn’t made the approach. Data has to undergo a process of weakening and strengthening to find its most effective format, just as data’s form in argumentation is teased to eke out sound reason.

In the Internet’s Ego, the important nodes that create a field of awareness are webpages, typically ones on which a user has an account. This builds up an identity profile which when effectively used acts as a conceptual representation of all aspects of their identity they deem functionally important. These can break off into 3-Dimensional facets, where multiple identities exist for the same user, a construction known as an ‘alter-ego’.

The SuperEgo of the internet is entirely more concrete and traceable than anything visible in cyberspace to date. It’s a combination of what you Like, but just as importantly what you Ignore. I say ‘ignore’ because ‘disliking’ something still patterns an association with it – a negative association, but one which will persist in the structure of an online profile. Ignoring is subtly different because it effectively excludes information from a user’s existence, marking it as irrelevant, and inaccurate.

The SuperEgo we lay down on the internet isn’t an active part of our profiles, but like the stencil spinning top it traces where we’ve gone in virtual space and how we’ve interacted with nodes along the way. Like Socialspace, this pattern is used to make up something that can be seen not as a user node’s ego, but the Internet’s ego. If the internet has a consciousness, some point of focused thought, it is the point to which the most nodes have trafficked their attention. The most likes, the most views, the most shares. It’s easiest to experience this after something newsworthy, when the same thought is affirmed across dozens of nodes on the network. It downloads to Intraspace, and we can’t help but think about it and its place according to our own identities.

*****

Hopefully understanding the way these three platforms connect will help people realize the importance of all three, and how to move between them if at any point they feel stuck. We know that this is how cyberspace operates, but not necessarily why it operates in this way. From the perspective of one Intra- node, why should the Inter- Ego matter? Why do people crave attention, be it from friends or strangers or even from their own mind?

I think that ultimately we have a strong conceptual awareness that observation premeditates control. We struggle for our ideas to be known not for the virtue of being known, but for the virtue of being used. When the precursor ran home with an abstraction of a wildcat inside to share the experience with the tribe, it was with the knowledge that it could enrich the lives of those updated. It was not done with the intention of controlling the actions of the tribe, but done so that members of the tribe could more readily control their own lives. That to me is what cyberspace is all about; providing a guidance map for others to realize there is more in the world than the one path they have walked throughout their lives. To provide that for something as reaching as the Internet seems to me to be a very positive trait. To want to inform oneself through contact with nodes of cyberspace – an entirely freeing, life-giving experience.

Inspirational Reading:

Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point

For understanding Socialspace and how ideas take off. Very good read, very diverse selection of experiences to draw from. Contains some gorgeous math on epidemics.

Edward De Bono's Lateral Thinking

A revolutionary novel in terms of understanding Intraspace according to vertical (selective) and lateral (generative) thought. Very short, as it mainly contains exercises.

80 Days

It took me three read-throughs to work out why I like about Jules Verne's Round the World in 80 Days so much as to number it among my favourite books. It isn't what one may call an epic or a masterpiece like a few other books on that list – but it is entertaining, visionary, and it inspires ideas.

I had one question on my mind when I was reading through Phileas Fogg's adventures this time: What makes it plausible? Where does the protagonist find the time to have adventure alongside his mathematical circumscription of the world? More directly: to what degree is humanity allowed in mechanics, and why is it a deficit?

Let me tell you a little bit about Phileas Fogg.

Verne endeavoured to make a clockwork man. Phileas Fogg has no past, but has simply 'been' for as long as anyone can remember. Every day he follows the same routine. His obsession with rigorous time-keeping has led him to a very orderly life. He rises at the same hour, goes to and returns from the Reform Club at the same stroke every day, and plays whist like an automaton. And it isn't just time – Fogg demands certain conditions in which his time is spent. A difference of 2 degrees Celsius in the temperature of his shaving foam is enough to upset the balance of his life.

From this introduction to Fogg, we learn two things. First, that he is capable. To keep such rigorous discipline in his life is no easy task – most people find it impossible to live by a schedule, not only because they are undisciplined, but because the world changes around them. Every day demands new activities and trials, hosts upsets and challenges, and we rise to meet them or fail, and in doing so lost time and unbalance the schedule.

What Fogg has created in his London life is a static world: one in which every disaster can be foreseen and averted, and in which conditions can speed progress in his favour. One of Fogg's greatest benefits is that unlike most people he has no need to work or procure finances – he focuses his energies on keeping what he already has and maximising its use.

And then, when he appears to have tuned his life to a perfect state of efficiency, Fogg departs on the greatest journey of his life. In most of the essays I've read on the subject, Fogg is seen as a gambler. But that's not right. A gambler weights odds and accepts the chance of loss. Fogg intimately understands the universe and how it works, and in doing so knows he cannot lose. He is not a gambler, no more than the rest of us are gamblers for going out of our bedrooms every morning and hoping we won't be tackled by flying walruses.

Fogg's comments are brief, and to the point. He himself offers no clues to his immaculate time keeping, claiming only that all is foreseen, and taken into account. That itself holds so much mystery: how and what has Fogg foreseen, and how did he do so?

The answer is quite simple, and comes out as the true nature of the bet Fogg has set to prove to his fellows at the Reform Club that we live in an ordered universe. First; every disaster is foreseen. Fogg is aware of all the delays that come with travel and living. He is aware that life is not static, that there are problems which prevent absolutely fluid motion. The gentlemen at the Reform Club have foreseen these difficulties too, and hope to win their wager by them.

But what they have not foreseen and what Fogg knows as the missing scientific principle that shall save him is that every journey will also have unpredicted windfalls. There will be times when travel goes smoothly, and times when a typhoon pushes you towards your goals. Circumstances can be kind as well as cruel. Fogg knows this. Fogg believes that we are not men desperately struggling in a chaotic world, but finding the measure of a balanced world where luck and misfortune exist in equal measure.

Windfalls are where Fogg's extra time comes from. What makes Phileas Fogg so special, and what makes me love him as a character is that he is optimism engaged as realism; he knows that life isn't as difficult as it appears.

Reasons why I love my planet

Sometimes when you’re in the midst of famine, terrorism, viral outbreaks and high finance it’s difficult to see the freckles of goodness that spot Earth (hrm… freckles = melanoma = cancer… bad analogy). The fact is they do exist. As most of the problems I have listed have to do with human beings and all of them are perpetuated by human behaviour it’s best to look outside the species for a ray of sunshine (sunshine = metabolic radiation = melanoma = cancer… why do I bother…)

So recently I’ve been preoccupied with the utter coolness of life on Earth when it isn’t constantly lopping grenades at other life on Earth. This was partially triggered by my vegetarianism post, which ignited my dormant respect for vegetable matter and its diversity. So here goes.

Plants:

Plants are awesome. No, I’m not a hippie, and I’m not on drugs. Really, they are. They are the oldest surviving kingdom of organic life on Earth save bacteria, but to be honest it isn’t really that difficult to survive for millions of years when you are a single cell organism. But when you are capable of perpetuating your existence simply by drinking up light and dirt, you reach a new echelon of epic-ness.

The way I understand it, plants are differentiated from other forms of life by the fact that they have more chloroplasts than mitochondria and have more than a modicum of cell matter. Plants also have a very simple nervous system which allows them to undertake basic perceive-react programming without the bells and whistles.

Plants have two qualities I appreciate. The first is adaptability. They can reattach damaged limbs not only from their own species but from other plant species. Younger plants can graft parts of older plants in order to reach maturity faster. How cool is that? If I could graft a third arm without extensive surgery I’d be a much happier man.

The second quality is patience. Plants don’t feel the need to rush – everything they need will come to them provided they wait long enough. They stand around in the shade, eating and growing, and eventually they grow taller than the shade and blossom. If an axe is left next to a tree, they don’t avoid it – they grow over it, absorbing the blade little by little until the axe is fixed within them where it cannot do any harm. Plants don’t have that vibrant ‘kill or be killed’ mentality that we animals do. Some live and others die, but none complain.

The symbiosis of plants is to be appreciated too. Think of barbs and burs. Plants have learnt to both predict and count on the fact that animals will find them tasty and attempt to eat them, so that they can reproduce. The same holds for the Venus Flytrap – plants are well acquainted with the concept of bait. When you think of how such a mechanism must have arisen, you can gain some appreciation for just how old the plant kingdom is. They’ve been there right from the beginning, through every incarnation of the planet that yielded the genetic potential for birds, reptiles, insects, fish and mammals.

You are never too old to climb a tree (although I wouldn’t recommend it if you are one hundred and thirty, and if you are, congratulations on learning how to use the internet). If you have not climbed a tree within the past month, in the name of whatever you hold dear stop reading this and do so now.

Welcome back.

I sat in a tree today. Granted, it was in the middle of a parking lot, but you can’t be pernickety when you live in the city. Trees evoke a primal emotion within me. Perhaps it is some residual ancestral programming sparked in my coiling myriad of DNA helixes. Climbing trees makes me feel safe and distant from the world below. I read somewhere that most people hardly ever look above eyelevel, and it’s true. If you ever need to get away from everything, or if you ever need a quiet place to think and reflect, seek the gentle companionship of a tree.

Bacteria:

I know I bashed them for not evolving the way we have, but now I’m taking it back. Bacteria are amazing. Back in yonder days when complex organisms didn’t exist, they probably seemed like lazy slobs. But now they are swimming in the bloodstreams and acidic juices of every life form on the planet, and staying small looks like a pretty good idea. Imagine a whole city nestled in your kidney. Imagine what it must be like to have such a simple code of behaviour instructing you – divide and conquer.

As with human beings, there are two main types of bacteria. The first type is ‘bad’. These are viruses, who focus on cell division at the detriment of their host. They consume all the resources that keep us going and use it to grow. If the virus is unlucky, it eventually ends up killing itself by destroying the host and any path to a new one.

The second type are ‘good’ bacteria. They believe in moderation, and spend their time conquering more than dividing. They keep a constant watch for bad bacteria and fight against them for territory, keeping the host alive and killing off large numbers of themselves in the process. Sometimes all this internal warfare really does feel like someone has dropped a nuke in your stomach.

Bacterial relationships are reflected pretty well in Star Wars. For those of you who have been living under a rock since the 70s, I’m talking about midi-chlorians, the fictional micro-organisms which reside in every living thing and are responsible for the phenomenon known as ‘The Force’. Basically ‘The Force’ is separated into two sides (sound familiar?), Light and Dark. The Light Side is harnessed by controlling one’s emotions and using moderation with every action one performs. It is not ‘good’ as some people may see ‘good’, but most people will agree it is synonymous with balance. The Jedi (users of the light side) are beings who have dedicated themselves to perpetuating civilisation by curbing the effects of such emotions as hatred and love (yes, love. The Jedi insist that unchecked love leads to fear, fear to power lust, and power lust to hatred).

Similarly bacteria are separated into their two groups in this way: moderation (the light side) and domination (the dark side).

We have a lot to learn from bacteria, provided we haven’t already done so from Hollywood.

Bacteria are there to remind us that life is everywhere, and that we are never alone. Do you consider your soul the sole resident of your body?

I don’t.

 Do you believe that all independent life has its own soul?

I do. There are approximately 40 000 000 000 individual bacteria cells in 1 gram of organic matter. If all souls are equal or at the very least can be said to have begun equal, you need acknowledge that 10¹⁴ thinking, feeling life forms are flowing through your veins like empyreal fire at this very moment.

None of us are alone, and all of us matter.

Books:

Ok, technically they are not alive, but they are outside the human species. Some things breathe, and other things make those first things breathe. Books are those things. Those un-breathing things, that is.

Language alone is a broken instrument. When we speak to one another, we are primarily concerned with three things; the ease of communication, the speed of communication and the correctness of communication. While these are similar, they are not identical.

‘Ease’ of communication refers to the rate at which understanding is perceived to flow. It avoids unnecessary repetition, the use of synonyms and analogy which otherwise lengthen the process of speaking.

‘Correctness’ of communication is the rate at which understanding actually flows. This one can be difficult, because sometimes people say they understand what you are saying and end up killing an American president when all you really wanted was for them to pass you a nacho. The factors affecting correctness are word use, pronunciation and connotation. For example if one pronounces the word ‘enchilada’ as ‘bazooka’ you are likely to trigger a war.

‘Speed’ of communication is exactly what it sounds, ironically. People don’t want to stand in the rain talking about umbrellas for half an hour before opening one. In conversation you need to get your point across quickly. Focus, mental flexibility and verbal reflex get you there. Some people like me really struggle with this, and are left soaking wet, babbling about umbrellas long after all conversational participants have fled.

Books are the base upon which language is honed into a finer tool. They contain centuries’ worth of analytical and speculative data which have been condensed in a variety of forms and ways to iterate the exact thoughts of their makers.

This all sound very cold, which is in no way how I feel about books.

A library is a safe harbour. In a confusing and often demanding world, books give us clarity and respite. They ask for nothing, and give everything.

For times when we feel Earth is devoid of any and all virtue, we can turn to fiction and imagine things like honour, chivalry and self-sacrifice are called for at every moment. In books Evil need not be devious or cloaked in deception, but is openly recognised and easily fought. Anything I have ever thought worth knowing was learnt from fiction. I reckon the real world could do with a touch of the inexplicable.

Perhaps the greatest phenomenon exclusive to literature is that it in the end the art form has very little to do with the writer. Words are meat – they refer to those physical entities and equations that bind together to create a story. One does not feel sad because one reads the word ‘despair’. One feels sad because they have empathy and imagination, and it is the reader who is responsible for defining the surreal perimeters simple phrases like ‘a war-torn wasteland of mountainous debris’ evoke. I did not put a sun or a moon in that phrase, but there is a good chance you saw one when you pictured it. Books remind us that we are all artists, and we can all create. Books cause a revolution in the mind by activating the senses and charging electricity into a dormant brain.

Books, while unliving and unloving, cause others to live and love.

“Creepy Serial Killer” Potential

People who know me vaguely do not wish to know me well. Perhaps it is my errant social behaviour, in general triggered by stupid repetitive questions and my attempts to avoid them. Perhaps my black clothes and bottomless supply of seemingly useless objects confuse and disturb them. Perhaps it’s the way I prefer to walk briskly through crowded areas rather than hobbling around as though I’ve been shot in the foot and had my hip replaced with rubbery tofu.

Whatever the reason, the general vibe I get is that I have “Creepy Serial Killer” potential. While I understand this is a cause for concern, it is completely unwarranted. Almost. I briefly considered giving in to others’ perceptions and becoming a vigilante, but after certain life-changing decisions decided I would just be nice to everyone and master the art of writing instead.

Even so I have a considerable backlog of aberrational behaviour that makes people uncertain of my social calling. For example:

• I tend to hang around in dark corners where nobody can see me until I am close enough to stab them.

To explain this, I have to point out that if you pull out a book and start reading in a visible location a neanderthal will wander by and ask you “Whut you reading?” every five minutes. They will then clump around you and begin talking to one another as though you aren’t there, because all you really want to do is read your book and maybe if you stare at the pages long enough they’ll go away. But they don’t. They just stand there and make conversation about Eragon and Twilight, and I would be perfectly inclined to join in if they stopped confusing what happened in the movie with what happened in the book.

• I wear black clothes – more specifically black chinos and long sleeve black shirts, even in summer. Only a psychotic stalker would do this so as to blend in with the surrounding darkness on moonless nights.

People don’t understand colours the way I do. Brown and grey are generally shunned as the ‘loser’ colours that have no friends because they are most frequently seen in faeces, chewed up newspapers and dreary skies (you’d be dreary too if people scowled and looked worried whenever they looked up at you). To me, these colours are a mark of deference. Black in particular strikes me as a deferential colour as it isn’t really a colour at all, but rather a lack of pigmentation.

All science geeks know that when you blend every colour in existence you get white, because white is the sum of the diverse colours that make up our visual reality. Painters should be well learned in the scale between primary colours and their corresponding mixes which can create any other colour by blending them together.

By choosing to walk around colourless, what I’m trying to say is “Hey, I’m young and I acknowledge I don’t have much rattling around in my head just yet. I have room to learn.”

My eventual plan is to ascend the spectrum. From black I’ll move on to brown, from brown to blue and, if by any chance I live to be ancient, from blue to white.

I think the main problem with this idea of self-classification is that onlookers associate black with the unknown rather than the unknowing.

• I write about complex subjects with seemingly thoughtless conviction and moral irreverence.

Yes, it has occurred to me that people who see a phrase like, “I concede, description is the root of all individuality, but you must also consider the nature of the subject. A cow, by common description, is a four-stomached, mammalian, herbivorous quadruped. This is the Idea; the rule on which all variations of the cow spread” posted in a blog will doubt the writer’s sanity and leave them wondering whether it’s something “the voices” told him. 90% of the time you can be certain they haven’t. Well, actually they have, but by logical processes I have either validated their statements or disowned them from my psyche.

The trouble is I don’t want to take up two hours of your time explaining a sentence where I have defined each word by strict limitations that differentiate it from near identical words. For example, to me ‘liberty’ is a pragmatic concept whereby a group of entities can react within a restricted environment without causing harm to one another, whereas ‘freedom’ is a boundless state whereby an entity may undertake any given action in order to achieve happiness regardless of consequences to other entities.

I’ve just turned two words into forty-six without even explaining the exact boundaries in which ‘entities’, ‘consequence’ and ‘happiness’ fall. The habit of shortening things works very well when you are thinking to yourself, and looks so neat on paper that any writer will feel the irresistible temptation to avoid the lengthy process of definition. I have seen it ruin countless debates before they can even begin, and people don’t even realise the cause of the conflict. They just think “That person isn’t using my definitions, and that means they are an idiot,” or in my case, “That means they are a loon.”

I’ll say it right now so people can quote my youthful wisdom when I’m famous: don’t assume that other people think like you do, and don’t hate them when you find out they think differently. Hating someone because they aren’t you is a terrible thing to do, and, I believe, the prime cause of Nazism.

• I am honest to a point of brutality.

If ever I do get into a conversation with someone, I inevitably will say something to which there is no correct social response. For example, if someone asks me “Is so-and-so a friend of yours?” I evaluate my high standards of friendship (being willing to die for a person in exchange for my own life under the condition that I will be happy with the general ins and outs of life if I do survive [barring the fact that in most cases I would do this out of a sheer desire to be polite rather than actually liking a person]) and I say something like “No, but we have a longstanding acquaintance.”

Then I think to myself that that suggests a certain animosity towards so-and-so which doesn’t exist, and to clarify I add, “I don’t really have any friends.”

Instead of making things better, I’ve made them worse, because not only have I said something awkward, I’ve pitted myself against the whole of humanity by having unreasonably high standards. All conversation ends, and I am left to face the truth: I haven’t any friends of no fault of my own, but because no-one I have ever met meets the base requirement for my friendship, and that is to need me. Nobody wants the truth unless it’s absolutely essential. They want convenient lies, and I am not prepared to give them any.

• People confuse Antisocialism with Asocialism

This one is a big problem. Since the dawn of man, or of Jesus anyway, people have said “You’re either with me, or against me.”

Life is not based on absolutes like this, no matter how many people wish to believe it is. Switzerland continues to exist despite the annoyance of politicians everywhere.

But despite the presence of Switzerland like a huge quartered paradise of sanity on the war-torn battleground of Earth, the rule of “With or against” survives. For example, a new movement begins to spread across the world suggesting we all wear alice bands and cummerbunds in a show of solidarity. 99% of the population now walk around like the over-accessorised maniacs they are while one or two people say “No thanks, cummerbunds are starchy and alice bands are just one step away from tiaras. I don’t think I’ll wear that goofy getup, thanks.”

These few go about their everyday lives as pariahs, because they are naturally upsetting the social order merely by not subscribing to it. They are ostracised for being ‘publicly indecent degenerates’ just because they couldn’t care less about the prevalent fashion. Then things get ugly and somebody hurls the word “anti-social”.

By the general use of prefixes, we can rest easy with these definitions:

Social – Approving of the culture and actions of a population.

Asocial – Not approving of the culture and actions of a population.

Antisocial – Disapproving of the culture and actions of a population.

Even here, the distinction is lost and I must return to my example.

The ASOCIAL member of society ignores the pressure to wear a cummerbund, because they wish to do otherwise. Perhaps they have a wide assortment of bowties they have collected over the years and do not wish to see them become obsolete.

The ANTISOCIAL member of society hates cummerbunds and the filthy bastards who wear them. He takes specific pleasure in setting fire to cummerbund factories and threatens to pickle people’s underwear if they don’t start wearing bowties.

This should make things a little more clear. Both the social and antisocial view themselves as members of society and actively try to manipulate people into being more like them, while an asocial doesn’t really care so long as they get to do their own thing.

Ironically enough, the most public supporter of asocialism was in fact Ayn Rand, who was undoubtedly anti-social. The reason asocials are allowed to be swept under the rug is because if they do intentionally draw attention to their activities, they become ‘antisocial’. Where that leaves me is ‘decidedly confused’. This probably demands its own post.

The point I intended to make is that prejudice is wrong, even if it prevents you from being stabbed in a dark alley one day.

Flicker Shows continued...

Earlier I discussed the differences between books and films, comparing the mediums by the time  we dedicate to their contemplation and the source of their inventive splendor. I finished off with the question, ‘What is the purpose behind a short story, and how is a short story applicable to film?’
Short stories, as readers will know, have more forms than a gloamgloazer. There are long short stories, short short stories, short long short stories and long short short stories. Typically we can catogorise them as different from novels by their size... in most cases.

When we examine adapted short stories in comparison to adapted books (adapted for the film industry, for this ramble) we will most often find the outcome is more successful. When books are adapted, they contain too much information and are thinned out to fit the appropriate time slot. When stories are adapted, often the opposite is true. They require more substance - not less - and are viewed more as concepts than as rigid frameworks for a storyline. Thus 'I, Robot' becomes an amalgamation of various ideas discussed in the course of Asimov's work, 'I am Legend', long enough to be a novel itself, incorporates only the idea of vampirism as a bacterial disease capable of wiping out the human race. Minority Report becomes a discourse on the concept of prosecuting potential criminals, while Dick's noir outcome is scrapped entirely, as is his 20th century idea of the future maximising the use of recording tape.

The attitudes between adaptations of books and short stories are immediately recognisable. Fatally, when a book is approached the screenwriter attempts to capture every aspect of the work - and fails. A book is not a film. A book cannot be condensed into two and a half hours. Back in the days of youth and folly when I still felt excited about seeing a movie based on a book I had read, I always left feeling somewhat cheated. They'd make bum moves like summing up a chapter with a line ("Norbert's Gone", for Lorkhan's sake) or wipe out characters (Cyclops and his followers from 'The Postman'). Then they go one step further and make unnecessary changes. I've wiped my brain clean of the numerous lines I heard come out wrong during the adaptation of the Harry Potter series. Don't screenwriters realise writers sit down and weigh each word as carefully as though they were handling gold? They push the boundaries further by changing characters' personalities. The Twilight movie (I could only suffer to watch the butchery of the very first) had Bella strip naked for the entertainment value of a scene rather than the true bearing of her character. The unmentionable disaster I must mention (gotta love a paradox) is at last 'The Golden Compass', flashing in cheap, whorish neon that not even the original title would make it through to the final cut.

(I am aware of the title's varied use as the trilogy's original name [The Golden Compasses] and the US release title. Goodness knows what goes through the minds of publishers.)

My point? In doesn't work, damnit. Darwin would cringe at the sight of Hollywood jungle and the natural selection that is catalysed there between conflicting film producers. When money becomes an object, art suffers. Sad, but true.

Speaking of dear Darwin, it's funny how the word they use for the metamorphosis from literature to film is 'adaptation'. Theodosius Dobzhansky defined adaptation as "an evolutionary process whereby an organism becomes better able to live in its habitat or habitats."
Well, in the sense of this commentary, one may say it is "an evolutionary process whereby an artwork becomes better able to live in its habitat."
By the very nature of the word and its underlying semantic and linguistic values, an assumption is being made that the film is an evolved state of the written word.

It is a strange thing to consider. The intention of written words has always been to attempt to deliver a message to another person in a form logical and comprehendable to a receptive human mind, even after the singularity or 'perfection' of that intention was denied.

The intention of recording, from the beginning, was to give an accurate moving picture of reality. Afterwards people experimented with special effects, doing this and that to the image where they could, sharpening, obscuring, perfecting - always scientific, rather than artistic. These became a matter of interest to theatricals, who despite their strutting about the stage could not capture a moment perfectly if its specifics held any surreal components. Thus after the success of a production of Gulliver's Travels in 1902, films grew to a standard in the exhibition of high budget or impossible dramatic productions.
So if recording was seen as an evolutionary medium for theatre, why are we forced to sit through the demolition of the written word? There's a HUGE difference between books and plays, so why have the two combined in recent years into the woeful morass of 'adaptation'?

Sometimes, I like to leave things at a question. If there is an answer, I've already made it clear that it isn't one that could justify what film has done to the literary world. I'll just keep pretending adaptations don't exist, and hope people come to see things my way.

Regrettably Unregrettable

I spent this morning in bed reading Spud, a book about a kid who encounters havoc while living at a boarding school. To get the book part out of the way, it's brilliant.

The point of mentioning the book is that it drew my line of thought to way back when I was scouting high schools and had the option to board at an out-of-the-city semi-private school, to be technical only if I received a scholarship, which I didn't, but looking back if I pressed the matter and made certain concessions I could have actually gone.

When I think back to my tragic time at the local high school one short bus ride up the hill (but one very long wait for the bus) my immediate thought is that if I could do it all over I would have rather gone to the boarding school.
Firstly because although it sounds snotty I really hated taking the bus; not because I felt like a proletarian but because it was a devastating drain on the amount of time I had at home, and occupied much of my thoughts. I was involved in several extra-curricular activities which all ended at different times. Debating on mondays meant that I finished school at 15:30, which would make me miss the 15:45 bus unless I ran the two kilometres to the bus stop. The next bus usually showed up at 16:30, but occasionally a bus came at 16:05 or slightly later so I kept a constant look out in case I could catch an earlier ride home. This complicated reading, because I needed to look up every few seconds unless someone else was waiting at the bus stop. Tuesdays & Thursdays I did First Aid and finished at 16:30, the next bus was at 17:00. Wednesdays and Fridays school came out an hour earlier than any of the buses so I stayed in the library (in the early years, as a junior I dropped first aid and worked as a student librarian most afternoons) until I could walk down for the 15:15 bus, which was the earliest one with any predictable time pattern.
Needless to say most of my school career was spent waiting for the right time to get to the bus, my constant deadline. I DO NOT work well with deadlines. I get nervous thinking about the ever decreasing amount of time I have left. Rather than motivate me I tend to freak out under the pressure.


The second reason I would have gone to the boarding school is because I am a hopeless PC game addict. I can't really explain it that well... maybe it's because in computer games you actually feel like you're actions have some impact on the world you're living in. Maybe I just like to feel powerful, or brave and heroic and all those things that the real world beats the crap out of.
Yeah, that's probably it. Anyway, I spent almost every moment I could in front of my computer playing games with my brain on 'fuzz' mode. The problem with Virtual Reality, I've since found, is that it takes a vampiric hold over the real world, sucking up time and ensuring that nothing ever gets done, I never developed my social skills or really any other skills because I only really cared about the world past the flickering screen. Trouble is, I realised I didn't want to be that kind of person.
I wanted to care about this world too, and be bold and brave and powerful. Unfortunately, as I said, the real world kicks people like that in the face.


I know that I require a certain degree of forced discipline, and boarding school may have been what I needed. I would have had more time to think of my schoolwork without concentrating on the bus schedule (sounds lame, but it's true) and I would be cut off from my precious virtual reality, forced into the real world, where I might have adapted quicker. If it were that clear cut, it would have been perfect.
I would have spent my days in the library reading books, studying, perhaps even have plucked up the courage to get into a relationship. I can almost feel a happy me in a parallel universe looking back and being thankful for never chasing his emotions to a public school.


Of course, when I look back at who I was when I was thirteen I know I was an arrogant snot rag who learned some important things in high school.
What strikes me with the deepest dread is the books: what if I had never read all the books I read in public school. I'm sitting here thinking that my life would have been a ghastlier horror than Lovecraft could produce if I had never read Herbert, Hardinge, Wooding, or Scott... I would forgo the human beings I met in high school in an instant for a chance to have turned out as a more capable human being, but my books... that would be inconceivable. They shaped me. They are, as only a librarian could say, my true friends.
Anything else that occurred; such as the bus and my PC game addiction, are regrettable, yet my life as is stands as a whole is regrettably unregrettable, because I cannot regret the books I've read.