Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture

354 Pages·1994·20.47 MB·English

by  Mark Dery

FLAME WADS
THf OIS[OUHSf Of [YBfH[ULTUHf
fOlTfO BY HRHK OfHY
OUK( UHIU(HSITY PH(SS
OUHHRM RHO LOHOOH 1994
© I994 Duke University Press
Second printing, I997
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
00
"Flame Wars" and "Back to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate,
and Tricia Rose" both by Mark Dery; chapter I4 of Synners, by Pat Cadigan; "A Rape in
Cyberspace," by Julian Dibbell; and the graphics in Mark Pauline's article, "Survival
Research Laboratories Performs in Austria" are all reprinted by permission of the
authors. With the exception of "A Rape in Cyberspace," by Julian Dibbell, and the
index, this work appeared originally as volume 92, number 4 of the South Atlantic
Quarterly.
Library of Congress Cataloging·in-Publication Data
Flame wars: the discourse of cyberculture / edited by Mark Dery.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8223-1531'9 (acid-free paper) : $39.95
- ISBN 0.8223-154°-8 (acid. free paper) : $13.95
I. Computers and civilization. 2. Artificial intelligence.
3. Internet (Computer network). I. Dery, Mark.
QA76·9·c66F55 1994
306.I-dC20 94-24517
[OHTEHTS
Flame Wars
MARK DERY
New Age Mutant Ninja Hackers: Reading
Mondo 2000 II
VIVIAN SOBCHACK
Techgnosis, Magic, Memory, and the Angels
of Information 29
ERIK DAVIS
A8rippa, or, The Apocalyptic Book 61
PETER SCHWENGER
Gibson's Typewriter 71
SCOTT BUKA TMAN
Virtual Surreality: Our New Romance with
Plot Devices 91
MARC LAIDLAW
Chapter 14, Synners 113
PAT CADIGAN
Feminism for the Incurably Informed 125
ANNE BALSAMO
iv Contents
Sex, Memories, and Angry Women 157
CLAUDIA SPRINGER
Black to the Future: Interviews
with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate,
and Tricia Rose 179
MARK DERY
Compu-Sex: Erotica for Cybernauts 223
GARETH BRANWYN
A Rape in Cyberspace; or, How an Evil
Clown, a Haitian Trickster Spirit, Two
Wizards, and a Cast of Dozens Turned
a Database into a Society 237
JULIAN DIBBELL
Virtual Environments and
the Emergence of Synthetic Reason 263
MANUEL DE LANDA
Survival Research Laboratories Performs
in Austria 287
MARK PAULINE
Taming the Computer 297
GARY CHAPMAN
Glossary 321
EMILY WHITE
Index 327
Notes on Contributors 347
HRHK D~HY
fLAMf WARS
[me wa<s. in compu-slang. are vitriolic on
line exchanges. Often, they are conducted
publicly, in discussion groups clustered under
thematic headings on electronic bulletin
boards, or-less frequently-in the form of
poison pen letters sent via E-mail to pri
vate mailboxes. John A. Barry's definition of
"flame" (n., v.) as "a (usually) electronic
diatribe" suggests that such exchanges occa
sionally take place off-line, although deni
zens of computer networks are putatively
PC junkies and hence likely to prefer vir
tual invective to FTF (on-line shorthand for
"face-to-face") tongue-lashings.l
Then, too, the wraithlike nature of elec
tronic communication-the flesh become
word, the sender reincarnated as letters float
ing on a terminal screen-accelerates the
escalation of hostilities when tempers flare;
disembodied, sometimes pseudonymous com
batants tend to feel that they can hurl in
sults with impunity (or at least without fear
of bodily harm). Moreover, E-mail missives
or "posts" seem to encourage misinterpre-
2 MarkDery
tation in the same way that written correspondence sometimes does.
Like "snailmail" (compu-slang for conventional letters), electronic
messages must be interpreted without the aid of nonverbal cues
or what sociolinguist Peter Farb calls "paralanguage"-expressive
vocal phenomena such as pitch, intensity, stress, tempo, and volume.
The importance of body language is universally conceded, of course;
books on the subject are staples of the supermarket check-out stand.
Paralanguage, Farb writes, is no less essential to accurate reading:
"No protestation by a speaker that he is uttering the truth is equal
to the nonverbal confirmation of his credibility contained in the way
he says it."2 Both, significantly, are missing from on-line, text-based
interaction, which may account for the umbrage frequently taken at
innocently intended remarks. It accounts, too, for the cute use of
punctuation to telegraph facial expressions. Here is a key for some
commonly used "emoticons," defined in The New Hacker's Dictionary
as "glyph[s] ... used to indicate an emotional state" (read them
sideways) :
:-) = smiley face; used to underscore a user's good intentions.
:) or, less frequently, :} = variations on the same theme.
;-) = wink; used to indicate sardonic humor or a tongue-in
cheek quip ("nudge, nudge; wink, wink").
: ( = sadness, sometimes used facetiously.
Of course, no signaling system, as one "net surfer" observes, IS
foolproof:
Shit happens, especially on the Net, where everyone speaks with
flattened affect. I think the attempt to signal authorial intent
with little smileys is interesting but futile. They're subject to slip
page like any other kind of sign. The bottom line is, anyone who
plans to spend time on-line has to grow a few psychic calluses.3
Electronic notes, posted in group discussions, differ from hand- or
typewritten letters in several significant ways. Like public bathroom
graffiti. their authors are sometimes anonymous, often pseudony
mous, and almost always strangers. Which is the upside of incorpo-
Flame Wars 3
real interaction: a technologically enabled, postmulticultural vision
of identity disengaged from gender, ethnicity, and other problematic
constructions. On line, users can float free of biological and sociocul
tural determinants, at least to the degree that their idiosyncratic lan
guage usage does not mark them as white, black, college-educated,
a high-school dropout, and so on. "There is no visual contact, no
hearing of accents," says Wayne Gregori, a thirty-five-year-old com
puter consultant who runs SFNet. "People are judged on the content
of what they say."4
Posts are read and responded to by computer users scattered
across the Internet, the global meta-network that comprises informa
tion services such as Bitnet; the private, academic, and government
laboratories interwoven by NSFNET (the National Science Founda
tion Network); mainstream networks such as America On-line and
CompuServe; and smaller, more esoteric bulletin boards like San
Francisco's WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link) and New York's
MindVOX. (Mitch Kapor, founder of the Lotus Development Cor
poration, once compared the Internet to a "library where all of the
books are dumped on the floor in no particular order."5) But un
like profundities scrawled on rest-room stalls (which always seem,
somehow, as if they belong on the walls of Pompeian ruins), on-line
conversations exhibit a curious half-life; as the reader scrolls down
screen, scanning the lively back-and-forth of a discussion that may
go back weeks, months, or even years, he experiences the puns, phi
lippics, true confessions, rambling dissertations, and Generation X-er
one-liners as if they were taking place in real time-which, for the
reader watching them flow past on his screen, they are.
On occasion, one might stumble onto a flame war, although ver
bal brawling lowers the tone of colloquia and is therefore frowned
upon. In the WELL's Mondo 2000 conference, users take their dis
putes outside the topic, into the virtual version of the back alley
a topic-cum-boxing ring called "Flame Box," where they may roll up
their sleeves and pummel each other witless. Witlessness, in fact,
was the order of the day in the flame war I witnessed, where squab
bIers seemed to specialize in a baroque slackerbabble related to the
mock-Shakespearean put-downs used by Alex on his droogies in A
4 MarkDery
A Portion of the Internet: The NSFNET TI Backbone and Regional Net
works. This image is a visualization study of inbound traffic measured in
billions of bytes on the NSFNET TI backbone for September 1991. Image
created by Donna Cox and Robert Patterson, National Center for Supercom
puting Applications, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Reprinted
with permission.
Clockwork Orange: "Look, you syphilitic bovine harpy," "You heav
ing purulent mammoth," "Get thine swampy effluvia away from me,
you twitching gelatinous yolk of rancid smegma," and on, and on.
"This standoff will probably end in Koreshian glory," predicted one
user, with thinly disguised relish.
In some ways, flame wars are a less ritualized, cybercultural
counterpart to the African-American phenomenon known as "the
dozens," in which duelists one-up each other with elaborate, some
times rhyming gibes involving the sexual exploits of each other's
mothers. At their best, flame wars give way to tour-de-force jeremiads
Flame Wars 5
called "rants"- demented soliloquies that elevate soapbox demagogu
ery to a guerrilla art form. Characterized by fist-banging punctua
tion, emphatic capitals, and the kill-'em-all-and-Iet-God-sort-'em-out
rhetoric patented by Hunter S. Thompson, rants are spiritual kin to
Antonin Artaud's blasphemous screeds and the Vorticist harangues in
Wyndham Lewis's Blast. Here is a classic, written by a female user
who calls herself "outrider":
Never give in, never submit. Or just never go out of your house
anymore. In twenty years this will be Life: stay home all the time
because it's too dangerous to go out/you can't eat red meat in
public/or sugar either/or grease/and you damn sure can't smoke;
get all stimuli, info, human contact, groceries, money, etc. on
your computer. All materials will be delivered by heavily armed
people in tanks: they must cross the moat filled with piranha,
crocodiles, and weird water-borne disease organisms, and also
pass the security check that keeps them from getting Swiss
cheesed by the remote control firepower in the gun turrets at the
razorwire perimeter, then they have to pass the DNA identity
scanner at the last portal-and they absolutely refuse ALL TIPS
AND GRATUITIES. After a pleasant meal of micronuked frozen
blah, you can jump onto the Net and read the Daily Horros
in the form of movingpicto-news; go to the library and down
load the original French version of Madame Bovary and a decent
French dictionary. Read in the comfort of your cozy warm bed,
safe behind triple-wall steel constructed building. Pet your cat/
dog. Clean your arsenal. Sleep. Dream of a more lifelike life ...
remember the olden days when you could walk outside in the
Night and go places, when you could drive safely from here to
there ... go back to sleep.6
This special issue's title is intentionally ironic. The tone, as in most
intellectual discourse, is decorous; there are no flame wars here, and
no rants in the proper sense (although Tricia Rose's inspired perora
tion on feminist mothers as "the most dangerous muthafuckahs out
there," with its call for "feminist women to have as much power and
as many babies as they want to, creating universes of feminist chil-