(Phaysis)

There once was a DARPA defense project to create a decentralized communications network that had very few points of weakness and therefore could survive a nuclear attack. ARPAnet.

Academia joined on. The network grew, proved it was functional. Project a success, network renamed The Internet, as in “a network of networks”. All was well.

Electronic mail — email — and remote login to connected mainframes — telnet — was born. Researchers could share work, loan computer time, and join each other’s projects without traveling.

Realtime communications between users on the same system had existed — chat — but eventually a method to share and broadcast these chat messages between users on physically separate but connected systems came into being: Internet Relay Chat, or IRC. The network grew more vivacious.

File servers were set up to archive and share any file of interest: File Transfer Protocol, or FTP. A user could upload a picture or download a program.

Indexes were created to help users search these file and message archives: Archie and Gopher. The future was handy.

People could mail messages to special addresses to be publicly posted into groups based on common interests: Usenet. Anybody could come along and read these messages, then post a reply if they felt so inclined. Like posting a note on an office message board.

A few major businesses and a lot more schools joined the Internet. Those students graduated and formed a class of businesses called Internet Service Providers to allow themselves, and their customers, to retain access to the network.

In the early 90′s, a researcher at a European particle physics lab, CERN, built the greatest killer app of them all: The World Wide Web. Hypertext had hit the mainstream. Anyone could publish a document and link it to other documents anywhere else, giving rise to the “spiderweb” of threads between documents. The possibilities multiplied.

Late 90′s, the Internet, with the bright light of the WWW, began to attract those with lots of money to invest like moths to a porch light. New money was born, “DotComs” flourished, stock speculators placed bets. The Web reached critical mass. Soon, anything and everything you’d want began showing up on the Internet; things previously inaccessible found their way online for either profit or community. A new world dawned.

The rise of journaling and weblogs gave new voice to millions who discovered the richness and depth of long-form commentary. Every person could have a say, each one an audience. The banquet tables were filled with plenty of food for thought for everybody.

Then along came Facebook and those of its ilk, and all was forgotten about the rest of the Internet. All attention became centralized; where once was many voices in delightful cacophony became a few choirs singing nursery rhymes amongst themselves. The vast mindshare all across the net quickly funneled into one point of weakness. An attack on this would be devastating, and like subway riders in a power outage, all would be lost in the dark.

Been a few weeks; figure I should say something. Neglecting my journal in lieu of posting quick status updates on Facebook. I hate that site, because I keep going back to it, clicking “Refresh”, hoping something good pops up. Psychologists have learned all about the strength of randomized rewards, and how it can best be used to illicit specific behaviors.

Essentially, you put a rat in a Skinner box — a training environment with a paddle, food dispenser (for rewards), and electrified floor (for punishment) — and set the food system to eject a pellet after a certain number of paddle presses. If you configure the system to eject a pellet every time the rat pushes the paddle, it’ll learn to push the paddle once, get its food, and move along. If you configure it to eject after a high number of pushes, the rat will lose interest because there’s probably easier food sources elsewhere. But, if you make it eject randomly, sometimes the rat will get the food quickly, sometimes it will have to work for it, and for that reason it keeps going at it, hoping that at some point soon it will get its food.

And so it is with Facebook. And so it is with email. And so it is with slot machines, lottery, chat rooms, coffeeshops, bars, blogs, anything where chance is a component of a quick reward. The chance that someone in my many groups will say something funny, drop an important piece of info, post a hilarious picture, or provide commentary on something I posted, that keeps me going back. Keeps me hitting “Refresh” to the detriment of the rest of my life. I don’t want to say I’m sick, but there it is; I get addicted more easily than I can resist. And that pisses me off.

Forgive me, reader, for I have sinned. It’s been a while since my last update.

See, since I opened my Facebook account, I’ve been paying a large amount of attention to that account as I make snarky commentary and wait for the snarky replies (this is strangely similar to my former IRC habit). So, at the end of the day, my desire to make long-form commentary in this journal is diminished, and I’d rather put on some music, play Mahjongg, then go to bed.

A shame, a shame.

I will confess, however, that I have been writing a short story during the past five weeks. It’s science-fiction in general, futurepunk in specific (I’m trying to avoid calling it “cyberpunk”, given the soured reputation of the genre, even though it technically is cyberpunk). Early in February, I got an itch to lay down a few paragraphs to set a scene. More style than substance, but I knew there was a story there somewhere. The next night, I wrote the next chapter and felt it; I had to write this story to see where it goes. After the third chapter, I had to stop myself and go, “Hey, so…what’s the ending?” And I thought about it, considered some of the options made visible by my writing so far, and I couldn’t come up with anything.

And then I laid down for bed when it smacked me like a ton of lead. “Oh, fuck! That’s the ending!”

The next few weeks was spent carving the path to actually reach that conclusion. The distractions mounted — facebook, work, Olympics, drooling on my desk — but I managed to lay down the final chapter a few days ago. The first draft is finished. I’m now in the final readthroughs to smooth the rough hairs before I send it to a few friends for critique. When they return their notes and I integrate them into the text, I’ll most likely be ready to share with you, my reader.

So, keep close.

So, it seems your humble author has finally gone and done it. I drank the Kool-Aid(tm). And now you can find me on Facebook. No sense linking, because most of you are already on my friends list.

And why did I do it? Kinda because I don’t hang out with anyone. There’s work, coffee, home, and there’s not too many people at each that I chat with. Y’know? More my fault than anyone else’s. So Facebook is a stand-in, a proxy for friendship. I always say “friendship is proximity”, and I still believe it, so if this is what I need to do to keep my friendships from fading completely, then joining is what I shall do.

However, I do blame my recent Facebook fetishism for my journal’s neglect. Funny, but I’m doing the same exact things with Facebook that caused me to leave IRC: mumble rambling WTF-isms and wait for responses. And wait. And wait. Projects kinda take a back seat. Funny, that.

So yeah. Find me there. If you ask nicely, I might accept your friendship.