Gabe hadn't read Shogun, which ordinarily I would use as an opportunity to scourge him from a profound intellectual height. Something more like the opposite has happened - I envy this ignorance of the text. I wish to Gord I could read it anew. Shogun is almost twelve hundred pages, and our affair was torrid. I couldn't leave it well enough alone. A visual note: it was a borrowed copy from Brenna's dad, before she and I agreed to be married, and because it was a paperback it could barely hold itself together. By the time it fell into my hands, it had essentially split itself into two books of a digestible six hundred pages apiece.
I'd seen Penny Arcade referenced by a Known Quantity, Cory Doctorow, who inverted our Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory to suggest something it really doesn't say. He would like to make a point the comic doesn't make - that people operating under their Real Names would create a less fractious social environment online - and then prove that he is right by arguing the opposite. I love this dude, I'm not even mad. It would be hard to identify a greater champion of the idea that technology should center human beings. We are from the Web Before. We both live here and we both belong here.
The GIFT reminds me a little bit of the Bechdel Test, another ancient comic which has been canonized at some level into folk wisdom. That certainly wasn't her intention - she thought she was making a joke. We were under the impression we were making a joke also. But the thing about jokes is that they can have true things embedded in them, inadvertently or - as is sometimes the case - vertently. It won't surprise you to learn that "in this house" we believe that interpersonal strain may be part of the human condition. Real Names, as we have seen in the years hence, simply inflect the attacks - granting them their own piquant flavor.
In 2010, Blizzard started fucking around with their "Real ID" shit and we made our position on that clear at the time in a post and a comic. "Full Anonymity" and "Full Identity" might be two poles dummies want to stake claims over, but I don't live in a world where you're exclusively forced to argue the most naked exponents of every concept. Well, no, that's not right. I do live in that idiot world, and it's one where the participants in such theater are richly rewarded for it. The Internet I'm from was all Islands and this Internet is all Fortresses warring over a false Pangaea forged by narcissists on pain of exile. Guess which one I prefer. Guess which one you would prefer - as though you will ever, ever again be given the chance.
Facebook was founded one month before that strip was published. YouTube was founded the year after. Twitter was founded the year after that. The "Internet" as people now know it was founded over a couple years, which is funny, because those are all monolithic systems. They're mechanically and aesthetically at odds with the Internet itself - the conversion of a frontier to a constellation of wholly-owned markets, which is now your default mode of interaction with the network. Similar to Luddism, the only reason you don't know that is because of a now decades long campaign on the part of capital.
(CW)TB out.
