& a blog

Now that the internet has become an ambience, we have become enveloped by it. Just ten years ago, society traveled to the internet. It was something somewhat site-specific, a cafe, a library, a corporate office. At that point, the internet still had a certain physicality- one could move into its reach, and, more importantly, out. In the early days of wi-fi, this locality was something of a game. One might roam around the house, around the office, or around the neighborhood divining the presence of the internet. This was the age of the “hot spot,” spaces that were special for something you could not see, but could access. A pregnant, invisible ether. A magical site.

For many of us, the experience of the internet was connected to those spaces. A corner where a neighbor’s unlocked wireless came in strongest was something of a special place, even if it was on top of a dryer. One particular hot spot in my father’s house was next to a window which framed a long view of the Jackson Street T-Stop and the hills of Jamaica Plain. It would be impossible for me to divorce the experience of the boundless and infinite (for that is generally what I connect with the experience of the internet) from that imperial vista. Not to say that only such views can compliment a “hot spot.” To the contrary, “hot spots” in dark, windowless corners are all the better for the experience of the networked sublime. In a place where one feels trapped, the exploding second space of a strong internet connection feels like an escape by floo powder.

Which of course reminds us of the sheer disembodying effect of internet use. Like the cliched image of the out-of-body-experience, the internet always takes us out of ourselves, above our physicality, to a plane that plato might have endorsed for its purity in abstraction. But unlike the out of body experience, the internet rarely points us back to our bodies, save in the mediated re-representations of ourselves (like facebook photos, digital profiles, usernames, and avatars) that supplement our desire for the physical with a new physicality. A body that is not one. A body that is the sign of a body (it has the photographic trace of the body, it answers to the body, it mimics the names of the body, but it is not a body). A body that has taken on a second life, or perhaps a primary life of its own.

We are becoming victims of an invasive ether. Between 3G networking and the growing ubiquity of Wi-Fi, we are very rarely outside of an enveloping ambience- the internet made massive and inescapable. The network made into the mundane, the essential, the indispensable. Once a luxury, internet access is growingly a utility. Forgoing its status as commodity, the internet has become something woven into the fabric of life.

Is the internet itself Orwell’s “Big Brother”?  It is becoming a surveillance we volunteer ourselves to. But why do we so require its ubiquity? Why did we leave the corners were we knew we could find it and require it to be everywhere, and thus nowhere?

The internet is utopia. This was the core belief of the California Ideology critiqued by Marxist media theorists and expounded by the entrepreneurs who would become moguls of silicon valley. But all these years later, re-examining the claim with an eye towards Thomas More and Fredric Jameson we might see its veracity anew. The internet is “no place” indeed. When the network forks such that its intersections cease to be visible (or important) then we might truly admit that we are perpetually ascending from somewhere to nowhere. We have lost our hot spots. The internet is public parks, and on trains, and on the beach. If it is an invasive ether, than its invasiveness has already subsided. We have walked it down our streets, and let it map our doorsteps. We have made it a cloud, hanging above us, more intimate than satellites, more familiar than the stars. We have conquered our own spaces, giving it over to blanket coverage and overlapping access. We map the territory we have not conquered (via cell phone reception charts and studies) marking out lands beyond culture. We aspire towards an assimilation. We just don’t want a moment of disconnection.

We desire to become space itself. We realized long ago that the “hot spot” would never be practical, unless we ourselves were the “hot spot.”

So we became the ether.