I
first used the prehistoric net in 1984, the year that Apple introduced
the first Macintosh, and a full decade before websites, email
and the like. The internet as we know it did not exist. Cybergypsies
gives a snapshot of the net the way it was then.
It was a world made for writers – everything was text –
no photographs, music or movies. The only graphics we had were
ANSI art,
which looked like this:
Front
page of Dust'N'Bones BBS
Mycologik,
by Nootropic, click
image to enlarge
The primaeval net was no less chaotic than that of today. I met
virus writers, hackers, witches, sex-peddlars, conmen, net vamps,
randy paratroopers posing as girls, people who tried to sell me
A-bomb blueprints.
The random weirdness of the net was very obvious, but it opened
my eyes to the fact that ‘real’ life is actually no
less chaotic or bizarre. It just seems normal because we filter
out what we don't want to see. Cybergypsies chronicles
the interaction of virtual and real lives.
My friends were among the first to use the net for human rights
campaigning. Campaigning for the Kurds on Greenet, I met the astonishing
Alastair McIntosh,
who remains a close friend to this day. For years I used to relay
Amnesty International's Urgent Action alerts from Greennet to
Fidonet via my BBS, The Butterfly Effect.
Amnesty International's first ever online local group ran on The
Butterfly Effect. It is long since defunct.
Extract from an interview on The Well:
When I began writing Cybergypsies, I knew that I wanted
to convey the real experience of what it had been like to live
in several worlds simultaneously, but I didn't know how to do
it. At first I was making distinctions between ‘real’
life and the various lives I led on the net (and elsewhere).
But it was ALL real to me. All equally real, or equally unreal.
So the first thing that happened was that the perspective flattened.
Meetings with Luna, or Geno, or with Jeffrey Archer, were treated
in exactly the same way. The ruined town inside Shades, where
jackdaws nested among rubble and blackened rafters, was no more
or less real than the ruined Kurdish town of Halabja, destroyed
by Iraqi cyanide bombs. The testimony of Lilith, to cannibalism
and murder in the Vortex, had the same weight as the tortured
memories of my friend Don McCullin, who had spent thirty years
photographing wars and human rights atrocities. Gradually there
evolved an interweaving of stories, themes and currents. The
discontinuous narrative and apparently dsylexic structure is
an attempt to convey what my ‘cyber’ experience
had been like - fractured, hallucinatory, random, full of strange
and unexpected juxtapositions - coincidences and ‘noincidences’
- blind alleys, fragments of ‘reality’ torn up and
flung in your face.
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