Indra Sinha
The Cybergypsies - ‘A frank account of love, life and travels on the electronic frontier’
Interview provided by Scribner (1999)
The Cybergypsies is a Scribner paperback original available now. (Trade paperback, 405 pages, £9.99; ISBN 0-684-81929-5)
Netsurfers are vulgar tourists. Cybergypsies are/were the hard-core travellers and explorers of cyberspace. The Cybergypsies is a kind of antique cyber-travel book, locating the strange, anarchic worlds of the online mavericks who display a curious combination of brilliance and delinquency.
It autobiographically describes one man’s obsessional exploration of early cyberspace over many years and the people he meets electronically, the cybergypsies: virus writers, hackers, witches, sex-peddlers, conmen, net vamps, randy paratroopers posing as girls; the A-bomb blueprints he was offered for sale. He recounts with startling honesty how he nearly lost everything and how the Net can be as dangerous and destructive as any drug addiction.
He also shows how the internet can be used constructively, as he describes how he, with Don McCullin, campaigned for human rights with desperate appeals for the Kurdish refugees in the wake of the Gulf War, involving Jeffrey Archer and justice for Bhopal’s gas victims.
And it’s very good.
Indra (after a Vedic storm god) Sinha was born in India (during a thunderstorm), of an Indian father and an English mother (a writer). He won awards in every major advertising show as a copywriter. At the height of his career, he literally walked out of advertising one day to become a full time writer, and now lives in East Sussex with his wife and children.
When you first discovered the Net, what was there apart from Shades?
Precious little that was accessible to folk like me. It was 1984,
pre-internet days. A good ten years before the web took off. British
Telecom were offering a service called Telecom Gold. It was really
aimed at businesses. You could use it to connect to financial databases
(at about £3 a minute. It also had a thing called Noticeboard, and a
games section. It soon acquired a multi-user game called Shades, which
was a first generation offshoot of Essex MUD [Multi-User Dungeon], the
original ancestor of all MUDs, MUGS, MOOS and MUSES worldwide. Some of
the first Shades players were Essex MUDers. The Coder of Shades was
one. Zeon the Wizard another. Once you got used to the modem, and began
wondering about whether there was intelligent life anywhere else in
cyberspace, certain other things opened up. BT also had services called
Prestel and Micronet. An account with one of these brought automatic
membership of the other. Both also had Shades. By the end of the 1980s,
still five years before the web, there was a considerable community of
Shades players, maybe two hundred who knew each other on and off line.
That tight little community is scattered but still in touch. Shades is
online again, this time on the internet, accessible via telnet, but
subject to bad lag and as a result virtually moribund.
Apart from being adapted for the internet, the game has hardly changed at all since its debut fifteen years ago. You should recognise some of the locations.
A brief chronology:
1984 - My first excursion into cyberspace.
- JANET starts in Britain, connecting university mainframes to the young internet. You could get usenet groups for first time by hacking
- Fidonet starts, a confederation of bulletin boards (home-made software which allow outside dialers access to a specific region of your computer via a modem). The BBSS can dial each other to pass files and messages (echomail and netmail). No gateway to internet for years yet...
1987 - Greennet starts up in UK, connecting to internet newsgroups. I used it to open an account on the WELL in San Francisco which started about the same time. The WELL attracted land still does) a lot of cool people. ‘Vortex’ has already been in existence some time, but nobody knows about it.
1991 - Wyrd War II, death of Shades and Micronet
1992 - An article called ‘Surfing the Internet’ starts circulating on cybergypsy bulletin boards, written by Jean Polly of the WELL. It mentions telnetting, newsgroups, gophers (like wiretap-spies, where my Kama Sutra extract was pirated). It mentioned the world wide web only in passing, as a crazy vision that this guy at CERN had... gave his number if you wanted to talk to him about it.
- Demon Internet starts offering internet access to a cybergypsy clientele at a flat £10 a month. For a couple of years, there were only about 2000 of us. The software was a bugger to use...only a local call in London.
1993 - 200 websites on the WWW.
The book appears to have been written as a catharsis, for the sake of your marriage. How well has it worked?
Well, we’re still married. I wrote it originally to earn back the
money I’d squandered. I could never have written the book without her.
She read every page of every draft. We talked the whole thing through.
Sometimes it was painful. As for your question, hang on, I’II ask her.
Hello, this is ‘Eve’. I don’t think he realised how abandoned and neglected I felt. He didn’t do it deliberately, he just got absolutely fascinated. The healing began when he had a moment of revelation and saw how unfair the situation was. Then the problems just began to evaporate. We are happy now.
How do you explain the addictive quality of online activity?
It ravishes the imagination. It conjures into being realities as
‘real’ as real life, albeit harder to pin down. Your experiences in
cyberspace are as real as your everyday experience, just of a different
kind. You have a new life, an extra life, if you will. You are
experiencing the huge, creative power of the imagination. It is, as
Jarly said, like a drug. A highly addictive drug because it stimulates
the imagination to highly pleasurable visions. It may not take everyone
the same way.
For me cyberspace is not primarily about computers, any more than for [Thomas] de Quincey, opium-eating was about decanter and glass (he drank his opium in the form of a laudanum tincture). It is about the imagination. Cyberspace is a subset of the human imagination. It exists only in the imagination, nowhere else.
My motives in writing the book, again can be amplified by de Quincey [Confessions of an English Opium Eater]:
‘I here present you, courteous reader, with the record of a remarkable
period of my life; according to my application of it, I trust that it
will prove, not merely an interesting record, but, in a considerable
degree, useful and instructive. In that hope it is that I have drawn it
up; and that must be my apology for breaking through that delicate and
honourable reserve, which, for the most part, restrains us from the
public exposure of our own errors and infirmities.’
So you were cybergypsies, explorers if you like, and the Net now is full of ‘cybertourists’. How have the gypsies adapted?
About 60% of Internet Service Providers (like Demon) were started
by cybergypsies. Having said that, Fidonet is a shadow of its former
self. The old gypsies, numerically, are swamped by the new breed of net
users. However, they are still around. Nearly all of them are finding
things to do via the internet. Many still run old-style bulletin
boards. Some have retreated into obscure corners... the Vortex is still
there, but now overrun by the people ‘Luna’ called barbarians.
Do you think that readers will need a working knowledge of computers, particularly MS-DOS, to get the most out of your book?
No. I have no interest in computers myself and I would hate anyone
to think that this book is somehow ‘about computers’ or ‘about the
net’. It is about people, and how they used their imaginations. It is
about the collisions of cyberreality and the real world. About the
ruined city of Shades and the ruins of Halabja. About death in the
Vortex, or in Bhopal, I tried to express it to Peter Guttridge, who
wrote the postscript, by saying: It is about the power of the
imagination to create worlds, and about the consequences of its failure
in the real world.
As to MS-DOS, there are many languages in this book. MS-DOS is one. Sanskrit, Greek, Hindi, hexadecimal, Russian, DNA-code are some others. You don’t need to know any of these.
There isn’t much DOS in the storytelling. Only the hacking of Nasty Ned’s computer. And you don’t have to understand it. But if you do, so much the better.
Do
you ever wail and gnash your teeth when you read fictitious passages
about computers by writers who have experience of nothing more advanced
than an electric typewriter? And who’s the worst for this?
Books about computers bore me. Badly written books more so, I am
tired of hearing people say that printed books and newspapers are dead
because ‘soon you will be able to get information about anything from
the internet at the flick of a button’. Such statements can only be
made by people who’ve never spent hours searching the web in vain for
some elementary piece of information.
Do you think that the Net is reinventing the act and vernacular of interpersonal communications?
Letter writing is experiencing a resurgence. In the form of emails.
It’s now possible to be in close daily contact with friends all over
the world. I correspond almost daily with friends in the US, India,
Australia.
Where are they now? What are Jarly et al up to?
One or two, naming no names, are in prison. Jarly is doing very
well thank you, more or less as described. But these days you’re as
likely to meet him at the Groucho Club as at a hacker’s convention.
Geno has vanished. Anyone know of where he is, let me know. Gawain is
eccentric as ever. Zeon and many of the others are around on Shades.
Lilith says she is desperate to start answering her fanmail at
lilith@cybergypsies.com. But I won’t let her loose until she promises
not to seduce my readers.
There
is a big difference between the virtual sex favoured by Lilith and the
dayglo porn that seems to pass for online sex these days. Are you, as
you seem, slightly wistful about this shift?
I was never into online sex, always found the idea too silly and
embarrassing, witness my feeble performance when seduced by the
inimitable Lilith. If you read the Cyber Sutra, the sort of loving
favoured by the best roleplayers was not a crude simulation of sex,
expressed in four letter words. Often did not involve any overtly
sexual reference. It was very finely done. Like an Anais Nin story.
Lilith’s encounter with Pierrot towards the end of the book was
supplied to me by Lilith herself specifically for use in the book. It
gives an idea...
Did your rural existence heighten the illusion of your games?
No, I think I said somewhere that Sussex itself is a cyberspace for
many who come to live here, expecting rural idyll. The games were not
illusions, they were different kinds of reality, conjured in and by the
imagination. Magnus and I could sit on a peak in the Lake District,
surrounded by astonishing countryside and hook into the internet from a
laptop to talk to the Detonator. Everything enriched everything else.
How did you link up with Simon & Schuster [Scribner is an imprint of S&S]?
Simon & Schuster bid for the book after seeing the proposal.
The book is nothing like the proposal, I am delighted to say. S&S
seem quite happy about that too. Viking Penguin are doing the book in
the US. They never saw the proposal. They saw an early overgrown draft
and made a pre-emptive bid, which we were delighted to accept, to take
the thing off the market.
How long did it take you to write The Cybergypsies, and were there many distractions while you were writing?
In a sense, fifteen years, since the book is an attempt to recreate
for the reader the actual experience of being in that world. Collecting
notes since 1991, when the idea first occurred. We had a section of my
bulletin board, which we called ‘Computer Gypsies’ and the inner core
used to go in there. Later it became ‘Cyber-Gypsies’, I wrote solidly
[or about a year. Maybe eighteen months, with rewrites. But I have
rewritten at least a third of the book in the final proofs...
Distractions? Earning a living. The freelance advertising has pretty much dried up, so I need the book to do well and I aim to make a living just from writing.
Are you working on a second novel at the moment?
I’m deeply into my new book, which has got the working title of ‘Curry Yarns’. It isn’t a novel. Like Cybergypsies,
it’s based on real events, but told in a novelistic way. It’s set
mostly in India. It is an investigation of two murders, one a famous
society murder of 1959...an amazing and frankly sensational new light
on that, and a murder from about 100 years ago. Having said that, parts
of the book are set in the 4th century AD, and the modern story perhaps
starts in 1857 at the time of the Mutiny in which my family fought
against the British and lost. Anyone who likes the mazes and mysteries
of Cybergypsies will like this one.
How do you use the Net these days? Does your wife use it too?
I use it for email and research. The web is an extremely useful
research tool, I don’t do IRC (chat) because it bores me. I have no
deep or fundamental interest in the net, per se. I find the web useful,
but also dull.
How do you see the future of the Net panning out?
Within a couple of years, it will be like television. Websites will
have sound and video action... Business will be done in a huge way over
the net. But something that the big spenders, the corporations, the
huge advertisers and their ad agencies don’t realise is this: on the
net, no matter what any hotshot multimedia expert tells you, there is
no such thing as a target audience. Exactly the opposite. You are the
target. Conventional advertising buys opportunities to intrude into
people’s lives. On the net, people choose where they go. Why should
they visit your site? You will have to give them something to make it
worth their while and it won’t be mindless adspeak. The net will kill
conventional advertising within five years and good riddance.
Another message for huge corporations like Union Carbide. We, the pitiful handful of people who speak out for the victims of Bhopal may have little money. You might be able to outspend us loco times over, if it is a matter of advertising. But on the web, we are your equal. Your website. Our website. The world will choose. Huge corporations can tell all the lies, spout all the pompous corporate twaddle they like, they can spend hundreds of thousands on making their websites with java and flash, but in the end they will have to clean up their acts or they will die. Goes for Microsoft too.
How much do you think your addiction cost you over the years?
About fifty grand. Almost as much as Biffo spent on Scientology. [In the book.]
What’s the story behind Jamrach? Did he really exist, and if so, how did you discover him?
He really existed. He had a shop in Ratcliffe Highway, as described
in the book. I learned about it from the first (1888) issue of the
Strand Magazine (I have a complete old set). I registered the name
jamrach.com, because I wanted to create a web shop which was like
Jamrach’s... full of goodness knows what from all over the cyberverse.
And maybe one day I will.
I
see that you’re going to be including some unpublished sections on your
website. Was the book originally written for online publication?
No. I believe in paper and ink and the printing press. I am so sick
of hearing people say that printed books are dead. Only a cretin would
read a laptop on the loo, or on a riverbank. I wrote Cybergypsies,
as much as anything, to prove that the printed word is as powerful as
ever it was. A film producer has already approached me about turning
the book into a screenplay. But I wrote it to be unfilmable. The book
plays in the cinema of the imagination, which has no equal. One of the
people who read an early draft said to me, these games, Shades and the
Vortex, they must have had graphics, because mere words could have
never have been so vivid? I said, it’s through mere words that you have
experienced them.
How close did you come to losing your soul, as Luna warns might happen?
‘Luna’ was and is a one-off. If you are so desperately unhappy that
you want not to exist in the real world, only as a fiction of your own
imagination, then you may well feel that ‘you’, the cyber character,
have no soul. Actually, I have no idea what Luna meant. I glimpsed it,
possibly, in the paintings of the tortured schizophrenics we went to,
where we were supposed to meet her. Luna was desperately jealous of her
privacy. No one knew who she was in ‘real’ life. Those who knew her
best believed her to be genuinely female, about 55, professional,
probably a high ranking civil servant. Some even said that she might be
Stella Rimmington, then head of M15, I have asked S&S to send
Stella Rimmington a copy of the book. I loved Luna, she was my best
friend, I wish we were still in touch and hope that she’ll call the
bulletin board on the old number if she ever reads the book.
What made you jack in your ad-land job and do you ever regret it?
I’d never wanted to be in advertising and was not particularly good
at it, though for some reason I seemed to be strangely successful. I
was at a wonderful agency, full of talented people, doing clever
things. It was great fun. One day I just got sick of it and walked out.
I’ve never for a moment regretted it. I am now doing what I have
always, since the age of ten, wanted to do, and what I was put here to
do.
Where does the name Bear come from? is it a name that is used for you in real life?
Nah. Bear is a Shades name. Actually on Shades it is Bearrr, I
originally proposed to write the book under the name Farinsnod
Carneyblatt, which was the moniker I used in the virus nets, but my
publisher, unaccountably, was not keen.