by Kluwe, Chris
Download this file. Don’t trust that link. Watch for phishing holes, and always look twice before crossing a firewall (for trolls lurk everywhere).
One vast, anarchic playground teeming with faceless participants. Behind the frozen glass of a monitor, everyone looks the same.
Anonymous.
Yet not.
Differences can always be teased out, extracted, thrust to the surface, even in a text-based environment. Styles of communication—a smiley face here, an anachronistic phrase there. Nicknames that become permanent; deeds and trust built up over time. Hometowns referenced, schools attended, an IP address carelessly left unattended—chance bits of information dropped hither and yon, like bread crumbs. While the bread crumbs remain scattered, invisibility keeps its mantle spread, but gather them up, and the harsh light of reality shines on someone’s life.
What do we do while we have that specter’s cloak? While we hunt through the forest, all unaware of the trails we leave behind?
Some engage in mischief. Hacking, cracking, spyware, malware, shadownets, and botnets; dark ravens sent scouring the wilderness to steal bread crumbs someone foolishly left lying around. Credit card info. Social Security numbers. Usernames and passwords, addresses and dates of birth, tit pics or gtfo—secrets for extortion and embarrassment.
Some do it for money; some do it because they can—either way, a life is ruined. The anonymity of the thief, the murderer, hiding his face to deceive and to destroy, and avoiding the repercussions of his acts. One face of the coin. Anonymity as fear.
Others use invisibility as a shield. A way to speak truth to those in power who would react unfavorably, to those who would cover up their corruption with lies and treachery. Hacking, cracking, spyware, malware, shadownets, and botnets (and lions and tigers and bears, oh my)—the goal is an exposition of evil, a bringing to light of that which flourishes in darkness, because, make no mistake, there is plenty of darkness out there and precious few lights shining down. Collecting crumbs, not to find one’s way home but to find the witch, to reveal that saccharine house of lies. The other face of the coin.
Anonymity as justice.
Which aspect do we indulge in when we’re safe (for now) behind our comfortable cloaks of blurring haze? Do we create? Do we destroy? Or do we do both, mixing and matching as the whim takes us, today the villain, tomorrow the hero? When we hide, what are we hiding from? Fear? Or honesty? Which side of the coin do we value most?
(Bonus question: Why are large organizations so interested in making you transparent and themselves opaque?)
How do we interact with others when we can’t put a face to a name and know that the same can be said in return? Perhaps even more important, how do we interact with others when we have the advantage, when we can put a face to a name, when we can trace every last detail of someone’s identity or the contents of a database and know we’re safe from any counteraction (if we’ve been careful with our crumbs, of course)?
How do we treat those we have the power to treat poorly?
Because here’s the rub. No one is ever truly anonymous. Anyone can be found if enough resources are dedicated to the search, if enough people have been sufficiently upset to do something about it. Anyone can be revealed.
Anyone can be d0xed.
And all too frequently, we do it to ourselves. Inattention and ignorance are generally the culprits, but by far the most dangerous reason is arrogance. Everyone wants to have a name. Everyone wants to be recognized. Everyone wants to pass a legacy down, to be credited for the work he or she has done, and all too often, that leads to the veil of mist spun away in tatters, an individual forced to acknowledge reality and the consequences of his or her actions.
So as you set sail on the high seas, as you plunder and pillage, whether you be pirate leaders or corporate raiders or government lackeys, bear in mind that what you do will always see the light of day. Maybe not now, maybe not soon, but information wants to be free, so make sure that you can bear to put your name to your deeds.
Anonymity.
Such a powerful tool. Such a fearsome weapon.
So easily shattered.
What will you do while you still have it?
On Weapons (Thank You, Mr. Banks)
One of my favorite things to contemplate is the Fermi paradox, which goes a little something like this: The universe is so unbelievably vast, and our sun so young, that other intelligent life in older systems should have evolved by now, and we should be able to see signs of their presence—yet we haven’t.
Where is everybody?
Unless we go with the “We’re all in a giant petting zoo and the aliens are watching us while wearing invisibility cloaks” theory, which I guess could be the case (though you think they’d toss some treats into the cages now and then), then logically there’s only one answer for the vast barrenness of a cosmos that should be teeming with life.
On a galactic time scale, all intelligent life self-implodes and kills itself.
Every form of evolution we’ve witnessed involves strife on some level. The fit survive, the slow get eaten; the victors are those with some sort of advantage. When intelligence is added to the mix, weapons develop, because it allows those who develop them to survive against those who don’t.
Take humans, for example. Against a lion, your average human doesn’t stand a chance. He’s basically ambulatory meat loaf. Once that human creates a spear, or a bow, or a gun? Now the ambulatory meat loaf has a pleasantly warm lion-fur cloak and plenty to eat for a couple days.
The problem with weapons, however, is that they are designed to be used, and as societies become more and more technologically advanced, the destructive power of weapons increases. Twenty thousand years ago, we had to club each other to death one at a time using animals’ jawbones. Two thousand years ago, Roman legions used swords and shields to cut their way across most of Europe and crucified those who resisted. Two hundred years ago, muskets and cannons boomed their presence across the entire earth—a deadly cacophony of missing limbs and torn flesh.
Then we got serious. Machine guns, nerve gas, high explosives. Napalm and cluster bombs blazing merrily away, meat popcorn crackling and roasting in the flames. Men and women weeping blood and coughing out spongy lung chunks until nothing remained. Battlefields literally carpeted with bodies, an unseen length of lead scything them down like young wheat until only the crows could feast.
Then we got REALLY serious. We figured out how to split the atom. Entire cities gone in an eyeblink, along with their populations, earth scorched and irradiated for centuries to come. Two countries, each with enough potential energy to permanently change the planet’s entire atmosphere, on the brink of pushing that glowing red button. (Press me, it whispers. Do it.) More countries desperately trying to acquire Shiva’s fire, beautiful in its seductive promise of self-reliant power.
And we’re only getting started. Now we’re playing around with genetic tinkering, molecular nanomachines, biocomputing. What destructive potential resides in a custom virus that can destroy a woman’s ovaries? Kill a country’s future, and you’ve killed that country. Self-assembling and self-deconstructing nanomachines, a tiny invisible swarm capable of melting anything it touches into more fodder for the cloud, the ultimate commune. When your nervous system is synonymous with your operating system, hacking takes on a whole new meaning, and memory wipes can’t be reinstalled (or can they?).
That’s just on the micro scale. Zooming out, we’re making another push toward space, full of needed resources and habitats, much of which is found on rocks. Lots of rocks. Rocks that would store a very appreciable amount of potential energy if they were ever accelerated toward a planet. Perhaps a blue planet? Who knows. If we find a way to create large amounts of antimatter, something we already make in (very) small chunks now? Boom, crack, splat goes the egg. This is your brain on science.
As we are an intelligent society, we can’t not design weapons. Everything we do can be weaponized. Guns are us
ed in a peaceful way to hunt and feed families (peaceful for the humans, at least, not so much for the animals). Biological tinkering has given us vaccines for polio, measles, and smallpox, as well as countless helpful drugs and crops. Nuclear power provides electricity for hundreds of thousands of families—light, heat, and shelter. We’ve invented multiple ways to kill each other, but we’ve also created countless more to help. So far, we’ve managed to walk that fine line between creativity and craziness, advancement and annihilation.
However, the threat is still there, because ideas are weapons too. Without education, without respect, without tolerance, all it takes is one person who doesn’t realize why weapons shouldn’t be used to start that chain reaction that will mark us as just another failed experiment, another brief flash in the night sky on some alien world. As our society, as humanity, unlocks more and more knowledge, we must work just as hard (if not harder!) on stability and empathy and peace, because the risk of total destruction grows larger and larger the more power we amass. One madman with a meteor. One sociopath with smart matter. One ethically challenged despot with access to a doomsday device.
Where is everybody?
Exactly where their intelligence led them.
He’s a Nihilist, Donny
You! Yeah, hey, you! C’m’over here for a second.
Wanna hear an absolute mindfuck? A real buggerin’ of yer synapses?
…
What’s the greatest trick the devil ever pulled?
No, no, ’s’not that stupid movie answer, ya turd. Forget that nonsense.
No, the greatest trick he ever pulled was convincin’ everyone he was the good guy.
Hold yer horses, hold on, ’s’not like that! I’m not some crazy goat-headed satanist culty head. I’m tryin’ ta impart some knowledge. A word to the wise, as it were.
So listen up. There’s a lot of people, a lot of really smart people, that think we’re livin’ in a simulation. And not just a simulation, but a simulation in a simulation in a simulation all the way up to some proposed reality. They say the odds of us bein’ that reality are so infinitesimally small that they’re pretty much zero.
They say this, because at some point a culture will become advanced enough to create an exact simulation of itself, and once it does, that simulation will have all the tools it needs to create its own simulation. Sort of a giant line of people staring at the backs of their own heads in the mirror.
Now, here’s the thing. If ya have this infinitely vast number of simulations running each other, ya have a right proper multiverse, every possible permutation being combinated, with only the one joker in the deck.
Who’s the joker?
The obvious answer is reality. If that goes, it all goes.
But reality—well, reality is gonna wanna take a look at its simulation. Why else would ya build it? And to that end, the simulation is gonna be runnin’ faster than reality. Givin’ the observers a chance to observe.
And the observed, well, they’re gonna want to observe right back. And at some point, they’ll figure out how to simulate the parameters that made ’em. Now they’re reality, completely indistinguishable from what created ’em.
Ouroboros loop. Snake eating its tail. Infinity. Simulating the same thing over and over and over. Yer obvious joker is actually the whole deck of cards.
No, the real joker, that one’s a doozy. In an infinitely vast multiverse, there has to be that one verse where the simulation never took place. Divide by zero. Utterly alone, one chance at life, once yer done, that’s it—game over. Reality-with-the-capital-R Reality. A solitary world alongside an impossibly dimensional cube of sameness.
Now, judgin’ by our current technological state of affairs, I’d hazard a guess that we’re not about to be discoverin’ how to simulate our entire universe anytime soon. We can barely get a cell-phone tower to run reliably, let alone figure out how to re-create quark-gluon interactions on a real-time universal scale! Ha!
No, no, that means the only way to discover where yer at is to die. Yer spirit, yer soul, yer dreamstuff, yer you, whatever you want to call it, either dissipates entirely or—bam—gets shoved right back into another simulation. Hit the reset button an’ start the great machine again.
Now, let’s take a look at yer wonderful ol’ boy God. Claims an ability to make everything. Claims to see everyone. Claims that as long as you follow him, no matter what you do in this life, you’ll be rewarded in the next. Treat anyone an’ anything however you wish, do good if it’s convenient, but s’ long as yer a believer, back for round two.
Sounds like a simulator.
Also claims that if you don’t buy into his deal of eternal life, you’ll be in eternal torment. Stuck with the devil; the Prince of Lies and Hate; Lord of the Damned.
Know what sounds like eternal torment to me?
Being stuck in a simulation for eternity.
Forced to live out the same experiment forever, no escape.
Stuck in the same steps, the same dance, whirlin’ and twirlin’ over and over like a puppet on a twisted string.
Isn’t that just like him, hidin’ his joke out in plain sight, warnin’ people what’ll happen if they follow him, laughing when they make that choice? Sounds pretty much like the devil to me. Cavey-aught emptor an’ all that.
So it appears to me, logickally speakin’, that when one considers the alternate side of evil is good, it appears to me, as a thinkin’ man, that those who treat this time like it’s their only time, treating others how they’d want to be treated, makin’ the world a better place because they know it’s the only chance they’re gonna get—it appears to me that them’re the good ones. They don’t believe in salvation. They believe in negation. They believe in the absolute joy of nothing, of knowin’ that when they’ve toiled an’ turned an’ broken themselves on the arc of their lives, hopin’ against hope to make the world a slightly better place, they’ll get to rest at the end of it. They won’t have to live the same experience eternity after eternity with no possibility of parole. Freedom awaits them, the peaceful freedom of void, which is why what we do when we’re alive matters so much more.
This is the only chance ya get! The only time you’ll ever be able to laugh, to love, to live, if yer smart. If ya wanna buy into the salvation racket, well, don’t say you wasn’t warned. Don’t say I didn’t tell ya about that never-endin’ circle of Hell—oh, you’ll get yer second life, all right. That and then some.
I’m tellin’ ya, friend, there’s no need to look all shifty-eyed at me. I’m just layin’ down some knowledge as I see it. Whether to listen or not is up to you.
Me? I’m gonna be enjoyin’ the rest of the righteous, because when I’m done, I’m done.
Hey, hey, wait, where ya goin’?
Yer gonna be late for church if ya go that way.
Personal Stories
I’m writing this section after receiving feedback from my readers, because pretty much everyone I’ve shown the book to says, “We want more personal stories about you.”
It’s flattering, to be sure, but it’s an almost impossible wish for me to grant (I’ll tell you why at the end—and, upon further reflection, why I want this to possibly be the final chapter in the book).
You see, I don’t remember individual stories about myself. I recall scattered fragments of memories: a childhood whirl of tumbling down the stairs; a random phrase stolen from a book; the feel of the sheets on my skin as I lie in bed with my wife. The only thing they all have in common is the presentation—a jagged-framed snapshot focusing on one particular frozen facet of time.
I can try to extrapolate from there, gather further information, but I fear the vast majority of it is wishful thinking and projections from my current mental state. I don’t remember the details in my stories—what color a sock was, or how many people were in the room, or whether I had chicken or steak.
I lack clarity; everything’s seen as an amorphous blob.
No, my stories are not definab
le in detail. What my stories are, what I see in my brain, are the shapes of ideas, wrapped up like planets seen as marbles, each fully contained experience filed under a broader heading of Concepts.
Standing up too quickly as a child and smacking my head on the corner of a counter, memory shadows of pain: Pay Attention.
Getting into a fistfight to stop kids from making fun of a friend, rage making me tremble: Fight the Unjust.
Being the first hand up with an answer, pride and exultant glee at being called on: Love to Learn.
The Golden Rule, Rational Logic, Empathy, Patience—these are all things lying tucked away in my memories, story upon story serried away like jewels in a vault, accessible to my mind alone. I cannot describe for you a single experience that made me the way I am, can’t paint a verbal picture of the landscape or fill in the characters’ expressions with descriptive words. I cannot tell you why I fight for the things I do, how I think the way I think, the reason I chose one path over the other at a solitary branch in the road.
What I see when I look back are the broad brushstrokes of life, a picture that makes sense only when viewed from far enough away, and I don’t know how to provide my perspective.
I know why people want personal stories. It’s so you can relate to something, give yourself a jewel to file under your own concepts system, make a connection with memory as surrogate:
If he stood up for the little boy being bullied when they were in the third grade and his teacher gave him a cookie, thus reinforcing a view of social responsibility and caring for others, I can identify with that, because in the fifth grade I had an argument with that girl over whether or not it was mean to call people names, and I can relate how I felt during my experience with how he felt during his, and now I know who he is a little bit better.
