by Adam Sah
January, 1991
(unpublished)
A friend of mine and his fiancee invited me to spend New Year's with them at his parent's cabin, in upstate New York. They insisted I bring along a fourth, so as to diffuse the three-is-a-crowd syndrome. So I called on my friend Amy, who'd I'd known the better part of eight years, which is a very long time when you're a junior in college.
Mike and Joanne had probably met Amy before, at one of my innumerable Saturday-night get-togethers, relaxing exercises in the art of building friendships over rum and coke. He was a fellow Computer Science undergrad at SUNY at Stony Brook. She was an English major, but definitely spent a large portion of her life online. I used to call folks like her "CS groupies". Although the connotations are unfair, most of these folks were, in fact, dating CS majors- why else would they choose to go out to a perfectly respectable dinner, only to end up vigorously debating the relative merits various operating systems?
The life of a CS major is perhaps a bit strange, owing to the almost inbred isolation of writing computer programs at odd hours of the night. I started life as an artist, and showered quite consistently. But the magic of a working program, a rarely enjoyed and fleeting pleasure, is a draw (read: drug habit) that easily overcomes the need for food and sleep, much less such incidentals like hygeine. I'd join a 12-step program, but as a software engineer, I'd be tempted to optimize it into 5 steps.
And this love is nurtured by a culture which now exists largely in the ether. I'm currently collaborating on work with a person I've met a few times at conferences, but who will likely never meet me otherwise. He lives perhaps an hour away, in the South Bay outsiders call Silicon Valley. This "net" is nothing new- hackers have lived with it for years. We often maintain friendships over the wire; it's hard to start one, but continuing an existing one is easy.
The trouble is that this lifestyle is somewhat encroaching. The net isn't about 500 television channels- it's about always being within a few keystrokes of everyone in your life- of having any curiousity satisfied by renowned experts within a few hours tops- about being kept up to date within minutes of major news events. It's about being online. And this weekend was offline. Very offline.
So offline, we didn't have a telephone, much less net access. No fax machine, no television. You could bring a beeper: if the signals could make it between the mountains, you could drive for 20 minutes into town to call the person back. I was shocked. This sounded dangerous- what if something happened? I'm not talking about someone falling ill-- that seemed less of a problem, probably because it was even completely plausible that anyone could be an hour from a hospital. My first worry was the failure of some distant computer whose uptime was my paycheck. The big question: could we do it?
I was both excited and scared. I'd never been away from civilization for more than an hour or two. As a city-boy growing up near The City (New York), there's a certain feeling of safety in being surrounded by lots of other people, at least when you unlock the apartment door. Central Park is great: you can tuck yourself away in a facsimile of nature, without ever losing that feeling of being connected to it all. That's what Net access is like; even if you're offline, you comfort in the knowledge that online is two keystrokes away. It's popular here in the Bay Area to throw parties and leave a live connection to the net going, so people can casually check for new email. And yes, we really do get mail at 5am on a Saturday night- if nothing else- that's well into Sunday in Britain, and the hackers are still working in Japan.
The drive up was incredibly long; we were just barely mature enough to not ask "are we there yet?". Remember, you're talking about a culture where 3 one-thousanths of a second is considered fatally slow, and where anything not instanteous is ripe for fixing. Five hours is eternity. I grew bored of the scenery after the first five miles in the mountains. I was offended at having to drive through 6 small towns on one-lane roads to get to this place. This story could have been written on one of the six lanes of the Bay bridge.
The weekend went swell. This comes as no shocker, I suppose. We took long walks, in fours and in twos. We talked politics, music, and so on. Sort of like The Big Chill, only no one had to die. I cheated and brought a portable CD player. We toasted the New Year and wondered how we could be sure our watches weren't off by five minutes, possibly invalidating the experience. We tried for a no-acronyms policy. It failed almost immediately, when Mike replied, "What?! No TLAs?"
But mostly we sat around bored. The excitement of being part of it all was, of course, absent. It's like we were asleep or something. By comparison to the hustle and bustle of being at a cloverleaf of the Information Superhighway and the Miracle Mile, sitting around without entertainment seemed like wasted space. And of course it wasn't. It was a recharge. I stole the chance on Saturday night to do a little pencil sketching, which I never have time to do anymore. Joanne took the opportunity to do some homestyle cooking. And of course, we all unloaded some secret on one of the others.
The moral of the story is that if you're an net.junkie (ie. you're reading this online), it is possible to get away from it all. Being offline isn't all that bad. Honest. No major disasters will happen in your absence. Don't be frightened- it won't hurt a bit. They still need you more than you need them. Repeat this in the car and you'll be fine.
If you're not a junkie, perhaps consider this a warning. One friend of mine here in Berkeley refuses to get online. She was an English major in college, who owned a Mac only to write papers and avoided all the other mind candy. Even she's losing out- stuck for work, she picked up an entry-level job at a nearby software company- sleeping with the enemy, indeed! And still she's resisting. One day, she's going to want a raise, and that will be it. She's got every other base firmly covered, and she's no dummy. So you either lose control over your life to being poor, or lose control to the Net. Take your pick.