Essays. Catscan Columns

The streets didn't save the regime, though. In 1870 Bismarck's Germans smashed the French armies at Sedan. Paris was blockaded.

In response, Nadar invented airmail.

In 1859, Napoleon III had offered Nadar 50,000 francs to take aerial photographs of the Italian front in his military adventure in Italy; but Nadar was a staunch radical republican and stoutly refused any bloodmoney from the imperial war-machine. The disaster of 1870 was a different matter. As Nadar explained from Paris, via balloon, to *The Times* in London, destroying the repugnant Imperial regime was one thing, and rather understandable; but killing the Parisian populace wholesale was quite another.

Nadar was normally a highly ma

Nadar's balloon corps didn't make much real military difference. Some were shot down; one was blown off to a fjord in Norway. In any case, balloon traffic could not hope to match the enormous military significance of German railroads.

And yet the balloons were there -- and they could fly. After the debacle of Sedan, Paris had no government, damn little food, no mail, no official backing, and victorious enemy guns on all sides -- but anyone in Paris could see Nadar's balloons. There wasn't much to them, really, other than straw and hot air and an attitude, but they were there, and they were flying. They were energetic, they were optimistic, and they made a bold pretense of practicality. People have died cheerfully for less. It was his finest hour.

Nadar outlived everyone in the Pantheon Nadar. His enormous vitality served him well, and he died two weeks short of his ninetieth birthday, in 1910. This man, who showed such preternatural insight into other people, was not devoid of self-knowledge. As early as 1864, he described himself well:

"A superficial intelligence which has touched on too many subjects to have allowed time to explore any in depth.... A dare-devil, always on the lookout for currents to swim against, oblivious of public opinion, irreconcileably opposed to any sign of law and order. A jack-of-all-trades who smiles out of one corner of his mouth and snarls with the other, coarse enough to call things by their real names -- and people too -- never one to miss the chance to talk of rope in the house of the hanged man."

Nadar died eighty-three years ago. We have no real right to claim him -- visionary, aesthete, polemicist, Bohemian, technologist -- as a spiritual ancestor.

But it might be a damned good idea to adopt him.

CATSCAN 13 "Electronic Text"

In the mid-1980s I bought a modem and began hanging out on local computer bulletin board systems. I found the practice intriguing. There seemed to be a lot of potential online for interesting new forms of cultural agitation and fanzine work. The proto-Net itself was a remarkable technical i

After two years I gave up. E-mail from local bulletin board systems was consuming as much time as my regular printed mail, but my printed mail far outclassed anything I could find electronically. My printed mail was much denser and much more informative than anything available to me online, and my printed mail was arriving from all over the world. Electronic text was like a bowl of homemade soup, but what I required was exotic bouillon cubes shipped in from every corner of the compass.

I was writing quite a bit for online discussion groups, but the effort it took to do this well didn't seem to be well repaid. Printed fanzines and SF magazines offered a larger and more demographically varied audience than the computer enthusiasts on local boards. Time constraints, and the limits of the medium in the mid-80s, forced me off the net.

In 1990, a much larger and vastly more sophisticated Net returned with a vengeance and brusquely thrust its tentacles up through my floorboards. I found it necessary to get back up to speed in a hurry.

I have now been online steadily -- mostly on the WELL, CompuServe, and the Internet -- for three years. I've sampled many other systems -- GEnie, America Online, Delphi, dozens of local boards -- but WELL, CIS and Internet seem to best suit my particular interests and activities. I don't consider myself a netguru, because I've met some actual netgurus, and I know I'm certainly not one, because I don't program. But I enjoy the reputation of a minor netguru because I write for the Net and about the Net. The entire texture of my literary enterprise has been altered, probably permanently, by gopher, ftp, WAIS, World Wide Web, and global e-mail.

I now spend shocking amounts of time online. I used to carry out a wide literary correspondence through the mails. That activity is now near death, replaced by faxes and e-mail. I haven't written a personal letter in months that wasn't to some modem-deprived soul in Britain, Russia, Japan, or Mexico.

On-line, however, I'm very active. During 1993, I accumulated about half a megabyte of e-mail every week. Since the net-release of the electronic text of my nonfiction book HACKER CRACKDOWN, that rate has more than doubled. I'm getting thirty messages a day.

Most of my traffic, thankfully, is not personal e-mail but electronic magazines. I read a lot of fairly diffuse local discussion from the EFF-Austin board of directors emailing list, but I also read many online publications such as RISKS DIGEST, BITS & BYTES, COMPUTER UNDERGROUND DIGEST, EFFECTOR, PHRACK, and Arthur Kroker's CANADIAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL AND SOCIAL THEORY.

I spend a great deal of time grappling with these electronic magazines -- these "e-zines." I can't truthfully say I that actually "read" them. I certainly don't read them with the focussed attention that I devote to printed material such as BOARDWATCH or WORLD PRESS REVIEW or BOING BOING.

Of course, it's possible to leaf quickly through a print magazine, and most of the print magazines I receive: SCIENCE, NATURE, SECURITY MANAGEMENT -- receive just that kind of browsing, cursory treatment. But my relationship with electronic text is different -- not just cursory, but cursor-y. I question whether the antique term "reading" is properly applied to the consumption of electronic magazines. Traditionally, reading does not involve scrolling spasmodically down, and occasionally back up, through an endless piano-player roll of intangible verbiage. Electronic text lacks the ritual, sensual elements of print publication: back covers, front covers, typography, italics, convenient stopping places, an impending sense of completion -- what one might call the body language of the printed text. The loss of these sensory clues has subtle but profound effects on one's dealings with the text.

I now spend about as much time reading -- or perhaps "scrolling" is the proper term -- e-zines as I do reading printed magazines. I've become dependent on e- zines. I scarcely see how I got along in life before electronically subscribing to COMPUTER UNDERGROUND DIGEST. This compendium of unorthodox computer activities now seems to me a vital part of the mental armamentarium of every serious-minded adult. The same goes for RISKS DIGEST, that startling assemblage of bizarre engineering anecdotes from all over the planet, concerning "risks to the public in computers and related systems." Reading RISKS is wonderfully revelatory, much like having the Wizard of Oz invite you behind the curtain to confidentially bitch at length that the giant brass bowls of flame have given him emphysema.