Zoomers lived after the net exploded and have never known what life was like outside its grasp. They weren’t even there when the net came down.
Millennials knew the net in their youth, it was already settling into place, but by the time they were old enough to do anything there it was no longer uncharted land—it was hardly the computer underground. They were born too late to ever quite know how to live and operate in an entirely offline world, but too soon to grow up as Zoomers, caged from birth to death in the social media panopticon.
Boomers built the net, along with many from the Greatest Generation who came before them, and out of raw metal and silicon they literally laid down the foundation for everything to come.
But it was Generation X who found themselves existing as the Net Generation, the ones who broached the hard edge of online space in their 20th century youth of the 80s and 90s, when it was underground and uncommon to do so. These were the ones who discovered a hidden hatch into this secret world, explored it and informed it, and out of it they cleaved the trails that everyone else would eventually follow in on.
It’s the gift and burden of GenX to bridge the frontier of the net, this vast new place in space, with the offline world of Cartesian coordinates and geophysical location that existed before it—and to do that, to be able to keep a passionate excitement for the cybernetic future they knew was dropping down on everything, and to also hold a genuine gladness and nostalgia over the offline past they truly lived, is a history and situation that Zoomers are rightly envious of. The Net Generation stepped from the 20th century ground into 21st century space.
The following excerpt of Circuits of the Wind was originally published in Modern Matter magazine.
Birth of the Net Generation
In these red September weeks a new routine was carved. It was whittled from the core and figure of his life, from where he was: he was in a bedroom, where with locked door he would stay up all night on the computer, reaching out upon the wires, then go to bed after his little sister was brought to school and his parents both drove away to work in the early rising whispers of the sun. He’d see them leaving from the window, watch his parents backing slowly down the driveway, the cars growling hoglike with their loud and noxious sputters, and then alone in the house he’d crash to bed in the blue light of morning, sleeping softly until the late afternoon when he would rise and shower before they’d all come back home, so that he’d be ready to appear downstairs at dinner.
“So what’d you do all day?” his mother would ask hopefully during the course of their meal.
“Oh, I checked out some job prospects,” he’d mutter, and then as soon as he was done he would go up for another night alone at the machine, reaching out to the great world that existed over the distant wires.
He now spent a great deal of time on Usenet, which replaced all the boards for him. What was the use of communicating with a few unknown callers there in Clifton, on the local boards, when you could be reaching out to the whole entire world? When you posted to Usenet, your words reverberated around the planet: you had a global effect. It was so much more exciting and of greater consequence than any board that hung upon a single phone line; here was the whole vast continent connected, all the apartment rooms and office cubicles and shady caverns of the thousand university computer labs, and it reached further out to that sun-mellowed ground of Europe, and across vast frozen expanses, out to the foreign tundras of Japan, Australia, New Zealand, over enormous seas and deeply penetrating even the worm-boring dark of jungles—and when you typed, comments echoed back from all these places to pile upon your words, and the conversations threaded into one.
You knew more people in more places and could engage with them instantly than ever had been possible, and the thousand groups with their fine delineations were populated with experts in their fields; Usenet was like a whole planetary chat about everything, something for the entire world to see and be a part of all at once. What you typed streamed out for inspection or comment by anyone, and the steady flow of posts cascaded in an open, public history of contemporary speech and debate. It was a public record of the now for all the earth, for everyone and for all time. Here were words spoken for the ages. Forget the local, with all its futilities and backwater pettiness; clearly global was the future way. This was going to be it; there simply was no use sticking around the boards any longer. This was the ultimate opportunity, and after knowing its succulence, its awesome promise, and seeing its continued feverish growth he left those local boards forever.
He evaluated groups by the dozen, peeking in and reading through discussions across the broad range of human interest, and he took in the great number of interesting minds who now were out there. He was thrilled by this world, which was one so vibrant, full, and rich; he saw it as the place where he would connect with all the right people and where he would finally find his way. He put his faith in it. He saw himself, within a few months or maybe a year at the most, becoming a regular in his own favored groups, developing a solid reputation as a young man who was working his way up as a great writer of the Internet, known for his words and opinions in a smattering of smart, eclectic groups.
He came to know the land, the hard unchanging shape of it, and he developed comfortable paths around it. The geography was familiar now—it was his home, the daily spaces that he walked through. The newsgroups became a preoccupation and he began to post with more confidence and an increased regularity. He felt cocksure, and swore openly, was even downright vulgar as if it were all a back-hall dorm session far away from any proctors, a session that would dissipate forever the second they got up to leave; there were swear words, there were many swear words imprinted into the text of the Usenet feed—cursings, vulgarities and coarse stumblings.
He read the topics in all their rainbow-colored energy, in all their wonderful limitless variety, with great soothing relief and also wonder—in these messages the random names of people and places listed out onto his screen, vibrantly and colorfully in their gigantic abundance, phrases called out to him, quotations spoke to him, he caught parts of college slogans and he felt the different tribes and spirits asserting all their ways, and whole legends whispered out from there and stalked his dreams. He read the million messages frenetically but with absolute and total joy, with unrestrained, emotive energy. For it was life that he was seeing!
But these sessions also teemed with sadness and a sweaty desperation: how to know and master it, how to gauge it all, and where to go with it? He wanted to touch everything, know every voice and face behind every visitor of every channel, read all the conversations and contribute to every one of them, know the labs and mainframes and PCs across all the dorm rooms, city towers, high-scaling apartments, low-hung ranches and the rooms, the gleaming glass-walled buildings that were placed all across the land.
All of it was coming fast, the chattered hive of Usenet, and the quick rain of email, and the hundred public repositories of files known as FTP; and the chat rooms: there were now a thousand IRC channels happening at any instant, and it took a dozen seconds for the list of them to scroll down even at a lightning speed. He still tried logging them all, saving the vast long lists of them in capture buffers, feeling that he should keep them for close examination at a later date—someday he would sit down and try to sort it out. There was more raw life in a listing of IRC channels than could be found in any copy of the newspaper, or in any television program being broadcast. All of it was part of this living life, and real, right now.
He spent all night on IRC, chatting with the strangers in the channels, and he ran the Lynx program on the Risc so that he could see the World Wide Web, spilling out screens of distant text that interlinked Kansas to Kentucky, and to Switzerland; he made all the hops, and followed links by pressing down upon the arrow keys, and he pondered the vast connections and the windless sweeps that he was pulling in from seven continents and that came across the screen in seconds.
But as he lived his life online, he was still insolubly alone, desperately reaching out for something—for friends who would understand, who would work together with him, friends who would grow with him out on the wilds of the net, and in their many projects and on the pages of their zines they would carefully advance together. He was seeking on a mission—lost himself, yet looking for others to cling to in the turbulence.
He dreamed that a great literary movement would have to emerge now on the net, he felt that it was inevitably so, and he deliberately sought to be its leader. His friends would be other young men just like him, just about his own age, with all the same worries and aspirations, and who were also madly clawing at the wires—and in his search he happily began to find them: one he saw of promise was Scott Brady, formerly of Arlington, now relocated to a tiny loft in Greenwich Village and with all the haughty ambition to be a noted writer of the net age, and there were about a half a dozen more just like him that he saw out there, on the net, and he corresponded passionately with them all. He was open and honest, told them all to hang true, and he saw them clinging together, bonded by fate, parading through the literary dramas of life as a great and loyal team, and soaring swiftly into the deep carvings of history. It was their time, the net was now, and his hopes were high: he felt a tall suspicion that some of the best writers in the world alive today were writing out their literary oevures on it. They were not débuting in the front of sheeny magazines that slithered quickly into death, or tucked obscurely inside the hard shells of weighty books, or brought out in the daily moiling push and spit and fold of the city newspaper that would be discarded in just another daybreak, but they were here: the writing was typed out on computer keys from remote outposts around the planet, from every brick apartment house and gully, to nameless farm towns, hard citied cellars, and café tables on cobblestone patios that overlooked warm seas—then piled on the hard drives of all the world’s news servers, the weightless million messages that spun out a thousand times and would never disappear: yes, they were right here, on Usenet. It was exciting to be a part of it, a new medium that reached around the globe, that still had the broadness and opportunity of an uncharted frontier—but it was also frustrating and infuriating; the old world of print didn’t see Usenet or know the reputations of its great new writers, the old writers hadn’t ever heard about it and you couldn’t explain to a literary maven of the former world, the world of paper publishing, about its wonders, and teach them all the jargon, so that they could know how this new writing was held in “articles” and “follow-ups,” about how by the funneled logic of machines they were sorted into “threads,” contained in “newsgroups,” and read with software programs called “newsreaders” that allowed you to automatically subscribe to favored groups, and filter out authors you didn’t wish to see by adding their names to your “killfile”; you couldn’t explain to them the mores of quoting and archiving and server propagation—they expected to see a printed work on paper, an edited form, typeset, published by a company, an object that you purchased from a store and took back home with you. Their view of literature was forever interwoven with the rough fibers of wood and rag and grass, they thought of finished works as objects, not as processes—not things found for free among the ether, available anywhere, at any time, in print forever inside the great hived network of the silicon machines. They did not get it.
Just as he was sure that the net was the great new form, the fresh new space for all the writing that now mattered, he knew that it wasn’t going to work in the ways that the iron old establishment had operated in, habitually, for so long. So if any of those great writers of the past would ever cross over, he reasoned, it would not be without the passage of time and some painful difficulty first. He wondered of his own words, which he began to pour onto the net with great prolixity and ease—they too would live on, he knew, but he knew not when or how. He did not even think of it.
And how to even compare the new writers with the old, or explain the former to the latter? They were different. How to tell the denizens of the old world about Mister Cynical, the young man who had his own newsgroup upon which he constantly posted the two-screen stories of his life, telling his daily comic misadventures in a Denny’s restaurant, at work in an office cubicle, or at the mall? Or how to tell of all the good and flavorful poets that he knew were out there? All the clever posters, some surely for the ages, not just idle online chatter, no? How to explain the quirks and sparks of good old John Horner, that older man who stood there alone on Usenet with his hundred theories, addressing a crowd, stoically pointing a finger or holding out an outstretched palm in explanation, pulling on his black beard, speaking out impromptu thoughts just as quick as they would come—and during this time there was also a great blossoming of mailing lists, the email systems that connected a group of people together for a common bond and purpose, let them slip notes together through the electronic mail system as a single group, and personalities and cliques began to form and emerge from that great mass. He noted them carefully and studied all their words.
The lists were usually housed on computers at American universities, and some of them were known for this: stjohns.edu, buffalo.edu, uic.edu were just a few of them whose names he saw each day. He felt good about them, was thankful and happy for what they did. These were surely enlightened universities for kindly making this available for anyone to use—anyone could join these lists regardless of where they were, anyone could read them and contribute; you didn’t have to be affiliated with the university at all, but it was for the general public, the entire world—and he saw this as the future of education, saw that the old university system would break down as the great intelligent minds of the net would reach out and join the thousand mailing lists that interested them, the lists for subjects which they would contribute to and make advances in their fields. It was really quite astounding: here were these conversations that were taking place day and night by way of great university computers, but anyone on the net could join in and take part in what was going on—you were limited only by your energy and interest. He thought of it as a new age of scholarship: the university space was opening up wide to the world.
It was like magic, the way it happened, and when you were on a good list it gave you the illusion that you were sitting at a roundtable with all its other members: you could see them, all the heads, hear the chatter, the occasional hand motions—it really worked like that. These mailing lists were new social spheres entirely of their own, and he joined and touched a hundred of them. He was there just to feel the flavors, to walk the grounds and tap richly into their lifeblood. It was the new place to talk and hang out, and he wanted to see all the faces, to know everywhere there was to go. He saw them as the center of his education, the next step of his schooling, literary roundtables for learning and exploring and talking, for meeting people and making friends—everything happened there. So many topics and subjects of interest, so many new ideas; he joined and read. He had to gobble it up, and he saw it as the end of the traditional, printed magazine: why bother to subscribe to a glossy, monthly, advertiser-supported publication when here you had instant access to everyone’s real thoughts and experiences unfiltered, and shared immediately in them? There was plenty of hot national gossip available, and plenty of good writing—he felt it was his mission to know and analyze it all. He tried to gauge their general trends and to monitor all lists. He joined many, including those for the discussion of new music, the bands of the rock and roll underground that his generation had gotten all swept up in: he thought that he might be a journalist and critic here, that this would be not only his place for getting the great scoops which he’d re-report in the old media for money, but his best writing would be experimental free-form screeds sent out right in here, on the lists themselves, consisting of long, local reports of his life that would earn him an online reputation. People would come to know him by his words and they’d live for getting more of them, always on the lookout for his latest rambling madness coming in from Clifton at four o’clock in the morning after having gone out to see a rock show at the Mayfield Tavern, rolling in with the cold breathings of the night, after many beers standing down there in the sweaty walled-in confines of the nightclub, typing out on computer keyboard the thousand-word sketch of life as he’d just lived it, then pressing the control-key command to send it out two hundred sixty times around the earth, to the distant stations of all the other list subscribers who were eagerly awaiting it. He would set the beat of the nation; he would have them turn the page; he would be the arm of culture. There would be rants describing chaotic wild nights watching rock bands perform, gauging the crowd, noting the feelings and the impressions of the evening, and interviewing the performers afterward, coming up with outrageous stories told exquisitely and with a trademark flair, rants that came bursting in from the night, comic, adventurous, and always concluding with a touch of thoughtful insight, a streak of heavy wisdom that was undeniable.