{"id":292001,"date":"2025-06-14T02:45:38","date_gmt":"2025-06-14T02:45:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peraltafinancing.com\/ambient-music\/clicking-with-neal-stephenson-1994-disquiet\/"},"modified":"2025-06-14T02:45:38","modified_gmt":"2025-06-14T02:45:38","slug":"clicking-with-neal-stephenson-1994-disquiet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=292001","title":{"rendered":"Clicking with Neal Stephenson (1994) \u2013 Disquiet"},"content":{"rendered":"


\n<\/p>\n

\n

Every few years I re-read \u201cSpew,\u201d the Neal Stephenson story published in the magazine Wired<\/em> in 1994. It\u2019s still online<\/a>, as are we all. <\/p>\n

\u201cSpew\u201d is a prescient if purposefully exaggerated consideration of what was already called the \u201csocial graph\u201d but wouldn\u2019t achieve poisonous fruition until Facebook and its ilk took off a decade-plus later. Here, in a story of hyper-focused advertising, Stephenson gets close, with the term \u201csocial web.\u201d Gmail, which scanned people\u2019s emails to produce targeted ads (as may Yahoo<\/a> and other email providers to this day, apparently), wouldn\u2019t launch for another 10 years. Stephenson in \u201cSpew\u201d took early note of what we today term surveillance capitalism. <\/p>\n

He also paid attention to the ability to turn the tools of internet-connected observance on oneself. YouTube, foreseen here in some technology-intensive live-streaming, debuted the year after Gmail, in 2005. Back in 1994, this idea was, one might recall, still a stretch: \u201cYou have turned your room \u2014 my<\/em> room \u2014 into a broadcast station,\u201d the narrator exclaims believably. Twitch didn\u2019t surface until 2011.<\/p>\n

The subjects of Stephenson\u2019s premonitions include his own future work. He calls the troubling sludge that is the foreseen horrible Internet (capitalized back then) the Spew, not unlike the Miasma, as it would be labeled decades later in his novel Fall; or, Dodge in Hell<\/em> (2019).<\/p>\n

I recently re-read Stephenson\u2019s novel Cryptonomicon<\/em>, so my eyes were primed to notice, this time around, Stephenson\u2019s use in \u201cSpew\u201d of the word \u201cgomer\u201d to mean someone old, embarrassing, and ultimately disposable. In Cryptonomicon<\/em>, that word is half the name of a furniture company, Gomer Bolstrood, which later appears (earlier chronologically) in his Baroque Cycle. So, while the tone of \u201cgomer\u201d is different, the usage in \u201cSpew\u201d is very much this story\u2019s narrator\u2019s perspective of something out of date.<\/p>\n

There are some great lines throughout, such as this one, echoing the Rolling Stones\u2019 classic anti-advertising\/consumerist rant, \u201c(I Can\u2019t Get No) Satisfaction\u201d: \u201cI can tell you\u2019re cool because your water costs more than your beer.\u201d<\/p>\n

I mention \u201cSpew\u201d now because this following section of the story stood out to me in a way it hadn\u2019t on previous reads. Note how the fetishized fine-tuning of sound design provides a tactile quality and utility in an increasingly frictionless media landscape:<\/p>\n

\n

Click.<\/em>\u00a0Course, it never really clicks anymore, no one has used mechanical switches since like the \u201950s, but some Spew terminals emit a synthesized click \u2014 they wired up a 1955 Sylvania in a digital sound lab somewhere and had some old gomer in a tank-top stagger up to it and change back and forth between Channel 4 and Channel 5 a few times, paid him off and fired him, then compressed the sound and inseminated it into the terminals\u2019 fundamental ROMs so that we\u2019d get that reassuring\u00a0click<\/em>\u00a0when we jumped from one Feed to another. Which is what happens now; except I haven\u2019t touched a remote, don\u2019t even\u00a0have<\/em> a remote, that being the whole point of the Polysurf. Now it\u2019s some fucker picking a banjo,\u00a0ouch<\/em>\u00a0it is an actual\u00a0Hee Haw<\/em>\u00a0rerun, digitally remastered, frozen in pure binary until the collapse of the Universe.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

You can read the full story at wired.com\/1994\/10\/spew<\/a>, though that may be behind a paywall.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Every few years I re-read \u201cSpew,\u201d the Neal Stephenson story published in the magazine Wired in 1994. It\u2019s still online, as are we all. \u201cSpew\u201d is a prescient if purposefully exaggerated consideration of what was already called the \u201csocial graph\u201d but wouldn\u2019t achieve poisonous fruition until Facebook and its ilk took off a decade-plus later. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12031],"tags":[79897,14262,66916,53077],"dealstore":[],"offerexpiration":[],"class_list":["post-292001","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ambient-music","tag-clicking","tag-disquiet","tag-neal","tag-stephenson"],"yoast_head":"\nClicking with Neal Stephenson (1994) \u2013 Disquiet - Som2ny Network<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=292001\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Clicking with Neal Stephenson (1994) \u2013 Disquiet - Som2ny Network\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Every few years I re-read \u201cSpew,\u201d the Neal Stephenson story published in the magazine Wired in 1994. 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