I Still Miss My Luddite Web Browser
My novel Lessons in Magic and Disaster comes out in less than two months! Jamie is a PhD student in English lit, researching a mysterious novel from 1749 that seems to hold important secrets. But Jamie’s mom, Serena, is in a bad spot — Serena has been hiding from the world in an old one-room schoolhouse for the past several years, ever since Serena’s life fell apart. Jamie has a big secret: she’s a witch, and she decides to bring Serena back to the world by teaching her magic. This book is my exploration of hope and human connection in the face of grief and trauma — and it has a lot of stuff about homophobia and transphobia that feels more relevant now than ever.
You can pre-order a signed/personalized copy from Green Apple Books in the USA, and if you’re in Canada you can get a signed bookplate from Cross & Crows if you pre-order by July 20. And if you pre-order from literally anywhere and send me a receipt by Aug 19, I’ll send you a PDF containing an alternate ending to All the Birds in the Sky and roughly 30,000 words of the sequel, All the Seeds in the Ground. I’m so grateful to everyone who’s pre-ordered this book already — you’re not just supporting this book, you’re helping me to keep creating and goofin around.
I miss being a late adopter
I've always been a late adopter when it comes to technology. People sometimes think that's a weird thing for a science fiction writer to say, but it's always made perfect sense to me. Science fiction is very much about being skeptical of new technology, and ready to see the possible downsides of anything innovative. As Frederik Pohl famously said, anyone can imagine the car — but it takes a good science fiction writer to imagine the traffic jam.
For a surprisingly long time, I was the only person I knew who refused to use graphical web browsers. I loved Lynx, a text-based web browser which ran in a terminal window. I still love Lynx and I'm kind of salty that I quit using it — web pages load so quickly when they're nothing but text and image descriptions, and it just felt like such a chill way to experience the internet. I especially felt this way when websites started getting cluttered with endless animations, MIDI files and other sensory-overload garbage.
I used to rant that it was a waste of perfectly good bandwidth to download a million images and files, and a well-designed website should look just as good via a text-based browser. Not to mention, websites that worked in Lynx would also be accessible to visually impaired people.
I did eventually surrender and get myself a copy of Netscape — because I won unlimited free internet from a Christian ISP. This now-defunct ISP, which promised that they could keep people from being able to see any immoral content on the internet, included support for Netscape in their offerings and I reluctantly decided to go ahead and join the rest of humanity.
(Long story short, my partner at the time took me to a hog festival in rural North Carolina where there was a Best Dressed Hog competition, and a Christian internet provider was holding a drawing for a free unlimited account, which I won! Their actual scheme for getting rid of filth on the internet was to bundle some net-nanny software with the browser, but it was easy enough to remove. The upshot was that for years, I had a faith-based email address and I made sure to look at as much gay shit as possible using their web connection.)
Lately, as the internet tilts back toward sensory overload and relentless flashy widgets, I feel increasingly increasingly nostalgic for when I used to use Lynx as my browser. And it makes me happy to know that others are feeling nostalgic for a much older version of the internet as well. When I was at XOXO Fest in Portland last fall, I heard a lot of talk about bringing back the web and even having webrings again.
A couple weeks ago, I went to the release party for the third issue of New Session, a wonderful online literary magazine that is only accessible via Telnet (another terminal protocol that only supports text). I had a massively warm fuzzy feeling, especially since the launch party included an old-timey UNIX terminal like the ones I used to play with at my parents’ university when I was an actual child.
I also was the last person I knew to get a cell phone. I just didn't like the idea of carrying around a phone in my pocket, and I knew that I would be constantly wrecking it. I had a whole complicated system where I could call my own answering machine from a pay phone and listen to people's messages so I could call them back. After I finally got in and got a cell phone, I was the last person I knew to get a smartphone — almost.
At San Diego Comic Con 2013, I was moderating a panel with Chuck Palahniuk and a few others. Nobody on the panel had smartphones — in response to an audience question, Chuck held up a phone that looked like it might have actually been from the 1980s, and everyone else held up their own low-functionality devices. I did my part, raising aloft my beloved red flip phone that was literally held together by several pieces of duct tape. It was a wonderful moment of Luddite solidarity.
I held out against smartphones as long as I could, until one time I was in a taxi on my way to the airport and realized I didn't have my flight info. My flip phone wasn't able to access my email, so I ended up pulling out my laptop and trying to get on open wifi networks every time the taxi stopped at a red light. Miraculously, this worked and I was able to pull up the email that had my flight details so I knew which terminal we should go to, but it felt dicey. I gave in and got a Samsung Galaxy soon afterward.
Oh, and also! I insisted on using a “rabbit ears” antenna that I got at Radio Shack to watch television until the late 2000s, because the notion of paying for cable TV felt ridiculous to me. I could pick up a surprising number of channels with a decent antenna (and occasionally some soup cans!) and I was mostly watching DVDs anyway. Recently, I met someone who is still nerding out on using a simple antenna to watch television, and I was hit with another wave of nostalgia — and, honestly, a touch of envy.
I had a similar moment of envy when I read this interview with economist Paul Krugman, in which he says he doesn't use any apps or image-based stuff on the internet whatsoever. As he finally states, "I'm text-based." This feels like an Identity, especially now that the entire internet has become exhaustingly video-and-widget-based, and it often seems as though we’re supposed to be performing our emotions in an exaggerated way for people on the other side of a camera.
There's a certain smugness in being a late adopter that I absolutely relish — the look on people's faces when I used to show them my duct-taped flip phone was extremely satisfying.
So I'm kind of bummed that all of the pleasure of being a late adopter has evaporated, for a couple of reasons.
First, there hasn't really been a new technology in the past fifteen years that all my friends and colleagues have seized upon, which I can proudly opt out of using. In fact, I can’t think of an exciting new consumer technology that’s come along in the past fifteen years, full stop.
When I think about the things that Silicon Valley is abjectly begging us to embrace as new and cool, I think about the metaverse, cryptocurrencies, other assorted web3 crap, and of course generative A.I. I can't take any satisfaction in not using any of these, because hardly anybody I know is using them either — and the people who are really excited about them appear to be utter clowns. By rejecting these technologies, I'm just being a grounded, sensible person, and where's the fun in that?
Secondly, I've entered a kind of devil's bargain with a lot of tech and especially social media. I really try not to let it run my life — like, as I wrote before, I mostly don't look at the internet during work hours. And I turned off all notifications on my phone years ago, except for text messages. And yet, I feel the need to stay on social media because it's how I promote my work. (And sometimes it can be fun?) I mostly don't allow any apps on my phone, and instead I just use the phone’s browser to look at the mobile websites — but sometimes, I need to have Instagram installed to use all the promotional bells and whistles.
In essence, I've moved toward a philosophy of harm reduction. Besides not allowing notifications, I don't let subscriptions autorenew — like, if I sign up for something, I cancel five minutes later so it won't keep charging me every month. And I've been working on relying less on the tech giants: my current project is figuring out how to migrate myself off of the Google ecosystem as much as possible. I quit Substack a few years ago.
And yet, it really does feel as though consumer tech has changed in a fundamental way since Obama's first term. It's becoming a mature business, full of rent-seeking quasi-monopolies that no longer feel the need to break new ground but still seem pathetically desperate for us to tell them that they’re innovators. I'm not saying anything you haven't heard a million times lately. So maybe I'm not just nostalgic for being the last holdout against the cool new thing, but also for those times in the distant past when I first sat down at a Unix terminal and the internet felt new and splendiferous. When we were all more “text-based” and going online felt like a fun way to express ourselves and make random weird shit.
I dunno. What do you think?