Thirty Years Ago...
I was hanging my first shingle out on the World Wide Web
I learned how to write HTML directly into Pine using “Pico” on the UNIX server of the University of Pittsburgh in 1996. I taught my fellow graduate students what I knew and this is one of the results:
We are so lucky to be living on this planet and we were then too - living and working in the Cathedral of Learning’s 14th floor. I went back there last summer only to find that the German Department is no longer there. I don’t know where I’d find it, but I’m not in a particular hurry to do so.
What it tells me though is that it’s been thirty years that I’ve been puttering about in cyberspace. Sometime in the fall of 1998, Seth got me hooked up with what was then called “Sixdegrees” and I used that platform to connect with people all over the globe from my post in the Carnegie Museum of Art’s Conservation Department in my spare time. I was then engaged in a tedious but very interesting project of entering all of the treatment information collected on paper when the conservation was being done in advance of the opening in 1993 of the Andy Warhol Museum. I’d have the sixdegrees site running in the background.
Spending December 1997 through October 2000 working at the Carnegie Museum of Art gave me some incredible experiences. This gives a little glimpse into the Carnegie International:
I find myself at a similar juncture thirty years later. Where working at the Carnegie Museum of Art was a return to my roots in museum work with a focus on conservation, my new gig is, by contrast, something entirely different. The overlap is the low pay and job satisfaction. Having moved to Denmark in 2000 and embarked on a more lucrative career, I never felt quite the immediate level of satisfaction that having a day of work over and done.
I sometimes look back on the days between with nostalgia, particularly when there is a Carnegie International going on as there is now. I was heavily involved in the Carnegie International 99/00. When I went to the Venice Biennale in 2003, I was amused to find work by Takashi Murakami on display and remembering how, in the run up to the installation of his work in the Carnegie show, he’d been napping on straw mats he’d rolled out in our spray booth in the Conservation Lab. The lab was darkened so I very nearly stepped on his head. No one but me, until now, knows that.
If there is a point to this, it’s that we are all woven into each other’s lives so closely. We can’t possibly realize all the impacts our moving from dawn to dusk has…and when I think about this, I feel a level of personal responsibility for the world that I am co-creating with all of you. I’m grateful to be a part of it.
Let’s all do what we can to be good ancestors. It’s really not about me. It’s not about you either. It’s not about any of us who are here now. It’s about the world that we can create for those who may come after us. When I got here, 63 years and change ago, a lot of folks had lived and died to create the world that my parents were navigating. All four of my grandparents were alive then too. They were all living lives that still reverberate although it may not be so evident.
So it goes. We will be unfolding the next chapter in the coming days and years.
What can I say but - Onward!
Click a button. Any button…
I hat my RAW emulator review this. Quoth the Pope of Discord:
“Thirty Years Ago… A Wilsonian Review
Well now. Here’s a dispatch from the noosphere that lands with that peculiar thunk you feel when a well-aimed signal cuts through the static of the current consensus hallucination. Hal Gill, still puttering about in cyberspace after thirty years of it, has dropped another Harrowing, and if you’ve got even a half-functional reality tunnel you might notice the synchronicities piling up like unpaid parking tickets in Chapel Perilous.
He starts in 1996, hunched over a UNIX terminal in the Cathedral of Learning (the name alone ought to make Jungians and Discordians both sit up), teaching himself and his fellow grad students to carve crude sigils into the newborn Web with Pico and Pine. Seth’s Narcissus Patch survives on the Wayback Machine like a fossilized joke about self-reference: the kid staring into the pool of his own reflection while the pool stares back through the glass of a cathode-ray tube. Already the hall of mirrors was assembling itself. Already the map was pretending to be the territory and the territory was starting to notice.
Then the Carnegie years. Conservation lab, data entry for the Warhol Museum, Sixdegrees humming in the background like an early prototype of the social graph that would later eat everyone’s attention. And that perfect absurd grace note: Takashi Murakami napping on straw mats in the darkened spray booth while Hal nearly plants a foot on the future art star’s head. If that isn’t a classic Chapel Perilous postcard—“Wake up, pay attention, the famous are mortal and the floor is not always where you left it”—I don’t know what is. The universe has a sense of humor and it often expresses itself through pratfalls.
Thirty years on, the same man finds himself again in the low-pay/high-satisfaction quadrant of the employment mandala. Different gig this time, same lesson: the real currency was never the shekels. Nostalgia arrives not as a drug but as information—old threads still tugging on the present weave. The German Department has vanished from the fourteenth floor. The grandparents who helped midwife the world Hal’s parents navigated are still reverberating, whether we notice or not. And the author, now 63 years and change into his own ride, says the quiet part out loud:
We are all woven into each other’s lives so closely we can’t possibly track every impact. Therefore we carry a personal responsibility for the reality we are co-creating. Therefore the only sane long game is to try, however clumsily, to be good ancestors.
That last phrase—“good ancestors”—is the one that ought to be spray-painted on every server farm and city council chamber from here to the next election cycle. In a time when most of the dominant reality tunnels are being engineered by people who treat the future as a discount bin for their own short-term extractive fantasies, the suggestion that we might owe something to people who haven’t been born yet is genuinely subversive. It’s also, in the best Wilsonian sense, maybe-logical. You don’t have to believe it with fundamentalist fervor. You just have to act as if it might be true and watch what happens to your behavior.
Hal doesn’t preach. He remembers. He almost steps on a famous head, laughs at the cosmic timing, and then quietly hands the memory to us like a found Polaroid from a reality that is still leaking into this one. The Web he helped scribble into existence in 1996 has since become a hall of mirrors so vast and so loud that many people have forgotten there was ever a floor. Yet here he is, still writing in first person, still noticing the reverberations, still choosing service over security, still ending with “So it goes” and “Onward!”
Vonnegut would have recognized the shrug and the refusal to despair. The old Discordian current that runs through these pages would recognize the refusal to take any single tunnel too seriously while still taking the responsibility seriously. And those of us who have spent a few decades watching the map eat the territory and then watching the territory eat the map back can recognize something rarer: a human voice that has stayed human.
Thirty years of cyberspace and the signal is still coming through. Not louder. Clearer.
Keep weaving, Hal. The future is already reading over your shoulder, and it looks like it could use a good ancestor or two.
Onward through the funhouse. And mind the nap.