TNA-GOLD 1/TNA-GOLD - Volume 1.iso/24hours/democr2.txt

Text File | 1996-03-11 | 16KB | 254 lines

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                       Free Speech in an Open Society

                                     Or

                       What I did On Summer Vacation

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           Iliana Filby | [e-mail] | Schenectady, New York
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It was early evening on the fourteenth of November, a fine brisk evening. I
was riding my bicycle down Ash Grove Road, on the outskirts of Cambridge,
New York. I had spent most of the day at New Skete, a small Orthodox
monastery on Two Top mountain, celebrating the wedding of my friends Karen
and Ed. Anna had offered me a ride home, since it was growing chilly, but I
decided that I'd rather ride home. As I passed the Smolla's farm, I noticed
traffic coming toward me, and I steered my bike towards the right, away
from the oncoming cars. Next thing I knew, the car which was furthest away
swung toward me, sped up, passed the first car and then I felt a terrible
grinding and crunching, heard glass breaking, grunted as I hit the
pavement. I didn't feel much pain, but my face was covered in blood and
tears, and I remember growing angry at the lady who was the passenger of
the car that hit me. She kept on screaming, "Oh my god! Oh my God!"

                                    ***

At first the doctors didn't think that I'd survive. I'd broken both arms,
shoulders, hands, smashed my pelvis, and lost my left leg. I'd lost a lot
of blood, and I'd gotten a lot of dirt and grease ground into my wounds. My
mom tells me that I was distinctly green, and for the first two weeks, my
life hung in the balance. My memories of this time are still quite clear,
though mixed entirely with hallucinations. Those hallucinations were
formidable: some were exquisitely sweet, beyond words, and some were so
fiercely awful as to also defy description. The theme of all of them,
though, was this pitched battle between good and evil, full of skirmishes
peopled by folks from my life, all playing roles in this inward war. I
think that this inward battle echoed both my physical struggle to stay
alive, to will my life, and also some sort of moral battle: did I want to
live? Did I deserve to live? Did I have a reason to live?

                                    ***

Many people came to visit me when I was in the hospital; my mom stayed with
friends at New Skete, and my oldest brother San came from Africa. My dad
came with his wife, and my brother Erik came, as well. The monastics from
New Skete came often, as did many of the parishioners. I also got lots of
cards and mail, even from people I didn't know. One letter I remember
especially came from a lady who used to pick me up when I hitch-hiked. I
don't think I'd ever learned her name, but she remembered me, and got my
name and address from the newspaper. Lots of friends came from Bennington,
and the love of all of these people, friends and family and strangers
alike, were instrumental in my recovery, both physical and emotional. I've
always thrived best when I had lots of people around to talk and play and
work with, and I was rarely alone for long at the hospital. My brother Erik
had given me a PowerBook 100 computer, so I'd play lots of Solitaire and
Tetris and Pipe Dream when I didn't have company. I wrote some too, though
it was difficult with only one hand working.

                                    ***

After many months in three different hospitals, I was finally told that it
was time to leave. Unfortunately, I'd been evicted from my apartment a few
days after my accident. My then-landlady didn't think I'd be a good rental
prospect, apparently. I suppose that it was unlikely that I'd be moving
back there, since it was a second-story apartment, but I'm still mad that
she made my mom and San pack up and empty my apartment during the first
week after my accident. They had enough to deal with, what with spending
most of every day with me in the trauma ward. Grrr. Anyway, finding a place
to live wasn't such an easy matter. The fellow who ran me over was
uninsured, so there hadn't been any fat settlement. Basically, I was
penniless. The social workers at the hospital did really well though, and
found me an accessible apartment in the same city as the rehabilitation
hospital where I'd be going for therapy during the months ahead. I was
leery at first. The apartment building was called The Lawrence Center for
Independence, and I had awful visions of some institutional setting (I'd
really had my fill of institutional settings). It was still cold and bleak
when I first went to see the place, and I sat for a while in my mom's car
and just eyed the building warily. Finally we went inside, and it wasn't so
bad after all. I asked the building manager if I could dig and plant a
garden out back, and when she said yes, I agreed to move in the following
week.

                                    ***

The first six months in my new home were dreary and grim. There were some
bright points: planting my first garden, and watching the first seedlings
come up; going to church at the monastery again, and seeing my friends
there. My left hand began to work one day, and this gladdened me. I began
to write more on my PowerBook, a little poetry, a few stories, and
descriptions of some of the more noteworthy of my hallucinations. I was
mostly sunk in a deep depression, however. I didn't know anyone in the
city, and I missed the countryside where I'd lived before. Without a car, I
felt imprisoned and alone. The loneliness was the worst part. I'd never
been so alone for so long. I missed the exchange of ideas and musings and
just plain fun that I'd engaged in constantly since I was little.

                                    ***

One day, rummaging around in some boxes that still hadn't been unpacked, I
found an old 2400 baud modem. I think I'd found it at a yard sale the
summer before, when I didn't even have my own computer. I pulled it out,
along with all its trailing wires, and brought it to my desk. I wondered if
I could hook my little PowerBook up to this 'internet' that my strange
neighbor had told me about. I started mucking with it, and by early
evening, I'd succeeded! I went to my neighbor again, and got the address
for a local BBS. I logged in and began poking around, filling out the
registration material. About 30 seconds after I checked the 'female' box,
the sysop of this BBS interrupted with a request for chat. Woo! He was a
friendly sort, and while we've since lost contact, he deserves thanks for
giving me a thorough and fun introduction to this whole 'online' thing. I
still remember how fast my heart beat during the first few hours, how my
fingers shook with excitement and glee to be talking with someone once
again. All through that night we talked about books and food and music and
politics and sex.

                                    ***

As soon as I woke the next day, I went online again. I found a list of
local online resources, and one of these was the excellent SALS/MVLA gopher
server. This was my first real taste of the internet, and I was hooked
after the first half hour. Actually, the SALS/MVLA system worked in such a
way that I really did have to re-login every half hour, and I did so pretty
much every half-hour for the next 3 or 4 months. The net was like my very
own Everything Box. Anything I was curious about, I could search for via
this gopher server. I found many resources which helped me immeasurably,
for example, disability resources that were crucial as I navigated through
those first difficult months. I quickly became interested in the politics
and philosophies of this new world I had discovered, and I found much to
read. One document that made a great impression on me was the New York
Telecommunications Exchange Commission's Report, and especially the text
that sprang up around the subject of that report. I read fierce letters
written by librarians (of all people), protesting the inequities and errors
in logic and plain bad sense of the proposed New York legislation. I made
phone calls to some of these librarians, and read more and more, becoming
increasingly engaged and excited.

                                    ***

I'd found a paper by Larry Masinter and Erik Ostrom, about the MOO Gopher
protocol, and I wanted to try for myself this 'social virtual reality'
thang that Pavel Curtis wrote about in yet another paper. I began looking,
and I became an expert at finding open telnet prompts, or tickling remote
systems until they gave me an open telnet prompt. From there I connected to
my first MOO. I created characters in several of these virtual spaces, and
I remember how sweet those first days were, too. I would traipse into the
living room of one community, for instance, and settle on the sofa. Text
would be scrolling down my monitor, the words of people from all over the
world! Here was a young guy from California, muttering dark words about
'foo' and 'bar'. A woman my own age was leaning against the wall opposite
me, and she was so cool, her text dripped with hipness and MOO savvy self
confidence. Another woman struck up a conversation with me: we talked about
why my textual description included 'a barely noticable limp, about her
brother who had just lost his hand in a farming accident. Remember that I
was still connecting through the SALS/MVLA gopher server, and each and
every half hour, I'd get kicked off the system, yelling to my new virtual
friends that "I'd be back."

                                    ***

One of the librarians that I'd been talking with on the phone encouraged my
interest in information policies and the internet. He was a professor at a
local university, and after a month or so of both phone and emailed
exhange, he helped me to apply to the School of Information Science and
Policy at SUNY Albany. Now I got my first unix account, and I discovered
USENET and the World Wide Web, and listservs, and many more communities of
people connecting from all over the world. I remember one day, perhaps a
year and half after my accident, sitting here in my apartment, and saying
aloud. "Wow, I'm not nearly so alone as I'd thought." This is what the
internet has given me, really. A sense of community and belonging. This
past August, I drove my new pickup truck all around the United States,
visiting many friends. I'd never seen much of the states before, and I
still catch myself grinning as I remember camping on the coast of Maine
with genna and Lemi, playing scrabble with Quinn and Gilmore in Rochester,
drinking beer with Jason in Chicago, chasing buffalo (no, I hadn't met them
online) through the badlands of South Dakota, sipping latte with Jack and
legba and Rebis in Seattle, climbing Joi's wet mossy steps in Eugene,
meeting Caroline for espresso and getting strangers to take our picture,
seeing the real Lambda server in Palo Alto, watching The Net (awful movie)
with what's-his-name, getting mauled by Kilik's kitten (and petting the
REAL Kilik!), sleeping on dr's floor, finding Jimson Weed in Oak Creek
Canyon with Sick and Eclipse, sneaking into a university computer lab to
find Jander in Albuquerque, climbing the Sandia's with Hagbard in my truck
(and us somehow getting me up to the VERY summit), and eating at that cool
vietnamese/italian restaurant with delicious Amy.

                                    ***

Trying to describe the depth and breadth of my engagement with people in
and through the internet will take more time than I have right now. I'm
busy working on my thesis (about the effects of the recently passed
Communications Decency Act on the Library Bill of Rights), and planning my
next trip to Boston to visit friends that I've made via the internet. I
have a telnet window open, and my friend Mika needs me to proof-read a text
she's working on. I have mail to read and respond to. I have to finish the
graphic that I promised to make for my mom's new web page. My life is very
full. I still get depressed and lonely, and I still think Schenectady is a
pretty grim place. But as I look behind me and before me, I feel mostly
good. I am proud of my involvement with all the people that I know online.
I am proud of the paper that I wrote and presented at a recent conference,
about collaborative virtual work spaces. I'm proud of who I am, and proud
of the friends who care for me and support me as I move ahead. I have great
hope for the future.

                                    ***

The hope that I have regarding my own future is due in large part to the
place that the internet has had in my recent life, and the place that I've
had in the life of the internet. The net has been a tool, a space, a place,
a friend, an addiction, a pain, and ten thousand other things for me. I
suspect that my response to the net reflects the experiences of many of
you. As I've been writing this essay, I've been poking around my hard
drive, digging up old words. I just found an essay I wrote for Professor
Galvin's Information Policy seminar, almost exactly a year ago. In this
short opinion paper, I described the Exon/Gorton amendment as "a feeble and
absurdly broad mish-mash of telecommunication buzz-words, the meaning and
implication of which would steal all the fire from the belly of the
internet." To be honest, I didn't believe for a minute that it could ever
become law. I was wrong. There have been some changes to the Communication
Decency Act since Exon and Gorton intially presented it, but the changes
have neither been substantive nor particularly positive.

                                    ***

The fact is, the recently passed CDA still threatens to steal our fire. Not
only does it want to penalize us for expression which is protected under
the Constitution, but its idiocy has deflected many of us from even
-attempting- to understand the rest of the Telecommunication Act of 1996. I
think that a lot of mistakes were made in Washington by those people whom
we should be able to trust to represent us and our best interests. The CDA
was rushed through the hill as if it were a pin-ball ball, instead of being
considered thoughtfully. Now we will all pay the price of this hurry and
sloppiness. We have been spending our time and resources to keep the CDA
from becoming law, and now more time and money will be spent in the courts
to repeal the CDA. If we look around, we can see that our struggle here on
the net has borne some good fruit. I think it's pretty nifty that Bill
Gates and I can find at least this forum to stand together. I wonder if the
Senators and Congresspeople, and even President Clinton and Vice President
Gore will be able to find common ground with the rest of us in the coming
months?

P.S. I am pretty damned sorry that I haven't got meet the infamous and
magnificent NrrdGrrl yet. She's my next road-trip. She's really wonderful,
and she's my friend. Yay!

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