No, they dream in numbers. They don’t dream of Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion, or tears in rain, they dream of:
256 the ‘web safe’ palette
0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 The Fibonacci sequence
N51:32:02 W0:03:52 the longitude and latitude of the Star of the East on streetmap.co.uk
±0·6180339887 The golden section
2000 y2k, the year geeks made more money than anyone else and the internet bubble burst; the number of polygons in a single character in ‘The Getaway’ on PS2
9, 26, 30, 31, 38, 45 the winning numbers for National Lottery on my 40th birthday
#FF0099 hex RGB value for Madfashionbitch pink
3016895585 eBay item number for Quad 303 Power Amp Box, empty
911 German sports car, ground zero, my wedding anniversary
66 number of synonyms for the word ‘space’ found at dictionary.com 3.1415926535897932384626433832795028841971693993751058209749445923078164062862089986280348253421170679 who ate all the pies?
It was a motley crew of computer game developers, ex-servicemen and performance artists who began to explore the possibilities of the Internet in the early nineties. It’s hardly surprising that the virtual world they created was a morass of sci-fi fantasy art, paranoid conspiracy theories, and arcane scrawl. When venture capitalists drove their sheep into the new world media domain land-grab, they never bothered to learn the culture and language of the digital ab-originals. They just chucked loads of cash at them and hoped they’d behave themselves.
Out went the ASCII portraits of Dr Spock and in came lashings of sumptuous full colour product shots. It was so real you could almost touch it. Well you could touch the screen, and you could see the picture if you waited for long enough, and you didn’t mind seeing everything rendered in the same 256 garish colours. But these were temporary glitches, soon to be resolved by universal broadband internet connections, streaming video, a new flash plug in, and your new superfast dell lap top [bought 2nd hand on eBay].
But even when your video is full screen all you’ve got is TV and it is clear that the more people say ‘Reality TV’ the less real things get. Images on their own will never deliver anything close to reality let alone hyper-reality. It’s the underlying structures that allow the media to deliver a landscape rather than a linear story. Even the most loyal gaming foot soldier will admit that despite the 2000 polygons per character The Getaway is not a world with limitless possibilities, in the way that for instance eBay is: Here’s the proof from a PS2 game cheats site: “Hint: Kill someone easily. After you are done chasing the car at the beginning of the mission, aim your gun at the barrels behind the fence on the platform of the building, and then shoot. Someone will fly out of the door after the barrels explode!” to use the argot, It’s a “kin set up”.
The ‘reality’ of eBay is confirmed by the obsessively detailed item descriptions, the close ups of dents and scratches and the complex personal network of buyer and seller’s feedback. There is no cheats.ugo.com for eBay, just real people trying to sell you an empty box for a fiver [postage and packing not included]. This is true of all my favourite Internet destinations; streetmap, “we know where you live”, dictionary.com “monkeys type Shakespeare”. Even amazon, where that nice assistant who recommends books and music, knows you so well, and has the brain of ten librarians, is just a number monkey. The ‘reality’, the sense of being in a place of infinite possibilities comes from the detail, the facts, the numbers and the connections between them. If a web site hasn’t got those number monkeys behind it, it will be as flat as a pancake and stale the day after it launches.
So what do you do, if you don’t speak the language of numbers? Number Monkeys are notoriously stroppy and impossible to communicate with. This is the clever bit. You know the way Parisians refuse to speak English even though they speak it better than many English people and most Americans? You have to warm up your monkeys with a bit of number first [try any of my suggestions from the list]. Number monkeys love to talk, but they are proud, and so they should be, Chris and Chris, thanks for all the Phish.