Joshua Cohen - Book of Numbers

The D-Unit we knew had always been a hardware guy, meaning that he regarded software as like unserious, or pretentious, as like the gynolinguistic pedagogy of his wife. He had spent his life around machines and if he at least tolerated the code that programmed them it was because it came on discs that came packaged in envelopes, in boxes. The D-Unit we knew never had any patience for the service economy, but was fundamentally a maker, a producer, consumed by stuff and things. To him, legit computing could only be accomplished in a workplace with other professionals, in the flesh and on a schedule, time and space were physically shared. The engineers replaced the tubes, replaced the transistors and circuits, by hand, the boss had a desk with only a paperweight on it and could not even type. The home was the home, the office was the office, and to bring a hugenormous mainframe back into the house, even in a better color than mental ward offwhite, was as like committable an offense as like bringing back into the house another lover to introduce to your child and spouse.

We are not implying that D-Unit was a company suit, we are just trying to convey that for him the home office dichotomy was a quasireligion, just as like his parents had kept glatt kosher and his grandparents had kept the Sabbath. He would never have read the Rationalists in the lab, he would never have soldered on the toilet.

He would have been appalled by all this realization of the virtual, communication becoming transactional, customers exchanging money for air. He would have considered it a scam, as like having to pay an admission fee at libraries, or having to pay a multinational corporation for admission to his brain. A multinational corporation that made its money licensing his knowledge to others, and, in turn, by commodifying, commodizating, their thoughts. He would never have listened to the movements of the fourth Bartók quartet out of the order of their intention, he would never have looked at the Rubens Calvary except in person.

We should also say that he always insisted on matinees at the Aquarius Theater.

But that D-Unit who was totally capable of achieving his own access instead chose to subscribe to a cruft of rectarded netservices whose chief goal was to keep their users within the walled garden by providing a sense of community, along with local news and weather, only so as like not to lose them to the wilds of the web — that this was his choice meant he was depressed. We read his emails first, the first emails we ever read, and confirmed, depression. Online was not a hobby for him, but an attempt to spend himself unsad. Companionship at 14400 bits/second, 2400 baud, $6/hour on evenings and weekends, $3/hour on weekday days.

Venturing into the online activities of abco, abco33, batchelor, and cuddlemaven did not bring him or them to life, but brought us to become them or him, which prevented any mischief. Initially. While the rest of userdom was liberated by alias to chatrape girls or cybercheat on husbands, to meddle in any way as like D-Unit or his selves was to transgress a commandment. Respect the name. Respect thy parents even unto their proxy reputations. Initially.

D-Unit had posted to boards about the Dodgers, about seismology. To a room called Bay Singles, a place for people to flirt while discussing the dangers of meeting people online. To a room called Bay Singles: Jewish, a place for Jews to flirt while discussing the dangers of meeting goyim online. He also gave advice at Querytek, and at 1-900-Trouble. The desperation was overwhelming. He had helped a woman fix her modem by telling her to restart it. He had also accessed pornography. We would prefer not to discuss it.

It was ultimately the census that broke us, a room in which amateurs made recommendations for a digitization of the census and in a thread titled “1990 Last Paper Census??” D-Unit had posted a warning about the ease of data manipulation and uploaded a paper about accusations of electronic voting fraud in the 1972 presidential elections. The thread then split into two, one a discussion of Nixon, the other a discussion of the history of data manipulation, beginning with the punchcard and its tabulator and ending, as like all discussions end, with the Holocaust.

D-Unit had been attacked for defending the deathcamp totals. The thread had been dormant for eight or nine months. We posted nonetheless. We posted as like abco33, then created our own avatar and agreed with ourselves. Posted as like abco33 again, with thanks for our support. Then we argued about the Dodgers, a team we knew nothing about, a sport we knew nothing about, and were informed that, in baseball, there was always next season.

In Bay Singles, batchelor had explained his situation to troglodyke_Y, a selfidentified lesbian who had collapsed midway through and written, “what else 2,” number 2, “expect from women?” then admitted he was a man. In Bay Singles: Jewish, cuddlemaven had explained the same or a very similar situation, which had garnered a single response, “abs?” and so still as like cuddlemaven we took the thread offboard and emailed the responder directly, wondering why s/he had thought it was “us,” and the party who turned out to be a retired PARCy responded, “abraham cohen is deceased. whoever you are you are being reported for violation of your ToS,” and so that account, the CompuServe, died too.

We flamed the PARCy with emails, as like other avatars, as like the same avatars but registered with other services. batchelor but now @Prodigy, cuddlemaven but now @GEnie. We even went trolling for him among the dossy BBSes and subscribed to leetish listservs and wrote posts or comments or whatever they were called then to autogenerate and hex all the sysops down. It was an addiction, because the self is an addiction. We placed orders just through chatting, with paraphiliac feeders who lived in the Bay and were willing to drop takeout Asian fusion at the foot of our stairs with no strings attached, or else we explained and this we regret that we had cancer and so normcores took pity on us too and delivered pallets of cane sodas for nothing, never taking the bill or coins we left wedged under the mat. Our deliverers did not even want to meet us, certainly not after we insisted that we did not want to be met in our condition, and this let us assert was ultimately more important than the start of ecommerce, this was more as like the start of freecommerce, though not even that claim can justify our behavior.

We joined all the religious fora because back then the only pages that existed, smut aside, were about two things, basically: one being the absolute miracle of the very existence of the pages, as like some business celebrating the launch of some placeholder spacewaster site containing only contact information, their address in the real, their phone and fax in the real, and two being the sites of people, predominantly, at this stage, computer scientists or the compscientifically inclined openly indulging their most intimate curs, their most spiritual disclosures, as like experimental diabetes treatment logs and conversion diaries patiently explaining ontological discrepancies between Theravada and Mahayana Buddhisms, interspersed with kitten and puppy photos, a Christmas tree growing at syrupspeed from starred tip to rootless trunk until filling the window.

We tracked what we could, as like much as like we could. We trafficked, unable to stop. We had to know everything, to not just know everything but to have it, to keep it all under wraps, under banner. We correlated pages with profiles, crossreferenced profiles based on similarity of subject, of style or time of expression, but each time a connection was made, another connection appeared, and the number of sites grew too large, and so the number of their links grew too big, and so the database we were producing went onerous.