Free Writing the Introduction

Earlier in the writing process for my thesis, I began drafting the introduction with a few anecdotes, hoping one of the two (or, somehow, both) might stick and provide a way in for the themes I wanted to address in my larger body of writing. They didn't, really, so after over seventy pages of drafting, I've decided that the time for that draft is over, and it's time to take the context of the earlier writing and use it to frame a new introduction. Although I didn't start with the introduction last time, I think I want to this time, if only because I feel like I already know where I want to go by the time I hit the first full chapter outside the introduction section I've been asked to put down and I'm already working backwards. No need to work backwards twice, after all.

What didn't work when I was writing last? That's the second question I've asked myself. I think it's before I started writing, I was doing so from a position of imagining an almost somehow benign variant of future-shock. The kind of shock that results from suddenly realizing you're living in what you would have, in years that you can still remember, a kind of future-environment and it's snuck up on you. Happens all the time now. Ordering pizza on the internet isn't new anymore. Cell phones with more computing power than... well, maybe an entire nation back in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, depending. The sum total of human knowledge, almost, available through a device the size of a tri-corder but more fashionable, in designer colors. Kay bought something in England - hand-made paintbrushes - that weren't really any more expensive than what you can get at fucking Hobby Lobby for a set and literally had them here in two days. Later that year, we'd try to mail something the next city over and it wouldn't get there for almost a week. So, clearly, distance is literal under some kinds of measurements, but startlingly fluid under others.

But, again, later that year and after I'd started, Brexit happened and Trump's been happening - with his nonsensical fear-mongering about immigrants and walls and borders - and I realized that there are benign varients of future-shock, gee-fuckin'-whiz moments where we get super excited about possiblities that are really only hemmed in by the inevitable but uncertain horizon of finite resources, the bumpy plateau of peak oil, and the Forever War militery-media-industrial complex that looks like the bastard fuck-baby (because love is not involved here, but lust seems to be) of Orwell and Huxley's least delightful elements. Yes, there are, but that same hazy demarcation that drifts on the horizon like a smoggy aurora borealis is the reason for the season - along with a collapsing economy that resulted in following the Gorden Gecko script a little too closely and without any real understanding of what it implied, aging boomers clutching white, white pearls against the perception of a never-ending horde of barbarians that are, well, less white, and a pointless, technically impossible demand that younger generations follow suit.

You know, that's why my original scripts don't work. Weirdly, for me anyhow, they bordered on the utopian sentiment - the beginning of a narrative where borders were more permiable, communication was more possible, and the belief that this was somehow good and everyone kind of knew it. Like, that we were crawling somehow out of the narrative wreckage of a cyberpunk dystopia and, hopefully, into a new one - just not without growing pains. I think we do want a new narrative, but that's not the point of Gibson's work; Gibson is not writing about constructing a new narrative, he's writing about the white Western world's stupid adherance to the idea that it is somehow essentially central and the increasing decentralization, de-canonization, identity diversification is terrifying. He's writing about a class of people that always believed they were right and that the people at the helm of their societies really had their best interests in mind. That they weren't Gordon Gecko but that, somehow Gordon Gecko would reward them, that the crumbs from his mouth and the coke off his mirrors would trickle like mana into their own rain-barrel coffers despite everything that they were told and despite everything you can see.

So the bastards do what bastards do, and they panic. Like a drowning and drunk swimmer, flailing in a West Egg pool at a party they weren't invited to, you can't even rescue them, and you just have to wait the fuckers out and fish their body out when they're done. Pump their stomach if you want to, but don't let them drive home.