Disquiet

Every few years I re-read “Spew,” the Neal Stephenson story published in the magazine Wired in 1994. It’s still online, as are we all.

“Spew” is a prescient if purposefully exaggerated consideration of what was already called the “social graph” but wouldn’t achieve poisonous fruition until Facebook and its ilk took off a decade-plus later. Here, in a story of hyper-focused advertising, Stephenson gets close, with the term “social web.” Gmail, which scanned people’s emails to produce targeted ads (as may Yahoo and other email providers to this day, apparently), wouldn’t launch for another 10 years. Stephenson in “Spew” took early note of what we today term surveillance capitalism.

He also paid attention to the ability to turn the tools of internet-connected observance on oneself. YouTube, foreseen here in some technology-intensive live-streaming, debuted the year after Gmail, in 2005. Back in 1994, this idea was, one might recall, still a stretch: “You have turned your room — my room — into a broadcast station,” the narrator exclaims believably. Twitch didn’t surface until 2011.

The subjects of Stephenson’s premonitions include his own future work. He calls the troubling sludge that is the foreseen horrible Internet (capitalized back then) the Spew, not unlike the Miasma, as it would be labeled decades later in his novel Fall; or, Dodge in Hell (2019).

I recently re-read Stephenson’s novel Cryptonomicon, so my eyes were primed to notice, this time around, Stephenson’s use in “Spew” of the word “gomer” to mean someone old, embarrassing, and ultimately disposable. In Cryptonomicon, that word is half the name of a furniture company, Gomer Bolstrood, which later appears (earlier chronologically) in his Baroque Cycle. So, while the tone of “gomer” is different, the usage in “Spew” is very much this story’s narrator’s perspective of something out of date.

There are some great lines throughout, such as this one, echoing the Rolling Stones’ classic anti-advertising/consumerist rant, “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”: “I can tell you’re cool because your water costs more than your beer.”

I mention “Spew” now because this following section of the story stood out to me in a way it hadn’t on previous reads. Note how the fetishized fine-tuning of sound design provides a tactile quality and utility in an increasingly frictionless media landscape:

Click. Course, it never really clicks anymore, no one has used mechanical switches since like the ’50s, but some Spew terminals emit a synthesized click — they wired up a 1955 Sylvania in a digital sound lab somewhere and had some old gomer in a tank-top stagger up to it and change back and forth between Channel 4 and Channel 5 a few times, paid him off and fired him, then compressed the sound and inseminated it into the terminals’ fundamental ROMs so that we’d get that reassuring click when we jumped from one Feed to another. Which is what happens now; except I haven’t touched a remote, don’t even have a remote, that being the whole point of the Polysurf. Now it’s some fucker picking a banjo, ouch it is an actual Hee Haw rerun, digitally remastered, frozen in pure binary until the collapse of the Universe.

You can read the full story at wired.com/1994/10/spew, though that may be behind a paywall.