Networks Everywhere
-------------------
The following entry is transcribed from a notebook (the
paper kind) I took with me on a trip to the Internet Archive
Canada in Vancouver last week. I was there to attend a
session entitled "In Honour of Canadian Web Preservation"
which turned out to be interesting in ways that I didn't
expect and am still processing. But this isn't about that;
it's a rumination on a Solderpunk's most recent post about
bike messengers [1], and how it relates (in my head) to a
recently published book by Lori Emerson [2].
2025.05.28
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It's a clear, slightly too-warm day in Vancouver, and I am
sitting at one of several orange metal tables in the plaza
at the back of the Art Gallery, next to where the old
Centennial fountain used to be.
No bike messenger sightings yet, nor do I expect any.
Another job gone the way of the telephone operator I
suppose. Can't stop progress, might as we (sometimes) might
want to.
I am reflecting on Solderpunk's recent phlog, and how I
never made the (in hindsight, obvious) connection between
the folks on electric bikes tooling around my suburban
neighbourhood delivering pizza, and the fabled (extinct?)
bike messengers of yore, endlessly cheating death while
ferrying documents between corporate clients in their
downtown office towers, who I used to regularly see hanging
out between jobs in the very space I'm in now, back in the
90s [3].
Solderpunk identifies many salient differences between the
pizza deliverers and the messengers, but I did think of one
more, the obviousness of which is probably why he didn't
bother to mention it, viz. the messengers delivered (mainly)
information, whereas the deliverers deliver physical goods.
Which would make the messengers a network of sorts, if we
accept Lori Emerson's definition of a network as "the
connection between two or more nodes that facilitate human
communication" [4], in a way the pizza deliverers are not.
I've been thinking about - and noticing - networks more than
usual in recent days, as I work my way through Emerson's
recently published book "Other Networks." Subtitled "A
Radical Sourcebook" it's a fascinating compendium of
alternative, mostly pre-Internet networking technologies -
analogue, electronic and wholly imaginary - ranging from
barbed wire telephony to amateur radio satellites to Otlet's
Mundaneum. "Radical" I think because it holds open at least
the possibility of unsurveilled network spaces, utopic in
ways we once briefly thought the Internet might become.
[Here my written entry tails off into hastily scribbled
point form musings, as the afternoon sun, moving across the
plaza, began to encroach upon my shade. I noted that most of
the Other Networks might best not be viewed as practical
alternatives so much as evidence that our present-day
almost-all-encompassing Internet was not inevitable and need
not last forever, and that other, better (or at least
different) networks may one day take its place.]
References
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[1] Solderpunk. Bike Messenger Archetypes [...]
gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~solderpunk/phlog/
bike-messenger-archetypes-in-fiction-and-reality-past-and-present.txt
[2] Lori Emerson. Other Networks
https://othernetworks.net/#articlesandbooks
[3] Hellbent - Bike Couriers of Vancouver
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9Eo9FjeMQU
[4] Emerson, p.3
Sat May 31 14:07:36 PDT 2025
