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The Dactyls of October
``` [I've reformatted this slightly but haven't changed the words. Phil]
Date: Fri, 8 Jul 1994 10:54:59 -0700
From: Geoffrey Nunberg
In response to a number of requests (most of them from Brian Smith), I'm posting a radio piece I did for "Fresh Air" a couple of days ago on the language of the info age.
geoff nunberg
The Dactyls of October Geoff Nunberg Language Commentary for "Fresh Air," NPR, July 6, 1994 (Copyright 1994 by the author)
I've been looking over the new magazines like Wired and Mondo 2000. Cyberzines, they call themselves, the Vanity Fair or Interview of the information age. As best I can figure the information age runs from 18 to 25. Or at least the magazines have a rather MTV cast to them. Jazzy fonts on colored backgrounds, text running over the pictures. It's all very engaging, but a little hard to read for someone of my decade and diopter. I find myself yearning for the austere simplicity of the black-and-white screen on my antique Mac. But maybe that's the point of these magazines, to drive us all on line. Cyberquislings, boring from within.
There's clearly something big afoot. There are echoes of the sixties, with all its talk of revolution -- how the technology is going to lead to universal empowerment and the end of hierarchy. You might think nothing had changed in the last 30 years, except that now the relevant technology is software engineering instead of pharmacology. It's not surprising to find Timothy Leary on the editorial board of Mondo 2000, having decided to drop in again now that things are once more getting interesting.
But the language of the age has nothing to do with the 60s. It's cyberspeak, all those compounds patched together from the truncated syllables of other words. Cyberspace, internet, ethernet, hypertext, vaporware, ubicomp, nanotech, infobahn. You think of the fighter planes in the old comic strips: pocketa, pocketa, pocketa, pocketa. I have heard the future, and it speaks in dactyls. It's a rhythm we've heard before, but not at Woodstock. This is the music of October, 1917. It's the way the Bolsheviks consolidated their words, as ruthlessly as they consolidated everything else: comintern for Communist International, agitprop for agitation-propaganda, komsomol, Komkultur, sovnarkom. The words had a willful ugliness, as George Orwell put it, as if to signal a break with bourgeois aesthetics. It was was the language of technological efficiency, literally telegraphic, the clipped syntax used for communication by wire.
The resemblances to cyberspeak are more than accidental. For one thing, current computers constrain the shape of words in some of the same ways that the telegraph did. There are the programming languages that won't accept expressions with extra spaces in them, the operating systems won't let you use more than eight letters for a filename, so that all your files wound up with titles like TaxInfo.txt. And when cyberspeak picks up the pattern, it's as if to say, this is how we're going to talk when we let machines be a party in the conversation.
But there are indirect historical connections, as well. The terminology of Soviet Communism was the model for Orwell's Newspeak -- words like doublethink and Minipax, not to mention the name Newspeak itself. And that in turn was the idiom that William Gibson transformed to make the language of cyberpunk, which took newspeak from gray to noir. It was Gibson who coined Cyberspace. It's the sort of word that Big Brother would have used if he'd been a radio evangelist in Raymond Chandler's LA.
Of course the new cyberspeak doesn't have the dark, oppressive overtones of its predecessors. It's upbeat and hopeful. But then there was a brief moment when the Russian revolution was light and gay. It was the time of the Constructivist avant-garde, with their collectives, their paeans to bridges and machines, their new forms of theater -- not to mention the typographical experiments that are the direct progenitors of the graphics in Wired and the rest.
I'll grant you the comparison has its limits. The digital revolution has produced some interesting creative works, but it has yet to turn out a Malevitch or a Mayakovsky. For that matter, we should feel a little embarrassed about calling this a revolution at all, at least by contrast what happened in October of 1917. It's more like a virtual revolution, where everybody gets to lead the charge on the Winter Palace and nobody actually has to be carried off on a litter. Still, it's a great time to be young and on-line, and maybe November will come in little milder this time around. ```
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