These days we never are alone. My father, in his old age, not computer savvy, watches NASCAR, the ad-laden machines circling and circling a flattened hole. For others, there is baseball — men throwing spheres and running; genre novels — caricatures of caricatures; yardwork — the fringe and silent growths of architecture — a strand within a strand of endless strands. A sleeping or waking spinning while standing still, or unseen stairwells, numbers counting none. Even in the light of homes there are these boxes and the wires and the doors. We diagnose ourselves. We know ourselves and others through the pictures and the language and the sound. As of this minute, DomainTools.com estimates there are 112,606,155 active websites. There are 373,749,730 names of shells of sites once active, now deleted. In the past twenty-four hours alone there have been 74,463 new created and 84,167 deleted, and 82,045 already-existing sites transferred to new owners. A constant creation, recreation, decreation, destroyed. The space for expansion approaches endless, with no current maximum cap on the potential number of characters in a newly registered URL. Some browsers may not be able to parse the string (in 2006, Microsoft stated its max was 2,083, though Firefox would carry up to 65,536 characters), making the site difficult to access, but as far as privatizing the space, all gates are open — an unlimited field of nowhere directives, inxs no land.
Any name, too, is subject to variation, sub-indexing. So you can’t have insomnia.com (though, as with other sites, you can have all other kinds of info about who owns it, including their name, address, telephone number, and e-mail, by which means you might conduct a deal), but the potential registrar isn’t by any stretch ready to let you give up then and there. Instead of insomnia.com, DomainTools.com suggests the following privately owned but up-for-purchase URLs (as of November 6, 2009):
SevereInsomnia.com, $588.00
NewInsomnia.com, $1,410.00
TotalInsomnia.com, $1,688.00
InsomniaZone.com, $1,050.00
InsomniaGames.com, $708.00
InsomniaCoffee.com, $1,588.00
Beyond these already begotten name tags, there are the endless reams of potential doppelgängers, poised to slink out of the void for somewhere around $9.99. The registrar’s suggestions in lieu of insomnia.com spill on for pages, each yours quickly, at a click, though by any instant also perhaps sucked up by another buyer, the eLandscape changing, becoming tamed:
FREETURMOIL.COM
BIGTURMOIL.COM
TURMOILLIVE.COM
EASYTURMOIL.COM
TURMOILONLINE.COM
NEWRESTLESSNESS.COM
TURMOILSTORE.COM
HOTTURMOIL.COM
MYRESTLESSNESS.COM
TURMOILPRO.COM
TURMOILFORYOU.COM
TURMOIL4YOU.COM
TURMOIL4U.COM
TURMOIL2U.COM
BESTAGITATION.COM
HOTWAKEFULNESS.COM
WAKEFULNESSPRO.COM
WAKEFULNESSFORYOU.COM
WAKEFULNESS4YOU.COM
WAKEFULNESS4U.COM
WAKEFULNESS2U.COM
YOURSLEEPLESSNESS.COM
NEWSLEEPLESSNESS.COM
MYSLEEPLESSNESS.COM
BESTSLEEPLESSNESS.COM
FREESLEEPLESSNESS.COM
BIGSLEEPLESSNESS.COM
SLEEPLESSNESSLIVE.COM
EASYSLEEPLESSNESS.COM
SLEEPLESSNESSONLINE.COM
SLEEPLESSNESSSTORE.COM
HOTSLEEPLESSNESS.COM
SLEEPLESSNESSPRO.COM
TURMOIL4YOU.INFO
TURMOIL2U.INFO
TURMOILFORYOU.INFO
TURMOIL4U.INFO
SLEEPLESSNESS4U.COM
SLEEPLESSNESSFORYOU.COM
SLEEPLESSNESS2U.COM
SLEEPLESSNESS4YOU.COM
BESTAGITATION.INFO
YOURINSOMNIALIVE.COM
YOURINSOMNIAONLINE.COM
YOURINSOMNIASTORE.COM
YOURINSOMNIAPRO.COM
YOURINSOMNIA2U.COM
YOURINSOMNIA4YOU.COM
YOURINSOMNIAFORYOU.COM
YOURINSOMNIA4U.COM
NEWINSOMNIALIVE.COM
NEWINSOMNIAONLINE.COM
MYINSOMNIALIVE.COM
NEWINSOMNIASTORE.COM
MYINSOMNIAONLINE.COM
HOTWAKEFULNESS.INFO
WAKEFULNESSPRO.INFO
WAKEFULNESSFORYOU.INFO
WAKEFULNESS2U.INFO
WAKEFULNESS4YOU.INFO
WAKEFULNESS4U.INFO
YOURSLEEPLESSNESS.INFO
NEWSLEEPLESSNESS.INFO
MYSLEEPLESSNESS.INFO
BESTSLEEPLESSNESS.INFO
FREESLEEPLESSNESS.INFO
BIGSLEEPLESSNESS.INFO
SLEEPLESSNESSLIVE.INFO
EASYSLEEPLESSNESS.INFO
SLEEPLESSNESSONLINE.INFO
SLEEPLESSNESSSTORE.INFO
HOTSLEEPLESSNESS.INFO
SLEEPLESSNESSPRO.INFO
SLEEPLESSNESS2U.INFO
SLEEPLESSNESSFORYOU.INFO
SLEEPLESSNESS4U.INFO
SLEEPLESSNESS4YOU.INFO
YOURINSOMNIALIVE.INFO
YOURINSOMNIAONLINE.INFO
YOURINSOMNIASTORE.INFO
YOURINSOMNIAPRO.INFO
YOURINSOMNIAFORYOU.INFO
YOURINSOMNIA4U.INFO
YOURINSOMNIA4YOU.INFO
YOURINSOMNIA2U.INFO
NEWINSOMNIALIVE.INFO
NEWINSOMNIAONLINE.INFO
MYINSOMNIALIVE.INFO
NEWINSOMNIASTORE.INFO
MYINSOMNIAONLINE.INFO
Any one of these suffix- and prefix-affixed strings is potentially yours, a waiting doorway into somewhere to be developed or resold, or otherwise resigned to the middle ground of registration. Some of these may once have perhaps been bought and built by others and then abandoned, in the shape of houses haunted by what was and now is not. The skeletons of these once-entered and since-abandoned electronic rooms still abound here, archived, if not in brain meat or old caches, until somehow those archives crash or are erased, by some furious weather or magnetism, some god act. So much of nothing these days ever is deleted — copies of copies, zombified. What is spoken from any platform might appear in mirror sites at anonymous addresses without permission, culling text simply to feed search engines, traffic, endless spooclass="underline" a silent congress, a morphing backlog, electronic window, every hour in your home. Spam folders stacked full of language piling up without an eye, sent by machines to millions of accidental or magnetized addresses, sometimes sucking actual unique messages into its vortex, claiming presence in the blank. The result here, with such influx, is that there’s so much being made you’ll never see — throes of constant building and recycling — an endless tunnel, corridors upon corridors of code. Many of these sites, too, are aimed at particular persons, in subsets of language. What will be missed. How does one choose. Soon it is the flux itself that is the identity, perused as unconsciously as one passes ads and grows old.
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“The more our daily life appears standardised, stereotyped and subject to an accelerated reproduction of objects of consumption,” writes Deleuze, “the more art must be injected into it in order to extract from it that little difference which plays simultaneously between other levels of repetition, and even in order to make the two extremes resonate — namely, the habitual series of consumption and the instinctual series of destruction and death.”182 Expression in the age under computers and endless replication continues to further and further incorporate the inorganic spread into its flesh, turning in on itself as would more and more mirrors, a reflective and variating outer shell — there are more nodes alive now than at any other minute in history, no matter when you read this sentence, no matter how long this book survives, until there comes some Other [pause] Meditation. And yet the light is on inside us, drinking. The light sees, eats, absorbs all. It “connects the tableau of cruelty with that of stupidity, and discovers underneath consumption a schizophrenic clattering of the jaws, and underneath the most ignoble destructions of war, still more processes of consumption.”183 And, grown out from this light, the outer scrim grows thicker, both holding out and holding in, silent in meditation, ever-present. So much is about an often unconscious but continuously updating manipulation of the existent, finding new doors hid in large maps, milking the error up into replication and recreation. There is virus, hacking, glitch. Within each of these, the thread continues spreading, knocking out new doors inside itself to keep up with the coming fold.