The fact that this has gotten through to you proves
that the network is still penetrable. If this is what is has come to, if this is
all we have left to go on, perhaps it is enough. Yes. It will have to be. We
will have to start from here. It’s not much to work with. But yes, it is
enough. Look at it this way: the fact that anything could still get through
these days, past all the censors and sentinels, is in itself nothing less than a
miracle. Structurally, the network, the system, the grid, whatever we want to
call it, is perfect at last. It is perfect. It is perfection itself. Which is to
say that it does not exist. It is crucial that we be clear about this. It is not
hidden. The system, the machine, the network, is not hidden. It is not
concealed, cloaked, buried or veiled. It simply does not exist. And the fact
that it does not exist renders it, by definition, invisible, anonymous, hence
invulnerable to any assault. The fact that its diverse servants remain unnamed,
unknown, even to each other—yes, even to themselves—is the key. The fact
that those who serve it do so unaware, perhaps even believing themselves to be
members of the opposition, is the network’s ultimate beauty, strength and
genius. But it is also its Achilles heel. I will try to explain. Let us say,
purely for the sake of argument, that you were one such servant, a servant of
the network, a censor, a sentinel or a screener as they are sometimes called.
You could be stationed anywhere, at any number of posts. You might be a
journalist or an editor at a newspaper, or an editor of film or video, or a
librarian or a teacher. You might be an executive, in advertising, sales,
marketing, or on the board of a museum, or the assistant head of human resources
at a mid-sized corporation. Perhaps you run a small not-for-profit theater or a
little magazine or a travel agency or a bar. You are a lawyer, an analyst, a
cook, someone who begs for change outside a bank machine at night. You drive a
truck, program computers, trade foreign currencies, or raise livestock. You are
someone’s husband, wife, son or daughter, uncle, sister, colleague, friend.
Let’s say you recommend a certain book or a movie, or you repeat a joke you
heard somebody tell. Maybe you catch an error in a resume or spot a broken tail
light or notice a bit of dirt under a certain waiter’s fingernail. A man is
crying at a business lunch, a taxi driver asks about your mother, or your lover
suddenly displays a hunger to which you are unaccustomed. Any number of events
occur. And you react to these events. You react according to the role you have
been assigned. You change the subject abruptly in the middle of a conversation.
Your mind wanders or you avert your eyes, start a rumor, or misplace a set of
keys, or you forget to give someone a message—a message they have been
anticipating. You choose a certain restaurant, a certain car, a specific word or
victim. Your thoughts drift off, away from who you’re with, who you are
speaking with, to someone else, someone you remember or seem to remember but are
now no longer certain that you ever really knew. You do not sense the system
working through you. You react to things, events, believing your reactions to be
random, the results of complex interactions between sets of overlapping facts,
idiosyncrasies, probabilities and choices. You believe you make your own
decisions; decisions based on quality, excellence, appropriateness and common
sense. You measure one thing in relation to another, appraising similarities and
deviances from models. You believe that economic trends, aesthetic movements and
preponderant beliefs are as organic as cyclonic systems, and that clothes go in
and out of style. You trust your memory and your senses; you believe in art and
in the law. You have political opinions. You support or are opposed to certain
wars, ethics, industries, words. You are no different from anyone, really. In
the larger scheme of things, your actions, your individual moment by moment
actions, do not amount to much. The world does not depend on you, on what you do
or think from moment to moment. In truth, you have very little power and just as
little responsibility. What you are reading is a fiction, in other words, a lie.
We are playing a game. It is harmless. It is art. You know the difference
between art and what is real. Everyone does. We know such things without ever
being taught them, without ever being trained to believe or think this way.
There is no “network.” Not really. Not for real. There is no “system,”
no “machine,” or what have you. The only “sentinels” are in the minds of
crackpots, kooks, paranoids, nuts. You see them on the street talking to
themselves. They walk very quickly as though they are headed somewhere
important. They walk right into you, as though you aren’t there. They’re the
ones who write letters to the editors of newspapers. They’re the ones who are
always asking you to read one of their poems. The only “network” is the one
inside their heads. Out here in reality, nothing quite so insidious or
interesting is going on. You go to work, live your life, and you go home and
watch the television. You fall in love, make a sandwich, read a book, go to
church or to the beach, or to the mall, or to your shrink like anyone else. You
read a story, and it’s just a story— not some tactic of control, not some
component of a matrix of signs, codes and laws, rules we can’t articulate,
models we can’t define yet struggle to conform to with each thought that
enters our minds. Things are just not that exciting, that dramatic or intense.
The ads on the billboards and bus stops are just ads. Wrong numbers are wrong
numbers. They happen all the time. What you read in the paper or see on TV is
there because people want it there. It’s news. Or it’s art. Or something
random. It’s not some kind of plot. The signs that get seen and the messages
that get heard, get seen and heard for reasons; for a thousand little reasons,
because they are important, or someone paid to get them published or broadcast
or posted, or any number of such reasons; ordinary reasons, not because of some
conspiracy to control communications. Even certain words, ideas, images, trends,
recurring conversations, insignificant beliefs that are born into the world out
of nowhere one day and gradually take hold, spreading like a virus until you
realize that everyone you know is suddenly talking about a certain program or
using a certain word or reading a particular book, or are outraged by some
issue. Even these occurrences are just a matter of chance. They are not the work
of secret agents, operatives, sentinels, or servants of some vast, anonymous
regime. Things are not that complicated, though at times we may wish they were.
Things, for the most part, can be explained by human nature, force of habit, a
general lack of imagination, or coincidence. Take for example the overwhelming
uniformity of dress, hairstyle, mannerisms, people’s taste in literature, art,
food, architecture, the way you seem to have the same conversation day after day
with the same people, visit the same places, come to similar realizations at
more or less the same time, how everything confirms what at the moment appears
to be the obvious truth but in a week or two will be utterly forgotten, replaced
by something else, something contradictory, something which you and everyone you
know will understand and talk about with such authority that it could only have
been the real truth all along, waiting there to be discovered finally by
everyone all at once; or take the fact that every other TV show or movie or book
has to do with the police or criminals or both, or take the fact that you do not
ever show up for work dressed as a priest, or even the fact that no one—and I
mean no one—living in the seventh century ever had a Freudian dream; or that
only an idiot or a lunatic or an artist would burn a hundred dollar bill, or
that cancer is a superstition, or that privacy has always been a myth, or the
fact that this is not a story, not even literature at all, but an encrypted
message, perhaps even a test, like one of those canaries they used to send into
the mines if a wall collapsed or a mainline broke, or some other kind of
accident or catastrophe occurred; or the fact that this has somehow slipped
through some crack, some fissure in the system, through the wall, found some
secret passageway through the labyrinth of screens, the invisible web of
safeguards, fail-safes, the grid, the tapestry of trip wires, the menagerie of
guards, censors, checkers, police, unconscious monitors, somnambulants, friends,
authorities, experts, professionals, teachers, soldiers, servants,
collaborators, accomplices, bystanders, onlookers, spectators, witnesses.
© 2002 C. J. Hopkins
