Poe in Cyberspace: Web 1, 2, 3 . . .

Abstract

The West Point classmate who appreciated Poe as a “fellow of talent” assumed that he would be “too mad a poet to like Mathematics” (PL 114). Mad or not, Poe began his lifelong interest in mathematics by standing a respectable seventeenth in his math class of eighty-seven cadets. Throughout his career he maintained a continual thread of logical and mathematical awareness in his detective tales, science fiction, Eureka, and criticism, in counterpoint to their Gothic elements. To follow up on the unprecedented success of “The Raven,” Poe surprised his readers with the mathematical claim in “The Philosophy of Composition” that he had written “The Raven” by following a few logical precepts: “No one point in its composition is referrable either to accident or intuition—that the work proceeded, step by step, to its completion with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem” (L2 61–62).Poe experienced in antebellum American literary culture an unprecedented combination of historical factors: geographic expansion on a continental scale, major moral reform, and sweeping technological innovations. These complexities give his career special relevance for us today as we face the dangerous mix of political uncertainties, COVID, Ukraine, and the dual economic worries of inflation and depression. Our response today is to turn toward the digital or virtual equivalents of in-person work and socialization. Thus traditional culture is being replaced to some extent by mechanized procedures and oceans of data. The new mathematical entities have been enlivened to some extent by assuming two-letter abbreviations: AI (artificial intelligence), ML (machine learning), and VR (virtual reality). Facebook, once a familiar and stable cultural standard, is now refashioning itself as Meta, transforming ordinary reality into AR (augmented reality).These fundamental transitions deeply affect the Internet, as might well be imagined. When websites first appeared in the 1990s, they were composed chiefly of static pages of information. In response to the innovations of interactive social networks, blogs, wikis, and shared media, Tim O’Reilly in 2004 introduced the term “Web 2.0.” In the early web, which became known retrospectively as Web 1.0, a typical attraction was the Encyclopedia Britannica Online, its static pages written by experts. In Web 2.0 the comparable page was Wikipedia, an ongoing compendium produced by multiple anonymous contributors. After smartphones encouraged the broad expansion of the Internet, Web 2.0, being largely unregulated, contained material that had legal protection, but which unprotected printed outlets could not risk publishing. One serious charge was that Web 2.0 had spread conspiracy theories, hate, and racist sentiments, and even lies and disinformation. At the same time, the Internet was accused of ignoring privacy, being flagrantly partisan in political elections, and offering unstable advice on the COVID pandemic. In addition, many web pages practiced what Shoshana Zuboff studied in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019) as the relentless collection and sale of demographic data, location information, and personal habits online. The final effect is that the Internet, once trustworthy, is no longer so.In the worst case, a would-be shooter could take advantage of the low level of supervision in order to obtain on the Internet uncensured instructions on how to make bombs and ghost guns. Some shooters realized that their attacks could be live streamed, thereby encouraging other shooters. Thus in 2019 the New Zealand shooter who killed fifty-one Muslims in Christchurch live streamed the event, providing an example for the Buffalo shooter who used the Internet in multiple ways in his racist attack on a Tops supermarket in spring 2022. He drew information from BitChute, a video sharing site, Reddit, 4chan chat rooms, racist articles on HuffPost and Medium, and practical videos on YouTube. During his fatal shootings, he streamed video live on Twitch, afterward writing a diary, producing a 180-page manifesto, and posting details on Discord. The common thread in these mass shootings is the belief in replacement theory, the notion that Blacks, immigrants, and others were eliminating the dominant white culture in order to replace it with a radical alternative culture. The nonprofit site Media Matters for America reportedly found fifty ads on Facebook promoting replacement theory, some from candidates for political office, in addition to restored posts previously removed from mainstream platforms such as Twitter and Reddit (New York Times, June 1, 2022).Today, as the Internet turns from Web 2.0 to what is called Web3, many observers hope that its new technologies will provide protection that the legal system has failed to offer thus far. Thus Web3 holds up some hope, although most users may still not know what it is. The term could not be explained by 70 percent of the readers of the Harvard Business Review in a survey conducted online on LinkedIn in March 2022. The promise of Web3, to use its own terminology, would be to store data on the blockchain of individual users and rely on its own cryptocurrency to replace transactions of untrustworthy governments and large organizations. The general promise of blockchain is that it would take power now concentrated in the hands of Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, Meta (Facebook), and Microsoft and redistribute it across the Internet to empower ordinary users.Many claims are now being made for this new technology. Web3 is decentralized because ownership is distributed among its builders and users. Web3 is permissionless because everyone has equal access. Web3 uses native payments of cryptocurrency instead of banks and payment processors. Web3 is trustless: it operates using incentives and economic mechanisms. Two more features: Web3 uses DeFi, decentralized finance, and DAO, decentralized autonomous organizations.Supporters argue that Web3 will provide increased data security, scalability, and privacy for users, combating the influence of large technology companies. However, critics are concerned that a decentralized web with low regulation can disseminate harmful content and end up concentrating new wealth in a small group of early investors, turning crypto into a Ponzi scheme.Thomas Stackpole’s balanced response in response to the question “What Is Web3?” appeared in the Harvard Business Review of May 10, 2022. Much interest in Web3 stems from envy or FOMO (fear of missing out) because some early investors had reported making a fortune by investing in crypto. Memorably, famous media stars, not just techno-libertarians and bank haters, were appearing as advocates on TV and in commercials. What started as a curiosity and speculative niche became big business.Crypto is supported by blockchain, which is a “distributed ledger” whose database is backed by a network of independent computers. The idea of the “digital deed” is to support the ownership records of unique digital objects, which are called nonfungible tokens or NFTs. In 2022, their market was said to be worth $41 billion, a value that seemed to appear out of nowhere. Needless to say, blockchain faces major technical, environmental, ethical, and regulatory hurdles as well as the hazards of intentional abuse. Nevertheless, some experiments in Web3 are now underway in the communities of the NBA, Nike, Adidas, Under Armour, and Time magazine. However, the assets of Web3 are highly concentrated: “The top 0.01% of bitcoin holders own 27% of the supply” (bitcoinist.com).To some critics, Web3 seems to be largely speculation in cryptocurrencies, a mirroring of the shadow banking practices that resulted in the 2008 financial crisis. At one time the value of crypto is said to have risen as high as $3 trillion, but in the summer of 2022 it reportedly fell to $1 trillion (decrypt.co). The skeptic Jim Chanos, an American investment manager, called crypto a “predatory junkyard”; columnist Paul Krugman labeled crypto a “postmodern pyramid scheme” (New York Times, July 12, 2022). In China and eight other countries, cryptocurrencies have already been banned, and its treatment under European regulations remains unclear. Despite catastrophic losses, the enthusiasm of some advocates of crypto remains undampened (New York Times, August 2, 2022).Many of the hopes and fears concerning Web3 depend on its use of big data and mathematical procedures, which add convenience but also weaken human control. The huge swings of opinion on the subject may reflect the public’s low level of mathematical literacy. In Poe’s case, some contemporaries were distressed by what they saw as his excessively mathematical side. Charles Frederick Briggs, founder of the Broadway Journal, who hired Poe as an editor, complained about Poe to James Russell Lowell on June 27,1845: “I think a machine, something like Babbage’s[,] might be constructed to write poetry and criticisms like his” (www.eapoe.org). Poe had been early aware of Babbage’s computer, mentioning it in “Maelzel’s Chess-Player” (Southern Literary Messenger, April 1836) and again in “The Thousand and Second Tale of Scheherazade” (Godey’s Lady’s Book, February 1845), which Briggs excerpted in the Broadway Journal on January 25, 1845 (PL 497), just a few days before the publication of “The Raven.”In the poem Poe used the raven, a highly intelligent animal with deep associations in myth, prophecy, and tradition, for its special voice reputedly resembling that of human speech. Poe’s tale of a bereaved lover is cast as a ballad in which he asks a series of questions to which the raven speaks the refrain “Nevermore” in reply. The lover’s midnight reading is interrupted by an outbreak of involuntary memory (to use Proust’s term) of his sorrowful thoughts of the loss of his “sainted Lenore,” now in heaven, hoping for a joyous future reunion with her in the afterlife. However, the raven’s refrain “Nevermore” startles him, denying this meeting will ever take place, then resisting the lover’s attempt to dismiss him. In “The Philosophy of Composition,” Poe quotes the final text that presents the image of the shadow of the raven on the floor, and the startling disclosure that the shadow now contains the young man’s soul:Then, perhaps for the benefit of genteel readers of Graham’s, where the essay appeared, Poe describes the final effect of the poem as “Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance” (L2 70), a deep sentiment that Kenneth Silverman uses as the subtitle of his biography of Poe. However, some readers have had a different understanding, seeing allegorical significance in the young man’s soul leaving his body and becoming entrapped in the raven’s shadow on the floor, never to leave. Here “Nevermore” is not the raven’s refrain but the young man’s own description, concluding the ballad with the allegorical suggestion that the young man’s trapped soul signified his realization of his imminent fate of madness, death, and damnation. In this reading, the closing text of the poem does not support Poe’s account of the young man’s final sentimental and melancholy separation from Lenore; instead, the ballad concludes abruptly with the shock, amplified by its severe understatement, of the young man’s first realization of the full extent of his final moral state and its associated terror and horror.Although Poe may not have been, as his West Point classmate claimed, “too mad a poet to like Mathematics,” he evidently realized at some point that a reputation for mathematical proficiency would do wonders for his reputation. Thus he also adds a second mathematical claim in “The Philosophy of Composition,” namely that “the extent of a poem” exists in a “mathematical relation to its merit . . . [adding that] the brevity must be in direct ratio of the intensity of the intended effect” (L2 62). Indeed, a short poem such as a sonnet may be more intense than a long epic, but Poe’s claim of a precise “direct ratio” in the number of lines overstates the case. Nevertheless, Poe understood that exaggeration in matters of appearance could make an impression more memorable. In private, Poe admitted that what he called his tales of ratiocination could owe more to their novelty than to their logical discipline. “These tales of ratiocination,” Poe wrote to Phillip P. Cooke, “owe most of their popularity to being something in a new key. I do not mean to say that they are not ingenious—but people think them more ingenious than they are—on account of their method and air of method” (PL 661).“Poe in Cyberspace” columns are available online at eapoe.info.