The literary origins of the Context
In 1999, cyberpunk and transreal poet Rudy Rucker published a book called “Saucer Wisdom” (Rucker, 1999). Disguised as a non-fictional report based on the edited notes of an alien abductee named Frank Shook, the book is actually an amazing collection of Rucker’s fantasies about the future of communication, computing, and humanity.
One technology that Rucker describes is called a lifebox, a device that holds the recorded and heavily hyperlinked memories of a person.1 A bit like what Vannevar Bush described as the memory extending machine (Memex) in his legendary 1945 article As We May Think.
Originally used to create chatbots that mimicked deceased relatives, it soon becomes a kind of business card: the Context. People begin to exchange their Contexts in order to get to know each other even before they meet in person.
Frank and the aliens skip a little further into the future, and they find that the lifebox has become a huge industry. People of all ages are using lifeboxes as a way to introducing themselves to each other. Sort of like home pages. They call the lifebox database a context, as in, “I’ll UV you a link to my context.” Not that most people really want to spend the time it takes to explicitly access very much of another person’s full context. But having the context handy makes conversation much easier (Rucker, 1999, p. 59).
Contexts of the old internet
Rucker writes about Contexts at the turn of the millennia and so it is no surprise that he compares them to “home pages”. It feels like everybody at the time who could put two HTML-tags together had one and it often felt like seeing part of somebody’s personality. My own home page that I spun up as a teenager, back around the time when “Saucer Wisdom” was published, was certainly a reflection of the interests of my 15 year old self: My clumsy and self-important reviews of the Anti-Flag discography (consisting of exactly three albums and two EPs that I knew of at the time), descriptions of Flatland BMX tricks, my cheesy and juvenile attempts at poetry, and some notes on the math of juggling.
People used to have way more elaborate websites, be it on GeoCities, myspace or whatever and it feels to me that they often served the purpose of Rucker’s Context. Finding somebodies personal website — either by chance or on purpose — and clicking through their interests was almost a social experience, it was almost like interacting with that person.2
The aforementioned Rudy Rucker is an example of somebody who still maintains one of these wonderful oldschool personal websites: https://www.rudyrucker.com. And he also put his own lifebox online.
When social media came around personal websites mostly disappeared. But the replacement felt differently. And I will have to elaborate at some other time why I think that was the case.
Digital Gardens
Digital gardens recently became a thing within the PKM community. They can be described as a mix of blog and wiki. A regular writing that is then hyperlinked with the rest of the content. In a way they get closer to the idea of the old personal websites. They also go beyond that concept as they are incomplete. Some ideas are mere sketches, others are outlines or even fully formed essays.
Even though the garden metaphor is a good one, I’d rather call my digital garden my Context. It is the part of my lifebox that I wish to show to the web wilderness. The rest of it I keep offline: in my Obsidian vault, in handwritten notes and in my head.
References
Footnotes
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If you want to know more about this (and it is really worth it), have a look at Rudy Rucker’s website where he has put most (if not all) of his books online. The resources that go deeper into the concept of the lifebox and the impact it has on the future of communication are: Saucer Wisdom, The lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul and his blog post on Making a lifebox. ↩
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For a glimpse of this experience (or a dose of nostalgia, depending on your age) have a look at this project which has archived some gems of the old internet: restorativland ↩