In October 2016 a major cyber-attack took down high profile websites such as Paypal, Twitter and Spotify. It also took down 4 lesser known websites: Being Arthur, the Sillitoe Trail, Dawn of the Unread and Memory Theatre. These websites were all hosting digital literature projects by Paul Fillingham and I and are slowly being resuscitated.
The attacks raised an important issue regarding the future of the digital public sphere. Unless you’re a large corporation with a wealth of expert staff at your disposal, or, at the very least, a very competent and computer savvy programmer, such attacks are devastating and can completely wipe out your online presence within seconds. So much for online utopianism. So much for democracy. The more things change, the more they stay the same…
This is why this first blog post is inaccurately dated 18 February 2017. The first blog post for this D.H. Lawrence project was back around September 2015, but now we’re having to start all over again. On our official website I’m reliant on Paul Fillingham to magically restore the website so I can start blogging about our project. But as a freelancer, this is not high on his priority list. There’s the clients and the paid work. But I can’t wait any longer. Like Lawrence I’m impatient, restless, and desperate to move. So restless in fact I’m tempted to start each sentence of this blog with a verb, as Lawrence does in Sea and Sardinia. “Comes over one an absolute necessity to move. And what is more, to move in some particular direction.”
Moving we are then. At last. Not South West, as was Lawrence’s preferred direction in Twilight in Italy, nor East, when he embarked on the RMS Osterley on 26 Feb 1922 for Ceylon and the hope of “a new start.” But into the murky depths of the digital void where there is no sense of direction, no sense of beginning or end, just a kind of digital limbo. Although, technically speaking, this blog is completely fixed in time and space. It has an IPS address and so this is the first call out for visitors (or attackers) to come along.
I wonder what Lawrence would make of the hack. He was, after all, a man who preferred to throw a hand grenade into a room to see what would happen than sit down quietly in the corner. I don’t think he would appreciate the pointlessness of the hack. It would have to serve a purpose and there was no purpose served in bringing down our websites. It was too random. Undirected. But as a writer who despised the dehumanising effects of industrialisation, I think he would be appalled at our digital lives, particularly how complicit we’ve become in giving up our freedom for convenience.
The hack was successful because of our increasing reliance on the Internet of Things. Very simply this is computing devices embedded in everyday objects that are able to send and receive data via the internet. These ‘smart’ devices typically include baby monitors and thermostats, both of which can be controlled via your smartphone, down to the computer maintenance chip in your car that flashes up to tell you when you need a service. With everything increasingly being hooked up to the internet, there are more access points than ever, meaning you only need to leave one window open and boom! Game over.
No, Lawrence would have no sympathy for our plight or for anyone sucked into the glittering lights of the internet. He’d want to get as far away from the digital world as possible. “I’d wipe the machines off the face of the earth again, and end the industrial epoch absolutely, like a black mistake” he famously raged.
I hope he may forgive our “black mistake” in digitising his journey, and instead see it as another voyage of discovery, an attempt to charter unknown waters, a quest to find Rananim somewhere in the digital void before some benign force comes along and wipes us out for good.
D.H. Lawrence: A Digital Pilgrimage 