Stubs are fundamental
Fundamental to this endeavor,1 that is.
This post2 is where Indoor Condor links point until the entries to which they will eventually lead are written. Because of the nature of this project—a non-linear, associational Wikipedia-style memoir circling around my pet obsessions—often an entry will refer to other topics that I haven’t yet written about, but that I fully intend to write about. When that happens (a topic comes up that I will write on later), the links route here. As I complete entries, I’ll go back and update links so that they route appropriately.
Why use the word stub?
The concept of a stub is lifted from William Gibson’s as-yet incomplete Jackpot Trilogy, the first two books of which are The Peripheral (2014) and Agency (2020). Based on WG’s Twitter feed, which I haven’t kept up with in some time, I think the third in-progress book will be called Jackpot. There’s also a pretty-good television series based on The Peripheral, and coincidentally part of it was shot not far from where I live.
In these books, a stub is a past timeline that doesn’t align with the user-of-the term’s present, i.e., at some point the stub timeline diverged from the series of events that led to one’s own present. While time travel and/or alternate history stuff usually bores and annoys me, it works here because Gibson doesn’t get too caught up in the technicalities. He makes the technological serve the narrative instead of the too-frequent sci-fi pitfall of making the narrative secondary to the technological. In the novel, use of the term stub expresses something between disparagement and a lack of care for the people/circumstances contained in the stub. It’s not my real past, so why should I care about what happens to the stub people?
The first novel is set in future-London (future for any actual readers and post- a slow-burn apocalypse glibly referred to as the Jackpot, which we are arguable experiencing the relatively early days of in reality). Future-Londoners can access past timelines via technology. It’s not totally clear how this quasi-time-travel is possible (in the brilliant way that Gibson’s sci-fi doesn’t get overly enamored with the minutiae of technology), but one scenario is that rather than time-travel per se, the future-Londoners are interacting with simulations of the past based on archival data, i.e., there’s a wayback machine running simulations of “the world.” The future-Londoners can influence how those timelines play out. And in contrast to the Back-to-the-Future-butterfly-effect model of time travel, events in the stubs have no direct bearing on one’s present.
Here’s a rudimentary drawing to illustrate the timelines:
The folks on the main line after it has traversed the Jackpot and leveled out are able to reach back and contact the Fishers’ line, the klept warlord’s timeline, and others. Those timelines haven’t yet weathered the Jackpot. The good guys are trying to steer the Fishers’ timeline to better outcomes than the main timeline—perhaps even a future that doesn’t involve the Jackpot. Other, worse guys (like the klept warlord) are exploiting past timelines to test drugs, weapons, etc.—perhaps even accelerating those timelines’ momentum toward the Jackpot or worse.
Treating these timelines as simulations (and calling them stubs) doesn’t do justice to the people living in any given stub, but that’s kind of the point. Stub implies a dehumanization of the stub-denizens, and the question of the stubbers’ humanity is very much at issue in the books. There’s something to be said about this scenario as an analog of/metaphor for some of the dilemmas we’re encountering (in reality) around AI.
So…stub here3 (here being w/in this Indoor Condor project) is a bit different than the stubs of the Jackpot Trilogy, but the term feels apropos in that the stubs in Gibson represent potentiality and the as-yet incomplete, a chance to reach back and do things differently—for better or ill. So do the aspirational hyperlinks in this project that don’t yet have entries to point to. What good or evil will the revisionist relinking perpetrate on this text?
Welcome to the stub.
I want to celebrate here, right at the beginning of this whole thing, I’m going meta. It starts meta, intentionally and by-design. The project is significantly about itself. No apologies.
Again, meta
Again, here, as in in this project…meta!