THE CYBERGYPSIES

One man's struggle to break free of the net

Cybergypsies by Indra Sinha (Scribner. #9.99) Reviewed by Ewan Morrison, Sunday Herald, April 25, 1999

After all of the utopian nonsense usually expounded about the net, Indra Sinha's Cybergypsies brings cyberculture down to earth. You won't find this writer raving about the universal breakdown of cultural barriers, beckoning a new age of world peace by modem. Instead, you find a vivid portrayal of the real social repercussions of internet use. A net addict who lived on four hours of sleep every night and ran up £50,000 in phone bills, Sinha sacrificed reality for the pleasures of cyberspace. Cybergypsies is his own story.
Before he walked out of his job, and assumed the nom de keyboard, the Bear, Indra Sinha was a copywriter. It is no doubt this skill which creates the fast-paced, novelistic style of the writing here. Certain passages are written with such wit and precision it is impossible to believe you are reading a piece of non-fiction. The abiding metaphor of the net is the blurring of the distinction between fact and fiction, and in this book we find the same heady and confusing mixture.

Cybergypsies is at its best when the gap between the Bear's fantastic cyber nightlife and his dreary reality are most pronounced. While he neglects his wife and family and rejects his responsibilities, he becomes entrapped by a web - literally - of intrigues. What is the identity of the seductive Lilith? What is the meaning of a line of Sanskrit? Seduction after seduction, each encounter on the net is a mini-narrative, a detective story without the possibility of a definite conclusion. For all its indulgence in fantasy, the one thing that comes from Sinha's account of life on the net is, quite ironically, its authenticity. His text is punctuated by sudden lurches into screen information, inter-relay chat print-outs, badly decoded file transfers and cringe worthy romantic poems. This is the texture of communication on the net, half-formed ideas, lost texts, doodles, random trains of consciousness and endless e-mail outpourings. Every time someone tries to make a book or a film about the cyber-issues, they get it wrong. They try to tie it all down to a single strand - a conspiracy story, a love story or a secret to uncover. Sinha has got it right. In his book there is no one story, only fragments.

Cybergypsies resounds with the clamour of disparate voices and shows us the insanity of trying to piece it all together. The author's spiralling personal disaster and the force of his obsession is the stuff of compelling fiction. The only weak points in the book are when the novelist tries to get his life back together again through dabbling in politics. Using the net, he campaigns for human rights, publicising the plight of Kurdish refugees and the gas victims of Bhopal. Rather than showing the "positive" aspects of the net, as the publishers would have us believe, this book is a testament to the degree of alienation the worldwide web can instill in its users. The flipside of total personal and political powerlessness is no doubt a desperate need to believe you can take on the whole world and make your mark all at the touch of a button. So we have the illusion of participation in global politics while on the home front, the domestic issues of family life crumble. If you've fucked up your marriage you can always campaign for human rights. As this book is non-fiction and based on the writer's own experiences it is impossible to criticise the book without criticising the writer's life. The sad conclusion to be drawn from all of this is that the more Sinha sorts his life out, the more of a "good guy" he becomes, the less interesting it is for the reader. This is not because we have a sadistic interest in the demise of the author, but that good fiction demands conflict. But, then again, we have to keep reminding ourselves, this isn't fiction. Or is it? Once upon a time there was "narrative fiction", and "non-fiction", but now we have "narrative non-fiction". This is not just some bastard hybrid, it actually tells us something about the world we live in. Historically, we've moved on from telling our life stories, towards trying to live out fictions. What was once the fantasy of the decadent avant garde novelist is now within reach of the average net surfer. By allowing his life to be seduced by fiction, Indra Sinha follows the novelists of the other side such as de Quincey, Huysmans and Burroughs, who all tried to leave this world and report back. And like these novelists, there is a moral to his tale and the telling of it is a kind of purging. Burroughs and de Quincey gave up the junk, Huysmans gave up perfume and fine wines and, similarly, Sinha admits he no longer indulges in IRC (chat) - it bores him. He has lost interest in the net. But does that mean he's cured?

Ewan Morrison directed the A-Z of Scotland for Channel Four recently. He also writers [sic] for Mute, the cyber-magazine.