Technomadness and the Internet
rev 2.01

by Steven K. Roberts
Sept 29, 1993

NOTE: This article first appeared in Internet World, January 1994.



"So, where do you call home?" someone always asks me during those
on-the-street encounters around the bike. "Where do you actually
LIVE?"

"In the Internet," I answer, usually receiving a blank look in response.
"You know... online. My home is the Net." By this time, the
average questioner is squirming uncomfortably, unsure whether I
am some kind of proselytizing nutcase or simply another computer nerd
on the verge of launching into an obscure technical lecture.

It can take quite a bit of explanation to convey the once-alien
notion that with enough connectivity, your physical location can
become irrelevant. It is an idea that calls some very basic
definitions into question -- most centrally, what is HOME?

Think about it. What is it about a familiar setting that
provides all your essential stability and support resources? Is
it the building? The fixed mailing address? Proximity to your
work? Familiar people and nearby stores? A place to unpack your
belongings, stack up magazines, find things easily, and
accumulate a lifetime of memories? And if home really IS all
these things, how can the notion of living in the Internet make
any sense at all?

Ignoring the storage of physical objects and a guaranteed place
to sleep, consider four of the major requirements of "home":
familiar friends nearby, a place to work on your projects, a base
for your daily business or employment, and proximity to
comfortable local hangouts and other resources. These, for many
people, can all be viewed as various forms of information...
which has no mass and moves at the speed of light. It should
thus be possible to access that information from anywhere without
any disruptive effects related to your physical movement around
the planet.

Further, if your mode of physical movement satisfies your
tangible needs (like a place to accumulate interesting objects,
comfortable sleeping quarters, visceral fun, and whatever), then
you are capable of becoming a technomad: physically rootless,
but wired into your electronic home in the Internet.

Using my ten years of technomadics as an example, let's look at
those four areas a little more closely...


Friends


This one's easy! If a major component of "home" is a stable
circle of friends, then the Internet is the best one I've ever
had -- better even than my 8 years of traditional home ownership
in midwestern suburban neighborhoods. On the Net, friendships
span the globe (as I'm writing this, I'm engaged in a late-night
email exchange with a fellow named Tim in Austria who wants to
join the flotilla of aquatic technomads). Physical location is
meaningless, and that means that a circle of friends is no longer
constrained by the random influences that determined their
latitude and longitude. Relationships develop because brains are
compatible, not because the parties happen to live in the same town.

In addition, relationships online develop without regard to
physical appearance, and that has all sorts of interesting
cultural implications. Age, sex, weight, disabilities, facial
topography, pigmentation... none of these things make a bit of
difference when two brains are linked through the vapors of the
Net. The old biases that most people grew up with are now as
irrelevant as the obsolete national borders between us...

Given all this, plus the interesting intellectual demographics of
Dataspace, it's no surprise that most online denizens consider
the Net a central social resource. It is for me, certainly, with
romance swirling through my daily email and some of the most
significant relationships in my life maintained exclusively
online, often with people I've never met face-to-face. When I
meet someone new in physical space and realize that we should
remain in touch, I quickly warn them that I cannot maintain an
effective relationship with anyone who is not online -- the
meager bandwidth of occasional paper mail and the annoyance of
telephone tag are just too inhibiting.

Checking my archives, I see one mail file of nearly 300 saved
letters exchanged with one person over the past 6 months -- and
those were only the good ones! At least twice that number were
erased... the quick hellos, acknowledgements, ephemeral news
updates, and so on. What is the information content of all this?
Everything that makes up a friendship: mutual exploration,
argument, shared humor, moments of longing, late-night
maunderings, news of life developments... in short, everything
that people talk about.

Certainly, this is an important component of "home," and my
location during those 300 letters (and thousands of others
besides) ranged over some 20,000 miles of touring America during
the past year... wandering my neighborhood, dropping in on
friends for evenings of wide-bandwidth multisensory
interaction.


Projects

But it takes more than friendships to keep your life running
smoothly. Hobbies, passions, grand dreams, book-writing,
research, building new toys... all sorts of activities involve
digging for information, making purchase decisions, and
collaborating with others who share similar interests.

At the moment, I am designing my next technomadic platform -- a
small trimaran called the Microship. This is an incredibly
complex project, and I'm integrating resources from all over the
planet to help define the proper balance of hull geometry, sail
plan, solar power, hatch placement, freeboard, connectivity
tools, navigation resources, and countless other things. Daily,
I turn to the Net for help: posting questions to rec.boats and
other newsgroups, updating collaborators with daily email
reports, researching relevant literature online, and chatting with
potential traveling companions. There are people out there who
send me detailed commentary on hull fabrication methods or fine
points of navigation... in effect, collaborating with me across
the miles, sharing their knowledge to help build something they
may never see. Yet... I don't even know where they live or what
they look like.

Of course, it's still nice to have local help willing to get
their hands dirty, but information is a critical resource and
requires global scale. I've shared writing projects, gotten help
with design or repair jobs, and tracked down obscure technical
articles... usually within a few hours of sensing the need. Life
offline was never as effective.


Business


This is what most people grasp first about online resources --
the numbers and business communication tools. But going nomadic
adds another twist to it, and a critical one: somehow, I have to
generate the illusion of stability to keep clients, bankers,
insurance companies, and even some vendors feeling comfortable
about dealing with me. The business world hasn't yet learned to
accept fully nomadic individuals -- there's too much emotional
baggage attached to the words "homeless" and "unemployed."

But there's a trick. I have a base office manager named Barbara,
and her home office is Nomadic Research Labs. It's my company,
of course, but I never happen to be in the office. Instead, we
are in daily email contact, and we have developed a suite of
protocols to communicate phone messages, financial data, incoming
paper mail, red alert conditions, and the like. So while in
effect I have a traditional freelance/consulting practice, the
reality behind the scenes is that it is run entirely by remote
control, through the Net. I have decoupled from the desk, and
here, just as with friendships and project help, my physical
location makes no difference.


Hangouts

Finally, there's the matter of play. All these areas overlap
somewhat, since when you're a technomad the distinctions between
work and play grow blurry. This is no exception -- a usenet
newsgroup that begins as a casual hangout can yield friendships,
project help, and perhaps a business partnership. But the same
goes for the coffeshop on the corner...

The Net is full of playgrounds, ranging from multi-user real-time
games to thousands of newsgroups and "aliases" focused on a
dizzying range of subjects. Lurkers are legion -- many people
just hang around in the shadows and read. Others become highly
visible figures, holding forth with passion as discussion is
driven to and fro by happenstance of news and opinion. Still
others take pleasure in flaming -- in violent verbal attacks on
others. It's a mad and bizarre place, rich with variety, and
I've never found a loud smoky bar that can even begin to compete
with these electronic pubs so rich in information and culture.
There's not much "people watching" online, of course, unless
you're the sort who likes to download image files and stare at
your screen, and you still have to go someplace local for real
beer, but if brain stimulation is your pleasure you can find
enough to last forever on the Net.


Nomadic Research Labs


My own online adventures include all of the above, of course, but
I also maintain four "aliases," or electronic mailing lists.
These are invaluable for a variety of reasons.

First, there is the big one -- "nomadness." Including reflectors
and reposts, in which single addresses on the list actually
represent entire companies or other user populations, the
readership is on the order of 10,000 people. Every now and then,
I write an article about the current status of the bike or boat
project, recent adventures on road or water, or even
philosophical observations about the nomadic life in general.
These are posted to the world and archived in a couple of servers
Out There so that people who missed them the first time can
download them later.

The interesting twist here is that this is the same text I
publish in a quarterly print newsletter called "The Nomadness
Report," which costs $15/year. I've been asked why I freely give
away the same material to people on the net, yet charge for it on
paper. Aside from the obvious fact that it costs real money to
put out a print publication, the reason I publish it for free
online is simple: soft dollars.

It's a wonderful thing: those 10,000 or so people are an immense
resource of ideas, places to stay, and encouragement. Last year,
when I took off around the US in the diesel mothership to do
speaking engagements, more than half of the bookings resulted
from a single comment in one of those online postings. Likewise,
many of the homes I visit are those of online subscribers. And
when I need to know something -- like a recent question about
still-video image formats -- all I have to do is mention it in a
story and the letters come pouring in. These interactive
experiences would never happen with the print edition.

My second alias is "technomads" -- an online discussion group
focused on the tools and techiques of nomadic connectivity.
Unlike the nomadness list, which is for one-way publishing only,
technomads is an active forum for anyone who wishes to speak...
and about 300 people are involved. I'm actually rather quiet
here, just watching the periodic flurries of activity caused by
the occasional interesting question about chord keyboards or
cellular modems, every now and then interjecting a comment or
two.

Third, I have a very small list of about 15 people called
"flotilla" -- a place for possible traveling companions to chat
and get to know each other.

(Over time, if my dream of an aquatic nomadic community actually
develops, this will be the communication link that we will use to
handle all the logistical details. In the meantime, we're
tentatively exploring each other and trying to figure out how a
bunch of individuals of diverse skills and dreams might coexist
as a traveling group of networked small boats.)

And fourth, there's MS-Status, the daily postings to those
involved in the Microship project. I have a team of engineering
students at the University here, as well as a few professors,
consultants, and friends who are helping in various ways to build
this complex system. What better way to keep us all aware of
each other's work than to publish a detailed daily report? It
includes discussion of minute design issues, logs incoming
product literature and books, reports on developments with
sponsors, and forms a complete project history that is archived
and printed monthly as a resource for newcomers and raw material
for the eventual book.

The thought of managing a project of this scope offline, with
this many people involved, is chilling. Somehow, people coped in
the old days, and they have my respect; somehow, people even
cope NOW without a Net connection: I'm occasionally astounded to
find high-tech companies who are not online... living
anachronisms, charging ahead through an information vacuum, out
of touch with the world outside but getting away with it on the
strength of their skills, unique qualities, and traditional
clientele. As time passes, though, this will become more and
more difficult...


The Nomadic Connection


With all this talk about nomadic connectivity and virtual home in
the Net, I should make a few comments about the connection
itself. After all, when most people think of going online, they
think of modems and phone lines --or, for the lucky ones, a
dedicated high-speed network connection to a workstation. The
Macintosh PowerBook 170 I'm using to write this is wired via
AppleTalk to the UCSD network, which is in turn linked tightly to
the Internet... but this luxury only exists while I'm sitting in
my temporary Microship lab in the Engineering Building. When I'm
Out There, on the road or in the water, the connection is not
quite so robust.

The obvious path, and often a perfectly acceptable one, is
cellular modem. I've used a variety of these products, and as
long as I happen to be within radio range of a cellular phone
market I can connect at up to 10K baud. I've pushed this to over
100 miles with a 6-element Larsen yagi wide-band antenna
optimized for the cellular band. Unfortunately, however, this
is not always available when wandering in some of the more
interesting parts of the world.

BEHEMOTH's major Internet link is a custom implementation of the
Qualcomm OmniTRACS satellite terminal. A 14 GHz azimuth-tracking
antenna in a 1-foot radome on the back of my trailer locks onto
the GTE GSTAR satellite, with elevation tracking unnecessary in
the US due to a 40-degree beam height centered 40 degrees above
the horizon. (An antenna and ROM change will let this work in
the Pacific Rim, Austrailia, or Europe.) On the bike's console,
a Macintosh runs Eudora (an excellent email front end that uses
POP, or Post Office Protocol), as well as some special code that
emulates a POP server while handling communication with the
satellite terminal. At Qualcomm's site in San Diego, a
SPARCstation completes the link, transferring mail between the
satellite and the Internet. The result is a transparent email
path that works from my moving bicycle anywhere in or near North
America -- and this will be implemented as well on the new boat.

There are other methods as well. Radiomail is a new service that
uses small cellular-like modems and laptop or palmtop computers,
though at the moment service is limited to metropolitan areas.
Inmarsat's Standard C satellite service now supports an email
gateway and has the significant advantage of working globally,
but both the connect time and the terminal are expensive. And
all sorts of schemes are underway to use new low-earth-orbit
satellites, cram data into the interstices of existing cellular
transmissions, or take advantage of terrestrial packet data
communication methods developed over the past decade by amateur
radio operators. More is coming...

No matter what the communications path, the trend is toward
mobility -- the word is out that it's no longer necessary to
remain chained to your desk. Whether we're about to see a whole
population of technomads is yet unknown, but I wouldn't be
surprised... the age-old fantasy of freedom from the daily grind
is now easily within reach IF you can relocate the major
components of your home to the net. As to the rest, like having
a place to sleep and stockpile your library of books and CDs...
well, you just need to choose the right vehicle!

Cheers from the Net,
Steve Roberts