Ten years ago this past February, my friend and roommate Bobby Mallin was murdered.

Some part of me entertained the idea that I could save this detail as some kind of eleventh hour twist in the narrative of my life and my experiences. I considered that I could introduce you to him and tell you how he helped me find a way to love Star Trek: Voyager after once dismissing it as inferior to the other Star Trek franchise installments. I could tell you how he introduced me to the music of David Bowie and Prince. I could discuss our plans and aspirations and then – somehow -- the mountain of burnt mix CDs and catchphrases and quirks might move you to feel an inkling of what I felt when I learned that he was gunned down in the back with a dozen bullets and left to die at a country house between two trees one gray Friday morning.

I genuinely considered withholding his death until much later in the book.

Aside from offering a Twilight Zone twist (Bob loved Twilight Zone), the central idea behind saving such an important detail for a later reveal would be the idea that tragedy inspires action and moves people.

That idea, in my experience, is false. Tragedy exhausts people. Whether we are talking about pictures of injured dogs on the internet or sick political theater that makes a blood sport out of the lives of ordinary people, tragedy may inspire some kind of necessary action but it empties us rather than fills us.

I think this ultimately part of why it works, structurally, that Shakespearean tragedies and horror movies telegraph the fact upfront that almost everyone is going to die. What’s interesting is how it happens, what precedes it, and what happens as a result of the death. It isn’t a twist that Romeo and Juliet die; Shakespeare tells you it’s going to happen in the first minute like Babe Ruth signaling he’s about to hit a home run. Don’t test me on that. My knowledge of baseball pretty much begins and ends with that, aside from what I learned from the movie Field of Dreams and an 8-bit Nintendo game where you could make super-powered baseball players. I literally know more about the interstellar, fish-throwing sport of Bouillabaseball from the 80’s sitcom ALF than I know about any real world sport, despite four years of half-time shows in high school marching band. The key takeaway of that is: Babe Ruth and Shakespeare tell you what they’re going to do before they do it. The secondary takeaway is: I’m a colossal pop culture geek who was in marching band.

We watch tragedy not to see whether the characters die but, rather, how they live and the choices they make. There is no drama in death. Death is anti-drama unless it’s the story of the survivors or the beginning of an after-life odyssey like the one found in Dante’s Divine Comedy.

This goes entirely counter to what I had always thought, growing up. I spent most of my early life looking for some kind of tragedy, meaningful death, or external motivation to shape me into the super-hero or super-villain I was certain that I was destined to become. Batman lost his parents. Superman lost his planet. Lex Luthor went bald. Apparently, a defining tragedy can be something big or small. Still, I was always looking for The Universe to tell me what to be in some kind of grand gesture. I like grand gestures. That can be a problem sometimes.

Life doesn’t work like that. I was good at a fair number of things and bad enough at the things I was bad at to reject those as options. I ultimately had to choose whether to write with my right or left hand (or my feet) in elementary school. I was equally good writing with any of these. Nobody forced me to choose, aside from the teachers who told me I had to keep my shoes on.

Meanwhile, as cool as early 90s hacking magazines made it seem to scale a telephone pole and engage in “phone phreaking” and tech espionage, my poor performance on a Kindergarten ropes course drilled it into my head that anything involving climbing or heights was probably not an ideal vocation. I suppose jail should have also been a deterrent but heights are way scarier than jail. People can survive in jail for decades but one wrong move on a telephone pole and – BAM – lights out.

From a very young age, I wanted my life to be a mythological narrative with an heroic (or villainous) origin and a five act screenplay structure. I was utterly obsessed with Greek and Norse mythology, One Thousand and One Arabian Nights, A Wrinkle in Time, and anything even quasi-mythic. I was impatient about anything that didn’t seem to contribute to my own mythic journey. I went looking for odysseys that resembled Alice’s journey through Wonderland or Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth. Real life can be a bit disappointing in that regard as other-dimensional portals or magic rabbit holes seem to be in short supply. Labyrinth gave me nightmares but I devoured it. The Princess Bride’s meta-humor didn’t elude me and I approached life with the same kind of meta-humor, always hopeful that there was an audience out there somewhere following my exploits. Still, despite my urge to climb the fourth wall, I wanted to find my Princess Buttercup (or perhaps my female Dread Pirate Roberts, to be gender equitable).

It must have upset my mother a little when, as a young child getting ready for bed, I asked her, “Do you suppose my arch-nemesis is out there somewhere tonight, thinking about me?” (I was pretty swift with vocabulary words.) I believe her reply was, “Most people don’t have enemies.”

“But Superman has enemies.”

“Superman isn’t real. And sometimes, when you get older and do big things, people may want to stop you from doing those things. So you should always make sure that what you want to do is right.”

“I have enemies at school now, Mom. Bullies and hooligans. But none of them are my arch-enemy. What I’m looking for is an intellect to spar with. A rival worthy of my full attention.”

“I hope you never get that.”

“I hope I do. It would give my life meaning.”

You may doubt this exchange but I know for a fact that “hooligans” (along with “ruffians”, “rapscallions”, and “ne’er-do-wells”) was a favorite word of mine by age eight or so. This is burned into my memory because my rather stilted vocabulary (and attitude) led to a few playground incidents directed at me while a teacher wasn’t looking. If only I could have been more like my hero, the cowardly and cunning Dr. Smith from TV’s Lost in Space. He could get away with saying anything (and saying it eloquently) while avoiding any retaliatory physical comeuppance from that lowbrow hooligan, Major Don West.

Based on the way I’ve seen the internet evolve and change over my life so far, I probably wasn’t alone as a child in craving a world of retaliation-free, consequence-free speech. 2017 was the year in which we had a grand debate over whether punching a Nazi in response to hateful rhetoric was acceptable. These questions didn’t arise overnight. We had years of doxing (the release of a victim’s personal details online with the intent to intimidate) and years worth of intimate details of celebrities and politicians being hacked and released online. The people who spread these leaked details would claim that what they were doing was simply an act of free speech. This is the core issue in the debates over what kind of comedy is acceptable and whether college courses need “trigger warnings”.

As a rule, I think that what we’re talking about isn’t “free speech” if it hurts someone. “Free speech” is about illustrating ideas and having a discussion. Naturally, you can hurt someone unintentionally. If it’s unintentional, you own up to the consequences and show empathy for the injured person. You can also hurt someone intentionally with words (through satire or insults) if you find what they’re doing to be reprehensible... but then you own up to the intent of your words and armor up for verbal battle. What’s cowardly is to hurl insults or slander and then deny the wounded party their very victimhood by denying that any injury even occurred. When someone does this, they declare ownership over the thoughts and feelings of their target. The tactic of denying people the right to feel injured is, as Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Mister Worf would note, dishonorable.

As someone who always fancied the idea of being a mad scientist in pursuit of world domination, the concept of honor may sound a bit a strange, coming from me. The truth is, I spent most of my life obsessed with the concept of meritocracy. My heroes were always preoccupied with merit, from King Arthur’s noble “propositions” and “resolutions” in the musical Camelot to Hamlet’s investigation into whether his uncle really killed his father (always fact check your Facebook news sources and messages from angry ghosts before acting on them). As someone who was an exceptionally good test taker (800 SAT verbal and I slept through half the test), I was always waiting to take some standardized test and be ushered off into a secret room where I would be assigned an important task. Any frustrations I’ve had with the way the world is run boiled down to what I perceived to be matters of fairness and entitlement.

For a time, the internet (and online gaming) seemed to offer an alternate reality where merit could matter more than it did in day-to-day reality. It didn’t matter if I was shoveling popcorn at a theater concession stand or unloading a truck in my daily life; on the internet I could feel brilliant. My arguments could be judged on their merits in discussion posts, rather than my real life social status. My interests in comic books and science fiction were validated as worthwhile. I made good friendships with accomplished fiction writers in Hollywood who coached me one-on-one and encouraged the idea that I had potential. Randomized aspects aside, online gaming felt like a true merit-based system. I earned that purple tiger that my warrior rode on with hundreds of hours of mundane tasks that anyone else could theoretically do.

I came of age alongside the internet. I’ve come to recognize that the idea of the internet as some grand meritocracy has shortcomings. It has its pluses and its minuses, which we’ll get into later. I thought the internet would conquer the world and I would be astride the internet when it happened. The internet may have conquered the world but it did so without me.

Bobby Mallin was around for the first chapter of the internet’s journey in the popular consciousness. He sold me my copy of World of Warcraft at Circuit City, where he worked at his first (and only ) “real job”. He was my first Facebook friend. We would spend hours dissecting the works of Ray Bradbury or Harlan Ellison, obsessing about the future. He had a little cigar box full of mementos with the cover of Fahrenheit 451 glued on the top and an engagement ring he bought for a girl that he had never shown her. Though a dedicated Apple geek, he died several months before the first iPhone came out. I had a Twitter account but my vague recollection was that Bobby was against “microblogging” on principle; Bobby was an essayist, having been weened on Nickelodeon’s Pete and Pete with its topical essay episodic structure. He was kind, thoughtful, and clever. He became convinced circa 2005 that Barack Obama would be the next president. He was obsessed with the future.

Bobby Mallin remains, forever, in a world without smart phones or cloud computing. He never saw the financial collapse of 2008. The future that he imagined arrived without him and mutated into some strange other beast.

This book is dedicated to the idea of how our ideas of the future shaped my life and decisions. Together, we’ll trace what it meant for me to grow up alongside the internet, automation, and globalization across rural Appalachia. We’ll examine what world conquest even means and the pros and cons of amateur mad science. I’ll share a few triumphs and a few mistakes that I hope you will find valuable insights from. We’ll also take a look at why having an origin story isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be.

For now, let’s travel backwards in time to the past world that Bobby Mallin still inhabits and trace our steps towards the present, hopefully piecing together a glimpse of tomorrow in the process...