[

The Way Here

](https://halgill.substack.com/p/the-way-here)Hal Gill

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May 25

Sometimes, Substack may seem to be too much. I love how much the platform offers and am always discovering some other way of amplifying my signal through the noise of cyberspace. Substack has brought me back to that feeling when I first stepped into the Internet even before the World Wide Web browsers showed up.

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](https://halgill.substack.com/p/the-way-here)It was inspired by running across Tuhat.net where I’m likely to do some writing today as well. In fact, this is probably that writing. We shall see how the future unfolds.

If there is anything that I want to talk about from the Bunker on this rainy day in Washington, DC, it is the way in which we are all personally responsible for the future that will unfold. We are so adept at transforming the landscape. We can till the land. We can drag our harrows over the fields, churning up the surface for our creative work, drawing sustenance and abundance from the good earth. Harrowings is all about scratching up the surface to see what emerges, after all.

Every action we take as an impact on everything else. We forget this. I have been exploring the writers of the past several centuries and their ideas along these lines. Why do we go through life so asleep at the wheel. I dreamed last night about being in the back seat of a vehicle going down the highway without a driver and realizing that I was responsible for being in the driver’s seat. Somehow I had gotten in the back and the car was continuing down the highway. I’d abrogated my responsibility. I think this dream was quite symbolic of how I feel as I am going through life.

I don’t know. I just know how things seem to me. It seems to me that we are all co-creating the worlds we perceive. Different people see different worlds. How do you see yours? I’m interested in hearing the answer. When I hear it, if I hear anything, I’ll hear what I believe that I am hearing. Ideally, I’ll listen twice and think again about whether I have really understood what has been said or have I heard just what I think I have heard filtered through the lens of my experience.

We all filter our impressions of what we see and hear, what we feel and taste, what we smell, through our experiences. I don’t know how many of us are aware of that. I don’t know how many of us are, like I was in the dream, asleep at the wheel while believing that we are awake.

The Alchemy of Awakening

Transformation of the raw material encountered in living into the gold of experience; that’s on my mind. It’s what I have been living for sometime. I’m exploring. I’m open-minded. I want to check and recheck the retort to see what has been distilled from the experience of living.

There’s so much to be said about this, but somehow words seem to be insufficient to contain all I wish to say. This is one of the reasons that I do what I do in terms of the tools available in Substack. An example popped up thanks to Tejasvani Thakur liking it earlier this morning:

Harrowings Podcast - Sunny Trippel - Vocal Coach and entrepreneur

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I learn through dialogue and Sunny Trippel is one of the generous souls who will actually call me up on the phone just to catch up on her way to another engagement.

Being present with each other is what we do. There are so many selves present within us too. So many voices we amplify through both cyberspace and, when Sunny takes the stage, through the venue. I probably won’t be able to get to her performance as vocalist in Psycho Killers at the 8X10 in Baltimore, but if you can get there, do!

Getting to put all of this and more out on YouTube is also a boon that Substack has provided. The platform is a place to work out the alchemy of awakening. If anyone reads it and gets something out of it, wonderful. Even more wonderful is if someone gets moved to amplify the signal themselves through a restack, a restack with a note, or simply a comment on the substance of the writing. It’s so easy to do too although it is far more common for folks just to hit the “like” button and move on. Generally this is an indication that people have not gone deep but who can fault them in the information glut in which we are immersed?

What is vital to me is that a mark has been left. Harrowings is a signpost for those who may follow. Will it stand the test of time? Only time can tell. So far, it’s grown and is still growing as a body of work. The aim is to tranform myself along with the transformation of our society and all life on this planet. We have created a lot of issues. We have it within our power to address them but we have to lift up our eyes beyond the horizon and view our planet as a whole.

Taking in the View

I used this image for my novella:

THE MAP AT THE END OF THE WORLD - A Novella

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Taking the long view, I think about how our art, literature, music, video; all the forms that our creative work takes, will survive to inform life in the cosmos. We need, it seems to me, to start where we are with what we have and focus on our home from which we have emerged like leaves from a tree. If we aren’t to drive ourselves to extinction, we ought to focus and recognize our responsibility as living representatives of the species; living legacies of over a hundred billion lives who didn’t have the chance to get to here now.

For the novella, I selected Pynchon and Melville as the axes of a graph. Then there was another for anarchic charge. It made sense to me. I’m grateful that I saw that not only the works of literature, but all narrative output of our species might be given a place on this matrix. It might help guide us or those who come after. I don’t know. I do know that I am not the first with the idea. Look at the original library at Alexandria.

My first target though were The Great Books of the Western World. I bought these on eBay some years ago and they were delivered to my father’s garage before being packed up and moved here to Washington, DC. It was around then that I got back in touch with Dr. William Stanton Noe about whom I wrote yesterday in the already-cited “The Way Here”. I’d hit one of those gaps in my employment. This led me to moving from one opportunity to the next over the course of a year, but finally settling at a gig as the lead for a small team supporting the Coast Guard’s Enterprise Architecture Program Office, but I digress.

It seemed to me that we ought to be taking in all that we have accumulated as a species and analyzing it to chart a better future for our progeny. It seems to me, still, that we can do this with the technologies we have and even focus on allowing those technologies to emulate our own creativity. Now I’m not so sure, because I believe that our imaginative capability may be only ours and non-transferable, as it were.

I haven’t yet had a chance to read Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, but I see in the news that it has been released and focuses on these matters. It is subtitled:

“On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence”

It should be interesting to get a handle on it, so I am taking a short cut by letting one of my AI companions have a crack at it:

Pope Leo XIV critiques the technocratic paradigm that prioritizes efficiency, control, and profit over human values. He warns against transhumanist and posthumanist visions that seek to overcome human limitations through technology, arguing instead that true human grandeur lies in our relational nature, vulnerability, and openness to grace rather than in self-engineered perfection.

Key areas addressed include the defense of truth in the digital ecosystem against misinformation, the future of human work in an AI-driven economy, the protection of personal freedom from data exploitation and algorithmic dependencies, and the urgent need to prevent an arms race involving autonomous weapons.

In the realm of global peace, the document contrasts a prevailing culture of power that normalizes conflict with the Christian vision of a civilization of love. It calls for renewed multilateralism, diplomacy, disarmament efforts, and ethical constraints on AI in warfare.

The encyclical concludes with a hopeful call inspired by the Magnificat, urging believers and all people of goodwill to work together like the builders of Jerusalem—placing the human person at the center, prioritizing the vulnerable, and orienting technological development toward integral human development and genuine communion.

The ongoing evolution of our species will really depend upon how well we steward that with which we have been entrusted. I’m certain of that.

For now, I have written about as much as I care to but I would love to hear your thoughts

1994

It was August of 1994 and I’d just returned from an 8 week immersive program at the Goethe Institute in Prien-am-Chiemsee, a lovely little hamlet in the South-East corner of Bavaria.

Email was my first hint at what was possible. I’d been told about it by John Watson, who was then the conservtor of musical and scientific instruments at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. To be able to reach out and touch the mind of another member of my species at distance for practically nothing seemed to me to be absolutely incredible.

Anna Paquin was there.

In January 1994, telecommunications company MCI launched a famous, surreal series of television commercials starring 11-year-old actress Anna Paquin** to promote its information superhighway initiative, “networkMCI.” Fresh off her breakout, Academy Award-winning performance in The Piano* (1993), Paquin was chosen by MCI’s advertising agency, Messner Vetere Berger McNamee Schmetterer Euro RSCG, to put a comforting, innocent, and human face on intimidating high-tech concepts.

The Campaign Concept & Imagery

Director & Locations: Directed by Peter Smillie, the commercials featured a dreamlike, avant-garde aesthetic. They were filmed in stark, visually striking landscapes like the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah and the rugged Oregon coast.

Wardrobe: Paquin famously wore an oversized, dark bowler hat and a crisp white shirt while addressing the camera.

The Message: Rather than selling specific phone plans, the campaign served as an early prophetic vision of the World Wide Web, explaining how fiber-optic cables “thin as a human hair” would effortlessly connect computers, scientists, teachers, and everyday people.

“There Will Be No More There”

The most famous advertisement in the series focused heavily on the erosion of distance through digital communication. Walking through a barren, minimalist landscape, Paquin delivered poetic, philosophical monologues about data transmission:

“There will be a road. It will not connect landmasses; it will connect minds. Its speed limit will be the speed of light. It will not go from here to there... because there will be no more there*.”*

The campaign is widely remembered by early internet users as a definitive piece of 1990s tech nostalgia, capturing both the wonder and the slight eeriness of the oncoming digital age.

It was a remarkable piece of advertising. It sticks with me even now. When I began writing this, I wasn’t intending on writing about the early days of the Internet and the World Wide Web, however, here we are. I was entranced by this sudden ability to shrink the distance between us.

1996

I was stunned by the enormity and began working on my own web site in the summer of 1996.

I was then fresh out of my first post-divorce relationship. I’m so grateful for having been afforded that opportunity although it had very nearly cost me my life as I had taken the ending very hard and nearly drowned myself in my own fluids by dint of having attempted to treat a flu contracted on the evening of February 9, 1996 with Scotch.

Recovering from the resultant pneumonia in the early summer of the that year, and teaching German at the University of Pittsburgh, I was also taking a course in Linguistics. I’d sit and read “The Language Instinct” by Stephen Pinker. I remember it being a blissful state as I headed into the fall semester with a third year of support from the department since I had nearly died from sepsis from pneumococcal pneumonia during what ought to have been my final semester.

1997

The coming year would find me immersed in my studies. With the help of my fellow graduate students, I successfully managed to launch some extra-curricular activities for our undergrads to help them use their German-language skills outside of the classroom. The ripple effects from that continue. For my part, however, I faded from the scene following my own star. Within short order it would lead me to a period of time working behind-the-scenes at the Carnegie Museum of Art, part of the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh. In the Conservation Department, we cared for the collections of the Andy Warhol Museum as well as the Oakland-based CMOA. On my way out, I was able to help with the set up of the Carnegie International 99/00. I had so many outstanding experiences during my nearly three year tenure there, first as a volunteer, then as a paid intern, and finally as the secretary to the then-Chief Conservator.

The 59th Carnegie International is on display now! It is called “if the word we” and focuses on the first person plural pronoun. We are co-creating this world we live in.

And now I am back into biography but it’s really the story of my personal use of the Internet. As the Carnegie International was getting underway, I was sent a link to what was then one of the earliest social media platforms: Sixdegrees: ** Launched in 1997, SixDegrees.com** is widely recognized as the world’s first true social networking platform. Named after the “six degrees of separation” theory, it pioneered core features still used today: creating personal profiles, curating friend lists, and visualizing connection paths.

The platform introduced several features that defined early digital social connection:

Profile Creation: Allowed users to establish personal identities.

Connection Engine: Users could invite friends, family, and acquaintances. People could interact with others up to three degrees away.

Messaging & Bulletins: Users could send messages and post items on bulletin boards.

Why it didn’t last: SixDegrees was famously ahead of its time. When it launched, internet penetration was low (under 20% of US households) and dial-up speeds made loading graphics difficult. Ultimately, it lacked the user base to sustain itself and shut down in 2001.

The Six Degrees Patent is now owned by LinkedIn.

Before it dropped from the scene, however, I had used the platform to establish connections with people around the world. I was a bit random about it. It didn’t set all that well with my then-fiance that I was interested in having conversations with many people all over the world, however, she was soon out of my life anyway. I took up with a former student for a time, but the age difference between us was significant and it didn’t last. All the while, in the background, a conversation with the then-manager of Athelas, a modern-Danish classical sinfonietta in Copenhagen led to an eventual in-person connection. That led me to looking for a job there in Denmark. I was successful.

2009

The internet transformed my life at such a fundamental level that when I got the opportunity to attend the International Semantic Web Conference in 2009, I jumped at the chance. Being in the periphery of these events - breathing the same air - I managed to get a good look at how we were cooperating - much as Anna Paquin had promised at the beginning back in 1994. At leaast, that was the beginning for me.

My wife’s stroke in early November 2009 threw a wrench into my active participation in these events at an international scale. A year later, we began our transition into our DC residence from which I observe the passing show of history. All of what we are doing here is weaving the future for our progeny. I like to take a long view of history.

Yesterday

While I am simply another cog in the machinery, I’m awake and aware that I am also significant as well as insignificant. If I can help to amplify a signal through the noise of cyberspace, I will. Occasionally, I get amplified as well. As I stepped out of Daily Provisions and prepared to “Go Live” on Substack yesterday afternoon, I was surprised to see that Jesse Paris Smith had mentioned me in one of her articles:

I am astonished by Jesse Paris Smith’s generosity. If you don’t know her yet, follow her or, better yet, subscribe to her! She is consistently helpful in providing questions for us to answer. She is also the daughter of Patti Smith who, in a similarly generous manner, shares her perspectives with us. As Patti says, “Use Your Voice!” - and so I do.

Now

Now it’s time to go back to the top and see if I can’t discern a pattern or structure to this bit of writing. I had in mind to talk about Tuhat.net - a new platform for posting 1000 word essays without all that Substack has added over the time that it has been gathering steam. I started my first introductory essay on that platform and promptly lost it as I moved to the inner sanctum of the Bunker this morning. Up since a little before 4 AM, I’m writing at a leisurely pace now.