Labyrinth - Entrance 

The web was a neighborhood more efficiently lonely than the one it replaced. Its solitude was bigger and faster. When relentless intelligence finally completed its program, when the terminal drop box brought the last barefoot, abused child on line and everyone could at last say anything instantly to everyone else in existence, it seemed to me we'd still have nothing to say to each other and many more ways not to say it.

Richard Powers - Galatea 2.2

I couldn't think of a more fitting way to open the gate to my labyrinth, an on line place filled with loneliness, and what else is there than the web to point that out to me and anyone wandering between eternal solitude? In a place where you can always be alone it becomes much more easy to be lonely between many people, the glass wall eventually catches up. And isn't it a surprise now and then when the wall opens and the illusion of touch appears? Even when the only things I touch are my keyboard and my mouse.

The Richard Powers quote was given to me by JP, and he used it to explain why the net didn't make him comfortable. I wish I could have told him then that he and Powers where wrong, but unfortunately they are not, because there is so much talking, so little listening, and its so easy to abuse, so hard to reach out and be vulnerable, because eventually you will get hurt. A masochistic experience, yet I cannot tear myself away from it, fascinating as it is to watch so many people fuck up their lives, in exchange for what? What makes them come back, every time? "42", one of my on line friends said, when I asked him that. Part of the answer, probably. Maybe they come back because they all know what 42 means.

But the longer I lurked, the sadder the holiday became. People who used the web turned strange. In public panels, they disguised their sexes, their ages, their names. They logged on to the electronic fray, adopting every violent persona but their own. They whizzed binary files at each other from across the planet, the same planet where impoverished villages looked upon a ball-point pen with wonder. The web began to seem a vast, silent stock exchange trading in every more anonymous and hostile pen pals.

Richard Powers - Galatea 2.2

The labyrinth lies before you. You can go left towards a row of hedges, various marble statues shine through the foliage. Or right, an upward road through rocks and waterfalls.