Now, I just said that wjm@mit.edu was my name, but you might equally well (or equally inappositely) claim that it was my address. The categories are conflated due to the simultaneous redefinitions of space, personal identity, and subjectivity that are emerging as the network grows.

The Net negates geometry. While it does have a definite topology of computational nodes and radiating boulevards for bits, and while the locations of the nodes and links can be plotted on plans to produce surprisingly Haussmann-like diagrams, it is fundamentally and profoundly antispatial. It is nothing like the Piazza Navona or Copley Square. You cannot say where it is or describe its memorable shape and proportions or tell a stranger how to get there. But you can find things in it without knowing where they are. The Net is ambient -- nowhere in particular but everywhere at once. You do not go to it; you log in from wherever you physically happen to be. In doing this you are not making a visit in the usual sense; you are executing an electronically mediated speech act that provides access -an "open sesame."

Your own address is not pinned to a place; it is simply an access code, with some associated storage space, to some computer located somewhere on the Net. It does not matter much what sort of computer it is or where you might find it. (I have never laid eyes on the machine that gives me access to the network. I suppose it is in some back room at MIT. There is no reason for me to seek it out.) To get on the network you establish physical connection to your host machine (through a digital link, by dialing in from any telephone via phone lines and a modem, or even via a cellular modem), provide the access code, and give a password. You can then ask the host to send you the accumulated contents of your inbox, and you can send it your outbox for distribution. ⁴ Other users of the network hook into their host machines in the same way. Thus, unlike telephone calls or fax transmissions, which link specific machines at identifiable locations (the telephone on your desk and the telephone on my desk, say), an exchange of electronic mail (e-mail) links people at indeterminate locations. If I send you an e-mail message, it will come tagged with my name/address, but you will not know whether I transmitted it from my office or typed it in at home while sipping a glass of wine or entered it into my laptop on a trans-Pacific flight and then sent it from a public telephone at Narita airport. And I need not know where you are-your current street address and zip code or your telephone number; I just direct my message to your network name/address, and I can be sure that it will eventually end up at whatever machine you choose to log in from.

If I wanted to be particularly careful about concealing my identity and location-perhaps because I intended to do something embarrassing like downloading pornography or illegal like grabbing pirated software copies-I could route my correspondence through an "anonymous remailer." This is a machine that functions like a numbered postbox or Swiss bank account; I can use it as an address that reveals nothing about me, and I can drop messages onto it for subsequent pickup.

So the Net eliminates a traditional dimension of civic legibility. In the standard sort of spatial city, where you are frequently tells who you are. (And who you are will often determine where you are allowed to be.) Geography is destiny; it constructs representations of crisp and often brutal clarity. You may come from the right side of the tracks or the wrong side, from Beverly Hills, Chinatown, East Los Angeles, or Watts, from the Loop, the North Side, or the South Side, from Beacon Hill, the North End, Cambridge, Somerville, or Roxburyand everybody knows how to read this code. (If you are homeless, of course, you are nobody.) You may find yourself situated in gendered space or ungendered, domains of the powerful or margins of the powerless; there are financial districts for the pinstripe set, pretentious yuppie watering holes, places where you need a jacket and tie, golf clubs where you won't see any Jews or blacks, shopping malls, combat zones, student dives, teenage hangouts, gay bars, redneck bars, biker bars, skid rows, and death rows. But the Net's despatialization of interaction destroys the geocode's key. There is no such thing as a better address, and you cannot attempt to define yourself by being seen in the right places in the right company. ⁵

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