Without a net

Warren Ellis is writing a novel on the Internet. Using LiveJournal. It starts here. You also get occasional comments on LiveJournal itself:

Sometimes I think of LiveJournal as the world’s biggest technogoth community. LJ has been both lauded and derided as a space for people with black clothes and strange hair to work out their alienation and disaffection in electronic public. That hasn’t stopped it being successful, and it hasn’t stopped it being a tool for national and international networking. As a piece of “social software,” it’s not flawless, but its influence and effect has been huge.

The first thing we all do when we find out about this: we link to it. The second thing we do, those of us who have LiveJournal accounts: we add him to our friends list.

Stop and think about that one for a second. On LiveJournal, adding someone to your friends list doesn’t just mean you can read their entries easily. It also means that they’re on the list of people who can read your private entries, unless you’ve customized things a little.

At the moment, 332 people have added Warren Ellis to their friends list. He has access to the private entries of, well, most of those people. He can read them talking about things they don’t mean to show to anyone they don’t know — let alone a writer who’s always searching for new material for his perverted comic books.

In my universe, I’m going to believe that he did this on purpose, knowing full well what access he would be granted.