Loser (part 2)
Though he works a lot with the Internet very little of Svante's text are dedicated to the global Net he spends so much time with. We wonder if he consider it's boring to write about the Internet and his reaction is immediate. "Yes! It is boring. It's very boring. You don't ever see anyone writing a book about the joy of reading a book. I like what the Internet can offer me, but as a phenomena it's very boring."
And I think he’s written that somewhere that the Internet is a boring phenomena. Sometime during one of his stays in San Franscisco, a book written about the Internet. 300 pages about such a dull topic.
Cyberpunks are often more or less connected to the Internet, and we in fact wish to recall that Svante once called himslef a cyberpunk, during his time in Bollnäs, but Svante takes his time to think about it. He looks doubtful. He shakes his head; he can’t recall ever calling himslef a cyberpunk. "I hope I haven’t any way. Cyberpunks are the first computer nerds with a faith... class. A faith in the technology. Perhaps the people in Cult of the Dead Cow are cyberpunks; they who dress in computer chips. There must be something wrong with you if you want to be called cyberpunk."
When put in front of the hypothesis what if he he hadn’t discovered the Internet and gotten employed at Spray, he silently thinks before answering. "The Net has been a good thing for me. If not the Net I’d been forced to begin writing earlier. It feels like it’s something of my own."
He wears his shirt with irony. It says loser on the front, but if you turn it inside out I expect to find something like Gotcha! or Pulled ya leg there, didn't I? "But I'm no loser." He pauses. "No more than all humans are."
That’s a thesis I’ve heard from several times comming from him now. That we’re all losers as humanity, but we can be winners still by making the best out of what we have. What we have is ourselves, so I suppose that’s what we could share.
My tea is already cold, but I drink up what’s left of it, and first now notice that it’s really dark outside. It’s quite for a moment, and the night is like in the beginning has that lukewarme temperature. We ask Svante to skate some for us so we can take some pictures, and I stand watching mirash behind the lense and Svante on the board.
"See ya," Svante says before disappearing into the dark, beyond the illuminated 7-11. For a second his tattood star, on his forearm showing, and I remember he showed an almost similiar one he used to wear around his neck, but which fell off during yesterday’s party.
He has his skateboard on his shoulders, behind his head, and his black T-shirt disappears into the vivid dark. Into the city nature. I think he has written that sometime. That nature's the boss. So I concluded," which leaves us humans to be losers." And he told it to us straight: "We all are. Losers."