The Data Dandy and gargoyles

While reading Manovich's “Navigable Space”, one particular section caught my eye in its similarity to a type of character and place in Neal Stephenson's “Snow Crash”. Manovich talks about the flaneur and the explorer as types of new media users then quotes Geert Lovink, “The Net is to the electronic dandy what the metropolitan street was for the historical dandy.” This bears a striking resemblance to the Street created by Neal Stephenson. The Street is basically the manifestation of the virtual world where users congregate and move, meeting other users, buying, selling, living. It IS the internet and we, the users, are the “dandies”, just strolling through, being a part of it, engaging with it. Another interesting thing is the similarities between the data dandy in Manovich's article (“A perfect aesthete, the Data Dandy loves to display his private and totally irrelevant collection of data to other Net users.”) to the gargoyles in “Snow Crash”. After all, isn't that exactly what the gargoyles do? They collect as much information as possible, no matter how relevant or irrelevant, and makes it available on the internet. They are like the Data Dandy in that they are a non-identity; they are only comprised of what they do, which is constant recording and surveillance. This is even illustrated by the amount of equipment they wear, that they are covered with so much equipment that they perhaps, don't even look like human anymore and therefore, are called gargoyles.