The first thing that started frustrating me is the problem that Principles of Theory is born out of email, but Arthur White refers to it in the 70's.
A voice told me to loosen up and go with it, but the other voice attempted to solve it and came up with something good. The Internet as a character in our story helps to make Arthur White a more concrete person, but it helps to make Dr. Carlton Farthington more abstract...some sort of disturbing force...a primordial sea devil turned postmodern.
It makes total sense to me that, in the days when Dr. Farthington met with his followers face to face, that he talked about his book, but that it didn't really exist until one of his followers did half the work for him via email in the early 90's during email's infancy.
Dr. Farthington is a vampire (metaphorically) who maintains his own power by siphoning it off of others. It would make sense that The Principles of Theory is nothing until the technology exists to suck it out of his followers. In this regard, Farthington begins to make sense to me somewhat allegorically as the dark side of the Internet.
This vision of Dr. Farthington also helps me make sense of the time vortex.
Essentially, Farthington's power rises as digital culture rises, and the more the culture moves from the pagan, analog, portable village model of rock stardom that the sixties gave us and that faded in the seventies and toward the more sophisticated obliteration of time and space (since digital culture puts us in all times and all places at once and becomes an age of recycling and mosaic as opposed to innovation ((the "hardware" of technology advances while the "software" of human ideas dwindles)) the more abstract time becomes for Arthur and Will.
They are displaced minor heroes from a fallen age.
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