Author and Interplanetary Man of Mystery Mac Tonnies who died in October.
As part of a new HBO documentary called "Meeting Online," a series that will explore how "meeting someone online has dramatically affected" people's lives, Rita J. King submitted a story about her relationship with her friend Mac Tonnies. It's a touching and true story about the power and potential the digital culture to foster meaningful relationships.
Her story "My First Digital Death: The Technology of Consciousness" has just been published on the HBO documentary website, "Meeting-Stories.org." An excerpt:
In October of 2009, Mac asked me about a novel I'd been thinking about writing for a couple of years but didn't have time because I'd started a company that continues to grow. I told him that I didn't have time and he asked to see part of it. We signed into an editing tool and chatted while reading and writing. He absolutely loved what I'd written and gave me a spectacular piece of advice about how to pare back the narrative voice. He was a few days away from finishing his manuscript for Anomalist Books, "Cryptoterrestrials." On October 18, at the age of 34, Mac Tonnies sent two tweets on Twitter. One was a link to the Byrne/Eno song, "Everything That Happens Will Happen Today," which is a song about death if ever there was one, and a message to me. Then he died in his sleep from an undiagnosed heart condition.
Rita also produced the below video as a tribute to the life of Mac Tonnies.
[My First Digital Death: The Technology of Consciousness]
1 comments:
After about a decade of conversing with him online, on bulletin boards, email, and later Twitter, I got to meet Mac Tonnies. It was the summer of 2008, and Mac was passing through California, shooting a TV documentary.
He was still on Facebook at the time, and the fact that he was in town suddenly appeared on my "Wall." He had once asked me to do the cover portrait for his book, "After the Martian Apocalypse." This portrait doesn't even look like him, very digital, very abstract. But, he liked it. I had a large copy of this printed on canvas, and I always wanted him to have it. Here was my chance to hand it to him. In person.
We talked until the wee hours of the morning, milling around the parking lot of some downtown motel. Everything was closed, including the coffee shop. It was amazing to hear the people he had met, the depth of technical knowledge he had acquired. He could converse at length on any topic that captured his prodigious imagination.
One day the incessant online posts just stopped. I received a touching letter from his parents, saying they had the portrait he had left hanging in his apartment.
He is missed.
-eWarrior
(as Mac referred to me online)
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