Mark Twain in the 21st Century

The electronic cash system will be an alternative to using credit cards when doing retail business on the Internet. It's a big deal because it opens the Internet to doing some real business. Despite all the hoopla, not much money has changed hands to date on the nets -- a mere $200 million last year -- because as everyone knows, you never want to tell strangers your Visa card number.

Unlike credit cards, the Digicash solution is an actual new kind of currency. You need to sign up with Mark Twain, deposit money with them. When you buy things, the bank pays in encrypted "coins." Only you can spend them, and there's no way you can overdraft, they say.

OK, I can accept most of the premises here. The Digicash solution sounds reasonable. I agree it is probably dangerous to use one's Visa number on the nets -- though we expose ourselves to the identical risks each time we hand it to a clerk or waitperson, and they disappear behind a curtain to do God knows what with it.

But I am having problems placing Mark Twain in all this.

I have had this problem before, driving through Missouri and seeing all the Mark Twain Bank billboards. There's the bank's spiel on the right side, hawking CDs or auto loans or free toasters on the one side, and a big glorious head-and-shoulders portrait of Samuel Clemens/Mark Twain on the other.

There is no ironic daylight between Twain and the bank. They share the single mission, to provide comprehensive, low-cost financial services to savers and investors while building a better community for everyone.

My question is, does that sound like Mark Twain?

Did Twain ask to spend his afterlife as a symbol of fiduciary restraint? I recall him saying he much preferred to go to hell than heaven because that's where all the interesting people would be. I'll grant that bankers are as fascinating as they are hellbound, though that may be a stretch. But I can think of no moment in his voluminous writings where he indicated this was the way he wanted to be remembered, as a propped-up corpse with a handful of e-coins clutched in his carpals.

Mark Twain was born in 1835 with Halley's Comet streaming overhead and he vowed he would go out with it when it returned in 1910, and he did. In between he enjoyed an outrageous career that was one long noisy yawp at the phony customs of the powers that be, and a tender anthem to what was sweet and human and funny.

Mark Twain had no beef with technology. Huckleberry Finn was the first book written on a typewriter, which Twain kept on a desk beside his billiard table on the second floor of his eccentric home in Hartford, Connecticut, which housed, as he said in Life on the Mississippi, "all the modern inconveniences."

The Connecticut Yankee he dispatched back in time to Camelot was an inventor, and delighted in mounting the somber knights of the round table on humpback bicycles, and replacing their armor with stovepipe.

In his own century Twain lost an entire fortune investing in an automatic typesetting invention that wouldn't set type. "Put all your eggs in the one basket," he advised other would-be investors in Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar, " and WATCH THAT BASKET."

He wasn't against exploration. He once attempted to ride a speeding glacier through the French Alps, before a local tipped him to the glacier's slow gait. I believe Twain would view the whorls and dark alleys of cyberspace today as only a fraction less fascinating than piloting a steamboat around an unknown bend in the crickety dark.

It is hard to imagine a bank overlooking Twain's countless barbs at financial institutions, likening them to carny barkers with marble steps. ("I was without a compeer among swindles. It was perfect, it was rounded, symmetrical, complete, colossal." Life on the Mississippi)

It wasn't rascals he was against, per se. He had an affection for them, until they came into real power, and then the fun was no longer harmless. In my mind he would have sided much more naturally with the hackers and kids and pirates who have had the times of their lives the last few years, rafting through the virtual waters of the Internet, than the chrome-plated capitalists who march out to conquer cyberspace bearing Twain's face on their banners. ("There's millions in it!" The Gilded Age)

Lovers of Mark Twain have other options besides using his e-money. "Ever The Twain Shall Meet" (http://www.lm.com/~joseph/mtwain.html) is a good compilation of netsites that feature post-copyrighted books of Twain's. Another site, "Mark Twain Resources on the World Wide Web" (http://web.syr.edu/~fjzwick/twainwww.html) includes non-textual material ranging from exhibits to syllabi to the plot of the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode in which Twain cameoed.

There is no doubt in my mind what Mark Twain would think of the Digicash entry. It is the fondest sort of hubris that imagines that the human genius for concealing and controlling will ever outduel the our genius for revealing and appropriating.

I'll bet that, if asked what he thought of the plans of corporations to make the Internet a respectable place to do business, he would say something like he said about an opera he'd just attended:

"I haven't heard anything like that since the orphanage burned down"

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