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The hook-up chart lines up the names of partners who allegedly shared some sexual activity at least once. Among the familiar names in this tiny excerpt of the entire chart are Courtney Love, Jello Biafra and Billy Corgan. It started out as a simple girl-meets-boy story, but it soon whirled dizzyingly out of control. A girl met a boy, and then she met another boy, and then several other boys, all of whom met boys and girls of their own, who in turn met their own girls and boys. And four years after the first girl met the first boy, some 1,400 boys and girls had met and intimately mingled.
How do 1,400 hackers and crackers and Internet-lovers document their hook-ups? They use a diagram, of course -- a chart that shows how each person is connected to the other through bedroom dalliances, a chart that has now grown titanic in scale.
Picture a kiddie connect-the-dot puzzle on which some sardonic 5-year-old has connected every dot to every other dot, and you might have an idea of what the Sexchart looks like. At 46 KB, filled with ASCII dots and dashes that are almost impossible to track, the Sexchart is a little underground Internet project that tells you two things about computer people: They aren't as abstinent as you might have guessed, and they're more obsessive than you'd ever imagined.
Lish Daelnar, a 23-year-old woman who has maintained the Sexchart for most of its life, was the girl from whom the initial girl-meets-boy piece of the Sexchart spun. Daelnar lives in Santa Cruz, California, and though she is not herself a geek, she seems to know their kind well enough.
"I had dated a lot of guys in the 'Internet scene,'" Daelnar said. "And the chart was started specifically to make fun of me -- to show how many guys I dated." This was in 1997, when being in the so-called "Internet scene" actually meant something. It meant you knew about the Web, maybe had your own "home page," you looked askance at people on AOL, spent time chatting on IRC ... and various other stereotypes.
In the first incarnation of the Sexchart, Daelnar's nickname -- "CRANK" -- is at the center, and it's connected by dots and slashes to several guys' nicknames. According to that first chart, Daelnar cavorted with murmur, 8ball, pip, aoxomoxoa, mogel, spirit, turbo, jamesy and Dcheese.
Daelnar is quick to note, presumably in her defense, one small point about the Sexchart: The thing is not only about sex. See, though it's called a sex chart and although many people look at a connection on the chart as a sign that the two people have engaged in some naughty activities, virtually all very chummy doings can land you on the chart.
"A link is denoted by any sexual action between computer users that is capable of spreading an STD, with a minimum requirement of wet kissing," explains a disclaimer on the chart. Only about half of the links on the chart denote actual sex, Daelnar said, but those links aren't specified.
As the chart grew over the years, with Daelnar receiving more and more hook-up notices each month and painstakingly adding the items using a bare-bones text editor, some people became rankled by Daelnar's work. "The chart doesn't exactly cover a scene anymore," she said. "If you have an e-mail address, you can be on the chart."
Some people who were not part of the "Internet scene" and who just happened to engage in a meaningless Christmas-party peck on the (open) lips with someone who was on the chart, still landed on the chart -- and some of these people didn't quite like the chart.
But Daelnar's got little sympathy for this attitude -- she says that if you're ashamed of having done something, you shouldn't have done it. And you shouldn't have told anybody about it, either.
"If you're gonna have privacy, have privacy -- you can't tell six people and expect it to stay a secret," she said.
Daelnar does try to make her chart accurate, though, and if someone tells her that an item is not true, she'll remove it. But she said that many times when people tell her a hook-up didn't happen, they're lying, and she finds out about it.
"One time I listed a guy, and he said that it didn't happen," she said. "But then I found out he moved in with the girl. I was like, 'who are you trying to hide it from?'"
Others have threatened her. One guy wrote in an e-mail: "if yer source doesn't come clean, 6 kneecaps will cease to function. no joking. unlike most that sit around irc, i mean business. I'm a businessman, i handle everything professional, and that includes silencing a fucking polesmoker that doesnt know what hes snitching about."
Daelnar finds these reactions to her chart rather hilarious. "The point of it for me is to make people angry," she said. "People get very, very upset -- and it cracks me up because it's ASCII. Just ASCII. I mean, it's a make-out chart. This isn't a 'you got this person pregnant and they had to get an abortion' chart."
But since the chart is just ASCII, and since the links don't specify what exactly transpired between two people, looking at the Sexchart can set your mind on wild adventures. The chart does, in fact, document some not-so-conventional relationships. Siblings are connected to each other -- in one case directly (a brother and sister who are well-known to have been in each other's thang), and in other cases through other people, like when two brothers date the same girl. A few of the links also represent forced sex, Daelnar said, but she'll never say which ones. ("They know who they are.")
So Daelnar thinks that your reaction to the chart depends a lot on what filth is running through your head. "It's a lot in the way you look at it," she said, suggesting that the chart can be a neat little Rorschach device.
"Somebody with 20 links might mean they've kissed 20 people in their whole life," she explained. "But I've had people tell me that I'm a whore because I have so many links -- to which I reply that the Sexchart is not a sex chart. And if somebody's gonna judge me based on how many Sexchart links I have, I don't really want to be with that person anyway."
Daelnar has two aims for the chart, both of which she thought weren't quite attainable. Her first aim was to be written about by Wired. She presumably meant the magazine, but Wired News would suffice, she said.
Her other goal is more ambitious: to get everyone in the world on the chart. She doesn't really work toward this, but the hook-up notices keep pouring in, and perhaps one day a sizeable portion of the earth's population will be on it. At this point, in fact, the chart has become so unwieldy that she's actually looking for some help from programmers -- maybe there's an automated way to draw up the ASCII chart, she wonders.
You might question why Daelnar does all this -- whether her work yields any valuable information about anything.
Some have said that it points out some interesting social commentary -- for instance, the transient nature of love in our modern world. A less kind description of the Sexchart is that it's just the sort of muddled and complexly vague procrastination device you'd expect a group of microprocessor-thumping computer geeks to come up with -- something enormously time-consuming to create and utterly useless to look at, like "fan-produced" design blueprints of Star Trek space vehicles.
Daelnar herself says there is some use to it. "It's a great way to check who has diseases -- you can kind of choose somebody based on who they've been with."
