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Preface to the 1994 paperback edition
A lot has happened in the year or so since I wrote this
book. More than usually
happens in a year. Thanks to technologies like the computer, the
modem, interactive media,
and the Internet, we no longer depend on printed matter or word of
mouth to explore the
latest rages, innovations, or discoveries. By the time a story hits
the newstands, most insiders
consider it old news" and are already hard at work on the next
flurry of culture-bending
inventions and activities.
Cyberia is about a very special moment in our recent
history -- a moment when
anything seemed possible. When an entire subculture -- like a kid at
a rave trying virtual
reality for the first time -- saw the wild potentials of marrying
the latest computer
technologies with the most intimately held dreams and the most
ancient spiritual truths. It is a
moment that predates America Online, twenty million Internet
subscribers, Wired magazine,
Bill Clinton, and the Information Superhighway. But it is a moment
that foresaw a whole lot
more.
This book is not a survey of everything and everyone
cyber" but rather a tour through
some of the regions of this new, fledgling culture to which I was
lucky enough to gain
access. Looking back, it is surprising to see how many of these
then-absurd notions have
become accepted truths, and disheartening to see how many of the
most optimistic appraisals
of our future are still very far from being realized.
Cyberia follows the lives and translates the experiences of
the first few people who
realized that our culture was about to take a leap into the unknown.
Some of them have
succeeded beyond their wildest expectations and are now practically
household names. Others
have met with catastrophe. Still others have simply faded from view,
their own contributions
to the cyberian renaissance already completed.
The people in this book, and thousands of others like them
around the world,
understand the implications of our technologies on our culture,
thought systems, spiritual
beliefs, and even our biological evolution. They still stand as the
most optimistic and
forward-thinking appraisers of our civilization's fate. As we draw
ever nearer to the
consensually hallucinatory reality for which these cyberians drew
the blueprints, their
impressions of life on the edge become even more relevant for the
rest of us. And they make
more sense.
Douglas Rushkoff
New York City, 1994
Introduction
Surfing the Learning Curve of Sisyphus
On the most rudimentary level there is simply terror of
feeling like an immigrant in a
place where your children are natives--where you're always
going to be behind the
8-ball because they can develop the technology faster than
you can learn it. It's what I
call the learning curve of Sisyphus. And the only people
who are going to be
comfortable with that are people who don't mind confusion
and ambiguity. I look at
confusing circumstances as an opportunity--but not
everybody feels that way. That's
not the standard neurotic response. We've got a culture
that's based on the ability of
people to control everything. Once you start to embrace
confusion as a way of life,
concomitant with that is the assumption that you really
don't control anything. At best
it's a matter of surfing the whitewater.
--John Barlow, lyricist for the Grateful Dead and cofounder
of the Electronic
Frontiers Foundation
The kid who handed me the brightly colored flyer must have
figured I was younger or
at least more open-minded than I really am. Or maybe he had me
pegged from the beginning.
Sure, I had done a little experimenting" in college and had gotten
my world view a bit
expanded, but I was hardly ready to immerse myself in a subculture
as odd, or as influential,
as this one turned out to be.
The fractal-enhanced map-point" leaflet announced a giant,
illegal party -- a rave,"
where thousands of celebrants would take psychedelics, dance to the
blips of
computer-generated music, and discuss the ways in which reality
itself would soon conform to
their own hallucinatory projections. No big deal. Bohemians have
talked this way for years,
even centuries. Problem is, after a few months in their midst, I
started believing them.
A respected Princeton mathematician gets turned on to LSD,
takes a several-year
sabbatical in the caves of the Himalayas during which he trips his
brains out, then returns to
the university and dedicates himself to finding equations to map the
shapes in his psychedelic
visions. The formulas he develops have better success at mapping the
weather and even the
stock market than any have before.
Three kids in San Francisco with a video camera and a
broken hotel magnetic key
encoder successfully fool a bank cash machine into giving them other
people's money.
A new computer conferencing system immerses people so
totally in their virtual
community" that an alterego takes over a man's willpower, and he
finds himself out of
control, randomly propositioning women who happen to be online."
A science fiction writer, after witnessing the spectacle of
a child in hypnotic symbiosis
with a video arcade game, invents a fictional reality called
Cyberspace -- a consensual
hallucination" accessed through the computer, where one's thoughts
manifest totally, and
reality itself conforms to the wave patterns.
Then, in a bizarre self-fulfilling prophecy, the science
fictional concept of a reality that
can be consciously designed begins to emerge as a held belief--and
not just by kids dancing
at all night festivals. A confluence of scientists, computer
programmers, authors, musicians,
journalists, artists, activists and even politicians have adopted a
new paradigm. And they want
to make this your paradigm, too.
The battle for your reality begins on the fields of digital
interaction. Our growing
dependence on computers and electronic media for information, money,
and communication
has made us easy targets, if unwilling subjects, in one of the most
bizarre social experiments
of the century. We are being asked to spend an increasing amount of
our time on a very new
sort of turf----the territory of digital information. While we are
getting used to it by now, this
region is very different from the reality we have grown to know and
love. It is a boundless
universe in which people can interact regardless of time and
location. We can fax paper''
over phone lines, conduct twenty-party video-telephone conversations
with participants in
different countries, and even "touch'' one another from thousands of
miles away through new
technologies such as virtual reality, where the world itself opens
to you just as you dream it
up.
For example, many of these computer programs and data
libraries are structured as
webs, a format that has come to be known as hypertext.'' To learn
about a painter, a
computer user might start with a certain museum. From the list of
painters, he may select a
particular portrait. Then he may ask for biographical information
about the subject of the
portrait, which may reveal a family tree. He may follow the family
tree up through the
present, then branch off into data about immigration policies to the
United States, the
development of New York real estate, or even a grocery district on
the Lower East Side. In a
hypertext video game, a player might be a detective searching a
room. In the room is a chest
of drawers. Select a drawer. The drawer opens, inside is a note.
Point to the note, and text
appears. Read the note, see a name. Select the name, see a picture.
One item in the picture is
a car. Select the car, go for a ride through the neighborhood. See
an interesting house, go
inside...
Maybe this isn't all that startling. It has taken several
decades for these technologies
take root, and many of us are used to the way they work. But the
people I met at my first
rave in early 1990's San Francisco claimed they could experience
this same boundless,
hypertext universe without the use of a computer at all. For them,
cyberspace can be accessed
through drugs, dance, spiritual techniques, chaos math, and pagan
rituals. They move into a
state of consciousness where, as if logged onto a computer, the
limitations of time, distance,
and the body are perceived as meaningless. People believe that they
move through these
regions as they might move through computer programs or video games-
-unlimited by the
rules of a linear, physical reality. Moreover, they say that our
reality itself, aided by
technology, is about to make a wholesale leap into this new,
hypertextual dimension.
By handing me that damned rave promotional flyer, a San
Franciscan teenager made it
impossible for me to ignore that a growing number of quite
intelligent, if optimistic, people
are preparing themselves and the rest of us for the wildest possible
implications of our new
technologies. The more time I spent with these people, the less wild
these implications
seemed to me. Everywhere I turned, the conclusions were the same.
Quantum physicists at the
best institutions agree that the tiniest particles making up matter
itself have ceased to behave
with the predictability of linear equations. Instead, they jump
around in a discontinuous
fashion, disappearing, reappearing, suddenly gaining and losing
energy. Mathematicians,
likewise, have decided that the smooth, geometric model of reality
they have used since
Euclid first drew a triangle on papyrus is obsolete. Instead, using
computers, they churn out
psychedelic paisley patterns which they claim more accurately
reflect the nature of existence.
And who appears to be taking all this in first? The kids
dancing to electronic music at
underground clubs. And the conclusion they have all seemed to reach
is that reality itself is
up for grabs. It can be dreamt up.
Now this all may be difficult to take seriously; it was for
me--at first. But we only
need to turn to the arbiters of reality--mainstream scientists--to
find this confirmed. The
ability to observe phenomena, they now believe, is inextricably
linked to the phenomena
themselves. Having lost faith in the notion of a material
explanation for existence, these
quantum physicists and systems mathematicians have begun to look at
the ways reality
conforms to their expectations, mirroring back to them a world
changed by the very act of
observation. As they rely more and more on the computer, their
suspicions are further
confirmed: This is not a world reducible to neat equations and pat
answers, but an infinitely
complex series of interdependencies, where the tiniest change in a
remote place can have
systemwide repercussions.
When computers crunch data from real-world observations,
they do not produce
simple, linear graphs of an orderly existence but instead churn out
phase maps and diagrams
whose spiraling intricacy resembles that of an ancient mosaic, a
coral reef, or a psychedelic
hallucination. When the entire procession of historical, biological,
and cosmological events is
reanalyzed in the light of modern mathematical discoveries like the
fractal and feedback
loops, it points toward this era--the turn of the century--as man's
leap out of history altogether
and into some sort of timeless dimension.
Inklings of what this dimension may be like come to us
through the experience of
computer hackers and psychedelic tripsters, who think of themselves
not as opposite ends of
the spectrum of human activity but as a synergistic congregation of
creative thinkers bringing
the tools of high technology and advanced spirituality into the
living rooms of the general
public. Psychedelics can provide a shamanic experience for any
adventurous consumer. This
experience leads users to treat the accepted reality as an arbitrary
one, and to envision the
possibilities of a world unfettered by obsolete thought systems,
institutions, and neuroses.
Meanwhile, the cybernetic experience empowers people of all ages to
explore a new, digital
landscape. Using only a personal computer and a modem, anyone can
now access the
datasphere. New computer interface technologies such as virtual
reality promise to make the
datasphere a place where we can take not only our minds but our
bodies along for the ride.
The people you are about to meet interpret the development
of the datasphere as the
hardwiring of a global brain. This is to be the final stage in the
development of Gaia,'' the
living being that is the Earth, for which humans serve as the
neurons. As computer
programmers and psychedelic warriors together realize that "all is
one,'' a common belief
emerges that the evolution of humanity has been a willful
progression toward the construction
of the next dimensional home for consciousness.
We need a new word to express this boundless territory. The
kids in this book call it
Cyberia.
Cyberia is the place a businessperson goes when involved in
a phone conversation, the
place a shamanic warrior goes when traveling out of body, the place
an acid house'' dancer
goes when experiencing the bliss of a techno-acid trance. Cyberia is
the place alluded to by
the mystical teachings of every religion, the theoretical tangents
of every science, and the
wildest speculations of every imagination. Now, however, unlike any
other time in history,
Cyberia is thought to be within our reach. The technological strides
of our postmodern
culture, coupled with the rebirth of ancient spiritual ideas, have
convinced a growing number
of people that Cyberia is the dimensional plane in which humanity
will soon find itself.
But even those of us who have never ventured into a house
club, physics lab or
computer bulletin board are being increasingly exposed to words,
images and ideas that shake
the foundations of our most deeply held beliefs. The cyberian
paradigm finds its way to our
unsuspecting minds through new kinds of arts and entertainment that
rely less on structure
and linear progression than on textural experience and moment-to-
moment awareness.
Role-playing games, for example, have no beginning or end, but
instead celebrate the
inventiveness of their players, who wind their way through complex
fantasies together, testing
strategies that they may later use in their own lives, which have in
turn begun to resemble the
wild adventures of their game characters. Similarly, the art and
literature of Cyberia have
abandoned the clean lines and smooth surfaces of Star Trek and 2001:
A Space Odyssey in
favor of the grimy, posturban realism of Batman, Neuromancer, and
Bladerunner, in which
computers do not simplify human issues but expose and even amplify
the obvious faults in
our systems of logic and social engineering.
Not surprisingly, the reaction of traditionalists to this
expression has been harsh and
marked by panic. Cyberians question the very reality on which the
ideas of control and
manipulation are based; and as computer-networking technology gets
into the hands of more
cyberians, historical power centers are challenged. A bright young
hacker with enough time
on his hands can break in to almost any computer system in the
world. Meanwhile,
do-it-yourself technology and a huge, hungry media empire sews the
seeds of its own
destruction by inviting private citizens to participate through
'zines, cable shows, and
interactive television. The hypnotic spell of years of television
and its intense public relations
is broken as people learn to deconstruct and recombine the images
intended to persuade them.
The result is that the population at large gains the freedom to
reexamine previously accepted
policies and prejudices.
Using media viruses,'' politically inclined cyberians
launch into the datasphere, at
lightning speed, potent ideas that openly challenge hypocritical and
illogical social structures,
thus rendering them powerless.
A new scientific paradigm, a new leap in technology, and a
new class of drug created
the conditions for what many believe is the renaissance we are
observing today. Parallels
certainly abound between our era and renaissances of the past: the
computer and the printing
press, LSD and caffeine, the holograph and perspective painting, the
wheel and the spaceship,
agriculture and the datasphere. But cyberians see this era as more
than just a rebirth of
classical ideas. They believe the age upon us now might take the
form of categorical
upscaling of the human experience onto uncharted, hyperdimensional
turf.
The people who believe all this, so far, are on the
outermost fringes of popular culture.
But, as we witnessed in the 1960s, the beliefs of fringe cultures
can trickle up through our
youth into the mainstream. In fact, we may soon conclude that the
single most important
contribution of the 1960s and the psychedelic era to popular culture
is the notion that we have
chosen our reality arbitrarily. The mission of the cyberian
counterculture of the 1990s, armed
with new technologies, familiar with cyberspace and daring enough to
explore unmapped
realms of consciousness, is to rechoose reality consciously and
purposefully.
This book is meant to provide a guided tour through that
vision: Cyberia. It is an
opportunity to take part in, or at least catch up with, a movement
that could be reshaping
reality. The cyberian explorers we will meet in the next chapters
have been depicted with all
their human optimism, brilliance, and frailty. Like the first
pioneers of any new world, they
suffer from the same fears, frustrations, and failures as those who
stay behind and watch from
the safety of familiarity. These are not media personalities but
human beings, developing their
own coping mechanisms for survival on the edges of reality.
Whether or not we are destined for a wholesale leap into
the next dimension, there are
many people who believe that history as we know it is coming to a
close. It is more than
likely that the aesthetics, inventions, and attitudes of the
cyberians will become as difficult to
ignore as the automatic teller machine and MTV. We all must cope, in
one way or another,
with the passage of time. It behooves us to grok Cyberia.
Most people think it's far out if we get virtual reality
up and running. This is much
more profound than that. This is the real thing. We're
going to find out what "being''
is. It's a philosophical journey and the vehicles are not
simply cultural but biology
itself. We're closing distance with the most profound event
that a planetary ecology
can encounter, which is the freeing of life from the
chrysalis of matter. And it's never
happened before--I mean the dinosaurs didn't do this, nor
did the procaryotes
emerging. No. This takes a billion years of forward moving
evolution to get to the
place where information can detach itself from the material
matrix and then look back
on a cast-off mode of being as it rises into a higher
dimension.
--Terence McKenna, author, botanist, and psychedelic
explorer
PART 1
Computers: Revenge of the Nerds
Chapter 1
Navigating the Datastream
Craig was seven when he discovered the catacombs.'' His
parents had taken him on a
family visit to his uncle, and while the adults sat in the kitchen
discussing the prices of sofas
and local politics, young Craig Neidorf--whom the authorities would
eventually prosecute as a
dangerous, subversive hacker--found one of the first portals to
Cyberia: a video game called
Adventure.
Like a child who wanders away from his parents during a
tour of the Vatican to
explore the ancient, secret passages beneath the public walkways,
Craig had embarked on his
own video-driven visionquest. As he made his way through the game's
many screens and
collected magical objects, Craig learned that he could use those
objects to see'' portions of
the game that no one else could. Even though he had completed
whatever tasks were
necessary in the earlier parts of the game, he was drawn back to
explore them with his new
vision. Craig was no longer interested in just winning the game--he
could do that effortlessly.
Now he wanted to get inside it.
I was able to walk through a wall into a room that did not
exist,'' Craig explains to
me late one night over questionably accessed phone lines. "It was
not in the instructions. It
was not part of the game. And in that room was a message. It was a
message from the creator
of the game, flashing in black and gold...''
Craig's voice trails off. Hugh, my assistant and link-
artist to the telephone net, adjusts
his headset, checks a meter, then acknowledges with a nod that the
conversation is still being
recorded satisfactorily. Craig would not share with me what the
message said--only that it
motivated his career as a cyberian. This process--finding something
that wasn't written about,
discovering something that I wasn't supposed to know--it got me very
interested. I searched in
various other games and tried everything I could think of--even
jiggling the power cord or the
game cartridge just to see what would happen. That's where my
interest in playing with that
kind of thing began ... but then I got an Apple.''
At that point, Cyberia, which had previously been limited
to the other side of the
television screen, expanded to become the other side of the computer
screen. With the help of
a telephone connection called a modem,'' Craig was linked to a
worldwide system of
computers and communications. Now, instead of exploring the inner
workings of a packaged
video game, Craig was roaming the secret passages of the datasphere.
By the time he was a teenager, Craig Neidorf had been
arrested. Serving as the editor
of an on-line magazine'' (passed over phone lines from computer to
computer) called Phrack,
he was charged with publishing (legally, "transporting'') a
dangerous, $79,000 program
document detailing the workings of Bell South's emergency 911
telephone system
(specifically, the feature that allows them to trace incoming
calls). At Neidorf's trial, a Bell
South employee eventually revealed that the program'' was actually
a three-page memo
available to Bell South customers for less than $30. Neidorf was put
on a kind of probation
for a year, but he is still raising money to cover his $100,000
legal expenses.
But the authorities and, for most part, adult society are
missing the point here. Craig
and his compatriots are not interested in obtaining and selling
valuable documents. These kids
are not stealing information--they are surfing data. In Cyberia, the
computer serves as a
metaphor as much as a tool; to hack through one system to another
and yet another is to
discover the secret rooms and passageways where no one has ever
traveled before. The web
of interconnected computer networks provides the ultimate electronic
neural extension for the
growing mind. To reckon with this technological frontier of human
consciousness means to
reevaluate the very nature of information, creativity, property and
human relations.
Craig is fairly typical of the young genius-pioneers of
this new territory. He describes
the first time he saw a hacker in action:
I really don't remember how he got in; I was sitting there
while he typed. But to see
these other systems were out there was sort of interesting. I saw
things like shopping
malls--there were heating computers you could actually call up and
look at what their
temperature settings were. There were several of these linked
together. One company ran the
thermostat for a set of different subscribers, so if it was
projected to be 82 degrees outside,
they'd adjust it to a certain setting. So, back when we were
thirteen or so, we talked about
how it might be neat to change the settings one day, and make it too
hot or too cold. But we
never did.''
But they could have, and that's what matters. They gained
access. In Cyberia, this is
funhouse exploration. Neidorf sees it as like when you're eight and
you know your brother
and his friends have a little treehouse or clubhouse somewhere down
in the woods, and you
and your friends go and check it out even though you know your
brother would basically kill
you if he found you in there.'' Most of these kids get into hacking
the same way as children
of previous generations daringly wandered through the hidden
corridors of their school
basements or took apart their parents' TV sets. But with computers
they hit the jackpot:
There's a whole world there--a whole new reality, which they can
enter and even change.
Cyberia. Each new opening leads to the discovery of an entirely new
world, each connected
to countless other new worlds. You don't just get in somewhere, look
around, find out it's a
dead end, and leave. Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher were fascinated
by a few winding
caves; cyberkids have broken through to an infinitely more complex
and rewarding network.
Each new screen takes them into a new company, institution, city,
government, or nation.
They can pop out almost anywhere. It's an endless ride.
As well as being one of the most valuable techniques for
navigating cyberspace,
hacking the vast computer net is the first and most important
metaphor in Cyberia. For the
first time, there is a technical arena in which to manifest the
cyberian impulses, which range
from pure sport to spiritual ecstasy and from redesigning reality to
downright subversion.
Crashing the System
David Troup gained his fame in the computer underground for
a program he wrote
called The Bodyguard, which helps hackers maintain their chain of
connections through a
long series of systems breaches. Through another ingeniously
exploited communications
system glitch, we spoke as he relaxed on his living room couch in
Minnesota. From the sound
of his voice I knew he was using a speaker phone, and I heard
several of his friends milling
about the room, popping open beers, and muttering in agreement with
Troup, their local hero.
The fun of hacking lies in the puzzle solving. Finding out
what lies around that next
corner, around the next menu or password. Finding out just how
twisted you can get. Popping
out of a computer-based network into a phone-based network and back
again. Mapping
networks that go worldwide. We watched a system in Milwaukee grow
from just two systems
into a huge network. We went with them. By the end, we probably had
a more detailed map
of their network than they did. ''
The Bodyguard has become an indispensable part of the
hacker's daytrip survival kit.
It's kind of a worm [a tunneling computer virus] that hacks along
with you. Say I'm cruising
through fifteen Unixes [computers that run Unix software] to get at
some engineering firm.
Every time I go onto a Unix, I will upload my Bodyguard program.
What it does is watch me
and watch the system. It's got the names of the system operators. If
a system operator
[''sysop,'' the watchdog for illegal penetrants] or somebody else
who has the ability to check
the system logs on [enters the network through his own computer],
the Bodyguard will flash
an error flag [warning! danger!] and terminate you at that point. It
also will send you a
number corresponding to the next place down the hierarchy of
machines that you've
penetrated. You'll have your last connection previous to the one
where you got canned. It will
then reconnect you to where you were, without using the system that
knocked you off. It'll
recreate the network for you. It takes about four or five minutes.
It's nice because when you're
deep in a group of systems, you can't watch everything. Your
Bodyguard gets you off as soon
as a sysop signs on, before he even knows you're there. Even if they
just log in, you hit the
road. No need to take any chances.''
While the true hacker ethic is not to destroy anything,
most young people who find
themselves in a position where it' possible to inflict damage find
it hard to resist doing so. As
Troup explains, Most kids will do the most destructive thing they
know how to do. There's
nothing in there that they need, or want, or even understand how to
use. Everybody's crashed
a system now or then.''
Someone at Troup's end coughs in disagreement and paranoia.
David corrects himself.
No need to admit he's ever done anything illegal, now, is there?
I'd say 90 percent of
everybody. Everybody's got that urge, you know? `God, I've got full
system control--I could
just do a recursive rm [a repeated cycle to begin removing things]
and kiss this system
goodbye.' More likely, someone will create a small bug like putting
a space before everyone's
password [making it impossible for anyone to log on] and see how
long it takes the system
operator to figure it out.'' The passwords will appear correct when
the system operator lists
them--except that each one will have a tiny space before it. When
the sysop matches the
user's password with the one that the computer says the user should
have, the operator won't
notice the extra space before the computer's version.
This is the phony phone call'' to the nth power. Instead
of pranking one person on the
other end, the hacker incapacitates a big company run by "nasty
suits.'' Hard to resist,
especially when it's a company known to keep tabs on us. The events
that frightened Troup
out of hacking for a while concerned just such a company. TRW is
the Holy Grail target for
hackers. They're into everything, which is why everyone wants to get
into them. They claimed
to be impenetrable, which is half the reason why everyone wants to
get in. The more you
look into it, the more security holes they have. They aren't so
bad.'' One of Troup's friends in
the background chortles with pride. "It's difficult, because you
have to cover your tracks, but
it's not impossible. Just time-consuming,'' Troup explains.
I remember TRW used to have those commercials that just
said `TRW, making the
world a better tomorrow.' That's all they did. They were getting us
used to seeing them.
Because they were into everything. They sent Tiger Teams
[specialized computer commando
squads who establish security protocol in a system] into every
system the government has,
either to improve the system's security or to build it in the first
place. They have back doors
into everything they've ever worked on. They can assume control over
anything they want to.
They're big. They're bad. And they've got more power than they
should have, which is why
we were after them. They had Tiger Teams into airport security,
aerospace security. And the
government gets software from TRW, upgrades from TRW [also,
potentially, with back
doors].
When we got all the way up to the keyhole satellite, we
said `That's enough.' We
have really good resources. We have people that can pose as
nonpeople--they have Social
Security numbers, tax IDs, everything. But we all got kind of
spooked by all this. We had a
continuation of our plan mapped out, but we decided not to go
through with it. We ditched all
the TRW stuff we had. I gave it to a friend who buried it underwater
somewhere along the
Atlantic shelf. If I tell him to get it back, he will, but if I tell
him to get it back using a
slightly different phrase, he will disappear ... for obvious
reasons.''
Most purposeful hacking is far less romantic, and done
simply to gain access to
systems for their computing power. If someone is working on a
complex program or set of
computations, it's more convenient to use some corporation's huge
system to carry out the
procedure in a few minutes or hours than to tie up one's own tiny
personal computer for days.
The skill comes in getting the work done before the sysop discovers
the intrusion. As one
hacker explains to me through an encrypted electronic mail message,
They might be on to
you, but you're not done with them yet--you're still working on the
thing for some company
or another. But if you've got access to, say, twenty or thirty Unix
systems, you can pop in
and out of as many as you like, and change the order of them. You'll
always appear to be
coming from a different location. They'll be shooting in the dark.
You're untraceable.''
This hacker takes pride in popping in and out of systems
the way a surfer raves about
ducking the whitewater and gliding through the tube. But, just as a
surfer might compete for
cash, prizes, or beer endorsements, many young hackers who begin
with Cyberia in their
hearts are quickly tempted by employers who can profit from their
skill. The most dangerous
authoritarian response to young cyberian hackers may not be from the
law but from those
hoping to exploit their talents.
With a hacker I'll call Pete, a seventeen-year-old
engineering student at Columbia
University, I set up a real-time computer conference call in which
several other hackers from
around the country could share some of their stories about a field
called industrial hacking.''
Because most of the participants believe they have several taps on
their telephone lines, they
send their first responses through as a series of strange glyphs on
the screen. After Pete
establishes the cryptography protocol and deciphers the incoming
messages, they look like
this (the names are mine):
#1: The Purist
Industrial hacking is darkside hacking. Company A hires you
to slow down, destroy,
screw up, or steal from company B's R&D division [research and
development]. For example,
we could set up all their math wrong on their cadcams [computer
aided design programs] so
that when they look at it on the computer it seems fine, but when
they try to put the thing
together, it comes out all wrong. If all the parts of an airplane
engine are machined 1mm off,
it's just not going to work.
#2: The Prankster
There was a guy in Florida who worked on a cadcam system
which used pirated
software. He was smart, so he figured out how to use it without any
manuals. He worked
there for about a year and a half but was fired unfairly. He came to
us get them shut down.
We said Sure, no problem.'' Cadcam software companies send out lots
of demos. We got
ahold of some cadcam demos, and wrote a simple assembly program so
that when the person
puts the disk in and types the "install'' or demo'' command, it
wipes out the whole hard disk.
So we wrapped it up in its package, sent it out to a friend in Texas
or wherever the software
company was really from, and had him send it to the targeted company
with a legit postmark
and everything. Sure enough, someone put the demo in, and the
company had to end up
buying over $20,000 worth of software. They couldn't say anything
because the software we
wiped out was illegal anyway.
The Purist
That's nothing. That's a personal vendetta. Industrial
hacking is big business. Most
corporations have in-house computer consultants who do this sort of
thing. But as a freelancer
you can get hired as a regular consultant by one of these firms--say
McDonnell Douglas--get
into a vice president's office, and show them the specs of some
Lockheed project, like a new
advanced tactical fighter which he has not seen, and say, There's
more where this came
from.'' You can get thousands, even millions of dollars for this
kind of thing.
#3: The Theorist
During the big corporate takeover craze, companies that
were about to be taken over
began to notice more and more things begin to go wrong. Then payroll
would get screwed up,
their electronic mail messages aren't going through, their phone
system keeps dying every
now and then in the middle of the day. This is part of the takeover
effort.
Someone on the board of directors may have some buddy from
college who works in
the computer industry who he might hire to do an odd job now and
again.
The Purist
I like industrial hacking for the idea of doing it. I
started about a year or so ago. And
William Gibson brought romance into it with Neuromancer. It's so do-
able.
#4: The Pro
We get hired by people moving up in the political systems,
drug cartels, and of course
corporations. We even work for foreign companies. If Toyota hired us
to hit Ford, we'd hit
Ford a little bit, but then turn around and knock the hell out of
Toyota. We'd rather pick on
them than us.
Most industrial hackers do two hacks at once. They get
information on the company
they're getting paid to hit, but they're also hacking into the
company that's paying them, so
that if they get betrayed or stabbed in the back they've got their
butts covered. So it's a lot of
work. The payoffs are substantial, but it's a ton of work.
In a real takeover, 50% of the hacking is physical. A bunch
of you have to go and get
jobs at the company. You need to get the information but you don't
want to let them on to
what you're doing. The wargames-style automatic dialer will get
discovered scanning. They
know what that is; they've had that happen to them many times
before.
I remember a job that I did on a local TV station. I went
in posing as a student
working on a project for a communications class. I got a tour with
an engineer, and I had a
notebook and busily wrote down everything he said. The guy took me
back where the
computers were. Now in almost every computer department in the
United States, written on a
piece of masking tape on the phone jack or the modem itself is the
phone number of that
modem. It saves me the time and trouble of scanning 10,000 numbers.
I'm already writing
notes, so I just write in the number, go home, wait a week or so,
and then call them up (you
don't call them right away, stupid). Your local telephone company
won't notice you and the
company you're attacking won't notice you. You try to be like a
stealth bomber. You sneak up
on them slowly, then you knock the hell out of them. You take the
military approach. You do
signals intelligence, human intelligence; you've got your special
ops soldier who takes a tour
or gets a job there. Then he can even take a tour as an employee--
then he's trusted for some
reason--just because he works there, which is the biggest crock of
shit.
DISCONNECT
Someone got paranoid then, or someone's line voltage
changed enough to suggest a
tap, and our conversation had been automatically terminated.
Pete stores the exchange on disk, then escorts me out onto
the fire escape of his
apartment for a toke and a talk. He can see I'm a little shaken up.
That's not really hacking,'' he says, handing me the
joint. I thank him with a nod but
opt for a Camel Light. "That's cracking. Hacking is surfing. You
don't do it for a reason. You
just do it.'' We watch a bum below us on the street rip a piece of
cardboard off an empty
refrigerator box and drag it away--presumably it will be his home
for tonight.
That guy is hacking in a way,'' I offer. "Social
hacking.''
That's bullshit. He's doing it for a reason. He stole that
cardboard because he needs
shelter. There's nothing wrong with that, but he's not having such a
good time, either.''
So what's real hacking? What's it about?''
Pete takes a deep toke off his joint and smiles. It's
tapping in to the global brain.
Information becomes a texture ... almost an experience. You don't do
it to get knowledge.
You just ride the data. It's surfing, and they're all trying to get
you out of the water. But it's
like being a environmental camper at the same time: You leave
everything just like you found
it. Not a trace of your presence. It's like you were never there.''
Strains of Grateful Dead music come from inside the
apartment. No one's in there.
Pete has his radio connected to a timer. It's eleven o'clock Monday
night in New York, time
for David Gans's radio show, The Dead Hour. Pete stumbles into the
apartment and begins
scrounging for a cassette. I offer him one of my blank interview
tapes.
It's low bias but it'll do,'' he says, grabbing the tape
from me and shoving it into a
makeshift cassette machine that looks like a relic from Hogan's
Heroes. "Don't let the case
fool you. I reconditioned the whole thing myself. It's got selenium
heads, the whole nine
yards.'' Satisfied that the machine is recording properly, he asks,
You into the Dead?''
Sure am.'' I can't let this slip by. "I've noticed lots of
computer folks are into the
Dead ... and the whole subculture.'' I hate to get to the subject of
psychedelics too early.
However, Pete doesn't require the subtlety.
Most of the hackers I know take acid.'' Pete searches
through his desk drawers. "It
makes you better at it.'' I watch him as he moves around the room.
Look at this.'' He shows
me a ticket to a Grateful Dead show. In the middle of the ticket is
a color reproduction of a
fractal.
Now, you might ask, what's a computer-generated image like
that doing on a Dead
ticket, huh?''
CHAPTER 2
Operating from Total Oblivion
The fractal is the emblem of Cyberia. Based on the
principles of chaos math, it's an
icon, a metaphor, a fashion statement, and a working tool all at the
same time. It's at once a
highly technical computer-mathematics achievement and a psychedelic
vision, so even as an
image it bridges the gap between these two seemingly distant, or
rather discontinuous,''
corners of Cyberia. Once these two camps are connected, the real
space defined by "Cyberia''
emerges.
Fractals were discovered in the 1960s by Benoit Mandelbrot,
who was searching for
ways to help us cope, mathematically, with a reality that is not as
smooth and predictable as
our textbooks describe it. Conventional math, Mandelbrot complained,
treats mountains like
cones and clouds like spheres. Reality is much rougher'' than these
ideal forms. No
real-world surface can accurately be described as a "plane,''
because no surface is absolutely
two-dimensional. Everything has nooks and crannies; nothing is
completely smooth and
continuous. Mandelbrot's fractals--equations which grant objects a
fractional
dimensionality--are revolutionary in that they accept the fact that
reality is not a neat, ordered
place. Now, inconsistencies ranging from random interference on
phone lines to computer
research departments filled with Grateful Deadheads all begin to
make perfect sense.
Mandelbrot's main insight was to recognize that chaos has
an order to it. If you look
at a natural coastline from an airplane, you will notice certain
kinds of mile-long nooks and
crannies. If you land on the beach, you will see these same shapes
reflected in the rock
formations, on the surface of the rocks themselves, and even in the
particles making up the
rocks. This self-similarity is what brings a sense of order into an
otherwise randomly rough
and strange terrain. Fractals are equations that model the irregular
but stunningly self-similar
world in which we have found ourselves.
But these discontinuous equations work differently from
traditional math equations,
and challenge many of our assumptions about the way our reality
works. Fractals are circular
equations: After you get an answer, you plug it back into the
original equation again and
again, countless times. This is why computers have been so helpful
in working with these
equations. The properties of these circular equations are stunningly
different from those of
traditional linear equations. The tiniest error made early on can
amplify into a tremendous
mistake once the equation has been iterated'' thousands of times.
Think of a wristwatch that
loses one second per hour. After a few days, the watch is only a
minute or so off. But after
weeks or months of iterating that error, the watch will be
completely incorrect. A tiny change
anywhere in a fractal will lead to tremendous changes in the overall
system. The force
causing the change need not be very powerful. Tremendous effects can
be wrought by the
gentlest of "feedbacks.''
Feedback makes that loud screeching sound whenever a
microphone is brought close
to its own speaker. Tiny noises are fed back and iterated through
the amplification system
thousands of times, amplified again and again until they are huge,
annoying blasts of sound.
Feedback and iteration are the principles behind the now-famous
saying, When a butterfly
flaps its wings in China, it can cause a thunderstorm in New York.''
A tiny action feeds back
into a giant system. When it has iterated fully, the feedback causes
noticeable changes. The
idea has even reached the stock market, where savvy investors look
to unlikely remote
feedbacks for indications of which way the entire market might move
once those tiny
influences are fully iterated. Without the computer, though, and its
ability to iterate equations,
and then to draw them as pictures on a screen, the discovery of
fractals would never have
been possible.
Mandelbrot was at IBM, trying to find a pattern underlying
the random, intermittent
noise on their telephone lines, which had been causing problems for
their computer modems.
The fact that the transmission glitches didn't seem to follow many
real pattern would have
rendered a classical mathematician defenseless. But Mandelbrot,
looking at the chaotic
distribution of random signals, decided to search for signs of self-
similarity--that is, like the
coastline of beach, would the tiny bursts between bursts of
interference look anything like the
large ones? Of course they did. Inside each burst of interference
were moments of clear
reception. Inside each of those moments of clear reception were
other bursts of interference
and so on. Even more importantly, the pattern of their intermittency
was similar on each
level.
This same phenomenon--self-similarity--can be observed in
many systems that were
previously believed to be totally irregular and unexplainable,
ranging from the weather and
the economy to the course of human history. For example, each tiny
daily fluctuation in the
weather mirrors the climatic record of the history of the planet.
Each major renaissance in
history is itself made up of smaller renaissance events, whose
locations in time mirror the
overall pattern of renaissances throughout history. Every chaotic
system appears to be
adhering to an underlying order of self-similarity.
This means that our world is entirely or interdependent
than we have previously
understood. What goes on inside any one person's head is reflected,
in some manner, on every
other level of reality. So any individual being, through feedback
and iteration, has the ability
to redesign reality at large. Mandelbrot had begun to map the
landscape of Cyberia.
It Is the Mind of God
The terrace of the Applied Sciences Building overlooks what
students at University of
California at Santa Cruz call Elf Land''--a dense section of woods
where psychedelically
enhanced humans meet interdimensional beings. Back in the corridor
of the building, posters
of computer-generated fractal images depicting the "arithmetic
limits of iterative nonlinear
equations'' line the walls. The pictures nearest the terrace look
like the ferns on the floor of
the forest. The ones farther back look more like the arrangements of
the trees above them.
Posters still farther seem like aerial maps of the forest, seen from
above.
The mathematician residing in this self-similar niche of
academia and psychedelia is
Ralph Abraham, who broke through to Cyberia on his own, and in a
very different manner.
He abandoned Princeton University in favor of U.C. Santa Cruz in
1968, during what he calls
the apex of the counterculture.'' It was while taking psychedelics
in huge barn "be-ins'' with
his newfound friends that Abraham became familiar with what people
were calling the
emotional reality'' of numbers, and this led him to the hills and
caves of the Far East where
he spent several years meditating and hallucinating. On returning to
the university and his
computer, he embarked with renewed vigor into hyperspace to churn
out the equations that
explain his hallucinations and our existence.
While it seems so unlikely to the modern mind that
psychedelics could contribute to
real progress in mathematics and science, cyberians, for the most
part, take this connection
for granted. In the sixties,'' Abraham explains, "a lot of people
on the frontiers of math
experimented with psychedelic substances. There was a brief and
extremely creative kiss
between the community of hippies and top mathematicians. I know this
because I was a
purveyor of psychedelics to the mathematical community. To be
creative in mathematics, you
have to start from a point of total oblivion. Basically, math is
revealed in a totally
unconscious process in which one is completely ignorant of the
social climate. And
mathematical advance has always been the motor behind the
advancement of consciousness.
What's going on now is at least as big a thing as the invention of
the wheel.''
The brief kiss'' Abraham witnessed was the marriage of two
powerful intellectual
communities, both of which had touched Cyberia--one theoretically
and the other
experientially. And as cyberian mathematicians like Abraham tripped
out further, they saw
how this kiss was itself a fractal event, marking a point in human
history from which the
underlying shape or order of existence--the very "roughness'' of
reality--could be inferred.
They had conceived and birthed their own renaissance.
Abraham has since dedicated himself to the implications of
this rebirth. He sees the
most important, seemingly sudden, and non sequitur events in human
history--of which the
kiss above is one--as part of an overall fractal curve. It's
happened before. The Renaissance
was one. Christianity is one. The troubadors in the south of France;
agriculture; the new
concept of time that came along with the Old Testament--they are all
actually revivals. But
they are more than revivals. It's sort of a spiral model where
there's a quantum leap to a new
level of organization and complexity.''
Today, Abraham is in his Santa Cruz office, wearing a
sweatshirt, drawstring pants,
and Birkenstocks. He does not sport a slide rule or pocket
protector. He is Cyberia's Village
Mathematician, and his words are reassuring to those who are living
in a world that has
already taken this quantum leap. Just as the fractal enabled
Mandelbrot to comfort IBM
executives about the ultimately orderly nature of their line
interference, Abraham uses fractals
to show how this uncharted island in history on which we have found
ourselves fits into a
larger picture.
There is this fractal structure of discontinuity. If you
look at the biggest
discontinuities in human history, you will see they all seem to have
very similar structures,
suggesting a mathematical model behind the evolution of
civilization.''
Abraham argues that cyberian interest in the pagan,
psychedelic, spiritual, and tribal is
not in the least contradictory to the advances in computer
technology and mathematics.
Historically, he points out, renaissance periods have always
involved a resurgence of archaic
elements along with the invention of new technologies and
mathematical systems. The success
of Cyberia, according to the bearded technosage, will depend on our
ability to put these
disparate elements together. We have emphasized integration and
synthesis, trying to put
everything together in one understanding, using mathematical models
only as one tool. We
are also open to various pagan elements like astrology, telepathy,
the paranormal, and so on.
We're an interesting network.''
For younger cyberians, Abraham's network provides an
invaluable template by which
they can direct their own activities. As Ralph would say, he
groks'' their experience; he
understands how these kids feel responsible for reshaping not only
their own reality but the
course of human history.
We have to consciously interact with the creation of the
future in order for it to be
other than it was.'' In past renaissances, each creative birth, each
intimation of what we can
call "fractal reality,'' was buried by a tremendous
counterrevolutionary force. What happened
with the Renaissance? Within 200 or 250 years, it was dead again.''
Society refused to cope
with Cyberia then. But the invention of the computer coupled with
the undeniable usefulness
and profound beauty of the fractal has made today's renaissance
impossible to resist.
Valley of the Nerds
Two men are staring into a computer screen at Apple's
research and development
branch. While the first, a computer nerd straight out of Central
Casting, mans the keyboard,
beside him sits the other, John Barlow, lyricist for the Grateful
Dead, psychedelics explorer,
and Wyoming rancher. They watch the colorful paisley patterns
representing fractal equations
swirl like the aftervisions of a psychedelic hallucination. Tiny
Martian colonies forming on an
eerie continental coastline. The computer operator magnifies one
tiny piece of the pattern, and
the detail expands to occupy the entire screen. Dancing
microorganisms cling to a blue coral
reef. The new patterns reflect the shape of the original picture. He
zooms in again and the
shapes are seen again and again. A supernova explodes into weather
system, then spirals back
down to the pods on the leaf of a fern plant. The two men witness
the creation and recreation
of universes.
Barlow scratches his whiskers and tips his cowboy hat.
It's like looking at the mind
of God.''
The nerd corrects him: It is the mind of God.''
And as the latest kiss between the worlds of science and
spirituality continues, the
fractal finds its way into the new American psychedelic folklore--as
evidenced by that
fractal-enhanced Grateful Dead ticket.
It's the morning after a Dead show, in fact, when the young
man who designed that
famous concert ticket unveils his latest invention for a small group
of friends gathered at his
Palo Alto home. Dan Kottke, who was one of the original Apple
engineers, left the company
and sold off his stock to launch his career as an independent
computer graphic designer. He
has just finished the prototype for his first effort: a small light-
up LED device that flashes
words and pictures. He plugs it in and the group watches it go
through its paces. It's not as
trippy as a fractal, but it's pretty mesmerizing all the same. So is
Kottke, who approaches the
psychedelic-spiritual search with the same patience and discipline
he'd use to assemble an
intricate circuit board.
When I was a freshman in college,'' he carefully removes
the wires from the back of
his invention, "I would take psychedelics and sit by myself for a
whole day. What I arrived at
was that cosmic consciousness was a completely normal thing that one
day everyone would
arrive at, if they would just sit and think clearly.''
Kottke, like many of the brilliant people at his home
today, sees Cyberia as a logical
result of psychedelics and rationality. That's how I became friends
with Steve Jobbs. We
used to take psychedelics together and talk about Buddhist
philosophy. I had no idea he was
connected with Woz [Steve Wozniak] or selling blue boxes [telephone
dialers that allow you
to make free calls] at the time. We just talked about
transcendentalism and Buddhism and
listened to Bob Dylan. It must have been his alter ego.''
Until Jobbs and Wozniak created the Apple personal
computer, cyberian computer
exploration was limited to the clunky and essentially unusable
Altair brand. It appealed to
the soldering iron kinds of hackers,'' explains Dan, "but not the
spiritual kind.'' So the very
invention of the personal computer, then, was in some ways
psychedelics-influenced. Maybe
that's why they called it Apple: the fruit of forbidden knowledge
brought down to the hands
of the consumer through the garage of a Reid College acid head? In
any case, the Apple gave
computing power and any associated spiritual insights to the public
and, most important, to
their children.
It's easy to understand why kids are better at learning to
use computers than adults.
Just like in the immigrant family who comes to America, it is the
children who learn the new
language first and best. When mainframe computers appeared in high
schools around the
country, it was the students, not the administrators, who became the
systems operators. This
set into a motion a revenge of the nerds'' on a scale we haven't
yet fully comprehended. But
when the computer industry was born and looking desperately for
skilled programmers and
developers, these kids were too young to be hired. The companies
turned instead to the acid
heads.
When your brain is forming,'' explains Kottke, using his
long fingers to draw pictures
in the oriental rug, "it makes axons that are long, linear things,
feeling their way to some part
of the brain very far away to get connected. Your consciousness
develops the same way. The
middle teen years are about making connections between things in
your mind like computers
and psychedelics and fractals and music.'' Everyone is staring at
the impression Dan's fingers
have left in the rug, relating the pattern he's drawn to the design
of the colorful weave
underneath.
Kottke's soft voice grounds the group in reality once
again. But this kind of thinking
is very easily discouraged. The quelling of creativity is like a
virus that gets passed down
generation to generation. Psychedelics can break that cycle.'' So,
according to firsthanders like
Kottke, everything old becomes new again, and the psychedelics
user's mind is rejuvenated to
its original ability to wander and wonder. The frames and systems of
logic one has been using
to organize experience fall away. What better language to adopt than
computer language,
which is also unfettered by prejudices, judgments and neuroses?
Consciousness is binary,'' poses Kottke, from a casual
lotus position. "It's essentially
digital.'' At least this is the way computers think.'' When
information is stored digitally rather
than in a picture, on a record, or even in a book of words, it is
broken down into a series of
yes/no's or dot/dashes. Things must be spelled out explicitly. The
computer functions purely
in duality but, unlike the human mind, has no interpretive grid.
One of the primary features of the psychedelic experience
as it relates to the human
computer hardware, believes Ron Lawrence, a Macintosh expert from
Los Angeles who
archives Tim Leary's writing, is that it reformats the hard disk
and clears out the ram.'' That
is, one's experience of life is reevalutated in an egoless context
and put into a new order. One
sees previously unrecognizable connections between parallel ways of
thinking, parallel
cultures, ideologies, stories, systems of logic, and philosophies.
Meanwhile, trivial cares of the
moment are given the opportunity to melt away (even if in the gut-
wrenching crucible of
intense introspection), and the tripper may reenter everyday life
without many of the cognitive
traps that previously dominated his interpretation of reality. In
other words, the tripper gains
the ability to see things in an unprejudiced manner, like the
computer does.
Just like the great chaos mathematicians, great programmers
must be able to come
from a point of total oblivion'' in order to fully grok cyber
language, and in the mid-1970s
and early 1980s, psychedelics users were the only qualified,
computer-literate people available
to rapidly growing companies trying to develop software and hardware
before their
competitors. In the field of pure research, no one cares what an
employee looks like or what
kinds of drugs he eats--it's creative output that matters. Steve
Jobbs felt this way, which is
why his Macintosh project at Apple was staffed mostly by tie-dye---
wearing young men.
Today, even executives at the more establishment-oriented computer
companies have been
forced to include psychedelics-influenced developers in their ranks.
Chris Krauskopf, manager of the Human Interface Program at
Intel, admits, Some of
the people here are very, very, very bright. They were bored in
school, and as a result they
hung out, took drugs, and got into computers.'' Luckily for them,
the drug tests that defense
contractors such as Intel are required to give their employees
cannot detect psychedelics,
which are taken in microdoses. As for marijuana tests, well, it's
gotten pretty easy to predict
when those are coming, and a phone call or two from personnel
executives to the right people
in Research and Development can easily give, say, forty-eight hours'
notice. ...
A high-level personnel executive from a major Southern
California defense contractor
admits that the company's biggest problem now is that alternative
culture members'' are
refusing to work for them. In a secret, off-the-record lunch talk,
the rather elderly gentleman
said, between sips of Earl Grey, that the "long hairs we've hired
have the ability to attack
computer problems from completely different angles. It would be
interesting to take the plans
of a stealth bomber and trace back each innovation to the computer
it was drawn on. I bet the
tie-dyes would win out over the pocket-protectors every time.''
According to him, the
company's biggest problem now is finding programmers willing to work
for a defense
industry contractor. They're all against the idea of making
weapons. We may not be able to
meet our production schedule--we may lose contracts--because we
can't get enough of them to
work for us.''
Marc de Groot, a programmer and virtual-reality designer
from San Francisco,
understands why companies in the defense industry might depend on
cyberians. My question
to you is: Which is the less moral of the two propositions: doing
drug testing on your
employees, or doing defense contracting in the first place? That's
the real question: Why are a
bunch of acid heads working for a company that makes weapons?'' De
Groot's two-bedroom
apartment in the hills is modestly appointed with furniture that
looks like leftovers from his
college dorm room. Trouble is, de Groot didn't go to college. After
three tries, he realized he
could learn more about computers by working for his university as a
programmer than by
taking their classes, so he dropped out as a student and dropped
back in as an employee.
I think that people who like to expand their minds with
things like higher math and
computers and media are fundamentally the same people who would want
to expand their
minds with anything available. But this is a very bad political
climate for talking about all
this. You can't mix a thing like drugs with any intellectual
endeavor and have it stay as
credible.'' Yet, de Groot's apartment--which has one small bedroom
dedicated to life's
comforts and the rest filled with computer hardware--shows many
signs of the alternative
culture he prefers to keep out of the public eye. Dan Kottke's
fractal Grateful Dead ticket is
pinned to the wall next to the computer on which de Groot designed
sound systems for VPL,
the leading "virtual reality'' interface design firm.
Psychedelics are a given in Silicon Valley. They are an
institution as established as
Intel, Stanford, marriage, or religion. The infrastructure has
accommodated them. Word of
which companies are cool'' and which are not spreads about as
rapidly as Dead tickets. De
Groot finds his "user-friendly'' employment opportunities on the
WELL, an acronym for
Whole Earth `Lectronic Link, or on other bulletin board services
(BBSs).
One of the articles that goes around on a regular basis is
a list of all the companies
that do urine testing in the Silicon Valley. So you can look it up
ahead of time and decide
that you don't want to apply. Computer programmers have set up this
information service
because they know that a lot of their friends and they themselves
use these drugs.''
De Groot pauses. He is careful not to implicate himself,
but his emotions are running
high. And even more than that, people who don't use the drugs are
outraged because of the
invasion of privacy. They just feel like it's an infringement on
civil liberties. And I think
they're right. I have a friend who applied simultaneously at Sun
Micro Systems and Xerox
Park, Palo Alto Research Center. And he found out--and he's someone
who uses drugs--he
found out that Xerox Park was gonna do a urine test so he dried out
and he went in and did
the urine test and passed and then they offered him the job, and he
said, `I'm not taking the
job because you people do urine testing and I'm morally opposed to
it,' and he went to work
for Sun. Sun does not do urine testing. They're very big on not
doing it. I think it's great.''
Not surprisingly, Sun Micro Systems' computers run some of
the most advanced
fractal graphics programs, and Intel--which is also quite Deadhead-
friendly,'' is an industry
leader in experimental technologies like virtual reality. The
companies that lead in the Valley
of the Nerds are the ones that recognize the popularity of
psychedelics among their
employees. Still, although they have contributed to or perhaps even
created the computer
revolution, psychedelics-using cyberians feel like a persecuted sect
in an oppressive ancient
society that cannot see its own superstitious paranoia. As an
engineer at a Microsoft research
facility complains, drug testing makes her feel like the "target
victim of an ancient voodoo
spell.''
From the cyberian perspective, that's exactly what's going
on; so computer
programmers must learn not to give any hair or bodily fluids to
their employers. The
confiscated parts are being analyzed in scientific rituals'' that
look into the employee's past
and determine whether she has engaged in her own rituals--like
smoking pot--that have been
deemed heretical by the dominating religious body. In this case,
that dominating body is the
defense industry, and the heretics are pot smokers and psychedelics
users, who have
demonstrated a propensity to question the justifiability of the war
machine.
CHAPTER 3
The Global Electronic Village
Persecution of psychedelics users has fostered the
development of a cyberian computer
subculture. De Groot is a model citizen of the cyber community and
dedicates his time,
money, and equipment to fostering the Global Electronic Village.''
One system he developed,
which takes up almost half his apartment, is an interface between a
ham radio and a
computer.
He eats an ice cream from the shop downstairs as he
explains how his intention in
building the interface was to provide ham radio operators with
access to the electronic mail
services of UNIX systems to other sites on the Internet. My terminal
is up twenty-four hours
a day. It was never done before, it was fun to do, it gave me the
ability to learn about
electronic mail, and it provided a service.'' No profit? "You could
make money off of it, I
suppose, but my specific concern was to advance the state of the
radio art.''
It's hard to keep in mind that young men like de Groot are
not just exploring the
datasphere but actively creating the networks that make it up. This
is not just a hobby or
weekend pastime; this is the construction of the future.
De Groot views technology as a way to spread the notion of
interconnectedness. We
don't have the same distance between us anymore. Camcorders have
changed everything.
Whenever something happens in the world, chances are that someone's
around with a
camcorder to tape it. We're all neighbors in a little village, as it
were.'' Even de Groot's more
professional endeavors have been geared toward making computers more
accessible to the
community at large. The success of the cyberian paradigm is
dependent on regular people
learning to work with the technologies developed by vanguard,
countercultural entrepreneurs
and designers.
If you don't adhere to the new paradigm then you're not
going to survive.'' De Groot
puts down his ice cream spoon to make the point. "It's sink or swim.
People who refuse to
get involved with computers now are hurting themselves, not anybody
else. In a very loose
sense, they are at a disadvantage survival-wise. Their ability to
have a good-quality life will
be lessened by their reluctance to get with the program.''
Getting with the program is just a modem away. This simple
device literally plugs a
user in to cyberspace. Cyberspace, or the datasphere, consists of
all the computers that are
attached to phone lines or to one another directly. If a computer by
itself can be likened to a
cassette deck, having a modem turns it into a two-way radio. After
the first computer nets
between university and military research facilities went up,
scientists and other official
subscribers began to post'' their most recent findings to databases
accessible to everyone on
the system. Now, if someone at, say, Stanford discovers a new way to
make a fission reactor,
scientists and developers around the world instantly know of the
find. They also have a way
of posting their responses to the development for everyone to see,
or the option of sending a
message through electronic mail, or "E-mail,'' which can be read
only by the intended
recipient. So, for example, a doctor at Princeton sees the posting
from Stanford. A list of
responses and commentary appears after the Stanford announcement, to
which the Princeton
doctor adds his questions about the validity of the experiment.
Meanwhile, he E-mails his
friends at a big corporation that Stanford's experiment was carried
out by a lunatic and that
the corporation should cease funding that work.
The idea of networking through the computer quickly spread.
Numerous public
bulletins boards sprang up, as well as information services like
Compuserve and Prodigy.
Information services are large networks of databanks that a user can
call through the modem
and access everything from stock market reports and Macintosh
products updates to back
issues of newspapers and Books in Print. Ted Nelson, the inventor of
hypertext, an early but
unprecentedly user-friendly way of moving through files, has been
working for the past
decade or so on the ultimate database, a project aptly named
Xanadu.'' His hope is to
compile a database of--literally--everything, and all of the
necessary software to protect
copyrights, make royalty payments, and myriad other legal functions.
Whether or not a
storehouse like Xanadu is even possible, the fact that someone is
trying, and being supported
by large, Silicon Valley businesses like Autodesk, a pioneer in
user-interface and cyberspace
technology, legitimizes the outlook that one day all data will be
accessible from any
node--any single computer--in the matrix. The implications for the
legal community are an
endless mire of property, privacy, and information issues, usually
boiling down to one of the
key conflicts between pre- and postcyberian mentality: Can data be
owned, or is it free for
all? Our ability to process data develops faster than our ability to
define its fair use.
The best place to watch people argue about these issues is
on public bulletin boards
like the Whole Earth `Lectronic Link. In the late 1970s, public and
private bulletin board
services sprang up as a way for computer users to share information
and software over phone
lines. Some were like clubs for young hackers called k�dz kidz, who
used BBSs to share
anything from Unix source code to free software to recently cracked
phone numbers of
corporate modems. Other BBSs catered to specialized users' groups,
like Macintosh users,
IBM users, software designers, and even educators. Eventually,
broad-based bulletin board
services, including the WELL, opened their phone lines for members
to discuss issues, create
E-mail addresses, share information, make announcements, and network
personally, creatively,
and professionally.
The WELL serves as a cyber-village hall. As John Barlow
explains, In this silent
world, all conversation is typed. To enter it, one forsakes both
body and place and becomes a
thing of words alone. You can see what your neighbors are saying (or
recently said), but not
what either they or their physical surroundings look like. Town
meetings are continuous and
discussions rage on everything from sexual kinks to depreciation
schedules.''
The discussions on the WELL are organized into conferences.
These conferences are
broken down into topics, which themselves are made up of individual
responses. For example,
there's a conference called EFF, which is dedicated to discussing
issues related to Electronic
Frontiers Foundation, a group that is attempting to develop legal
frameworks for
cyberactivities. If you browse the topics on the EFF conference, you
will see a list of the
conversations now going on. (Now is a tricky word. It's not that
users are continuously
plugged in to the conference and having a real-time discussion.
Conversations occur over a
period of days, weeks, or months.) They might be about Copyright
and Electronic Mail,'' or
"Sentencing of Hackers,'' or even Virtual Sex!''
Once you pick a topic in which to participate, you read an
opening statement that
describes the topic or issues being discussed. It may be as simple
as, I just read The
Turbulent Mirror by Briggs and Peat. Is anyone interested in
discussing the implications of
chaos math on Western philosophy?'' or, "I'm thinking of buying a
hydroponic system for
growing sensemilla. Any advice?'' Other interested participants then
enter their responses, one
after the other, which are numbered in the order entered.
Conversations can drift into related
or unrelated areas or even lead to the creation of new topics. All
participants are required to
list themselves by name and user identification (userid) so that
someone may E-mail a
response directly to them rather than post it on the topic for
everyone to see. The only rule on
the WELL is, you own your own words,'' which means that anything
someone posts onto the
WELL remains his own property, so to speak, and that no one may
exploit another user's
words without permission.
But the WELL is not a dry, computery place. Once on the
WELL, there's a tangible
feeling of being plugged in'' to a cyber community. One develops a
cyber personality
unencumbered by his looks and background and defined entirely by his
entries to topics. The
references he makes to literature, the media, religion, his friends,
his lifestyle, and his
priorities create who he is in cyberspace. One can remain on the
sidelines watching others
make comments, or one can dive in and participate.
Cyberspace as Chaos
The danger of participation is that there are hundreds or
even thousands of potentially
critical eyes watching every entry. A faulty fact will be
challenged, a lie will be uncovered,
plagiarism will be discovered. Cyberspace is a truth serum.
Violations of cyber morality or
village ethics are immediately brought to light and passed through
the circuits of the entire
datasphere at lightning speed. A store with a bad returns policy
that cheats a WELL user has
its indiscretions broadcast globally within minutes. Information
about crooked politicians,
drug conspiracies, or other news stories that might be censored from
sponsored media outlets
finds an audience in cyberspace.
The cyber community has been made possible by the advent of
the personal computer
and the telecommunications network. Other major contributors include
television and the
satellite system as well as the appearance of consumer-grade video
equipment, which has
made it more than likely for police indiscretions to occur within
shooting range of a
camcorder. The cyber revolution has made the world a smaller place.
Just as a company
called TRW can expose anyone's economic history, links like the
WELL, UseNet, or even
CNN can expose TRW, too. Access to cyberspace--formerly reserved for
the military or
advanced scientific research--now alters the context in which many
individuals relate to the
world.
Members of the Global Village see themselves as part of a
fractal event. The virtual
community even incorporates and promotes many of the principles of
chaos mathematics on
social and political levels. A tiny, remote voice criticizing the
ethics of a police action or the
validity of an experimental result gets heard and iterated
throughout the net.
Ultimately, the personal computer and its associated
technologies may be our best
access points to Cyberia. They even serve as a metaphor for
cyberians who have nothing to
do with computers but who look to the net as a model for human
interaction. It allows for
communication without the limitations of time or space, personality
or body, religion or
nationality. The vast computer-communications network is a fractal
approach to human
consciousness. It provides the means for complex and immediate
feedback and iteration, and
is even self-similar in its construction, with giant networks
mirroring BBSs, mirroring users'
own systems, circuit boards, and components that themselves mirror
each participant's own
neural biocircuitry. In further self-similarity, the monitors on
some of these computers depict
complex fractal patterns mirroring the psychedelics-induced
hallucinations of their designers,
and graphing--for the first time--representations of existence as a
chaotic system of feedback
and iteration.
The datasphere is a hardwiring of the planet itself,
providing ways of distributing and
iterating information throughout the net. To join in, one needs only
to link up. Or is it really
that easy?
Arbitrating Anarchy
David Gans, host of The Grateful Dead Hour (the national
radio program that our
Columbia University hacker taped a few nights ago) is having a
strange week. The proposal
he's writing for his fourth Grateful Dead book is late, he still has
to go into the studio to
record his radio show, his band rehearsal didn't get out until close
to dawn, and something
odd is occurring on the WELL this morning. Gans generally spends at
least several hours a
day sitting in his Oakland studio apartment, logged onto the WELL. A
charter member of the
original WELL bulletin board, he's since become host of dozens of
conferences and topics
ranging from the Grateful Dead to the Electronic Frontiers
Foundation. In any given week,
he's got to help guide hundreds or even thousands of computer
interchanges. But this week
there are even more considerations. An annoying new presence has
made itself known on the
WELL: a user calling himself Stink.''
Stink showed up late one night in the Grateful Dead
conference, insisting to all the
Deadheads that Jerry Garcia stinks.'' In the name of decorum and
tolerance, the Deadheads
decided among themselves to ignore the prankster. "Maybe he'll get
bored and go away,''
Gans repeatedly suggested. WELLbeings enjoy thinking of the WELL as
a loving, anarchic
open house, and resort to blocking someone out completely only if
he's truly dangerous.
Stealing passwords or credit card numbers, for example, is a much
more excommunicable
deed than merely annoying people with nasty comments.
But today David Gans's electronic mailbox is filled with
messages from angry female
WELLbeings. Stink has begun doing sends''--immediate E-mail
messages that appear on the
recipient's screen with a "beep,'' interrupting whatever she is
doing. People usually use sends
when they notice that a good friend has logged on and want to
experience a brief, live''
interchange. No one "sends'' a stranger. But, according to Gans's E-
mail, females logged on to
the WELL are receiving messages like Wanna dance?'' or "Your place
or mine?'' on their
screens, and have gotten a bit irked. Anonymous phone calls can
leave a girl feeling chilly, at
the very least. This is somehow an even greater violation of
privacy. From reading the girl's
postings, he knows her name, the topics she enjoys, how she feels
about issues; if he's a
hacker, who knows how much more he knows?
David realizes that giving Stink the silent treatment isn't
working. But what to do? He
takes it to the WELL staff, who, after discussing the problem with
several other distressed
topic hosts, decide to put Stink into a problem shell.'' Whenever
he tries to log on to the
WELL, he'll receive a message to call the main office and talk to a
staff member. Until he
does so, he is locked out of the system.
Stink tries to log on and receives the message, but he
doesn't call in. Days pass. The
issue seems dead. But topics about Stink and the implications of his
mischievous presence
begin to spring up all over the WELL. Many applaud the banishment of
Stink, while others
warn that this is the beginning of censorship. How,'' someone asks,
"can we call ourselves an
open, virtual community if we lock out those who don't communicate
the way we like? Think
of how many of us could have been kicked off the WELL by the same
logic?'' What are we,
Carebears?'' another retorts. "This guy was sick!''
David lets the arguments continue, defending the WELL
staff's decision-making
process where he can, stressing how many painful hours were spent
deliberating on this issue.
Meanwhile, though, he begins to do some research of his own and
notices that Stink's last
name--not a common one--is the same as another user of the WELL
called Bennett. David
takes a gamble and E-mails Bennett, who tells him that he's seen
Stink's postings but that
there's no relation.
But the next day, there's a new, startling addition to a
special confession'' conference:
Bennett admits that he is Stink. Stink's WELL account had been
opened by Bennett's brother
but never used. Bennett reopened the account and began using it as a
joke, to vent his "alter
ego.'' Free of his regular identity, he could be whoever he wanted
and act however he dared
with no personal repercussions. What had begun as a kind of thought
experiment or acting
exercise had soon gotten out of hand. The alter ego went out of
control. Bennett, it turns out,
was a mild-mannered member of conferences like Christianity, and in
his regular persona had
even consoled a fellow WELLbeing after her husband died. Bennett is
not a hacker-kid; he
has a wife and children, a job, a religion, a social conscience, and
a fairly quiet disposition.
He begs for the forgiveness of other WELLbeings and says he
confessed because he felt so
guilty lying to David Gans about what had happened. He wants to
remain a member of the
cyber community and eventually regain the trust of WELLbeings.
Some WELLbeings believe Bennett and forgive him. Others do
not. He just confessed
because he knows you were on to him, David. Good work.'' Some
suggest a suspension, or
even a community service sentence: "Isn't there some administrative
stuff he can do at the
WELL office as penance?''
But most people just wonder out loud about the strange
cyber experience of this
schizoid WELLbeing, and what it means for the Global Village at
large. Was Bennett like
this all the time and Stink merely a suppressed personality, or did
Cyberia affect his psyche
adversely, creating Stink where he didn't exist before? How
vulnerable are the rest of us when
one goes off his virtual rocker? Do the psychology and neurosis of
everyday real-life human
interactions need to follow us into cyberspace, or is there a way to
leave them behind? Just
how intimate can we get through our computers, and at what cost?
CHAPTER 4
Interfacing with the Technosphere
The evolution of computer and networking technology can be
seen as a progression
toward more user-friendly interfaces that encourage hypertext-style
participation of both the
computer illiterate and those who wish to interact more intimately
in Cyberia than can be
experienced by typing on a keyboard. DOS-style printed commands were
replaced by the
Macintosh interface in the late 1970s. Instead of typing
instructions to the computer, users
were encouraged to click and drag icons representing files across
their screens and put them
wherever they wanted, using the now-famous mouse. But this has all
changed again with the
development of virtual reality, the computer interface that promises
to bring us into the
matrix--mind, body, and soul.
VR, as it's called, replaces the computer screen with a set
of 3-D, motion-sensitive
goggles, the speaker with a set of 3-D headphones, and the mouse
with a glove or tracking
ball. The user gains the ability to move through a real or fictional
space without using
commands, text, or symbols. You put on the goggles, and you see a
building, for example.
You walk'' with your hand toward the doorway, open the door, and
you're inside. As you do
all this, you see the door approaching in complete perspective. Once
you open the door, you
see the inside of the building. As you turn your head to the left,
you see what's to the left. As
you look up, you see the ceiling. As you look to the right, let's
say, you see a painting on the
wall. It's a picture of a forest. You walk to the painting, but you
don't stop. You go into the
painting. Then you're in the forest. You look up, see the sun
through the trees, and hear the
wind rustle through the leaves. Behind you, you hear a bird
chirping.
Marc de Groot (the Global Village ham radio interface) was
responsible for that
behind you'' part. His work involved the creation of 3-D sound that
imitates the way the
body detects whether a sound is coming from above, below, in front,
or behind. To him, VR
is a milestone in human development.
Virtual reality is a way of mass-producing direct
experience. You put on the goggles
and you have this world around you. In the beginning, there were
animals, who had nothing
but their experience. Then man came along, who processes reality in
metaphors. We have
symbology. One thing stands for another. Verbal noises stand for
experience, and we can
share experience by passing this symbology back and forth. Then the
Gutenberg Press
happened, which was the opportunity to mass-produce symbology for
the first time, and that
marked a real change. And virtual reality is a real milestone too,
because we're now able for
the first time to mass-produce the direct experience. We've come
full circle.''
Comparisons with the Renaissance abound in discussions of
VR. Just as the 3-D
holograph serves as our cultural and scientific equivalent of the
Renaissance's perspective
painting, virtual reality stands as a 1990s computer equivalent of
the original literacy
movement. Like the printing press did nearly five hundred years ago,
VR promises pop
cultural access to information and experience previously reserved
for experts.
De Groot's boss at VPL, Jaron Lanier, paints an even rosier
picture of VR and its
impact on humanity at large. In his speaking tours around the world,
the dredlocked inventor
explains how the VR interface is so transparent that it will make
the computer disappear. Try
to remember the world before computers. Try to remember the world of
dreaming, when you
dreamed and it was so. Remember the fluidity that we experienced
before computers. Then
you'll be able to grasp VR.'' But the promise of virtual reality and
its current level of
development are two very different things. Most reports either glow
about future possibilities
or rag on the crudeness of today's gear. Lanier has sworn off
speaking to the media for
precisely that reason.
There's two levels of virtual reality. One is the ideas,
and the other is the actual gear.
The gear is early, all right? But these people from Time magazine
came in last week and said,
`Well, this stuff's really overblown,' and my answer's like, `Who's
overblowing it?'--you
know? It reminds me of an interview with Paul McCartney in the
sixties where some guy
from the BBC asked him if he did any illegal activities, and he
answered, `Well, actually,
yes.' And the reporter asked `Don't you think that's horrible to be
spreading such things to the
youth of the country?' and he said, `I'm not doing that. You're
doing that.' ''
But the press and the public can't resist. The promise of
VR is beyond imagination.
Sure, it makes it possible to simulate the targeting and blow-up of
an Iraqi power plant, but
as a gateway to Cyberia itself, well ... the possibilities are
endless. Imagine, for example, a
classroom of students with a teacher, occurring in real time. The
students are from twelve
different countries, each plugged in to a VR system, all modemed to
the teacher's house. They
sit around a virtual classroom, see one another and the teacher. The
teacher explains that
today's topic is the Colosseum in ancient Rome. She holds up a map
of ancient Rome and
says, Let's go.'' The students fly over the skyline of the ancient
city, following their teacher.
"Stay together now,'' she says, pointing out the Colosseum and
explaining why it was
positioned across town from the Forum. The class lands at the main
archway to the
Colosseum. Let's go inside ...'' You get the idea.
More amazing to VR enthusiasts is the technology's ability
to provide access to places
the human body can't go, granting new perspectives on old problems
much in the way that
systems math provides planners with new outlooks on currents that
don't follow the
discovered patterns.
Warren Robinett, manager of the Head-Mounted Display
Project at the University of
North Carolina, explains how the strength of VR is that it allows
the user to experience the
inside of a cell, an anthill, or the shape of a galaxy:
Virtual reality will prove to be a more compelling fantasy
world than Nintendo, but
even so, the real power of the head-mounted display is that it can
help you perceive the real
world in ways that were previously impossible. To see the invisible,
to travel at the speed of
light, to shrink yourself into microscopic worlds, to relive
experiences--these are the powers
that the head-mounted display offers you. Though it sounds like
science fiction today,
tomorrow it will seem as commonplace as talking on the telephone.''
One of these still fictional interface ideas is called
wireheading.'' This is a new branch
of computer technology where designers envision creating hardware
that wires the computer
directly to the brain. The user literally plugs wires into his own
head, or has a microchip and
transmitter surgically implanted inside the skull. Most realistic
visions of wireheading involve
as-yet univented biological engineering techniques where brain cells
would be coaxed to link
themselves to computer chips, or where organic matter would be
grafted onto computer chips
which could then be attached to a person's nerve endings. This
"wetware,'' as science fiction
writers call it, would provide a direct, physical interface between
a human nervous system on
one side, and computer hardware on the other. The computer
technology for such an interface
is here; the understanding of the human nervous system is not.
Although Jaron Lanier's company is working on nerve chip''
that would communicate
directly with the brain, he's still convinced that the five senses
provide the best avenues for
interface.
There's no difference between the brain and the sense
organs. The body is a
continuity. Perception begins in the retina. Mind and body are one.
You have this situation
where millions of years of evolution have created this creature.
What is this creature aside
from the way it interfaces with the rest of creation? And how do you
interface? Through the
sense organs! So the sense organs are almost a better defining point
than any other spot in the
creature. They're central to identity and define our mode of being.
We're visual, tactile, audio
creatures. The whole notion of bypassing the senses is sort of like
throwing away the actual
treasure.''
Still, the philosophical implications of a world beyond the
five senses are irresistible,
and have drawn into the ring many worthy contenders to compete for
the title of VR
spokesperson. The most vibrant is probably Timothy Leary, whose ride
on the crest of the VR
wave has brought him back on the scene with the zeal of John the
Baptist preparing the way
for Christ, or a Harvard psychology professor preparing the
intelligentsia for LSD.
Just as the fish donned skin to walk the earth, and man
donned a space suit to walk
in space, we'll now don cyber suits to walk in Cyberia. In ten years
most of our daily
operations, occupational, educational, and recreational, will
transpire in Cyberia. Each of us
will be linked in thrilling cyber exchanges with many others whom we
may never meet in
person. Fact-to-face interactions will be reserved for special,
intimate, precious,
sacramentalized events.''
Leary sees VR as an empowerment of the individual against
the brainwashing forces
of industrial slavedriving and imperialist expansion:
By the year 2000, the I.C. (inner city) kid will slip on
the EyePhone, don a
form-fitting computer suit, and start inhabiting electronic
environments either self-designed or
pulled up from menus. At 9:00 a.m. she and her friend in Tokyo will
meet in an electronic
simulation of Malibu Beach for a flirtatious moment. At 9:30 a.m.
she will meet her biology
teacher in an electronic simulation of the heart for a hands-on `you
are there' tutorial trip
down the circulatory system. At 10:00 a.m. she'll be walking around
medieval Verona with
members of her English literature seminar to act out a scene from
Romeo and Juliet. At 11:00
A.M. she'll walk onto an electronic tennis court for a couple of
sets with her pal in Managua.
At noon, she'll take off her cyberwear and enjoy a sensual, tasty
lunch with her family in
their nonelectronic kitchen.''
What was that part about Malibu Beach--the flirtatious
moment? Sex, in VR? Lanier
readily admits that VR can provide a reality built for two: It's
usually kind of shocking how
harmonious it is, this exposure of a collective energy between
people. And so a similar thing
would happen in a virtual world, where there's a bunch of people in
it, and they're all making
changes at once. These collective changes will emerge, which might
be sort of like the
Jungian level of virtual reality.'' Users will literally "see'' what
the other means. Lanier's trick
answer to the question of sex is, I think everything in virtual
reality is sexual. It's eroticizing
every moment, because it's all, like, creative.'' But that answer
doesn't satisfy true cyber
fetishists. If a cyber suit with full tactile stimulation is
possible, then so should be cyber sex!
A conversation about teledildonics, as it's been called, gets VR
enthusiasts quite heated up.
Loading Worlds
We're at Bryan Hughes's house, headquarters of the
Renaissance Foundation, a group
dedicated to fostering the growth of the VR interface for artists
and educators. Bryan has just
unpacked some crates from Chris Krauskopf at Intel, which include a
computer, a VR system
designed by Eric Gullichsen called Sense8, and the prototype of a
new kind of helmet-goggles
combination. As Bryan searches through the crates for an important
piece of connective
hardware, the rest of us, who have been invited to try out the
potentially consumer-grade VR,
muse on the possibilities of virtual sex.
Dan, an architecture student at Berkeley with a penchant
for smart drugs,'' begins.
"They're working on something called `smart skin,' which is kind of
a rubber for your whole
body that you slip into, and with gel and electrodes it can register
all your body movements
and at the same time feed back to you any skin sensations it wants
you to feel. If you pick up
a virtual cup, it will send back to you the feeling of the texture
of the cup, the weight,
everything.''
So this skin could also imitate the feeling of ... ?'' I
venture.
A girl,'' answers Harding, a graphic designer who makes
hand-outs, T-shirts, and
flyers for many of the acid house clubs in the Bay Area. "It would
go like this: you either
screw your computer, or screw someone else by modem. If you do your
computer, you just
call some girl out of its memory. Your cyber suit'll take you there.
If you do it the phone-sex
way, the girl--or guy or anything out there, actually--there could
be a guy who's virtual
identity is a girl or a spider even--''
You could look like--be anyone you wanted--'' Dan chimes
in. "And then--''
Harding nods. Every command you give the computer as a
movement of your body is
translated onto her suit as a touch or whatever, then back to your
suit for the way her body
feels, the way she reacts, and so on.''
But she can make her skin feel like whatever she wants to.
She can program in fur,
and that's what she'll feel like to you.''
My head is spinning. The possibilities are endless in a
sexual designer reality.... But
then I begin to worry about those possibilities. And--could there be
such a thing as virtual
rape? Virtual muggings or murder through tapped phone lines?...
These scenarios recede into
the distant future as Bryan comes back into the room. The chrome
connector he has been
searching for is missing, so we'll have to make do with masking
tape.
We each take turns trying on the new VR helmet. Using the
latest sonar technology, it
senses the head position of the operator through a triangular bar
fitted with tiny microphones.
The triangle must be mounted on a pole several feet above the
helmet-wearing user--a great
idea except the little piece that connects the triangle thing to the
pole is missing. But Bryan's
masking tape holds the many-thousand dollar strip of hardware
safely, and I venture into the
electronic realm.
The demo tour is an office. No virtual sex. No virtual
landscape. But it looks 3-D
enough. Bryan hands me the joystick that is used in this system
instead of VPL's more
expensive glove controller. Bryan's manner is caring, almost
motherly. He's introduced
thousands to VR at conventions with Tim Leary across the country and
even in Japan, yet it's
as if he's still sensitive to the fact that this is my first
time.'' It seems more like a video game
than anything else, and I flash on Craig Neidorf wandering through
mazes, looking for
magical objects. Then Bryan realizes that I haven't moved, and
gently coaxes me to push
forward on the joystick. My body jolts as I fly toward the desk in
front of me. Bryan watches
my progress through a TV monitor next to the computer, which
displays a two-dimensional
version of what I'm seeing.
That's right,'' he encourages, "it only needs a little
push.'' I ease back on the virtual
throttle and guide myself around the room. You can move your
head,'' he suggests with calm
reassurance. As I turn my head, the world whizzes by in a blur, but
quickly settles down.
"The frame rate is still slow on this machine.'' That's what
accounts for the strobelike effect
as I swivel my head too quickly. The computer needs to create a new
picture every time I
move, and the illusion of continuity--essentially the art of
animation--is dependent on flashing
by as many pictures per second as possible. I manage to work my way
around the desk and
study a painting on the wall. Remembering what I've been told about
VR, I walk into the
painting. Nothing happens. Everything turns blue.
He walked into the painting,'' remarks one of the peanut
gallery watching my
progress. "Push reset.''
That's not one of the ones you can walk into,'' Bryan
tells me as he punches some
commands into the computer. "Let's try a different world.''
'LOADING WORLD 1203.WLD'
blinks on the screen as the hard drive grinds a new set of
pictures into the RAM of
the machine.
Now I'm in an art gallery, and the paintings do work. I
rush toward a picture of stars
and galaxies, but I overshoot it. I go straight up into the air
(there is no ceiling here), and I'm
flying above the museum now, looking at the floor below me. With
Bryan's guidance, I'm
back on the ground. Why don't you go into the torus,'' he suggests.
"It's neat in there.'' A
torus is a three-dimensional shape from systems math, the model for
many different chaos
attractors. Into the doughnut-shaped VR object I go.
Even the jaded VR veterans gather around to see what the
torus looks like from inside,
I steer through the cosmic shape, which is textured in what looks
like a galactic geometry of
clouds and light. As I float, I feel my body making the movements,
too. The illusion is
working, and an almost out-of-body sensation takes over. I dive then
spiral up. The stars
swirl. I've got it now and this world is mine. I glide forward and
up, starting a loop de loop
when--
Blue.
Shit.'' Bryan punches in some commands but it's no use.
There's a glitch in the
program somewhere.
But while it lasted, the VR experience was like getting a
glimpse of another
world--one which might not be too unlike our own. The illusion of VR
worked better the
more I could control my movement. As scientists have observed, the
more dexterity a person
experiences in a virtual world, the sharper he will experience the
focus of the pictures. The
same computer image looks clearer when you can move your head to see
different parts.
There is no real reason for this phenomenon. Lanier offers one
explanation:
In order to see, you have to move your head. Your head is
not a passive camera
mount, like a tripod or something holding your eyes up. Your head is
like a spy submarine:
it's always bobbing and looking around, performing a million little
experiments a second,
lining things up in the environment. Creating your world. That level
of interactivity is
essential to the most basic seeing. As you turn on the head-tracking
feature in the
Head-Mounted Display [the feature that allows you to effect where
you're looking] there's a
subjective increase in the resolution of the display. A very clear
demonstration of the power
of interactivity in the lowest level of perception.''
And a very clear demonstration of the relationship of human
perception to the outside
world, casting further doubt on the existence of any objective
physical reality. In Cyberia at
least, reality is directly dependent on our ability to actively
participate in its creation.
Designer reality must be interactive rather than passive. The user
must be part of the iterative
equation. Just as Craig Neidorf was most fascinated by the parts of
his Adventure video game
that were not in the instructions, cyberians need to see themselves
as the source of their own
experience.
Get Virtual with Tim!
Friday. Tim Leary's coming to town to do a VR lecture, and
the Renaissance
Foundation is throwing him a party in cooperation with Mondo 2000
magazine--the voice of
cyber culture. It's downstairs at Big Heart City, a club south of
Market Street in the new
warehouse/artist district of San Francisco, masterminded by Mark
Renney, cyber culture's
interface to the city's politicians and investors. Entrance with or
without an invite is five
dollars--no exceptions, no guest list. Cheap enough to justify
making everyone pay, which
actually brings in a greater profit than charging fifteen dollars to
outsiders, who at event like
this are outnumbered by insiders. Once past the gatekeepers, early
guests mill about the large
basement bar, exchanging business cards and E-mail addresses, or
watching Earth Girl, a
colorfully dressed cyber hippy, set up her Smart Drugs Bar, which
features an assortment of
drinks made from neuroenhancers dissolved into fruit juice.
Tim arrives with R. U. Sirius, the famously trollish editor
of Mondo 2000, and is
immediately swamped by inventors, enthusiastic heads, and a cluster
of well-proportioned
college girls. Everyone either wants something from Tim or has
something for Tim. Leary's
eyes dart about, looking for someone or something to act as a buffer
zone. R. U., having
vanished into the crowd, is already doing some sort of media
interview. Tim recognizes me
from a few parties in LA, smiles, and shakes my hand. You're, umm--
''
Doug Rushkoff.'' Leary pulls me to his side, manages to
process the entire crowd of
givers and takers--with my and a few others' help--in about ten
minutes. A guy from NASA
has developed 3-D slides of fractal pictures. Leary peaks through
the prototype viewfinder,
says "Wow!'' then hands it to me. This is Doug Rushkoff, he's
writing a book. What do you
think, Doug?'' Then he's on to the next one. An interview for
Japanese TV? "Sure. Call me at
the hotel. Bryan's got the number.'' Never been down to Intel--it's
the greatest company in
the world. E-mail me some details!'' Tim is "on,'' but on edge, too.
He's mastered the art of
interfacing without engaging, then moving on without insulting, but
it seems that this
frequency of interactions per minute is taking a heavy toll on him.
He spews superlatives
( That's the best 3-D I've ever seen!''), knowing that overkill will
keep the suitors satisfied
longer. He reminds me of the bartender at an understaffed wedding
reception, who gives the
guests extrastrong drinks so they won't come back for more so soon.
As a new onslaught of admirers appears, between the heads
of the ones just processed,
Bryan Hughes's gentle arm finds Tim's shoulder. The system's ready.
Why don't you come
try it?''
In the next room, Bryan has set up his VR gear. Tim is
escorted past a long line of
people patiently waiting for their first exposure to cyberspace, and
he's fitted into the gear.
Next to him and the computer stands a giant video projection of the
image Tim is seeing
through his goggles. I can't tell if he's blown away or just selling
the product--or simply
enjoying the fact that as long as he's plugged in he doesn't have to
field any more of the
givers and takers. As he navigates through the VR demo, the crowd
oohs and ahhs his every
decision. Let's get virtual with Tim! Tim nears the torus. People
cheer. Tim goes into the
torus. People scream. Tim screams. Tim dances and writhes like he's
having an orgasm.
This is sick,'' says Troy, one of my connections to the
hacker underworld in the Bay
Area, whom I had interviewed that afternoon. "We're going now. ...''
Troy had offered to let
me come along with him and his friends on a real-life crack'' if I
changed the names, burned
the phone numbers, etc., to protect their anonymity.
Needles and PINs
Troy had me checked out that afternoon through the various
networks, and I guess I
came up clean enough, or dirty enough to pass the test. Troy and I
hop into his van, where
his friends await us. Simon and Jack, a cracker and a videographer
respectively, are students
at a liberal arts college in the city. (Troy had dropped out of
college the second week and
spent his education loan on army surplus computer equipment.)
Troy puts the key in the ignition but doesn't crank the
engine. They want you to
smoke a joint first.''
I really don't smoke pot anymore,'' I confess.
It proves you're not a cop,'' says Jack, whose scraggly
beard and muscular build
suddenly trigger visions of myself being hacked or even cracked to
death. I take the roach
from Simon, the youngest of the trio, who is clad in an avocado
green polyester jumpsuit.
With the first buzz of California sensemilla, I try to decide if his
garb is an affectation for the
occasion or legitimate new edge nerdiness. Then the van takes off
out of the alley behind the
club, and I switch on my pocket cassette recorder as the sounds of
Tim Leary and Big Heart
City fade in the night.
I'm stoned by the time we get to the bank. It's on a very
nice street in Marin County.
Bank machines in better neighborhoods don't have cameras in them,''
Jack tells me as we
pull up.
Simon has gone over the scheme twice, but he won't let me
tape his voice; and I'm too
buzzed to remember what he's saying. (Plus, he's speaking about
twice the rate of normal
human beings--due in part to the speed he injected into his thigh.)
What he's got in his hands
now is a black plastic box about the size of two decks of cards with
a slit going through it.
Inside this box is the magnetic head from a tape deck, recalibrated
somehow to read the
digital information on the back of bank cards. Simon affixes some
double-stick black tape to
one side of the box, then slides open the panel door of the van and
goes to the ATM
machine. Troy explains to me how the thing works:
Simon's putting our card reader just over the slot where
you normally put your card
in. It's got a RAM chip that'll record the ID numbers of the cards
as they're inserted. It's thin
enough that the person's card will still hit the regular slot and
get sucked into the machine.''
Won't people notice the thing?'' I ask.
People don't notice shit, anymore,'' says Jack, who is
busy with his video equipment.
"They're all hypnotized.''
How do you get their PIN number?'' I inquire.
Watch.'' Jack chuckles as he mounts a 300mm lens to his
Ikegami camera. He patches
some wires as Simon hops back into the van. "I'll need your seat.''
I switch places with Jack, who mounts his camera on a tiny
tripod, then places it on
the passenger seat of the van. Troy joins me in the back, and Jack
takes the driver seat.
Switch on the set,'' orders Jack, as he plugs something
into the cigarette lighter. A
Sony monitor bleeps on, and Jack focuses in on the keypad of the ATM
machine. Suddenly,
it all makes sense.
It's a full forty minutes until the arrival of the first
victim at the machine--a young
woman in an Alpha Romeo. When she gets to the machine, all we can
see in the monitor is
her hair.
Shit!'' blurts Simon. "Move the van! Quick!''
We'll get the next one,'' Troy reassures calmly.
After a twenty-minute readjustment of our camera angle,
during which at least a dozen
potential PIN donors'' use the ATM, we're at last in a position to
see the keypad, around the
operators' hair, shoulders, and elbows. Of course, this means no one
will show up for at least
half an hour. The pot has worn off and we're all hungry.
A police car cruises by. Instinctively, we all duck. The
camera sits conspicuously on
the passenger seat. The cop doesn't even slow down.
A stream of ATM patrons finally passes through, and Troy
dutifully records the PIN
numbers of each. I don't think any of us likes having to actually
see the victims. If they were
merely magnetic files in a hacked system, it would be less
uncomfortable. I mention this to
Troy, and Simon tells me to shut up. We remain in silence until the
flow of bankers thenin to
trickle, and finally dies away completely. It is about 1:00 a.m. As
Simon retrieves his
hardware from the ATM, Troy finally acknowledges my question.
This way we know who to take from and who not to. Like
that Mexican couple. We
won't do their account. They wouldn't even understand the withdrawal
on their statement and
they'd probably be scared to say anything about it to the bank. And
a couple of hundred
bucks makes a real difference to them. The guys in the Porsche? Fuck
`em.''
We're back at Simon's by about two o'clock. He downloads
his card reader's RAM
chip into the PC. Numbers flash on the screen as Simon and Jack
cross-reference PIN
numbers with each card. Once they have a complete list, Simon pulls
out a white plastic
machine called a securotech'' or "magnelock'' or something like
that. A Lake Tahoe hotel that
went out of business last year sold it to a surplus electronic
supply house, along with several
hundred plastic cards with magnetic strips that were used as keys to
the hotel's rooms. By
punching numbers on the keypad of the machine, Simon can write''
the appropriate numbers
to the cards.
Troy shows me a printout of information they got off a
bulletin board last month; it
details which number means what: a certain three numbers refer to
the depositor's home bank,
branch, account number, etc. Within two hours, we're sitting around
a stack of counterfeit
bank cards and a list of PIN numbers. Something compels me to break
Troy's self-satisfied
grin.
Which one belongs to the Mexican couple?''
The fourth one,'' he says with a smirk. "We won't use
it.''
I thought it was the fifth one,'' I say in the most
ingenuous tone I've got. "Couldn't it
be the fifth one?''
Fine,'' Suddenly Troy grabs the fourth and fifth cards
from the stack and throws them
across the room. "Happy?''
I hold my replies to myself. These guys could be dangerous.
But no more dangerous or daring than exploits of Cyberia's
many other denizens, with
whom we all, by choice or necessity, are becoming much more
intimate. We have just peered
through the first window into Cyberia--the computer monitors,
digital goggles, and automatic
teller screens that provide instant access to the technosphere. But,
as we'll soon see, Cyberia
is made up of much more than information networks. It can also be
accessed personally,
socially, artistically, and, perhaps easiest of all, chemically.
PART 2
Drugs: The Substances of Designer Reality
CHAPTER 5
Seeing is Beholding
Terence McKenna--considered by many the successor to Tim
Leary's psychedelic
dynasty--couldn't make it to Big Heart City Friday night for the
elder's party. The bearded,
lanky, forty-somethingish Irishman was deep into a Macintosh file,
putting the finishing
touches on his latest manuscript about the use of mind-altering
plants by ancient cultures. But
by Saturday morning he was ready to descend from his small
mountaintop ranch house to talk
about the virtual reality that has his fans so excited.
We're backstage with McKenna at a rave where he'll be
speaking about drugs,
consciousness, and the end of time. The luckiest of friends and
mentees hang out with him in
his dressing room as he prepares to go on.
VR really is like a trip,'' one boy offers McKenna in the
hopes of launching into him
one of his lyrical diatribes. Terence ponders a moment and then he's
off, sounding like a
Celtic bard.
I link virtual reality to psychedelic drugs because I
think that if you look at the
evolution of organism and self-expression and language, language is
seen to be some kind of
process that actually tends toward the visible.'' McKenna strings
his thoughts together into a
breathless oral continuum. "The small mouth-noise way of
communicating is highly
provisional; we may be moving toward an environment of language that
is beheld rather than
heard.''
Still, assembled admirers hang on McKenna's every word, as
if each syllable were
leaving a hallucinatory aftervision on the adrenal cortex. They too
dream of a Cyberia around
the corner, and virtual reality is the closest simulation of a what
a world free of time,
location, or even a personal identity might look like. Psychedleics
and VR are both ways of
creating a new, nonlinear reality, where self-expression is a
community event.
You mean like ESP?''
Terence never corrects anyone--he only interpolates their
responses. This would be
like a kind of telepathy, but it would be much more than that: A
world of visible language is
a world where the individual doesn't really exist in the same way
that the print-created world
sanctions what we call `point of view.' That's really what an ego
is: it's a consistently defined
point of view within a context of narrative. Well, if you replace
the idea that life is a
narrative with the idea that life is a vision, then you displace the
linear progression of events.
I think this is technically within reach.''
To Terence, the invention of virtual reality, like the
resurgence of psychoactive drugs,
serves as a kind of technological philosopher's stone, bringing an
inkling of the future reality
into the present. It's both a hint from our hyperdimensional future
and an active, creative
effort by cyberians to reach that future.
I like the concept of the philosopher's stone. The next
messiah might be a machine
rather than a person. The philosopher's stone is a living stone. It
is being made. We are
making it. We are like tunnelers drilling toward something. The
overmind is drilling toward
us, and we are drilling toward it. And when we meet, there will be
an enormous revelation of
the true nature of being. I think every person who takes five or six
grams of psilocybin
mushrooms in silent darkness is probably on a par with Christ and
Buddha, at least in terms
of the input.''
So, according to McKenna, the psychedelic vision provides a
glimse of the truth
cyberians are yearning for. But have psychedelics and virtual
reality really come to us as a
philosopher's stone, or is it simply that our philosopher's stoned?
Morphogenetic Fields Forever
Cyberians share a psychedelic common ground. To them, drugs
are not simply a
recreational escape but a conscious and sometimes daring foray into
new possible realities.
Psychedelics give them access to what McKenna is calling the
overmind and what we call
Cyberia. However stoned they might be when they get there,
psychedelic explorers are
convinced that they are experiencing something real, and bringing
back something useful for
themselves and the rest of us.
Psychedelic exploration, however personal, is thought to
benefit more than the sole
explorer. Each tripper believes he is opening the door between
humanity and hyperspace a
little wider. The few cyberians who haven't taken psychedelics still
feel they have personally
experienced and integrated the psychedelic vision through the trips
of others, and value the
role of these chemicals in the overall development of Cyberia. It is
as if each psychedelic
journey completes another piece of a universal puzzle.
But, even though they have a vast computer net and
communications infrastructure at
their disposal, psychedelic cyberians need not communicate their
findings so directly. Rather,
they believe they are each sharing and benefiting from a collective
experience. As we'll see,
one of the most common realizations of the psychedelic trip is that
all is one.'' At the
euphoric peak of a trip, all people, particles, personalities, and
planets are seen as part of one
great entity or reality--one big fractal.
It may have been that realization that led Cambridge
biologist Rupert Sheldrake to
develop his theory of morphogenetic fields, now common knowledge to
most cyberians. From
morph, meaning forms,'' and genesis, meaning "birth,'' these fields
are a kind of cumulative
record of the past behaviors of species, groups, and even molecules,
so that one member of a
set can learn from the experience of all the others.
A failed animal-behavior test is still one of the best
proofs of Sheldrake's idea.
Scientists were attempting to determine if learned skills could be
passed on from parents to
children genetically. They taught adult mice how to go through a
certain maze, then taught
their offspring, and their offspring, and so on for twenty years and
fifty generations of mice.
Indeed, the descendants of the taught mice knew how to get through
the maze very quickly
without instruction, but so did the descendants of the control
group, who had never seen the
maze at all! Later, a scientist decided to repeat this experiment on
a different continent with
the same mouse species, but they already knew how to go through the
maze, too! As
explained by morphic resonance, the traits need not have been passed
on genetically. The
information leak was due not to bad experimental procedure but to
the morphogenetic field,
which stored the experience of the earlier mice from which all
subsequent mice could benefit.
Similarly, if scientists are developing a new crystalline
structure, it may take years to
coax'' atoms to form the specific crystal. But once the crystal is
developed in one laboratory,
it can be created instantly in any other laboratory in the world.
According to Sheldrake, this is
because, like the mice, the atoms are all "connected'' to one
another through morphogenetic
fields, and they learn'' from the experiences of other atoms.
Sheldrake's picture of reality is a vast fractal of
resonating fields. Everything, no
matter how small, is constantly affecting everything else. If the
tiniest detail in a fractal
pattern echoes the overall design of the entire fractal, then a
change to (or the experience of)
this remote piece changes the overall picture (through the
principles of feedback and
iteration). Echoing the realizations of his best friends, Ralph
Abraham and Terence McKenna,
Sheldrake is the third member of the famous Trialogues'' at Esalen,
where the three elder
statesmen (by cyberian standards) discuss onstage the ongoing
unfolding of reality before
captivated audiences of cyberians. These men are, quite consciously,
putting into practice the
idea of morphogenetic fields. Even if these Trialogues were held in
private (as they were for
years), Cyberia as a whole would benefit from the intellectual
developments. By pioneering
the new "headspace,'' the three men leave their own legacy through
morphic resonance, if not
direct communication through their publishing, lectures, or media
events.
Likewise, each cyberian psychedelic explorer feels that by
tripping he is leaving his
own legacy for others to follow, while himself benefiting from the
past psychedelic
experiences of explorers before him. For precisely this reason,
McKenna always advises using
only organic psychedelics, which have well-developed morphogenetic
fields: I always say
there are three tests for a drug. It should occur in nature. That
gives it a morpogenetic field of
resonance to the life of the planet. It should have a history of
shamanic usage [which gives it
a morphogenetic field of resonance to the consciousness of other
human beings]. And it
should be similar to or related to neurotransmitters in the brain.
What's interesting about that
series of filters, is that it leaves you with the most powerful
hallucinogens there are:
psilocybin, DMT, ayahuasca, and, to some degree, LSD.''
These are the substances that stock the arsenal of the
drug-using cyberian.
Psychedelics use among cyberians has developed directly out of the
drug culture of the
sixties. The first tripsters--the people associated with Leary on
the East Coast, and Ken Kesey
on the West Coast--came to startling moral and philosophical
conclusions that reshaped our
culture. For today's users, drugs are part of the continuing
evolution of the human species
toward greater intelligence, empathy, and awareness.
From the principle of morphogenesis, cyberians infer that
psychedelic substances have
the ability to reshape the experience of reality and thus--if
observer and observed are one--the
reality itself. It's hardly disputed that, even in a tangible,
cultural sense, the introduction of
psychedelics into our society in the sixties altered the
sensibilities of users and nonusers alike.
The trickle-down effect through the arts, media, and even big
business created what can be
called a postpsychedelic climate, in which everything from women's
rights, civil rights, and
peace activism to spirituality and the computer revolution found
suitable conditions for
growth.
As these psychoactive plants and chemicals once again see
the light of day, an even
more self-consciously creative community is finding out about
designer reality. While drugs
in the sixties worked to overcome social, moral, and intellectual
rigidity, drugs now enhance
the privileges of the already free. Cyberians using drugs do not
need to learn that reality is
arbitrary and manipulable, or that the landscape of consciousness is
broader than normal
waking-state awareness suggests. They have already learned this
through the experiences of
men like Leary and Kesey. Instead, they take chemicals for the
express purpose of
manipulating that reality and exploring the uncharted regions of
consciousness.
Integrating the Bell Curve
LSD was the first synthesized chemical to induce basically
the same effect as the
organic psychedelics used by shamans in ancient cultures.
Psychedelics break down one's
basic assumptions about life, presenting them instead as arbitrary
choices on the part of the
individual and his society. The tripper feels liberated into a free-
form reality, where his mind
and point of view can alter his external circumstances. Psychedelics
provide a way to look at
life unencumbered by the filters and models one normally uses to
process reality. (Whether
psychedelics impose a new set of their own filters is irrelevant
here. At least the subjective
experience of the trip is that the organizing framework of reality
has been obliterated.)
Nina Graboi, the author of One Foot in the Future, a novel
about her own spiritual
journey, was among the first pioneers of LSD in the sixties. Born in
1918 and trained as an
actress, she soon became part of New York's bohemian an subculture,
and kept company with
everyone from Tim Leary to Alan Watts. She now works as an assistant
to mathematician
Ralph Abraham, and occasionally hosts large conferences on
psychedelics. She spoke to me at
her Santa Cruz beach apartment, over tea and cookies. She believes
from what see has seen
over the past seven decades that what psychedelics do to an
individual, LSD did to society,
breaking us free of cause-and-effect logic and into an optimistic
creativity.
Materialism really was at its densest and darkest before
the sixties and it did not
allow us to see that anything else existed. Then acid came along
just at the right time--I really
think so. It was very important for some people to reach states of
mind that allowed them to
see that there is more, that we are more than just these physical
bodies. I can't help feeling
that there were forces at work that went beyond anything that I can
imagine. After the whole
LSD craze, all of a sudden, the skies opened up and books came
pouring down and wisdom
came. And something started happening. I think by now there are
enough of us to have
created a morphogenetic field of awareness, that are open to more
than the materialists
believe.''
But Graboi believes that the LSD vision needs to be
integrated into the experience of
America at large. It's not enough to tune in, turn on, and drop out.
The impulse now is to
recreate reality consciously--and that happens both through a
morphogenetic resonance as well
as good old-fashioned work.
I don't think we have a thing to learn from the past, now.
We really have to start
creating new forms, and seeing real ways of being. This was almost
like the mammalian state
coming to a somewhat higher octave in the sixties, which was like a
quantum leap forward in
consciousness. It was a gas. The end of a stage and the beginning of
a new one. So right now
there are still these two elements very much alive: the old society
wanting to pull backward
and keep us where we were, and the new one saying, `Hey, there are
new frontiers to
conquer and they are in our minds and our hearts.'''
Nina does not consider herself a cyberian, but she does
admit she's part of the same
effort, and desperately hopes our society can reach this higher
octave.'' As with all
psychedelics, "coming down'' is the hardest part. Most would prefer
simply to bring up''
everything else ... to make the rest of the world conform to the
trip.
The acid experience follows what can be called a bell
curve: the user takes the drug,
goes up in about an hour, stays up for a couple of hours, then comes
down over a period of
three or four hours. It is during the coming-down time--which makes
up the majority of the
experience--that the clarity of vision or particular insight must be
integrated into the normal
waking-state consciousness. Like the Greek hero who has visited the
gods, the tripper must
figure out how the peak of his Aristotelian journey makes sense. The
integration of LSD into
the sixties' culture was an analogous process. The tripping
community had to integrate the
truth of their vision into a society that could not grasp such
concepts. The bell curve of the
sixties touched ground in the form of political activism, sexual
liberation, the new age
movement, and new scientific and mathematical models.
Cyberians today consider the LSD trip a traditional
experience. Even though there are
new psychedelics that more exactly match the cyberian checklist for
ease of use, length of
trip, and overall intensity, LSD provides a uniquely epic journey
for the tripper, where the
majority of time and energy in the odyssey is spent bringing it all
back home. While
cyberians may spend most of their time surfing their consciousness
for no reason but fun,
they take acid because there's work to be done.
When Jaida and Cindy, two twenty-year-old girls from Santa
Cruz, reunited after
being away from each other for almost a year, they chose LSD because
they wanted to go
through an intense experience of reconnection. Besides, it was the
only drug they could obtain
on short notice. They began by smoking some pot and hitchhiking to a
nearby beachtown. By
the time they got there, the girls were stoned and the beach was
pitch black. They spent the
rest of the night talking and sleeping on what they guessed was a
sand dune, and decided to
drop'' at dawn. As the sun rose, the acid took effect.
As the girls stood up, Jaida stepped on a crab claw that
was sticking out of the sand.
Blood flowed out of her foot. As she describes it now:
The pain was just so...incredible. I could feel the
movement of the pain all the way
up to my brain, going up the tendrils, yet it was very enjoyable.
And blood was coming out,
but it was incredibly beautiful. At the same time, there was still
the part of me that said `you
have to deal with this,' which I was very grateful for.''
Once Jaida's foot was bandaged, the girls began to walk
together. As they walked and
talked, they slipped into a commonly experienced acid phenomenon:
shared consciousness.
It's the only time I've ever been psychic with Cindy. It's like one
of those things that you
can't believe ... there's no evidence or anything. Whatever I was
thinking, she would be
thinking. We were making a lot of commentary about the people we
were looking at, and
there'd be these long stretches of silence and I would just be sort
of thinking along, and then
she would say word for word what I was thinking. Like that. And then
I would say something
and it would be exactly what she was thinking. And we just did that
for about four or five
hours. She's a very different physical type from me, but it reached
the point where I could
feel how she felt in her body. I had the very deep sensation of
being inside her body, hearing
her think, and being able to say everything that she was thinking.
We were in a reality
together, and we shared the same space. Our bodies didn't separate
us from each other. We
were one thing.''
But then came the downside of the bell curve. The girls
slowly became more
disjointed.'' They began to disagree about tiny things--which way
to walk, whether to eat.
"There was this feeling of losing it. I could feel we were moving
away from it with every
step. There was a terrible disappointment that set in. We couldn't
hold on to that perfect
attunement.''
By the time the girls got back to their campsite on the
sand dune, their disillusionment
was complete. The sand dune was actually the local trash dump. As
they climbed the stinking
mound of garbage to gather their sleeping bags, they found the crab
claw'' on which Jaida
had stepped. It was really a used tampon and a broken bottle. And
now Jaida's foot was
beginning to smart.
Jaida's reintegration was twofold: She could no more bring
back her empathic ability
than she could the belief that she had stepped on a crab claw. What
Jaida retained from the
experience, though, came during the painful crash landing. She was
able to see how it was
only her interpretation that made her experience pain as bad, or the
tampon and glass as less
natural than a crab claw. As in the experience of a Buddha, the
garbage dump was as
beautiful as a sand dune ... until they decided it was otherwise.
Losing her telepathic union
with her friend symbolized and recapitulated the distance that had
grown between them over
the past year. They had lost touch, and the trip had heightened both
their friendship and their
separation.
Most acid trippers try to prolong that moment on the peak
of the bell curve, but to do
so is futile. Coming down is almost inevitably disillusioning to
some degree. Again, though,
like in a Greek tragedy, it is during the reintegration that insight
occurs, and progress is
made--however slight--toward a more all-encompassing or cyberian
outlook. In order to come
down with a minimum of despair and maximum of progess, the tripper
must guide his own
transition back to normal consciousness and real life while
maintaining the integrity whatever
truths he may have gleaned at the apogee of his journey. The LSD
state itself is not an end in
itself. While it may offer a brief exposure to post-paradigm
thinking or even
hyperdimensional abilities, the real value of the LSD trip is the
change in consciousness, and
the development of skills in the user to cope with that change. Just
as when a person takes a
vacation, it is not that the place visited is any better than where
he started. It's just different.
The traveler returns home changed.
Eugene Schoenfeld, M.D., is the Global Village Town
Physician. A practicing
psychologist, he wrote the famous Dr. Hip'' advice column in the
sixties; he now treats
recovering drug addicts. The doctor believes that the desire to
alter consciousness, specifically
psychedelically, is a healthy urge.
I think what happens is that it allows people to sense
things in a way that they don't
ordinarily sense them because we couldn't live that way. If our
brains were always the way
that they are under the influence of LSD, we couldn't function.
Perhaps it is that when babies
are born--that's the way they perceive things. Gradually they
integrate their experience
because we cannot function if we see music, for example. We can't
live that way.
Part of the reason why people take drugs is to change
their sense of reality, change
their sensation, change from the ordinary mind state. And if they
had that state all the time,
they would seek to change it. It seems that humans need to change
their minds in some way.
There's a reason why people start talking about `tripping.' It's
related to trips people take
when they physically change their environment. I'm convinced that if
there were a way to trip
all the time on LSD, they would want to change their reality to
something else. That is part
of the need.''
The sense of being on a voyage, of tripping,'' is the
essence of a classic psychedelic
experience. The user is a traveler, and an acid or mushroom trip is
a heroic journey or
visionquest through unexplored regions, followed by a reentry into
mundane reality. Entry to
the psychedelic realm almost always involves an abandonment of the
structures by which one
organizes reality, and a subsequent shedding of one's ego--usually
defined by those same
organizational structures. On the way back, the tripper realizes
that reality itself has been
arbitrarily arranged. The voyager sees that there may be such a
thing as an objective world,
but whatever it is we're experiencing as reality on a mass scale
sure isn't it. With the help of
a psychedelic journey, one can come back and consciously choose a
different reality from the
one that's been agreed upon by the incumbent society. This can be
manifest on a personal,
theoretical, political, technological, or even spiritual level.
As Dr. Schoenfeld, who once served as Tim Leary's family
physician and now shares
his expertise with cyberians as co-host of the DRUGS conference on
the WELL, explains,
that quality--that nonjudgmental quality could be carried over
without the effects of the drug.
After all, one hopes to learn something from a drug experience that
he can use afterward. (All
this interest in meditation and yoga, all these various disciplines,
it all began with people
taking these drugs and wanting to recreate these states without
drugs.) So, to the extent that
they can, that is a useful quality. And this nonjudgmental quality
is something I think that can
be carried over from a drug experience.''
Over There
So, the use of psychedelics can be seen as a means toward
experiencing free-flowing,
designer reality: the goal, and the fun, is to manipulate
intentionally one's objectivity in order
to reaffirm the arbitrary nature of all the mind's constructs,
revealing, perhaps, something
truer beneath the surface, material reality. You take a trip on
which you go nowhere, but
everything has changed anyway.
To some, though, it is not the just the change of
consciousness that makes
psychedelics so appealing, but the qualitative difference in the
states of awareness they offer.
The place people go'' on a trip--the psychedelic corridors of
Cyberia--may even be a real
space. According to Terence McKenna's authoritative descriptions of
that place, it is quite
different from normal waking-state consciousness:
The voyager journeys into an invisible realm in which the
causality of the ordinary
world is replaced with the rationale of natural magic. In this
realm, language, ideas, and
meaning have greater power than cause and effect. Sympathies,
resonances, intentions, and
personal will are linguistically magnified through poetic rhetoric.
The imagination is invoked
and sometimes its forms are beheld visibly. Within the magical mind-
set of the shaman, the
ordinary connections of the world and what we call natural laws are
de-emphasized or
ignored.''{EN1}
As McKenna describes it, this is not just a mindspace but
more of a netherworld,
where the common laws of nature are no longer enforced. It is a
place where cause-and-effect
logic no longer holds, where events and objects function more as
icons or symbols, where
thoughts are beheld rather than verbalized, and where phenomena like
morphic resonance and
the fractal reality become consciously experienced. This is the
description of Cyberia.
As such, this psychedelic world is not something
experienced personally or privately,
but, like the rest of Cyberia, as a great group project. The
psychedelic world each tripper
visits is the same world, so that changes made by one are felt by
the others. Regions explored
by any traveler become part of the overall map. This is a
hyperdimensional terrain on which
the traditional solo visionquest becomes a sacred community event.
This feeling of being part of a morphogenetic unfolding is
more tangible on psilocybin
mushrooms than on LSD. McKenna voices Cyberia's enchantment with the
ancient organic
brain food: I think that people should grow mushrooms. They are the
real connector back
into the archaic, even more so than LSD, which was largely
psychoanalytical. It didn't
connect you up to the greeny engines of creation. Psilocybin is
perfect.''
Like LSD, mushrooms provide an eight-hour, bell-curve trip,
but it is characterized by
more physical and visual hallucinations'' and a much less
intellectual edge. Users don't
overanalyze their experiences, opting instead to revel in them more
fully. Mushrooms are
thought to have their own morphogenetic field, which has developed
over centuries of their
own evolution and their use by ancient cultures. The mushroom trip
is much more
predictable, cyberians argue, because its morphogenetic field is so
much better established
than that of acid, which has only been used for a couple of decades,
and mostly by
inexperienced Western travelers.
As a result, mushroom experiences are usually less
intensely disorienting than LSD
trips; the place'' one goes on mushrooms is more natural and user-
friendly than the place
accessed on acid or other more synthetic psychedelics. Likewise,
`shroomers feel more
tangibly a part of the timeless, locationless community of other
users, or even animals, fairies,
or the "greeny engines'' of the spirit of Nature herself.
For this feeling of morphic community and interconnection
with nature to become
more tangible, groups of 'shroomers often choose to create
visionquest hot spots. Students at
U.C. Santa Cruz have developed a secret section of woods dedicated
to mushroom tripping
called Elf Land (the place just behind Ralph Abraham's office). Some
students believe that
fairies prepared and maintain the multidimensional area of the woods
for 'shroomers. Some
students claim to have found psilocybin mushrooms--which these
fairies are said to leave
behind them--growing in Elf Land. Most of all, Elf Land serves as a
real-world reference
plane for the otherworldly, dimensionless mushroom plane. And, like
the morphogenetic
mushroom field, Elf Land is shared and modified by everyone who
trips there, making the
location a kind of cumulative record of a series of mushroom trips.
Mariah is tripping in Elf Land for the first time. A
sophomore at U.C. Santa Cruz, the
English major had heard of Elf Land since she began taking mushrooms
last year, but never
really believed in it as a real, physical place. She eats the
mushrooms in her dorm with her
friends Mark and Rita, then the trio head out to the woods. It's
still afternoon, so the paths are
easy to follow, but Rita--a much more plugged-in, pop-cultural,
fashion-conscious
communications major than one would expect to find tripping in the
woods of Santa
Cruz--suddenly veers off into a patch of poison oak.
Mark, a senior mathematics major and Rita's boyfriend,
grabs Rita by the arm, afraid
that she's stoned and losing her way.
It's a pathless path, Mariah,'' Rita assures the younger
girl, without even looking at
Mark. Rita knows that Mariah's fears are the most pressing, and that
Mark's concerns will be
answered by these indirect means. Rita has made it clear that this
trip is for Mariah.
It's the perfect place to trip.'' Rita puts her arm around
Mariah. "People continually
put things there. Some of it's very subtle, too. Every time you go
there, there's different stuff
there. And it's all hidden in the trees up past the fire trails, up
in the deep woods there.'' She
points a little farther up the hill.
Then Mariah sees something--a little rock on the ground
with an arrow painted on it.
Lookee here!'' She stops, picks it up, and turns it over. Painted
on the back are the words
"This way to Elf Land.''
Someone left this for me?'' Mariah asks, the mushrooms
taking full effect now, and
the fluorescent words on the gray rock beginning to vibrate.
Just for you, Mariah,'' Rita whispers, "and for everyone.
Come on.''
Here's another one!'' Mark is at an opening to the deeper
woods, standing next to
another sign, this one carved into the side of a tree: "Welcome to
Elf Land.''
As the three pass through the opening, they walk into
another world. It's a shared state
of consciousness, not just among the three trippers but among them
and everyone else who
has ever tripped in Elf Land or anywhere else.
Mariah is thinking about her name; how she got it, how it's
shaped her, how it's like
the name Mary from the Bible, but changed somehow, too. Updated. At
the same moment as
these thoughts, she comes upon a small shrine that has been set up
in a patch of ferns
between two tall trees. The two-foot statue is of the Virgin Mary,
but she has been
decorated--updated--with a Day-Glo costume.
How'd that get there?'' Mariah wonders out loud.
Meanwhile, Mark has wandered off by himself. He's been
disturbed about his
relationship with Rita. She seems so addicted to popular culture--
not the die-hard Deadhead
he remembers from their freshman year. Should they stay together
after graduation? Get
married, even?
He stands against a tree and leans his head against its
trunk, looking up into the
branches. He looks at the way each larger branch splits in two. Each
smaller branch then
splits in two, and so and so on until the branches become leaves.
Each leaf, then, begins with
a single vein, then splits, by two, into smaller and smaller veins.
Mark is reminded of chaos
math theory, in which ordered systems, like a river flowing
smoothly, become chaotic through
a process called bifurcation, or dividing by twos. A river splits in
two if there's a rock in its
path, the two separate sections preserving--between the two of them-
-the order and magnitude
of the original. A species can bifurcate into two different
mutations if conditions require it.
And a relationship can break up if ...
As Mark stares at the bifurcated pairs of branches and
leaves, he realizes that
bifurcation is the nature of decision making. He's caught in the
duality of a painful choice,
and the tree is echoing the nature of decision-making itself.
Making a decision?'' Mariah asks innocently. She has read
the small sign nailed into
the side of the tree: "Tree of Decision.''
I wonder who left that there?'' Mark wonders aloud.
Doesn't matter,'' answers Rita, emerging from nowhere.
"Someone last week, last
year. A tripper, an elf ... whoever.''
As if on a visionquest, Mark and Mariah were presented with
a set of symbols in
material form that they could analyze and integrate into a pattern.
They were beholding''
their thoughts in physical form. The reality of their trip was
confirmed not just by their
fantasies but by the totems and signs left for them by other
trippers experiencing the same
things at different times.
Mushrooms very often give users the feeling of being
connected with the past and the
future. Whether the 'shroomers know about morphogenetic fields, they
do feel connected with
the spirit of the woods, and everyone who has traveled before in the
same space. Going up is
the voyage to that space, peaking is the un-self-conscious
experience of the new world, and
coming down is the reintegration during which the essence of the
peak experience is
translated into a language or set of images a person can refer to
later, at baseline reality.
CHAPTER 6
Making Connections
Distribution and Manufacture
For some cyberians, making sense of things and feeling the
connections with other
trippers is not enough. They use psychedelics to forge new
connections between cultures,
people, or even individual atoms. It is important to them that the
real world, and not just the
psychedelic space, consciously reflect the interconnectivity that
underlies reality. Just as a
fractal exhibits self-similarity, the psychedelic subculture should
reflect the quality of a single
trip.
LSD distributors, in particular, believe that acid
functions as a twentieth-century
psychic grease, allowing modern people to move their mental
machinery through the
ever-increasing demands of an information-based society. (Acid,
unlike mushrooms, can be
mass-produced, too.) Leo is an LSD dealer from the Bay Area who
believes that his
distribution of psychedelics is a social service. One of his
favorite distribution points is the
parking lot at Grateful Dead shows, where thousands of people mill
about, looking for
doses.''
Tonight's concert has already begun, but most of the crowd
of young merchants who
follow the Dead don't have tickets for the show. Instead, they
wander about the lot, smoke
pot with one another, and prepare for the concertgoers who will exit
the arena in two or three
hours.
Leo is well into his own acid trip of the evening (he says
he's been tripping every day
for several months) and sits in a makeshift tent, explaining his
philosophy to a young couple
who make falafel and beaded bracelets. While his rationale is the
result of a few years in the
military and a few others with skinheads, he does express the
psychedelic concept of
interconnectivity and networking from a modern cyberian standpoint.
The Deadheads (who
many cyberians feel are still caught in the sixties) are deep into a
conversation about how
they can feel their third eye'' while tripping, and how it makes
them feel connected to
everything in the world. Leo shakes his head scornfully.
The sixth sense of society as a whole also lies in its
connectivity and its ability to
intercommunicate. When society becomes enlightened, its third eye
happens to be that
connectivity. That's the evolutionary factor.''
Leo tries in vain to get them to understand the concepts of
feedback and iteration, and
how they relate to human society connecting through telephones and
the media. The bong
gets passed around again, and Leo tries a different tack.
I'm attempting to work this on a subversive level by
distributing a large amount of
LSD throughout the U.S. and trying to reach other countries, too.''
One of the Deadheads
laughs, just liking the sound of breaking the law. Leo rolls his
eyes and stresses the global
significance of his subversion.
LSD's definitely an interconnectivity catalyst for the
countercultures and subcultures
that we're tuned in to. We're able now, with our information-age
technologies, to know about
groups and countercultures who are communicating together and
sharing common resources
and information--like all you Deadheads living in this parking lot.
As these groups develop
their own identities, they gain a certain amount of awareness about
themselves as a collective
conscious. That offers a channel for catalytic tools like LSD to be
exchanged, putting all
these groups on the same wavelength.''
The falafel merchant shrugs, too stoned or too straight to
understand Leo's point. I
don't get it. Is LSD making this happen, or is it happening so
people can get more LSD?''
LSD is part of and a result of this interconnectedness.
It's mind expansive and
group-mind expansive. And what it does is act as a catalyst for
culture and individuals. Now
that we've left the industrial age and come into the information
age, the rate information
exchanges is increasing exponentially. It's very fast; you can look
at it in binary terms. Two,
four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two--that's how fast the information
multiplies. What's going on is,
the way people learn, is they cause an imprint in their
subconscious, and then they're able to
build a type of structure on their imprint which represents their
knowledge. And how they see
their own knowledge is their own wisdom ... it's their knowledge of
their knowledge.''
Both Deadheads are lost now. The girl has started
mindlessly unbeading a bracelet and
the boy is reloading the bong. But Leo doesn't care that he can't
make an impact on these
people. He just continues to reel out his run-on sentences into the
datapool in the hope that
they get picked up morphogenetically.
LSD primes the mind for subconscious imprintation--makes
it more susceptible to it.
We're able to learn more information at a faster rate because we're
able to imprint ourselves
at the same rate as the information is being developed, because in
the LSD state you're able
to conceive such a vast quantity of anything. When I'm on LSD
sometimes I can think in
broad terms and sometimes I even gain vocabulary that I've never
used before and I'm able to
retain that in the future.''
If you gave us another hit of your LSD, Leo,'' the bead
girl smiles, "maybe we'd
know what you're talking about, too.''
This is where traditional, sixties-style tripsters differ
from their cyberian offspring. The
sixth sense, or group mind oversoul,'' to which Leo has dedicated
himself (but which these
old-fashioned-type Deadheads can't understand) is the locus of
awareness that most cyberian
psychedelic explorers seek. Whether it be Mariah in Elf Land or Leo
in the LSD distribution
net, the cyberian difference is that psychedelic activity now
becomes part of an overall fractal
pattern, experienced, in one way or another, by everyone.
While Leo draws the lines of interconnectivity between
users and groups of users,
other reality designers at sublevels of the psychedelic fractal
network are more concerned
with the lines of interconnectivity between the very atoms of the
substances they take.
Becker, Leo's LSD source, is a twenty-eight-year-old chemistry grad
student with a strong
background in illicit psychopharmacology. His experience of
psychedelics is on a different
fractal order from that of classical personal tripsters or even Leo
and other cultural catalysts.
Becker knows about drugs from the inside out, so his answer to any
drug's problems lies in
its chemistry. If a drug is illegal, alter its chemistry to make it
legal again. If a drug is too
short-acting, figure out a way to stunt the user's ability to
metabolize it.
Leo arrives at Becker's attic laboratory discouraged from
the Deadheads the night
before. He's wondering if Becker can whip something up with better
transformational
properties than those of LSD.
Becker has just the answer. He spent all of last night
creating his first batch of 2CB
(in chemist's lingo, 4-Bromo-2,5-dimethoxyphenethylamine). It's
called Venus, and it's a
synthetic version of mescaline, with a few designer improvements.''
Becker's problem with mescaline, another organic
psychedelic, is that it is metabolized
by the body very quickly. By the time the user begins to trip
heavily, he's already on the way
down. To figure out how to modify the substance, Becker took a large
dose, then went on an
internal visionquest into the chemical structure of the active
mescaline molecule.
The native mescaline molecule is a ring. I saw how the
methoxy group which hangs
on that ring could be pried off easily by the metabolism, rendering
the molecule impotent in
an hour or so. By replacing that methoxy group with bromine, which
can hang on much
tighter, the drug becomes ten times stronger. The body can't break
it down, and it goes much
much further because it can stay planted in the brain's receptor
site that much longer.''
But how much do you have to take? And how do you know it's
not toxic?'' Leo asks,
fingering the white powder in its petri dish.
It's less toxic, Leo, don't you see? Plus it's much more
effective, so you don't have to
take as much. That way you don't get any side effects either. I'm on
it right now!''
Leo had dropped a tab of acid about two hours ago but it
wasn't doing anything. He
licks his finger, dabs it in the mound of powder, and puts it on his
tongue.
That's a pretty big hit,'' Becker warns. "Probably about
eight doses.''
Leo just shrugs and swallows. He can handle it. How fast
can you make this stuff?''
That's the joy. It's really simple to make. Just think of
it as stir, filter, wash, and dry.
That's all there is to it.''
As Becker goes over an ingredients checklist for a mass-
production schedule, Leo
collapses into a hammock and waits for the new drug to take effect.
Both believe that they
are on to something new and important.
By designing new chemicals, psychopharmacologists like
Becker design reality from
the inside out. They decide what they'd like reality to be like,
then--in a kind of submolecular
shamanic visionquest--compose a chemical that will alter their
observations about reality in a
specific way. Then, Leo, by distributing the new chemical to others
who will have the same
experience, literally spreads the new designer reality. The world
changes because it is
observed differently.
The other reason to make new drugs is to create unknown
and, hence, legal
psychedelics before the FDA has a chance to classify them as
illegal. A relatively new law,
however, has made that difficult. The Analog Substance Act
classifies yet-to-be-designed
chemicals illegal if they are intended to serve the same function as
ones that are already
illegal. This law was passed shortly after the Ecstasy craze'' in
Texas, where the new, mild
psychedelic got so popular that it was available for purchase by
credit card at bars. As a
result, according to Becker, "Lloyd Bentsen put a bee in the bonnet
of the Drug Enforcement
Agency, and it was stamped illegal fast.''
But rather than simply stamping out Ecstasy use, its
illegality prompted chemists like
Becker to develop new substances. Like computer hackers who
understand the technology
better than its adult users, the kids making drugs know more about
the chemistry than the
regulatory agencies. The young chemists began creating new drugs
just like Ecstasy, with just
one or two atoms in different places. In Becker's language, Thus,
Ecstasy began to stand for
MDMA, MDM, Adam, X, M-Ethyl, M methyl 3-4-methyline dioxy, also N-
ethyl, which was
sometimes called Eve, which had one more carbon, or actually CH2,
added on.'' This flurry of
psychopharmacological innovation prompted the Analog Act, and now
almost everything with
psychedelic intent is illegal or Schedule 1 (most controlled).
Despite its illegality, Ecstasy, even more than LSD and
mushrooms, has remained on
the top of the cyberian designer-substance hit parade. LSD,
mushrooms, and mescaline--all
powerful, relatively long-acting psychedelics--bifurcated, so to
speak, into two shorter-acting
substances, the mild, user-friendly Ecstasy, and the earth-
shatteringly powerful and
short-acting DMT. Both drugs can be found in many carefully
manipulated chemical
variations, and epitomize the psychedelic-substance priorities in
Cyberia.
The E Conspiracy
The circuits of the brain which mediate alarm, fear,
flight, fight, lust, and territorial
paranoia are temporarily disconnected. You see everything
with total clarity,
undistorted by animalistic urges. You have reached a state
which the ancients have
called nirvana, all seeing bliss.
--Thomas Pynchon on MDMA
Cyberians consider Ecstasy, or E as it's called by its
wide-grinning users, one of the
most universally pleasant drugs yet invented. While negative
experiences on Ecstasy are not
unheard of, they are certainly few and far between. Everyone knows
somebody who's had a
bad acid trip. Ecstasy does not carry the same stigma, which may be
why people don't freak
out'' on it.
As Dr. Schoenfeld explains, another part of the reason may
be that some of the
substances aren't yet illegal, so users don't have the same negative
associations and paranoia.
In addition, according to the doctor, the Ecstasy drugs are
nonaddictive and shorter-acting.
As you know, there are drugs being used that the DEA [Drug
Enforcement Agency]
isn't aware of. Once they get aware of them, they'll try to make
them illegal; but people who
take substances are becoming aware of these new drugs, which are
nonaddictive, and which
don't last as long as the other drugs used to last. They don't have
the same adverse effects.
For example, there are a few reports of people having bad
experiences with MDMA or
occasional freak-outs, but it's highly unusual. And even with LSD it
wasn't that common to
have freak-outs. You'd hear about the cases where people tried to
fly or stop trains or things
like that, but compared with the amount of use there was, that was
uncommon. With a drug
like MDMA, it's still less common for people to have bad
experiences.''
But E is not just a kinder, gentler acid. The quality of
the E-xperience is very
different. Bruce Eisner wrote the book Ecstasy: The MDMA Story,
still the most authoritative
and enlightening text on the drug's history and use. His scholarly
and personal research on the
chemical is vast, and he describes the essence of the E-xperience
well:
You discover a secret doorway into a room in your house
that you did not previously
know existed. It is a room in which both your inner experience and
your relations with others
seem magically transformed. You feel really good about yourself and
your life. At the same
time, everyone who comes into this room seems more lovable. You find
your thoughts
flowing, turning into words that previously were blocked by fear and
inhibition.
After several hours, you return to your familiar abode,
feeling tired but different,
more open. And your memory of your mystical passage may help you in
the days and weeks
ahead to make all the other rooms of your house more enjoyable.''
The main advantage of E is that it allows you to take your
ego with you.'' Acid or
even mushrooms can have the unrelenting abrasiveness of a belt
sander against one's
character. E, on the other hand, does not disrupt "ego integrity''
or create what psychologists
call depersonalization.'' Instead, the user feels as open and
loving and connected as he might
feel on a stronger psychedelic but without the vulnerability of
losing his "self'' in the process.
If anything, E strengthens one's sense of self, so that the issues
that arise in the course of a
trip seem less threatening and infinitely more manageable. E creates
a loving ego resiliency in
which no personal problem seems too big or scary. This is why it has
become popular in the
younger gay and other alternative-lifestyles communities, where
identity crises are
commonplace.
E-volution
You touch the darkness--the feminine, the gross, whatever
you see as dark,'' Jody
Radzik explains to Diana as they hand out flyers in the street for a
new house club. "When
you're on Ecstasy, the drug forces you to become who you really are.
You don't get any
positive experience from a drug like cocaine; it's a lie. But with
Ecstasy, it can have a
positive effect on the rest of your life!''
Jody and Diana are on their way to a club called Osmosis, a
house event which occurs
every Thursday night at DV8, a downtown San Francisco venue, for
which Radzik serves as
promotional director. Promoting house, though, is almost like
promoting Ecstasy. The drug
and subculture have defined and fostered each other. Osmosis is
proud of the fact that it
mixes gay, straight, glam,'' and house culture, and Radzik--
a gamine, extremely young
thirty-year-old with a modified Hamlet haircut and a mile-a-minute
mouth--credits E with
their success.
There's a sexual element to house. E is an aphrodisiac and
promiscuity is big. In
everyday life men usually repress their `anima.' Ecstasy forces you
to experience what's
really going on inside.'' Diana (who runs her own house club down
the block) is amused by
Jody's inclination to talk about taboo subjects. Jody goes on
proudly, exuberantly, and loud
enough for everyone else in the street to hear. Being publicly
outrageous is a valued
personality trait in E culture adapted from Kesey's Merry
Pranksters.
E has a threshold. It puts you in that aahh experience,
and you stay there. It might
get more intense with the number of hits you take, but it's not like
acid, which, with the more
hits you take, the farther you're walking from consensus culture.
With E, your ability to
operate within the confines of culture remain. You can take a lot of
E and still know that
that's a red light, or that there's a cop here and you don't want to
fuck up too much. On acid,
you can be completely out of your head, and walking in a completely
different reality.''
So E is not simply watered-down LSD. While acid was a
test,'' Ecstasy is a
"becoming.'' Acid involved a heroic journey, while E is an extended
moment. The traditional
bell curve of the acid trip and its sometimes brutal examination and
stripping of ego is
replaced with a similar vision but without the paranoia and
catharsis. By presenting insight as
a moment of timelessness, E allows for a much more cyberian set of
conclusions than the
more traditional, visionquest psychedelics.
Rather than squashing personal taste and creating legions
of Birkenstock clones, E
tends to stimulate the user's own inner nature. Hidden aspects of
one's personality--be it
homosexuality, transvestitism, or just love and creativity--demand
free expression. All this is
allowed to happen, right away, in the E-nvironment of the house
club. Reintegration on E is
unnecessary because the E-xperience itself has an immediately social
context. If anything, the
E trip is more socially integrated than baseline reality. E turns a
room of normal, paranoid
nightclubbers into a teaming mass of ecstatic Global Villagers. To
Radzik, the club lights,
music, and Ecstasy are inseparable elements of a designer ritual,
just like the campfire,
drumbeats, and peace pipe of a Native American tribal dance.
Arriving at the club in time for the sound check, Jody and
Diana dance a while under
the work lights. Jody's diatribe continues as he demonstrates the
new hip-hop steps he picked
up in Los Angeles last week.
The Ecstasy comes through the house music. The different
polyrhythmic elements
and the bass ... this is current North American shamanism. It's
technoshamanism. E has a lot
to do with it. It really does. I get a little nervous but I've got
to tell the truth about things. But
the system is probably going to react against the E element.''
Diana cuts in: And then they'll just shut you down like
they closed our party last
week.'' She takes a cigarette from behind her ear and lights it.
Jody still dances while Diana stands and smokes. Neither he
nor the E culture will be
taken down that easily. E is an enzyme that's splicing the system.
E is like a cultural
neurotransmitter that's creating synaptic connections between
different people. We're all cells
in the organism. E is helping us to link up and form more dendrites.
And our culture is
finally starting to acknowledge the ability of an individual to
create his own reality. What you
end up with, what we all have in common, is common human sense.''
The E-inspired philosophy borrows heavily from the
scientific and mathematics
theories of the past couple of decades. House kids talk about
fractals, chaos, and
morphogenetic fields in the same sentence as Deee-Lite's latest CD.
Jody's cultural
neurotransmitter'' image refers back to James Lovelock's Gaia
hypothesis, which is the now
well-supported notion that planet Earth is itself a giant,
biological organism. The planet is
thought to maintain conditions for sustaining life through a complex
series of feedbacks and
iterations. A population of ocean microorganisms, for example, may
regulate the weather by
controlling how much moisture is released into the atmosphere. The
more feedback loops
Gaia has (in the form of living plants and animals), the more
precisely "she'' can maintain the
ecosystem.
Evolution is seen more as a groping toward than a random
series of natural selections.
Gaia is becoming conscious. Radzik and others have inferred that
human beings serve as
Gaia's brain cells. Each human being is an individual neuron, but
unaware of his connection
to the global organism as a whole. Evolution, then, depends on
humanity's ability to link up
to one another and become a global consciousness.
These revelations all occur to house kids like Jody under
the influence of E. This is
why they call the drug a cultural enzyme.'' The Ecstasy helps them
see how they're all
connected. They accept themselves and one another at face value,
delighted to make their
acquaintance. Everyone exposed to E instantly links up to the Gaian
neural net. As more
people become connected, more feedback and iteration can occur, and
the Gaian mind can
become more fully conscious.
Jody and Diana both believe that house culture and the
Gaian mindset literally infect''
newcomers to the club like a virus. As Osmosis opens, Jody watches a
crowd of uninitiated
clubbers step out onto the dance floor, who, despite their extremely
"straight'' dress, are
having a pretty Ex-uberant time.
This looks like a group of people that might be
experimenting with Ecstasy for the
first time. They're going to remember this night for the rest of
their lives. This is going to
change them. They are going to be better people now. They're
infected. It's like an
information virus. They take it with them into their lives. Look at
them. They're dancing with
each other as a group. Not so much with their own partners. They're
all smiling. They are
going to change as a result of their participation in house. Their
worldview is going to
change.''
Indeed, the growing crowd does seem uncharacteristically
gleeful for a Thursday-night
dance club. Gone are the pickup lines, drunken businessmen,
cokeheads, and cokewhores. The
purposeful social machinations--getting laid, scoring drugs, or
gaining status--seem to be
overrun by the sheer drive toward bliss. Boys don't need to dance
with their dates because
there's no need for possessiveness or control. Everyone feels
secure--even secure enough to
dance without a partner in a group of strangers.
Whether that carries into their daily life is another
story. Certainly, a number of new
cyberian converts'' are made each evening. But the conversions are
made passively, as the
name of the club implies, through Osmosis. Unlike acid, which forces
users to find ways to
integrate their vision into working society, E leads them to believe
that integration occurs in
the same moment as the bliss. The transformation is a natural
byproduct--a side effect of the
cultural virus.
As club regulars arrive, they wink knowingly at one
another. Jody winks and nods at
few, who gesture back coyly. The only information communicated,
really, is I am, are you?''
The winkers are not so much the "in'' crowd as the fraternity of the
converted. They're all part
of what one T-shirt calls The E Conspiracy.'' These are the
carriers of the cultural virus. No
need to say anything at all. The E and the music will take care of
everything (wink, wink).
The sixties went awry because they wanted a sweeping
cultural change to go on
overtly,'' explains Radzik, nodding to two girls he's sure he has
seen before. They wink back.
"And that didn't happen. What's different about house is that no
one's trying to `spread the
message.' It's more like, we're into it because we love it, but
we're not out to convert people.
'Groove is in the heart' [a Deee-Lite lyric]. We just want to expose
people to it. People decide
that they're into it because they respond to it on a heart level. I
think the bullshit's going to
come apart of its own accord.''
So is this a dance floor filled with socially aware, fully
realized designer beings?
Certainly not. It's a dance floor filled with smart kids, sexy kids,
not-so smart kids, and not-so
sexy kids, but they do seem to share an understanding, in the body,
of the timeless quality of
bliss and how to achieve it through a combination of dance and E.
Even the music, playing at
precisely 120 beats per minute, the rate of the fetal heartbeat,
draws one into a sense of
timeless connection to the greater womb--Gaia. The lyrics all
emphasize the sound eee.''
"Evereeebodeee's freee,'' drones one vocal, in pleeesing gleeeful
breeezes, winding their way
onto the extreeemely wide smiles of dancing boys and girls. It's
just the E! Likewise, the way
in which E infiltrates society is much less time-based and
confrontational than was the case
with acid. E infiltrates through the experience of bliss, so there's
nothing to say or do about it.
The meta'' agenda here is to create a society with no agenda.
As Jody screams over the din of the house music, Fuck the
agendas. We just have to
manifest our culture. You have to trust your heart. That's what
Jesus really said. And that's
what E does. It shows people they have their own common sense. They
realize, I don't need
this!''
Bruce Eisner shows up at about midnight, exploring the
house scene and its
relationship to Ecstasy for the second edition of his book Ecstasy:
The MDMA Story. A
veteran of the sixties and just a bit too old to fit in with this
crowd, he almost sighs as he
explains to E-nthusiastic clubbers how E's preservation of social
skills and ego make it a
much better social transformer than the psychedelics of his day.
In the sixties, we were sure we were going to have this
revolution that would change
everything overnight. And it never came. We got the seventies
instead.''
A few girls laugh. They were born in the seventies. Bruce
smiles slowly. He's got a
dozen stoned kids hanging on his every word, when in fact he's
trying to understand them.
With E, you don't get so far out, like on acid, where you
lose touch with the physical
world. It allows you an easier time to bring the insights back in.
Huxley talked a lot about the
importance of integrating the mystical experience with the worldly
experience. He had that
one trip where he decided, `The clear light is an ice cube. What's
important is love and work
in the world.' And love and work in the world is what Ecstasy shows
you. It's a model for
enlightenment, and the challenge is bringing that into the real
world.''
So maybe revolution has become evolution as house culture
awakens to the fact that
there is method behind Gaia'a madness, and that Darwin wasn't
completely right. Life
naturally evolves toward greater self-awareness, and we don't need
to push it anywhere. The
universe is not a cold sea of indifference but the warm, living
waters of an oversoul
composed of waves of love--Gaia's morphogenetic fields. The mock
self-assuredness of the
me'' generation gives way to the inner wink-wink-say-no-more
knowing of the E generation,
as the sixties bell curve finally touches down, and ego fully
reintegrates into a
postpsychedelic culture.
CHAPTER 7
The Blast Furnace of Disillusion
For those still intent on smashing the ego into oblivion
and
discovering the very edge of what it means to be sentient, DMT
(dimethyltryptamine, and its cousin, 5-hydroxytryptamine) is the
only answer. It is a naturally occurring hallucinogen that is
usually smoked, although shamans snort it and some aggressive
Western users inject it. It's effect is immediate--definitely
within a minute, usually within seconds--and all-encompassing. It
cannot even be described in terms of magnitude (one user says,
It's like taking every LSD experience you've ever had and
putting them on the head of a pin''), but makes more sense when
thought of as a true, hyperdimensional shift. As Terence McKenna
describes it:
The experience that engulfs one's entire being as one
slips
beneath the surface of the DMT-ecstasy feels like the penetration
of a membrane. The mind and the self literally unfold before
one's eyes. There is a sense that one is made new, yet unchanged,
as if one were made of gold and had just been recast in the
furnace of one's birth. Breathing is normal, heartbeat steady,
the mind clear and observing. But what of the world? What of
incoming sensory data?
Under the influence of DMT, the world becomes an Arabian
labyrinth, a palace, a more than possible Martian jewel, vast
with motifs that flood the gaping mind with complex and wordless
awe. Color and the sense of a reality-unlocking secret nearby
pervade the experience. There is a sense of other times, and of
one's own infancy, and of wonder, wonder, and more wonder. It is
an audience with the alien nuncio. In the midst of this
experience, apparently at the end of human history, guarding
gates that seem surely to open on the howling maelstrom of the
unspeakable emptiness between the stars, is the Aeon.
The Aeon, as Heraclitus presciently observed, is a child
at
play with colored balls. Many diminutive beings are present
there--the tykes, the self-transforming machine elves of
hyperspace. Are they the children destined to be father to the
man? One has the impression of entering into an ecology of souls
that lies beyond the portals of what we naively call death. I do
not know. Are they the synesthetic embodiment of ourselves as the
Other, or of the Other as ourselves? Are they the elves lost to
us since the fading of the magic light of childhood? Here is a
tremendum barely to be told, an epiphany beyond our wildest
dreams. Here is the realm of that which is stranger than we can
suppose. Here is the mystery, alive, unscathed, still as new for
us as when our ancestors lived it fifteen thousand summers ago.
The tryptamine entities offer the gift of new language; they sing
in pearly voices that rain down as colored petals and flow
through the air like hot metal to become toys and such gifts as
gods would give their children. The sense of emotional connection
is terrifying and intense. The Mysteries revealed are real and if
ever fully told will leave no stone upon another in the small
world we have gone so ill in.
This is not the mecurial world of the UFO, to be invoked
from lonely hilltops; this is not the siren song of lost Atlantis
wailing through the trailer courts of crack-crazed America. DMT
is not one of our irrational illusions. I believe that what we
experience in the presence of DMT is real news. It is a nearby
dimension--frightening, transformative, and beyond our powers to
imagine, and yet to be explored in the usual way. We must send
the fearless experts, whatever they may come to mean, to explore
and to report on what they find.''
DMT is the most hard-core cyberian drug experience for
several reasons. The user penetrates'' another dimension,
experiences timelessness, and then enjoys nonverbal and nonlinear
communication and connectedness. Even "mind'' and self'' unfold,
freeing the user to roam about this dimension unencumbered by
physical, emotional, and mental barriers. This is a
psychopharmacological virtual reality.
DMT is metabolized almost as soon as it enters the system,
a
fact that, McKenna argues, indicates a long history of human
co-evolution with its molecular structure and a well-developed
morphogenetic field. He sees DMT and human beings as companions
in the journey toward a hyperdimensional reality. Still, the
intensity and severity of the DMT experience make any user aware
that he has taken something foreign into his system, and that he
may never be the same. Nearly everyone who smokes DMT reports
hearing a high-pitched tone corresponding to what they believe is
a carrier wave'' of reality at that moment. The visual world
begins to vibrate at the same frequency until everything breaks
up into geometric patterns and crystalline twinkles. This is when
the "machine elves'' show up, if they're going to. They look like
little elves, and sometimes hold wands or crystals and seem to be
dancing or operating some kind of light-and-glass machinery. The
elves definitely have a good time, but by the time the idea to
join and dance with the elves arises, they're gone and a
different set of images parades by.
Terence and his brother Dennis McKenna's experiences on DMT
shape many of the cyberian conclusions about reality. They
believe that DMT works by latching on to the DNA in a user's own
cells. Traditionally, DNA is understood to be the carrier of
genetic information in living things. It is thought to be in the
shape of a double helix (two spirals) so that it can split up and
replicate. The McKennas took this a little further both
scientifically and philosophically by assuming that DNA works by
resonating certain frequencies to their host cell and organism.
They believe that when DMT connects with the molecule, the two
strands of the double helix vibrate against each other like
tuning forks, which is why the user hears a tone and also
experiences such a radically different reality.
Terence and Dennis went to the Amazon to conduct
experiments
on themselves and test these theories using the state-of-the-art
organic tryptamines of the Jivaro Indian medicine men. Dennis
heard the most tones, so he became the main subject, while
Terence observed and speculated. The two young men succeeded in
putting Dennis into a completely psychotic state for several
weeks. But as Dennis freaked out, Terence sat on the other side
of their tent making notes and having insights. What he realized
in a sudden flash was that the structure of DNA resembles that of
the ancient Chinese I Ching sequence. Further, their functions
are the same.
As a gene carrier, DNA is what links any being to the
ancestors in his evolutionary past and the offspring in his
evolutionary future. The double-helix structure of the molecule
can be seen as a pair of metaphorical spiral staircases: one
going down into history, the other up into the future. Its
purpose is to compress linear time into these two active springs.
(As Sheldrake would also later conclude, the DNA is what sings''
morphogenetic fields over time and space.) The I Ching is thought
to work the same way, and uses a sixty-four-part structure almost
identical to that of DNA to help people predict future events and
understand their personal roles in the overall continuum of time
and space. Finally, back in the United States, Terence and Dennis
used computers to compute the I Ching as a huge fractal equation
for all of human history. According to their fractal, called
"Time Wave Zero,'' history and time as we know it will end in the
year 2012. This date has also been linked with the Mayan Tzolkin
calendar, which many believe also calls 2012 the end of linear
time. It makes the notion of a simple, global renaissance pale by
comparison.
Many cyberians agree with Terence that end of history is
fast approaching. When history is over, human experience will
feel like, you guessed it: a DMT trip. Experimentation with
tryptamines, then, is preparation for the coming hyperdimensional
shift into a timeless, nonpersonalized reality. It helps
cyberians discriminate between what is linear, temporary and
arbitrary, and what is truly hyperdimensional. This isn't an easy
task.
Downloading Infinity
Just as the most earth-shattering information off the
computer net is useless without a computer capable of downloading
it into a form that a user can understand, the DMT experience
provides nothing to a user who can't similarly download some
essence of timeless hyperspace into a form he can understand in
linear reality. However amazing and blissful the DMT euphoria may
be, coming down is much trickier than with any other
hallucinogen. It's no wonder, though. DMT brings one into a new
dimension--a dimension where the restrictions of time and self
don't exist--so stepping back into frictional, cause-and-effect
reality must be a letdown.
Most cyberian users do their DMT in pairs or small groups,
so that they may help one another come down more easily and
document as much of every experience as possible. In Oakland, an
entire household cooperative called Horizon is dedicated to
fostering good DMT trips. Several nights a week, the dozen or so
residents sit in a circle on the living room floor and take DMT
in sequence. As one tripper returns to earth, the next takes hold
the pipe and launches himself.
Dan, whom most consider the head of the house, is a
psychology student at Berkeley whose doctoral thesis is on shared
states of consciousness. He leads the evenings and judges whether
to intervene when someone is in great physical discomfort or
freaking out too heavily. Tonight, thanks to a connection made by
one of the residents over his computer bulletin board, a new
batch of 5 MAO'' DMT has arrived, a close relative of DMT but
even more powerfully mind-bending effects. Dan is aware that
he'll have to watch extra-carefully for disasters tonight--his
well-traveled math professor has warned him, "On 5 MAO, you begin
to see the words `brain damage' literally printed out in front of
your eyes.''
The first two adventurers log fairly typical experiences.
One girl curls up into a ball, but emerges understanding how the
nature of reality is holographic. Each particle of reality
reflects, in a dim way, the whole picture. It doesn't matter who
you are or where you are. Everything that ever happened or ever
will happen is available to everyone and everything right now.''
The next boy, Armand, who just returned from a three-month
visionquest to South America, has been taking acid every day this
week in preparation for tonight's ceremony. He remarks how this
circle ceremony is exactly the same as the way he took ayahuasca
and ibogaine (organic psychedelics) with a shaman in the Amazon.
Then he lights his pipe and almost immediately falls back onto a
pile of pillows. He writhes around for several minutes with his
eyes rolled back, then rises, announcing that he's been gone for
three days. He met an entire race of forest creatures, and they
needed his help. As he describes the place where he's been, what
the people look like, how he's eaten with them and even made love
with one of them, another girl in the circle suddenly perks up.
Hey! That's the story I've been writing!''
Dan establishes that the boy hasn't read the girl's story;
then, with techniques he has developed in shared-states
psychology, he helps the two relate their stories to each other.
Armand has, indeed, been living in Sabrina's fantasy story. He
decides to go back to help his new interdimensional friends.
Still stoned, Armand rolls back his eyes and he's gone. He
spends about ten more minutes moving around on his back. When he
rises again, he explains that in the five minutes he was absent
from the other dimension, several weeks went by and the crisis
was averted without him. Armand can't bring himself to feel happy
about this. He feels that his need to come back and tell his
experience to the rest of the circle deprived him of his chance
to save the forest creatures.
But they were saved anyway,'' Dan reminds him. "It's only
your ego getting in the way now.''
Armand shrugs. Dan doesn't want to let him reenter like
this, because the boy might be depressed for weeks.
Think of it this way,'' he says, putting a comforting hand
on Armand's shoulder, "maybe what you and Sabrina did out here,
recounting the story and verifying the reality of the forest
people, is what actually saved them.''
Jonathan, whose main interest is making music for other
people to listen to while they're on acid, breaks decorum by
taking the pipe and lighting it before Dan and Armand are quite
finished. He had a bad day in the recording studio and wants to
make up for it with a good DMT trip. Now.
But as soon as he inhales the DMT smoke, his expression
changes to one of fear--like the look on a young kid after the
safety bar slams down on a roller coaster. He's stuck on this
ride. Bizarre visions that Jonathan knows he won't remember whiz
by. He can see the other people in the room, but he can also see
past them, through them, around them. He can see their
experiences in the lines of their faces, then the lines become
his whole reality. They point everywhere. The walls of the room
are gone. This is cool,'' he thinks. "I can take it.'' Then he
gasps in terror, Who thinks it's cool?''
The flip side of Jonathan's euphoria is that he doesn't
know
who he is.
Oh fuck! Oh fuck!'' Jonathan screams.
Sabrina moves to touch him, but Dan holds her back. Let
him
go,'' the leader warns, "he's got to get through it.''
Just then Andy, a musician who lives downstairs, barges in.
Fuck! This new sampler just erased my entire drum machine's
memory! That's all my samples! All my patterns! Weeks ... months
of work!'' Dan quickly gets Andy out, but the synchronicity is
not lost on the members of the circle.
Jonathan, are you okay?'' Dan asks gently. The tripper
stares up at him from the floor. "Jonathan?''
Jonathan suddenly sits up. I'm your creation, aren't I?''
What do you mean?''
You made me, didn't you? I'm only here when you're on DMT.
Otherwise I don't exist, do I?'' Jonathan stares cynically at his
creator. "And you gave me this drug now, because it was time for
me to know, right?''
Sabrina is worried. She's been attracted to the boy for
some
time and would hate to lose him now. Jonathan?'' she says,
putting her hand on his back.
Jonathan lurches forward as if he's been stabbed. He
breathes heavily, holding his head in his hands, crying intensely
and then suddenly stopping.
Hours later, after everyone else has their chance to try
the
new drug, Jonathan explains what happened to him when Sabrina
touched his back. I had forgotten who I was. I had no identity
other than being Dan's creation. Then, all of a sudden I heard my
name--Jonathan. And I remembered my last name, and my mom, and I
went, `Wait a minute.' It was as if all the fragments of my life
had been blown apart and I was sticking them back in my body. I
was eagerly grabbing the information; I wanted this illusion of
my life. I was eagerly pasting it back on me. I was willingly
accepting this illusion.''
Sabrina feeds Jonathan chocolate chip cookies in the
kitchen
as life at Horizon hums back to normal. Dan watches Jonathan out
of the corner of his eye.
There's still this conversation going on in my head
saying--'We're sorry you had to find out this way,''' Jonathan
says.
You still think you're a DMT creation of Dan's?'' Sabrina
asks.
No. Jonathan is just a role I'm playing! It's as if the
whole search of life is not to obtain some kind of knowledge, but
trying to remember what you lost at birth. 'We're sorry you had
to find out this way. Such a shock to you. But now you know ...
you're not Jonathan.'''
Sabrina frowns. She was hoping that the cyberian truth
wouldn't be so depressing.
Jonathan reads her instantly and takes her hand. It was a
good experience, Sabrina, don't you see? Whatever God is, we're
all one thing. We're all part of the same thing. We've got no
identity of our own. 5 MAO DMT is like when you die. Life is like
this dream, and when you die you go, `Oh wow! It was so real!'
And then discovering that higher level--it's not like `Oh my god
I'm that higher self?' It's more like discovering `I'm not that
back there. I thought I was Jonathan--how silly!'''
Dan smiles and quietly moves out of the room. The download
has been successful.
Straight and Stoned
It's hard to know whether these people are touching the
next
reality or simply frying their brains. Transformation, no doubt,
is occurring in either case. But no matter how much permanent
damage may be taking place, there is substantial evidence that
these voyagers are experiencing something at least as revelatory
as in any other mystical tradition. The growing numbers of
normal-seeming Americans who are enjoying DMT on a regular basis
attests, at least, to the fact that even the most extremely
disorienting DMT adventures need not hamper one's ability to lead
a productive'' life.
World sharing and discovery of parallel realities fills the
DMT afternoons of Gracie and Zarkov,'' she a published
anthropologist, he an established and successful investment
analyst. Sex swingers in the 1970s, they became psychedelic
voyagers in the 1980s and self-published their findings in Notes
from Underground: A Gracie and Zarkov Reader out of their East
Bay home.
A cross between an opium den and a sex chamber, their
bedroom takes up at least half of their house. While most
people's parties end up in the kitchen, Gracie and Zarkov's end
up here in the bedroom, which is equipped with an elaborate
lighting system hidden behind translucent sheets on the walls and
in the ceiling panels, a remote control sound system, and several
cabinets filled with straps, studs, and belly-dancing gear.
Their writings on psychedelics are a detailed and
well-thought-out cross between the Physician's Desk Reference and
a wine-tasting guide; in describing the drug 2CB they point out
details such as there is a long, low-level tail to the trip.''
They've become regular Mondo 2000 contributors, avid heavy-metal
fans, and frequent DMT travelers. They spend their free hours
experimenting with new types of psychedelics and new combinations
of old ones. Gracie occasionally manifests the spirit of a female
goddess, most often Kali, and the two indulge in hyperhedonism on
an order unimaginable by others in their professional
fields--hence the pseudonyms. But Zarkov's practical, rationalist
Wall Street sensibilities shine through his storytelling about
psychedelics. To Zarkov, it's all a question of hardware and
software.
Tryptamines are a real phenomenon. If you take a high dose
of tryptamines you see certain things. I am a believer that you
are not a blank slate when you're born. You're a long complicated
product of genetic engineering by the Goddess, under all sorts of
selection criteria. And there's a hell of a lot of hardware and
wetware, so that DMT's not going to change everybody, or
everybody positively. That has to do with how you're wired up,
and how you're raised. Now, my experiences have been extremely
positive, but several of my closest friends are dead as a result
of psychedelic drugs. If you're not up to handling heavy
equipment, DMT is a very dangerous, very powerful hallucinogen.
It's extremely strong.''
Gracie and Zarkov can be considered designer beings. They
use their DMT experiences to consciously recreate their
identities in their professional worlds.
Gracie and I have developed the ability to write some
software to become significantly different people. That is a big
advantage in terms of being able to run our lives.'' They
sometimes like to think of themselves as anthropologists from
another dimension, merely observing the interactions and concerns
of human beings.
Zarkov makes practical use out of the sublime DMT state to
redesign the personality he uses in real life. He enjoys his DMT
experience, then downloads it in order to devise new business
strategies or even new sexual techniques--but he does not take
any of it too seriously. Zarkov remains convinced that our
reality is not making a wholesale leap out of history. His views
sharply contrast those of his good friend Terence McKenna.
I don't buy Terence's whole package. I just say that right
out. On the other hand, Terence is on to a lot of very important
things. Does that mean that the world's going to come to an end
in 2012? Does that mean that there's going to be a major
bifurcation? I don't see it that way. A drug is a tool, like a
microscope, a telescope, or a radio. Is it some godlike
metaphysical entity? Where I part company with Terence is where
he talks about the drug as a metaphysical entity which looks,
smells, tastes, and acts like God. I don't believe in God.''
Terence attributes Zarkov's obstinacy to an inability to
translate the experience of the infinite, egoless reality into a
model that can jive with his experience of daily, straight life.
Zarkov is great at downloading useful information, but, still
attached to his personality, he is not equipped to deal with the
most crushing nonpersonal cyberian conclusions. It's a question
of his ability to download threatening material.
Zarkov is terrified of psilocybin, and a fairly ego-bound
person. He is forceful, opinionated, and it never enters his mind
that he might not be entirely 100 percent correct. The couple of
times that he's tried to take mushrooms it's just been too rough
for him, because of the dissolving of the ego and surrender. This
is the issue for most males and most dominator types--is how can
you fling yourself into the blast furnace of disillusion?''
The point here is not to pit Zarkov and McKenna against
each
other, but to distinguish the specific qualities of the cyberian
psychedelic experience from other sorts of psychedelic
experiences. What makes a vision qualify for the renaissance is
that it is an experience of greater mystical dimensionality,
which can then be translated down, at least in part, to the
three-dimensional realm. One must retain an inkling of the
infinite--an intimation of immortality. As Terence argues:
You have to download it [the DMT experience] into some
kind
of model, and I don't know why I'm so able to do that. It may be
because of a bad upbringing. Because really there is nothing new
about this. This is what lurks behind Kabbalism and Catholic
hermeneutics. If you talk to the village priest, that's bullshit;
but if you talk to the theologians of the Jesuit order, they will
tell you God will enter history. History is the shock wave of
eschatology--the fall of all these dimensional models. This is
the secret that lies behind religion, but religion has been
subverted for millenia as a tool of social control through the
notion of morality. Morality has nothing to do with it. It isn't
good people who go to heaven. It's smart people who go to
heaven.''
CHAPTER 8
1234567: All Smart People Go to Heaven
Earth Girl--a beautiful if slightly otherworldly
twenty-year-old from Los Angeles--is at Mr. Floppy's Firm and
Floppy house party in Oakland, explaining the effects of Psuper
Cybertonic to several young girls who have traveled from the
suburbs to get a taste of the house scene. Adorning her Smart Bar
(a Peter Max version of Lucy's psychiatrist's booth) are several
posters of mushrooms, spaceships, and loose quotes from The
Starseed Transmissions:
As this new awareness increasingly filters into everyday
levels of human function, and as more and more individual human
cells become aware of what is taking place, the change will
accelerate exponentially. Eventually, the psychic pressure
exerted by a critical mass of humanity will reach levels that are
sufficient to tip the scales. At that moment, the rest of
humanity will experience the instantaneous transformation of a
proportion you cannot now conceive.''
Earth Girl and her traveling Smart Bar offer two brain
nutrient mixtures: the Cybertonic and a stimulant drink called
Energy Elicksure, made from ephedra (an herb related to the
active ingredient in Sudafed, the cold medicine that keeps one
from getting drowsy) and a few amino acid uppers. Her advice to
the high-schoolers is heartfelt but somewhat underinformed. She
relies heavily on the fact that these herbs are 100 percent
safe, used for centuries by ancient cultures, and make you feel
really good.'' The girls all buy the Cybertonic for $3 a glass
and chug it down. "Light up and live,'' Earth Girl calls after
the kids as they return to the dance floor.
A punkish boy stumbles up to the bar at about 4:00 a.m. His
girlfriend wants to dance till dawn but the LSD he took at three
that afternoon has sucked about as much in adrenaline as it
offered in insight. Earth Girl sells him a large cup of tangy
Energy Elicksure, and soon he's back under the strobe lights,
pulsing with new life.
It is the kind of scene that would horrify parents. What
the
hell's going on?
Earth Girl isn't really selling drugs; she's selling
nutrients. Drugs are patented medications that enhance brain
function; nutrients are nonpatented substances that the body uses
more like food to do the same thing, usually less invasively but
also a bit less effectively. They include substances like the
amino acid L-pryoglutamate, the herb Gingko biloba, niacin,
lecithin, and certain vitamins. Earth Girl's brews are slightly
altered versions of prepackaged nutrient mixes available at
health food stores or through multilevel marketers. These mixes
bear the names of Durk Pearson and Sandy Shaw, whose book Life
Extension first publicized the existence of smart chemicals and
the notion of nutrient-enhanced designer beings'' back in the
1970s.
Smart drugs (with names like vasopressin--a snorted
spray--hydergine and piracetam) are generally unavailable in this
country. Depending on the legal weather, these drugs can be
purchased through the mail from pharmaceutical companies overseas
because of a loophole demanded by AIDS patients who wanted access
to drugs not approved for use in the United States. (For more
information, see Dean and Morgenthaler, Smart Drugs and
Nutrients.) Smart drugs fall between the cracks of America's
ability to comprehend the uses of medication, which is why we
have such a cloudy understanding of their abilities and their
categorization.
Most cyberians understand the science by now. Acetylcholine
is one of the chemicals that allow for transmission of
information at the nerve synapses. As we get older, our supply of
acetylcholine decreases. While we can't just eat acetylcholine to
increase the supply in the brain, we can take its precursors,
such as choline, as well as chemicals that tend to increase our
own production of acetylcholine by the cholinergic system. Some
of these chemicals are now called nootropics'' (noos, "mind'' +
tropein, to turn''--that is, "acting on the mind''), the new
class of drugs that provide cognitive enhancement with no
toxicity.
The most widely used, over-the-counter smart nutrients are
mixtures of several forms of choline along with a few of the
enzymes and co-enzymes that turn them into acetylcholine. Earth
Girl's Cybertonic is a combination of choline, acetylcholine
precursors, and co-factors. Their effect is noticeable over time
but not very dramatic. The sudden increase in popularity and
marketing visibility of these nutrients is due to the fact that
other, much more potent smart substances have arrived in Cyberia.
It is a case of fame by association.
The pyrrolidone derivatives are the smart substances
deserving the most attention. In an unknown way, they improve the
functioning of the cholinergic system. They increase memory,
boost intelligence, and enhance certain kinds of learning. They
were originally used for diseases of old age such as Alzheimer's
and senility. The most widely distributed one in Europe is a
geriatric medication called piracetam, which is unavailable in
the United States. (Users here purchase it directly from European
distributors through the mail.) It is a fast-acting,
easy-to-notice cognitive enhancer. Walter Kirn, a novelist and
smart drugs user (whom we'll meet later), describes piracetam's
effect as going through life wearing a miner's lamp with a beam
of intelligence.'' Nearly everyone who takes it experiences
greater ability to conceptualize complex problems and to retain
information.
Users' reactions to the drugs differ, and all have their
preferred combinations and dosages. It's quite common to see a
bottle of vasopressin on a computer terminal, next to a bar of
chocolate or a pack of cigarettes. A particularly dense passage
of text to understand or a complex series of steps to write into
a program? A blast of vasopressin and everything gets clear in
less than a minute. Going to have a difficult day filled with
interviews? Probably better off with piracetam or pyroglutamate
in a few doses spread out over the course of the day--that added
articulateness and recall will come in handy. And, of course,
don't forget the daily dose of hydergine until the end of the
semester. Jet lag still a problem? Maybe some L-tyrosine (an
amino acid) to wake up this morning instead of coffee--it works
as well, without the jitters or the stress to the adrenal system.
Smart drugs even help psychedelics users come down off difficult
trips.
Smart drugs don't get cyberians high or stoned, but they do
seem to help them cope with complex computer problems,
ego-bending philosophical or spiritual inquiry, odd hours, a
highly pressurized work environment, or a creativity lapse. The
most common perception among users is that they have gained the
ability to deal with more than one or two parameters of a problem
at the same time. A computer programmer, for example, gains the
ability to track three or four different interdependent functions
through a series of program commands rather than only one. Smart
drugs give some writers the ability to keep half-a-dozen plot
points in mind at once. Psychedelics users report the ability to
download more of the information and realizations of a trip when
they augment the coming-down period with smart drugs.
A typical smart drug user receives his supplies from
laboratories in Europe, then creates his own regimen based on
self-experimentation. Personal neurochemical adjustment,'' as
users call it, is designer consciousness. Earth Girl's
distributor, Lila Mellow-Whipkit, a large, bald, hedonistic smart
drugs enthusiast, loves explaining how this neurochemical
self-modulation fits in to the new paradigm. He often sits behind
Earth Girl's Smart Bar sharing his wealth of data and insight
with newcomers.
Personal neurochemical adjustment--the equivalent is
personal paradigm and belief adjustment. And there's a basic
presupposition stolen from cybernetics that's used in NLP
[neurolinguistic programming]: the organism with the most
requisite behavior--the broadest variety of requisite
behavior--will always control any situation.''
To Lila, smart drugs, NLP, and cybernetics are all
basically
the same thing: programming.
In other words, if two people interact and they're trying
to get something done, the one who has the most variety in
behavior is the one who will be in charge and decide where it's
gonna go. It's an excellent operating presupposition. It works
most of the time, because that person's more able to compromise
and come up with ideas, they're less stuck. Think about children
who are getting a good Christian education right now. Where are
those people gonna be in the future? They're gonna be what Hunter
S. Thompson called `the doomed.' They are the doomed. They have
one belief system; they have one basic operating strategy, which
is the avoidance of pleasure. That's about it in Christianity as
far as your real life. You get to kneel and pray to this dead
guy.''
What Lila argues is twofold. First, smart drugs and
nutrients open up new neural pathways, allow for new thoughts and
more flexibility in conceptualizing. Those who take smart drugs
can understand more patterns and survive better. Second, and more
important, the implicit argument he makes is that the idea of
smart drugs and the willingness to experiment with them are
themselves heralds of the new paradigm. Not only is a smart drugs
user more equipped to deal with the increasingly complex reality
matrix; a person willing to take smart drugs is already coping
better. He has taken the first step toward becoming a designer
being.
The Readiness Is All
Downloading the massive information wave emanating from the
end of time is no easy task. Sure, a stockbroker can use smart
drugs to help himself draw broader conclusions about certain
market data, but cyberians have always known that the real
destiny of these chemicals is to foster the processing of the
inconceivable.
Mark Heley had just graduated Cambridge when he first found
smart drugs. An experienced psychedelic explorer, Heley already
believed that the earth is heading toward a great bifurcation
point. As a would-be usher of the final paradigm, he knew what
was required of him: a hierarchical leap in his mind's ability to
identify, process, store, and articulate the complexities of
eschatological acceleration. Mark was already smart--very
smart--but he'd need to be even smarter to face the challenges
ahead. He knew that smart drugs were going to play a major role
in the formation of Cyberia, and he knew he was going to be a
part of it.
At that time Earth Girl, who hadn't yet abandoned her given
name, Neysa, was visiting England. Her mother was a New Age
extremist, and Neysa, age eighteen, had left the West Coast to
get away from what she saw as trivial and fake spirituality. She
wasn't going back until she knew had something to fill the
vacuum.
As a writer for England's ID, Heley exploited his Cambridge
philosophy education to become an articulate launcher of cultural
viruses. In articles and lectures on topics ranging from
permaculture farming techniques to technoshamanism, Heley defined
the ways and memes of cyberian culture in London. He was DJing
for a house club and running a brain gym'' (brain machine rental
store), and in the process he gathered a wide following for a
twenty-four-year-old. Neysa, for the time being, was just hanging
out. When they met, they knew it would be forever.
In many ways, Heley and Neysa are opposites. He's an
intellectual who grounds every psychedelic revelation into a
plan. He's all business, and even his most far-reaching DMT
experiences mean nothing to him if he can't process them into
concrete realizations about the nature of reality. If those
realizations are to be worth anything, he must also quickly
determine how to communicate them to others through articles,
chemicals, club events, or cultural viruses. Heley is a mind. So
much so, that his body, often neglected through aggressive
chemical use and lack of sleep, revolts in the form of Chronic
Fatigue Syndrome, which incapacitates him completely for weeks or
even months at a time.
Neysa lives through her body almost exclusively. She can
feel what she calls spiritual weather,'' evaluate people at a
glance, and predict events in the weeks ahead entirely through
her body. She is incapable of articulating her experience through
words, but has developed her own "language of heart,'' which
takes the form of a smile, a touch, an embrace, or even sex.
Wherever she goes, a cluster of admirers forms around her looking
for the security that her carefree yet self-assured manner offers
them. With the help of Heley and his cyberian epiphanies, Neysa
was able to embrace the New Age ideas of her mother in a new,
cyberian context. Then she was complete: Earth Girl was born.
Where Heley valued smart drugs for their mental effects,
Earth Girl saw them as a physical preparation for the coming age.
They both knew that smart drugs and the cyberian designer minds
that the chemicals fostered needed to be broadcast to a wider
audience. America was ripe and ready. A few books on the
substances had come out in the United States, but popular, club
culture had no idea what was going on. Together, then, they
decided to put smart drugs and cyber culture on the map.
After severing ties with his partners at the Mind Gym in
London, Mark Heley came back to the Bay Area with Neysa and a new
idea: Smart Bars. They could distribute the drugs as healthy
fruit drinks over the counter right next to the dance floor.
Mark's media savvy and pharmaceutical experience could develop
the idea into a workable concept. Neysa's personality and flair
made her the perfect barperson and iconic representation of new,
designer being. Their mission was clear.
In San Francisco, Heley was introduced to Diana, a Berkeley
dropout who, with her friend Preston, was running Toon Town, an
underground roving house event for kids fed up with haughty dance
hall atmospheres. Heley's multidimensional language and strong
ideas soon earned him Diana as his new girlfriend, as well as a
position as one of the coordinators of Toon Town. Heley's
presence quickly manifested as an infusion of cyber-culture
viruses. Rooms were set aside for brain machines, virtual reality
demonstrations, sales of books and tapes, and the infamous Smart
Bar. While Preston would later resist Heley's metabrainstorm, for
the time being it made Toon Town the highest profile house
gathering in town. That, coupled with Diana's gentle pleading and
positive attitude, kept competition between the two men in check.
Heley, who by now had inherited and updated Ken Kesey's
role
as charismatic visionary of the San Francisco psychedelic
underground, invited the press and public to sample the Smart Bar
and other attractions at the cyber disco'' party. While he tells
only the facts to the press, "Smart drugs enhance
neurofunctioning legally and safely,'' he shares the real secret
of his success with anyone who thinks to ask.
My theory is that all that's happening is really the same
thing. There are cultural viruses which are actually no more than
elaborate placebos to draw people in. They're not the actual
things that are happening. For example, smart drugs and virtual
reality, these are two of my favorite cultural viruses because
they really hit wide and hard. Virtual reality comes from the
heart of a society which is really wired in to technology; it's a
powerful cultural virus for people to interface with a computer
in a harmonious way. And yet, if you try to experience it, you're
sadly disappointed. Or you take a smart drug and even after
designing an intelligent program, you realize that you've had all
this inside you in the first place. People think they're going to
get evolved using smart drugs, when actually you've got to be
evolved to want to use them in the first place.''
But Earth Girl shares a different story. Her enthusiasm for
smart drugs and her newfound fame are irresistible. She puts her
hair up in a Bardot-meets-Diller dredlocked beehive, and wears
Day-Glo silk robes. She offers her take on the smart drug virus
to the crowds who have gathered.
For me they're really good `cause I do enjoy getting high,
as everyone does. I love altered states--they're fun. But I can't
do the `body degeneration trip' anymore, especially the mental
one. Pot turns me into a moron. And a lot of these other kids are
doing so many drugs in one night that they're depleting
themselves of vitamins and minerals that these drinks put back.
Will they feel more love and communication ability from the
Psuper Cybertonic? Probably not. But at least they're going to be
maintaining a balance. They're tripping forever. They don't eat
for days. So I say, `Okay, here, have some of this, this is all
of the daily whatever you need. It's cheap, and it's actually,
really, really, really, really good for you so just like get into
it.'''
Mark gets pretty annoyed as Earth Girl babbles on to the
press. He knows her words are heartfelt, but they're also
mindless and dangerous. Soon, Earth Girl is more of a phenomenon
than the smart drinks themselves. She's gathered a posse of
young, mostly gay or sexually nondescript hangers-on whom she
calls the Foxy Seven. To anyone uninvolved in the scene, Earth
Girl begins to look more and more like a space cadet--or, in even
the best light, a new version of the stereotypical San Francisco
fag hag.'' The control she begins to exhibit over her seven
assistant bartenders is absolute. She is their mother and
spiritual guide. She holds out the promise of glory and
adventure, and it's all in the form of an elaborate theater/comic
book/cosmic fantasy.
Earth Girl shares her new vision of the Smart Bar mission
with her squadron as they set up her portable booth.
We're doing this because what we really are is, writers
and
performers. This is the perfect way to get in. We're going to
make our own comic book. We can keep launching all of our stuff.
That's why we all have to dress up. We're the Foxy Seven--Earth
Girl, Galactic Greg, Dynama, Greenfire. We get to play. Play and
serve ''
Earth Girl takes on the tone of a restaurant manager
briefing her new waiters, but in the language of a Course in
Miracles instructor on local cable access. When people are
talking to you and asking questions, they're looking at you like
you're an authority, so you conceive thought. And the stuff that
we put up--the pictures of mushrooms, quotes from The Starseed
Transmissions--it will help you keep on suggesting all this stuff
hypnotically and subliminally. I mean, everyone needs a little
awareness kick, as far as I'm concerned.''
Heley begins to feel it is Earth Girl who needs the
awareness kick. First, she has started bringing the Smart Bar,
which Toon Town paid for, to other clubs. Heley has been working
a carefully controlled culturo-viral experiment--now it is
out.'' Second, the kind of indiscriminate, overflowing
enthusiasm she exhibits clouds many of the issues that Heley is
attempting to clarify. She's even been on national television
news saying, "Smart drugs are really really really really really
really really really really really good!''
But things get even worse when Rolling Stone shows up to do
a piece on smart drugs. Of course, Earth Girl is the center of
the interview: Alcohol, cigarettes, coffee--work culture is drug
culture,'' she explains to their reporter. "With smart drugs,
there's no hangover, you're not depressed, you have a better
memory. Instead of getting fucked up and making a fool of
yourself, you're more in touch.''
Heley is incensed by her blanket statements, which
counteract months of his machinations. He broods in a back room
with the contempt of spurned lover. Alcohol is out there. Its
dangers are well known. It's promoted by a massive machine. She's
running up against something which she can never ever hope to
defeat. What are they going to do? Stop selling alcohol? No
fucking way. It just has to be played out. What you've got to do
is move the ground. You don't attack the monster. You infect him,
like a virus. Neysa's attitude is almost like a sixties' `left'
thing; it's like, `attack the monster.' But if you do that, you
become the monster. You're playing to spectacle. What we should
do is simply infect the monster and let it destroy itself. By
activating a media virus. And a media virus isn't a media attack,
it's something which exposes things internally.''
This conflict made for a tense week in Cyberia, as Earth
Girl explains: Honestly, the best way to tell on a reflection
level is the weather, as I'm sure you know. And if you just check
the weather out for the past three days it's just like ... it's
still ... we're coming out, we're trying to come out of it.''
It seemed to be a week in which cyberians were learning
that
somewhere else, someone else was doing exactly the same thing
they were. Someone else was writing a book about cyber culture.
Someone else was mixing a new house tune. Someone else was
creating a club. Someone else was doing a Smart Bar. In addition,
it had been raining for four days, and nearly everyone was
fighting the same cold. No one was fully sick, but everyone felt
under the weather.
Sitting with Earth Girl in a Thai restaurant on Haight
Street, I take some of the herbal formulas that Lila
Mellow-Whipkit has given me for my sniffles. Earth Girl explains
to me how everything fits together. In spite of her
generalizations, Earth Girl is a sensitive, spiritually mature''
young woman. It would be a mistake to let her cosmic jargon
obscure her quite perceptive observations on human nature in the
trenches of Cyberia:
The weirdness of this weekend is that everyone's
discovering all these parallel things that are going on and
everyone's reeling from the fear of `do it first.' But this is
just the realization of a universal mind! Of course everyone's
doing it all at the same time. It's all part of the same thing!
Everyone's fighting a cold, and feels like they've got a cold,
but ... it's not breaking through ... it's a slightly physical
thing, but it's much more psychological because in this time all
the fear can get in and all these negative thoughts and all this
stuff can get in, and it is getting in. It did get in ... but now
I feel today we're coming out of it. We've still got a lot of
shit we've got to work out personally, like, group-wise.''
To Earth Girl and her followers, the current friction is
really a morphogenetic stress. Many people are having the same
ideas at the same times because they are all connected
morphogenetically. The sickness and fear results from the
inability to break the fiction of individuality. But in the cyber
culture world, the denizens must realize that they are all
connected. Their commitment to the metatransformation of humanity
has put them all into the same weather system.'' They must be
content with never "owning'' an idea. There is no room for pride
or credit.
But Earth Girl also seems to realize that her final
allegiance is to herself and the Foxy Seven. Survival and
ambition--however rationalized--still take precedence. By the
time the Rolling Stone piece goes to press, Earth Girl has gone
off to Big Heart City, another club in town, which gives her
their entire basement (which was the location of Tim Leary's
reception last month) to create a smart drugs lounge. There, she
will be queen bee, and will never again have to put up with Heley
or his mild-mannered political arrogance. Her Smart Lounge will
just light up and live.''
Heley, meanwhile, partners with Chris, an electrical
engineering student and smart nutrients chemist whose knowledge
of neurochemistry is as vast as Earth Girl's knowledge of
spiritual weather.
It stops raining Friday afternoon, and Chris, Heley,
Preston, and Diana convene at 650 Howard Street (a club that has
become the temporary home of Toon Town) to eat the free hors'
d'oeuvres that the daytime bar gives out during happy hour.
Having reviewed the Rolling Stone article, they now discuss
strategies to keep their new and improved Smart Bar sans Earth
Girl, called the Nutrient Cafe, on the cutting edge of
neuro-enhancement. Mark gets on one of his articulate impassioned
riffs about the smart drugs virus, as the others drink beer and
nod. Not that they haven't heard all this before, but nodding
generally keeps Mark from getting too worked up and pissed off.
Heley's main regret is that the Smart Bar, which was supposed to
be an outlet for true information about good drugs and bad drug
laws, turned into a media joke.
It's a war on information. If you're not capable of
fighting the wrong information then you're not capable of
fighting the machine. The point is, that if we manage to combine
the subtlety of good information with the bludgeon of its media
impact, we'd have had a tool against the war on drugs. What do we
have at the moment? Petty hype for a bunch of multilevel
marketing people who want to scam a few fucking dollars out of
something that doesn't do what they say it does.
What could have happened is that we could have gotten to a
level where we could have argued the case for the complete
restructuring of the drug patenting laws just on their own
internal logic. Piracetam is not available in the U.S., not
because of any toxicity, or any side effects, but because it's
not patented. Because the company that invented it didn't patent
it. At the time, it just wasn't thought of as commercially
viable. The psychotropic effects of piracetam were discovered
years later. Also, there's no FDA approval procedure for a
nootropic drug. It has to be for Alzheimer's, or it has to be for
treating strokes.''
Heley's disgust is well founded. Today, most smart drugs
are
not available in the United States even to victims of geriatric
disease. In order for a drug to get FDA approval, a
pharmaceutical company must spend millions of dollars on tests.
It's worth it to these companies to do the tests only if they
know they will have a patent on the medication; with piracetam,
the companies know they cannot get a patent. So, instead, they
race to develop substances similar to piracetam and then patent
those. Meanwhile, only the underground knows of piracetam's
existence, and it's in the pharmaceutical companies' best
interests to keep it that way. The FDA obliges, and most doctors
who know of the drug do not buck the system or risk liability by
ordering unapproved substances from overseas.
In even more ludicrous cases, chemicals and nutrients like
DHEA (not legal in the United States) and L-pyroglutamate (which
is available at any good health store) have been studied by
pharmaceutical companies and proven to enhance cognitive skills
in humans. But the companies intentionally conceal these studies
and instead attempt to develop variants of these chemicals that
can be patented and sold more profitably. Some of these
substances have even been shown to be effective in treating AIDS,
but, again, since the drugs are not patentable, the studies done
on them are suppressed. In one case, a scientist has been issued
a court order not to reveal the results of his discoveries about
DHEA. Heley believes that smart drugs, as a cultural virus, will
expose how the American health-care business may be our nation's
most serious health threat:
Smart drugs is a good way of burrowing in there. The
argumentation that surrounds smart drugs, the web of the cultural
virus, is just a worm designed to eat into those regulatory
bodies and explode them by turning the mirror back on themselves.
If we can create a cogent argument we can show up their
structural inadequacies. The war on drugs, for example, being
this blanket war on drugs. You can advertise cigarettes and
alcohol and there are all these horrible over-the-counter drugs
that you can buy; painkillers in this country are pretty fucking
dubious to say the least. But the thing that can't be said in
American culture, because of that massive media attack, is that
some drugs are good for you in some ways.
What I object to is the smart drug argument being
completely obscured. Now the FDA has a counteraction. Their
counterattack has been to close the loophole which allows the
importation of smart drugs. And that is the only rational piece
of legislature in the entire cannon of American drug laws. And
that wasn't a loophole established by the smart drugs movement;
it was established by Act Up, and by AIDS activist organizations
over a long period of time with sustained political pressure of
an absolutely enormous magnitude. All the FDA is waiting for one
public excuse for closing this, and it's gone.''
Diana rises to get more food. Heley realizes he's
grandstanding a bit, and justifies himself. I admit that we made
a mistake with this thing. It got out of hand. What we're doing
now is we're actually trying to put this right. Doing this
Nutrient Cafe: really straightforward. We're not hyping, we're
not going do a media virus about it, but we'll provide a really
good product within a certain milieu, and lots of information
about it. And if we completely stay within the laws as they exist
at the moment, it'll just do the fucking job without all of the
bullocks.''
Diana returns with some chicken wings and joins in the
conversation. That bar never even evolved. When we started it
the whole idea was that Mark and Neysa [Earth Girl] would create
these products. They knew that Durk and Sandy products were shit
anyway. That's never happened. ...''
Mark defends: Well it's not just that they're shit;
they're
old. It's told and tired.''
The only thing that's evolved down in that basement [Earth
Girl's new Smart Lounge],'' Diana continues with candor, "is that
there's more decorations. And there's more flash and there's more
superstars. And that's not the point. There's no books down
there, there's no information, there's no pamphlets, there's no
nothing, and the people that designed it didn't know shit about
it. Not that I do, but I'm not selling the stuff.''
Mark interrupts: I'm certainly not washing my hands of it,
because we're all partly responsible; we instituted a lot of the
processes that lead to this thing. But I find myself radically
disagreeing with the way she's doing it. It's not her, it's not
even the way that she's approaching it. It's the way that she's
allowing it to go. It's a group thing. It's not Neysa, the owners
of Big Heart City, Rolling Stone, or Lila Mellow-Whipkit. It's
basically what all of them want out of it. This is a propagation
of an immediate product over something which is an informational
thing. How many people have ever fucking taken smart drugs since
we started this? That's a measure of its failure. The people that
fucking do the Smart Bar don't even use them.''
He stares off into space. He knows his ego is probably as
responsible for his upset as the political vulnerability of Earth
Girl's glamour image.
It's a matter of fine balance. I really believe that if it
had gone other ways, that FDA loophole wouldn't even be in
question. I think we'll still manage to keep it open, maybe we
have to do some repair work. It should never ever have been this
way. It's just my stupidity to allow it to happen.''
Maybe he should have taken more smart drugs.
CYBERIA PART 3
Technoshamanism: The Transition Team
CHAPTER 9
Slipping Out of History
Much more than arenas for drug activism, Toon Town and
other
house'' events are Cyberia's spiritual conventions. House is
more than a dance craze or cultural sensation. House is cyberian
religion. But the priests and priestesses who hope to usher in
the age of Cyberia have problems of their own.
We're at an early Toon Town--the night Rolling Stone came
to
write about Earth Girl and the Smart Bar. It's their first party
since one fateful night three weeks ago when their giant,
outdoor, illegal rave got crashed by the cops and they lost
thousands of dollars. Preston is still a little pissed at Heley
over that mishap. The English newcomer got too ambitious, and now
Preston and Diana's baby, Toon Town, is in serious debt. They may
never recover, and all Heley can think about are his damn
cultural viruses. This used to be a dance club!
Heley's in no mood for arguments now. It's 11:00 p.m. Earth
Girl hasn't shown up with her bar--correction: with Toon Town's
bar. She isn't picking up her phone. The laser is malfunctioning.
It's still early, but it's already clear that either the owners
of this venue or the hired doorpeople are stealing money. A
Rolling Stone reporter is on his way to write about the Smart
Bar, which is nowhere to be found. R.U. Sirius and Jas Morgan,
the editors of Mondo 2000 magazine, arrive with about forty
friends whom they'd like added to the guest list. Tonight is
supposed to be a party for the new issue, but, on entering the
club, R.U. Sirius announces that the real release party will
happen in a few weeks at Toon Town's competitor Big Heart City.
Tonight is just a party'' that Mondo is co-sponsoring. News to
Heley. News to Preston. News to Diana.
Bryan Hughes, the virtual reality guide, is setting up a VR
demo on a balcony above the dance floor. Along with his gear he's
brought a guest list of several hundred names. Cap'n Crunch,
notorious reformed hacker and the original phone phreaque, and
his assistant are trying to hook up his Video Toaster, but the
projector isn't working. The place is buzzing, but Heley is not.
Perched on a balcony overlooking the dance floor, he looks away
from the confusion, takes off his glasses, and pinches the bridge
of his nose. He's angry. Chris--the future nutrient king--mixes
Heley a special concoction of pyroglutamate to take the edge off
the apparent conflux of crises.
Diana and Preston are running around with wires and
paperwork, arguing about the limits of the building's voltage.
They perform much more actual physical business than Heley does,
but they know, even begrudgingly, that he's engaged in an equally
important preparation, so they give him all the space he needs.
Heley is the technoshaman. He is the high priest for this
cybermass, and he must make an accurate forecast of the spiritual
weather before it begins. He is guiding the entire movement
through a dangerous storm. But instead of using the stars for
navigation, he must read the events of the week, the status of
key cultural viruses, the psychological states of his
crewmembers, and the tone and texture of his own psychedelic
visionquests. Tonight, most of Heley's calculations and
intuitions indicate doom. He brought cyber house to San Francisco
and was willing to man the helm, but now it's getting out of
control.
I brought the house thing to Mondo, I did their article,
and I introduced them to it.'' Their disloyalty, Heley feels, has
undermined his efforts to bring real, hard-core, spiritual,
consciousness-raising cyber-influenced house to America.
"Sometimes I just feel like there's only fifteen of us really
doing this. There's Fraser Clark in England, who does Evolution
magazine, there's me, there's Nick from Anarchic Adjustment, Jody
Radzik, Deee-Lite. I don't mean that we're creating it, but we
are painting the signs. We're indicating the direction.'' Heley
looks down at the confusion of people, machinery, and wires on
the dance floor and sighs. God knows what direction this is
pointing in.''
It was about three weeks ago that things began to get
messy.
Heley, Preston, and Diana had arranged a huge rave''--a party
where thousands take E and dance to house, usually outside,
overnight, and illegally--at an abandoned warehouse and yard. A
club competing for the same business on Saturday night found
their map point (a small hand-out circulated through the
underground community indicating where the party was to be held)
and notified the police, who were more than willing to shut it
down. Heley recounts the bust with the conviction of a modern-day
Joan of Arc.
They arrived and they only saw people having a good time.
People having a party. There's no rational argument they can make
against us. They smell it. They smell it and they understand.''
Heley swigs down the rest of his pyroglutamate and soon
appears to have gained a new clarity and, along with it, a new
reason to fight on. This is not a countermovement. It is the
shape of the thing that will replace them. But it will be
painless for them. It's not a thing to be frightened of. If
you're frightened of acceptance, yes, be afraid because this
thing is a reintegration. The trouble is that it just dissolves
the old lies--all the things you just know are untrue. We're not
living that life anymore. You can only live the old lies when the
rest of the paraphernalia is in place. Really, house just
destroys that. It's not a reactionary thing.''
Let's leave Toon Town for a moment to get a look at the
history of this thing called house.'' Most Americans say it
began in Chicago, where DJs at smaller, private parties and
membership-only clubs (particularly one called The Warehouse)
began aggressively mixing records, adding their own electronic
percussion and sampling tracks, making music that--like the
home-made vinaigrette at an Italian restaurant--was called
"house.'' The fast disco and hip-hop---influenced recordings
would sample pieces of music that were called bites'' so (others
spell it "bytes,'' to indicate that these are digital samples
that can be measured in terms of RAM size). Especially evocative
bites were called acid bites.'' Thus, music of the house, made
up of these acid bites, became known as "acid house.''
When this sound got to England, it was reinterpreted, along
with its name. Folklore has it that industrial (hard, fast,
high-tech, and psychedelic) music superstar Genesis P. Orridge
was in a record store when he saw a bin of disks labeled acid,''
which he figured was psychedelic music--tunes to play while on
LSD. He and his cohorts added their own hallucinogenic flavor to
the beats and samples, and British acid house was born.
When I heard acid house music would be playing, I figured
for sure they meant it was a psychedelic dance club--music to
take acid to,'' explains Lyle, an ex-punker from Brixton who has
followed the house scene since its beginnings in the suburbs of
London. "It began on an island, Ibetha, off the coast of Spain.
Everyone goes there on holiday, does Ecstasy, and stays up all
night. We got back to England and decided we didn't want to give
it up and started raving on the weekends.''
Lyle's explanation is as good as any for how raves got
started. These Woodstock-like fests begin on a Friday evening and
carry on through Sunday afternoon. Dancing is nonstop. They
became most popular in the late 1980s, when thousands of cars
could be seen on any weekend heading toward whichever
suburb--Stratford, Brighton--was hosting the party. Police began
cracking down on them in 1990 or so, but then they went legit by
renting out permitted club space. News of raves eventually
rebounded to the United States, where the original house clubs
began to incorporate the British hallucinogenic style and
substances. San Francisco, where psychedelics are still the most
popular, was most receptive to the new movement, which is why
Heley and other English ravers wound up there.
As Heley suggests, there's more to raves and house than
meets the eye. Coming to an understanding of the house phenomenon
requires a working knowledge of the new technology, science, and
drugs that shape Cyberia, as well as an awareness of the new
spiritual dimension (or perhaps archaic spiritual revival)
arising out them. Just as the new, quantum sciences and chaos
mathematics developed out of the inability of materialist models
to effectively map our reality, house is meant as a final
reaction to the failings of a work ethic---based,
overindustrialized culture.
The ravers see themselves and the creation of their
subculture as part of the overall fractal equation for the
postmodern experience. One of the principles of chaos math, for
example, is phase-locking, which is what allows the various cells
of an organism to work harmoniously or causes a group of women
living together to synchronize their menstrual cycles.
Phase-locking brings the participants--be they atoms, cells, or
human beings--into linked cycles that promote the creation of a
single, interdependent organism where feedback and iteration can
take place immediately and effectively. A phase-locked group
begins to take on the look of a fractal equation, where each tiny
part reflects the nature and shape of the larger ones.
Members of rave culture phase-locked by changing their
circadian rhythms. They self-consciously changed their basic
relationship to the planet's movements by sleeping during the day
and partying all night. As Heley says in defiance: It's in the
face of the network that tells you seven to eight-thirty is prime
time. You sleep during prime time. You share the same place
physically as that society, but you're actually moving into a
different dimension by shifting through the hours. It's an
opportunity to break out from all the dualistic things.''
Of course, sleeping days and partying nights is just as
dualistic as working days and sleeping nights, but the point here
is that the dualistic things'' considered important by
mainstream culture are not hard realities, and they are certainly
not the "best'' realities. Ravers were able to create a
subculture different from the work-a-day society in which they
had felt so helpless. They used to be the victims of a top-down
hierarchy. As the poor workers to a mean boss or the powerless
kids to a domineering father or even the working class to a rigid
monarchy, they were just numbers in an old-style linear math
equation. Now, phase-locked as part of a living, breathing
fractal equation, they feel more directly involved in the
creation of reality.
When you move away from a massive guilt trip in which
there
is a direct hierarchy, you suddenly find that it doesn't matter a
fuck what your boss or the authorities think of you. You're
creating yourself moment by moment in an environment that is
created by people who are like-minded. It's a liberation, and
it's completely in the face of twentieth-century society.''
The ultimate phase-locking occurs in the dance itself,
where
thousands of these like-minded'' young people play out house
culture's tribal ceremony. The dance links everyone together in a
synchronous moment. They're on the same drugs, in the same
circadian rhythm, dancing to the same 120-beat-per-minute
soundtrack. They are fully synchronized. It's at these moments
that the new reality is spontaneously developed.
The dance empowers you. It reintegrates you. And then you
can start again. It's an ancient, spiritual thing. It's where we
have always communicated to each other on the fullest level.
Instead of being in this extremely cerebral,
narrow-bandwidth-television society, people learn instead to
communicate with their bodies. They don't need to say anything.
There is just a bond with everyone around them. A love, an
openness. If you look at a society as repressed as England, you
see how much impact that can have.''
The various forms of social repression in England, along
with its own deeply rooted pagan history, made it the most
fertile soil in which house could grow. As Heley shares: I felt
it was slipping out of history. That this was an alternative
history.''
House became massive in England. News of raves was always
spread precariously by word of mouth or tiny flyers, but somehow
everyone who needed to know what was happening and where, found
out. Either one knew what was happening or one didn't. It was as
simple as that. By the end of the 1980s, house was everywhere in
the United Kingdom, but it had never seen the light of day. Tens
of thousands of kids were partying every weekend. Mainstream
culture was not even aware of their existence. By the time the
tabloids caught on and published their headlines proclaiming the
arrival of house, the ravers had realized they'd gone off the map
altogether.
Off the Map and into the Counterculture
Today, the English house scene still defines the pulse for
other house-infected cities. Whether through the brain-drain of
emigrees like Heley or the exportation of London-mixed dance
tracks, Great Britain still holds the most coherently articulated
expression of the house ethic. While there's less technology,
fewer gays, and fewer smart chemicals at London clubs, there's a
much clearer sense of house's role as a countercultural agent.
Some argue that this is because London's morphogenetic
field
of counterculture is more developed than America's. London's
pagan cultures have endured centuries of repression and
distillation. Their phase-locking was probably achieved somewhere
in the twelfth century. Symbols and even personalities from
ancient pagan times still live in London house.
One such pagan hero is Fraser Clark, a self-proclaimed
psychedelic warrior from the 1960s who began Encyclopaedia
Psychedelica magazine, which has since mutated into London house
culture's `zine Evolution. At his London flat, which he shares
with two or three students half his age, the long-haired Welshman
rolls some sort of cigarette and explains to me what's happening.
From the British perspective, this is a historical battle for
religious freedom.
A kid grows up in a Christian culture and thinks he's
probably the only one questioning these ideas. When he comes to
house,'' the English are found of using the word alone like that,
as if it's a religion, "he suddenly realizes he's got a whole
alternative history. He might get into UFOs or whatever there
is--drugs, witches, it's all in there.''
And all quite accessible. To participate in this experience
of resonance, each participant must feel like part of the source
of the event. Where a traditional Christian ritual is dominated
by a priest who dictates the ceremony to a crowd of followers,
pagan rituals are free-for-alls created by a group of equals. For
house events to provide the same kinds of experiences, they had
to abandon even traditional rock and roll concert ethos, which
pedestals a particular artist and falls into the duality of
audience and performer, observer and object. The house scene
liberates the dancers into total participation. Fraser, whose new
club UFO opens tonight, explains the advantages of a no-star
system:
Nobody is that much better than the next guy that he needs
a whole stage and twenty thousand people fillin' up a stadium to
see him. Nobody's that much better than the audience. We don't
need that and people don't want it anymore. A lot of the music
you'll hear tonight is never gonna be on a record. Kids just mix
it the week before and play it that one night.''
So the house movement is determined to have no stars. It is
in the face'' of a recording industry that needs egos and
idolatry in order to survive. It depends, instead, on a community
in resonance. The fractal equation must be kept in balance. If
one star were to rise above the crowd, the spontaneous feedback
creating the fractal would be obliterated. The kids don't want to
dance even facing their partners, much less a stage. Everyone in
the room must become "one.'' This means no performers, no
audience, no leaders, no egos. For the fractal rule of
self-similarity to hold, this also means that every house club
must share in the cooperative spirit of all clubs. Even a club
must resist the temptation to become a star.'' Every club and
every rave must establish itself as part of one community, or
what Fraser calls "the posse.''
It looks sort of like a tribe, but a tribe is somehow
geographically separate from the main culture.'' Fraser finishes
his cigarette and feeds his dog some leftover Indian food from
dinner. "A posse is very definitely an urban thing. It's just a
group of people, sharing technology, sharing all the raves and
music as an organization. We even call them `posses putting on
raves.' I really don't think there's such a thing as personal
illumination anymore. Either everybody gets it or nobody gets it.
I really think that's the truth.''
UFO, a collective effort of Fraser's posse, opens in an
abandoned set of train tunnels at Camden Lock market. This
English party is not at all like a San Francisco or even a New
York club. It is an indoor version of the old-style massive
outdoor raves. The clothing is reminiscent of a Dead show, but
maybe slightly less grungy. Batik drawstring pants, jerseys with
fractal patches, love beads, dredlocks, yin-yang T-shirts, and
colorful ski caps abound. In the first tunnel, kids sit in small
clusters on the dirt floor, smoking hash out of Turkish metal
pipes, sharing freshly squeezed orange juice, and shouting above
the din of the house music. In one corner, sharply contrasting
the medieval attire, ancient stone, and general filth, are a set
of brain machines for rent. In the second tunnel, dozens of kids
dance to the throbbing house beat. Even though we're in a
dungeon, there's nothing down'' about the dancing. With every
one of the 120 beats per minute, the dancers articulate another
optimistic pulse. Up up up up. The hands explode upward again and
again and again. No one dances sexy or cool. They just pulse with
the rhythm, smile, and make eye contact with their friends. No
need for partners or even groups. This is a free-for-all.
A cluster of young men are hovering near the turntables
with
the nervous head-nodding and note-taking of streetcorner bookies.
They are the DJs, who are each scheduled to spin records for
several hours until the party breaks up at dawn. Tonight's music
will be mostly hard-core, techno-acid---style house, but there
are many house genres to choose from. There's bleep,'' which
samples from the sounds of the earliest Pong games to extremely
high-tech telephone connection and modem signals. New York house,
or "garage'' sound, is more bluesy and the most soulful; it uses
many piano samples and depends on mostly black female singers.
There's also headstrong'' house, for the hardest of headbangers;
"techno,'' from Detroit; dub,'' coined from Gibson's Neuromancer
for Reggae-influenced house; and "new beat,'' from Northern
Europe. Less intense versions of house include deep'' house,
with more space on the top layers and a generally airier sound,
and the least throbbing kind, and "ambient'' house, which has no
real rhythm at all but simply fills the space with breathy
textures of sound. Of course, any or all of these styles may be
combined into a single song or mix, along with samples of
anything else: Native American whoops,'' tribal chanting,
evangelists shouting, or even a state trooper calling a mother to
inform her "your son is dead.''
The DJs consider themselves the technoshamans of the
evening. Their object is to bring the participants into a
technoshamanic trance, much in the way ancient shamans brought
members of their tribes into similar states of consciousness. A
DJ named Marcus speaks for the group:
There's a sequence. You build people up, you take `em back
down. It can be brilliant. Some DJs will get people tweaking into
a real animal thing, and others might get into this smooth flow
where everyone gets into an equilibrium with each other. But the
goal is to hit that magical experience that everyone will talk
about afterwards. Between 120 beats a minute and these sounds
that the human ear has never heard before, you put them to music
and it appeals to some primal level of consciousness.''
If it didn't, house would never had made it across the
Atlantic to America, where it could manifest not only on a primal
level but a marketing one.
CHAPTER 10
Making the Golden Rule Trendy
Building on the foundations of shamanism in the English
house scene, Americans in San Francisco focus on the techno side.
While the English rave has a quality of medievalism, tribal
energy, and Old World paganism, the American cyber disco is the
most modern mutation of bliss induction, and uses whatever means
necessary to bring people into the fractal pattern.
As Jody Radzik explains: In a really good house
experience,
you want to create something like the Electric Kool-Aid Acid
Test. You're trying to create an environment where people can get
outside of themselves. There gets to be a certain point in the
night where people just cut loose. The party just reaches a kind
of critical mass. A synergy of shared consciousness occurs and
boom. You'll know it. It'll have a certain sparkle to it.''
Rising above the muted grit and gristle of the British pagans,
American technojunkies sparkle and buzz to the same throbbing
beat.
Rather than abandoning the television aesthetic and
discouraging the urge to be hip,'' club promoters use hipness as
bait. Jody Radzik, who designs house clothing when he's not
promoting the club Osmosis, believes that as house gets on MTV,
"a whole new culture will be created. This will be a result of it
being trendy. At the bottom line, that's what makes things run:
narcissism. Trendiness. I'm always trying to be the trendiest I
can be. It's my job. I do design. People get into this because
it's a hip new thing. Then maybe they have an opening and get
exposed to new ideas. But the fuel that's going to generate the
growth of this culture is going to be trendiness and hipness.
We're using the cultural marketing thing against itself. They
consume the culture, and get transformed. House makes the Golden
Rule trendy. That's why I'm trying to create the trendiest
sportswear company in the world.''
For Radzik, marketing is the perfect tool for
transformation. Rather than discard the system that has dominated
until now, the system is used to destroy itself. The machinery of
the industrial culture--be it technology, economics, or even the
more subtle underlying psychological principles and social
mechanisms--is turned against itself for its own good. Just as
the earth uses its own systems of feedback and iteration to
maintain a viable biosphere, house culture exploits the positive
feedback loops of marketing and data sharing to further human
consciousness. Radzik explains his take on the Gaia hypothesis
and McKenna's prediction about the year 2012:
This bifurcation we're coming up to, this shift, will be
the awakening of the planet's awareness. That's the shared belief
of the raver camp in the scene. House is the vehicle for
disseminating that culture to the rest of the planet.''
And how does house conduct this dissemination? By imparting
a direct experience of the infinite. In the dance is the eternal
bliss moment. The social, audio, and visual sampling of
innumerable cultures and times compresses the history and future
of civilization into a single moment, when anything seems
possible. The discontinuous musical and visual sampling trains
the dancers to cope with a discontinuous reality. This is a
lesson in coping with nonlinear experience--a test run in
Cyberia. A tour of Radzik's clothing studio makes this amply
clear. His design arsenal is made up of the illustrations from an
eclectic set of texts: Decorative Art of India, with pictures of
Indian rugs woven into patterns reminiscent of fractals;
Molecular Cell Biology, with atomic diagrams and electron
microscopy of cells and organic molecules; The Turbulent Mirror:
An Illustrated Guide to Chaos Theory and the Science of
Wholeness, with fractals and mathematical diagrams; and Yantra:
The Tantric Symbol of Cosmic Unity, a collection of hieroglyphics
and graffiti-like ancient scribblings. Radzik composes his
designs by computer scanning images from books like these and
then recombining them. With a keen eye for the similarities of
these images, Radzik creates visually what house does musically:
the discontinuous sampling of the symbology of bliss over time.
The images' similarities give a feeling of comfort and
metacontinuity.
Radzik leafs through the pages of his books, scanning
images
for his next promotional flier. The arcane and future groove in
the now. It's like this fantastic coincidence. House culture is a
meeting point for all these different things. Music, finally, is
the universal language of love. The nightclub people are the ones
who help manifest it into popular culture. What I do is creative
anthropology. I observe what's happening in the house culture,
and market it back at those people.''
It's important to realize that this seemingly mercenary
attitude is not inconsistent with house philosophy--in fact, it's
not considered mercenary at all. Marketing is merely one of the
feedback loops that can promote the house philosophy back into
itself, and amplify the experience. It does not suck from the
system, it adds to it. Everything relates to house in a
self-conscious or meta'' way. House music is not just music, but
samples of music recombined into a kind of meta-music.
House is merely a construction--a framework--like language
or any other shell. Once something is in the house,'' it has
been incorporated into the fractal pattern of metaconsciousness,
and is a subject of and contributor to the greater schematic. It
has become a part of the self-similar universe--one with the
galactic dance. That's why the mechanisms for change in house
might be "in your face,'' but they are almost never
confrontational. With no dualities, there's nothing to confront.
House, like punk, is an anarchic, rebellious movement,'' admits
Radzik "but it isn't a violent or negative one. If the planet's a
living organism, then it doesn't make sense to fuck with each
other.''
Nick Phillip, twenty-two, a recent emigre from Britain and
now the designer for Anarchic Adjustment clothing, is one of
Radzik's best friends and conspirators. He agrees wholeheartedly
that participants in house are within a construct that allows for
global change.
The kids now are not going to turn on, tune in, drop out.
They're going to drop in. They're going to infiltrate society and
change things from within. They're going to use business, music,
or whatever they can to change people. What we're doing speaks
for itself. People who are involved in the scene are creating
this stuff for themselves.''
Finally Going Mental
Nick has arrived at Toon Town tonight with a supply of his
most popular jerseys to be sold at the club's small shop, and he
senses that the crowd needs an infusion of life. Heley has moved
down from the balcony and is making suggestions to Buck, the
rookie DJ who will play until 2:00 a.m., when Jno, the
technoshaman extraordinaire, takes over. Nick makes his way to
the dance floor like a prizefighter taking the ring, and his
pugilistic fury is more reminiscent of punk slamdancing than
blissful house explosions. It's called going mental'' and it
looks pretty intense, but his enthusiasm is contagious and others
are either encouraged enough to join in or frightened off the
dance floor altogether. Apparently, part of the reason for the
evening's discontinuity is that the venue's previous event, a
birthday party for a yuppie named Norman, had not been let out
before Toon Town began. Diana and Preston have urged Buck to play
the most brutal house music he can find in the hopes of scaring
these people away.
Many house regulars have retreated to a brain machine
lounge,'' where they smoke and chat like members of a bridge
club. The room has been set aside for David, a distributor of the
"light and sound'' devices, to demonstrate the new technology to
house kids and maybe make a few sales. The machines consist of a
set of goggles and headphones.
No, it's not virtual reality,'' David says, probably for
the hundredth time, to a newcomer to the room. "It's for
relaxation and it can get you high.'' The goggles flash lights
and the headphones beep sounds at exact frequencies, coaxing the
brain into particular wave patterns. Ultimately, the brain
machines can put the user into the brain state of an advanced
meditator.
While the kids play with the machines, David is more
interested in explaining to an attractive young woman who is
waiting for a brain machine, an article he hopes to write for
Magickal Blend magazine about the physics of David Bohm.
It's all about discontinuity. Things that look separate in
our reality, the explicate order, are all linked together in what
Bohm says is the implicate order.''
David grabs a pencil and draws a picture on the back of his
hand to make his point. If two positrons shoot out of an atom at
the same time, and you shove one, the other will move, too.''
How does it know to move? ESP?'' asks the girl.
No. It happens at the same exact time.''
A couple of other kids perk up to hear the explanation.
That's because on the implicate order, the positrons are still
linked together.''
David is interrupted by a fourteen-year-old boy who seems
to
have a better handle on the idea. Bohm used the analogy of a
goldfish and two TVs. If you put two cameras on a single
goldfish, and connected them to two TVs, you might think these
were pictures of two different fish. But when one fish moves, the
other will move at exactly the same time. It's not because
they're connected. It's because they're the same fish!''
Right,'' David chimes in, eager to get credit for his
knowledge before the girl disappears under the goggles. "The real
goldfish in the bowl is the implicate order. The monitors--the
way we see and experience it--is the explicate order.''
The young boy rolls his eyes. Clearly, David doesn't
understand the implications of all this. Kind of, only, man. The
implicate order is timeless truth. It's the way things are. The
explicate order is the way they manifest for us in time and three
dimensions.''
David gives in to the child's brilliance. Do you take
smart
drugs, or what?''
In another private room, actually a kind of DJ lounge, Jody
Radzik, a DJ named Pete, and a more flamboyant crowd who call
themselves personal friends of the DJs'' smoke pot and talk
about similar issues. This is all very heady for a house club.
The center of attention is a state-of-the-art transvestite
calling "her''self Gregory, who is trying to understand the
merits of trendiness in house culture.
Radzik takes a stab at a simple response: House makes the
Golden Rule trendy. It makes spirituality trendy.''
But is trendiness good?'' Gregory asks, her eyes shifting
in that tweaking-on-psychedelics-paranoid way.
The culture is just pushing a pseudopod into a new
direction and that's a trend.'' Radzik says, using the biological
metaphor to reassure her. "The ideas have a life of their own.
They have an existence outside the human beings. The human beings
receive the ideas, and that manifests them.''
That's the implicate order being downloading into the
explicate order!'' The girl from the brain machine room has a
near religious experience in relating the two conversations. "We
were talking about the same thing in there!'' She beams. Two
conversations. Distinct on the explicate order, linked on the
implicate order. I get it now!''
Pete, the DJ, seems a little uncomfortable when the
conversation gets too far into science. Sounding as brainy as he
can, he tries to ground everything back to music. The ecstasy
comes through the music. The different polyrhythmic elements and
the bass. It's technoshamanism.
Gregory kisses Pete's hands as if she's recognized the
messiah. You're our spiritual leader, aren't you!''
Well, spiritual leader entails a lot of responsibility and
I don't think I want to take that on.''
Nobody does,'' Radzik says, once again, trying to bring it
all together. It's the unspoken rule here that if everyone's
point of view can be integrated into the same picture, it will
all be okay. "Nobody wants to be a spiritual leader. 'Cause
everyone's got the access to the E-xperience. Everyone can create
their own situation in the social context. House lets all those
different experiences get on and synergize.''
Gregory's eyes widen. She slowly rises, her arms
outstretched, her head falling back. With E, at 120 cycles a
second through our heart, we're dancing. We must dance!''
Radzik's been overpowered. Well, the E's not responsible,
but ...''
Gregory might be on the verge of a bad trip. She whips her
head to face Radzik directly. It'll literally bust our spines,
won't it?''
Radzik tries to regain control of the previously quiet
gathering. That's a lie! Propaganda.''
But Gregory doesn't seem to mind her suspicions about
permanent neurological damage. She clenches her fists together as
if to hold back an orgasm. The peak threshold is bliss, is E, is
now. We've condensed it down. It's powerpacked. It's now. We all,
man and woman, we come together and dance. All our technology.
We've heard of the side effects. E diminishes a vital chemical in
our bodies every time we take it. The chemical is the essence of
life. This is a gift which cannot be replaced. We're taking this
fluid and spending it. The E is undermining our very existence. I
feel a little bit of my life force being spent each time. It's
bliss. You're dancing it. E gathers all your life's bliss at one
time. If the world were supposed to end, we'd come together, take
E, and dance!''
Gregory's allusion to a recent study linking MDMA to spinal
fluid reduction in mammals, coupled with her oversimplified
E-xuberance for the dance, gets everyone a little uncomfortable.
Is this the transformed being we've been working to create?
Luckily, the moment is interrupted by a young visual artist and
video wizard who just happens to be distributing an MAO inhibitor
called Syrian Rue. Radzik introduces me as, Don't worry, he's
cool,'' which garners me four of the capsules. I put them in my
pocket and thank the boy, but he's already busy rigging a
projector to show a film loop on a wall near the dance floor.
It's a ten-second cycle of two boys fighting over a microscope. I
ask Radzik about the pills I've been given.
It's called Syrian Rue. Mark Heley will be able to tell
you
a lot more about it. It has to be taken with other psychedelics.
It has a synergistic effect. It's made from a bark.'' Not enough
information to merit sampling. I leave it in my pocket and work
my way back out into the club. I search for the periphery so that
I may observe but not participate ... fully. Leaning against a
noncommittal wall near the edge of the club is Bob, an oriental
computer programmer from Oakland whom I met last week at Mr.
Floppy's, where he operated the camera for some television
interviews and got bitten by the house bug. He continues a
conversation we had been having there, as if there were no break
in continuity:
Thought is a distraction of the moment. Whenever we're in
a
space we're processing information. In our reality, we're
bombarded with information. So in Reichian terms, we put this
armor on. You know the song, `I Wanna Be Sedated'? I think a lot
of people are anesthetized by their surroundings. It takes some
really piercing hard information to break that. Like piercing
your cheeks. If you get Zen, you've got to let go, and let it all
come in. But if you let it all in, you go crazy. But if you let
it come in without processing it, without calling it good or bad
... people who label things bad have got a lot of heaviness. Go
Zen about it. There is no black or white, then you can let
everything in.''
I give him one of my capsules of Syrian Rue and move on.
Engineering the Synchronization Beam
Our evening at Toon Town is getting into full swing. Most
of
Norman's birthday partiers are gone, and several hundred more
hard-core house people have crowded onto the dance floor. Buck,
the novice DJ, is spinning well, and steering the energy toward
deeper, techno-acid house. Nick, the rave pugilist, is on a small
stage pumping his fists into the air, and the laser is finally
functioning.
Meanwhile, on a balcony, Bryan Hughes, the cyberspace
guide,
leads a young man through his first virtual reality experience.
Cap'n'Crunch uses one of his cameras to capture an image of the
boy in his VR goggles. Another of Crunch's video leads comes
straight from the virtual reality machine. He uses his Video
Toaster to combine the two images and then projects a composite
video picture onto a giant screen above the dance floor. The
resulting image is one of the boy actually appearing to move
through the virtual reality space he is unfolding in the
computer. Superimposed on that picture are further video images
of people on the dance floor watching the giant projection.
Gregory notices me staring at the self-referential computer-video
infinity. Works kind of like a fractal, doesn't it?'' I have to
agree.
But Bruce Eisner, MDMA expert, who stares at the same video
depiction of virtual reality, shakes his head. He is amused but
unconvinced. Maybe one day the mystical vision will be realized
in some kind of neurological link-up or a virtual reality.
Technology does have a great promise. It could become seamless,
so that what we think of today as magic will eventually be done
by technology, and eventually we won't even see the technology. A
neo-Garden of Eden made possible by technology. But the main rub
is human nature. That's where I have a problem with the virtual
reality people. I was at the Whole Life Expo, and Timothy [Leary]
was there with John Barlow and Ken Goffman [R.U. Sirius] and they
were doing a panel on virtual reality and I sat there for an hour
and a half and listened to them talk about virtual reality the
way they talked about LSD in the sixties--it was this thing that
was intrinsically liberating. You hook yourself up to this thing
and automatically you're better--you got it. And so I asked him a
question. I said, `It seems to me that technology can be used for
good or for bad. In the sixties, Leary told us he was looking for
the cure for human nature. How is a new media intrinsically
good?'
Leary looked at me and said, `Bruce, I'm going to talk to
you as I would to a ten-year-old child.' And then he went on to
explain how when we have virtual reality, no one will have to fly
anymore. No one will have to go to Japan to make a deal. You can
do it in Hawaii on the beach. Fine. But why is that intrinsically
liberating?''
Eisner seems almost sad. He's not in tune with the same
harmonic as these kids but can, deep down, remember the sixties
and his own acid experiences. He refuses to be lulled into that
false optimism again. He stares out, losing himself in thought.
Meanwhile, the pulse on the dance floor deepens. I can feel
the bass passing through my body like the subsonic frequencies of
an as-yet-uninvented kidney therapy. The frenzy of the crowd
iterates back to the DJ, and in turn to Mark at the laser. The
walls are covered with projected images of fractals, tribes
dancing, the fight over the microscope, a cartoon smiley shoots
at evil, attacking letters. Another monitor displays the virtual
reality bombardments of attacker pilots in the Gulf War, intercut
with tribal dancing and the wild computer holographics of a tape
called Video Drug.'' The strobe flashes like a brain machine.
Do you know where I can get some Syrian Rue?'' asks a
young
house girl named Mimi, pulling me out of my trance and into
another. I recognize her from other house events; this makes her
part of our posse. Her face is soft and young--almost
supernaturally so. It's as if she isn't a regular human being but
an extremely human being. Her eyes are large and clear, almost
like a Disney character's. ... Then it hits me! She's a toon!
She's a soft and squishy new evolved being! The iterations have
created a new human. I produce the coveted capsule from my shirt
pocket and hand it to her. She pops it in her mouth and washes it
down with a choline drink, then hops back out onto the dance
floor. It's not as if I could have asked her to dance. One
doesn't dance with someone. One just dances. No purpose. No
agenda.
A smell like flowers. From where? Lavender water. Who?
Earth
Girl! She's arrived with her Smart Bar and has already set up. At
her side is Galactic Greg, one of her brightly clad bartenders.
Earth Girl embraces me as if recognizing me from lifetimes before
this one, and pours me a complimentary Cybertonic. It nicely
washes down the L-pyroglutamate I had earlier. I offer her one of
my two remaining Syrian Rue capsules, but Lila Mellow-Whipkit, in
drag this evening, stops her from accepting: You've got to be
careful with MAO inhibitors.'' Meanwhile, Galactic Greg begins
explaining his own and Earth Girl's mission:
Earth Girl, Galactic Greg, Psychic Sarah, Disco Denise,
Audrey Latina, Computer Guy, and his assistant Dynama. We all
make up the Foxy Seven, and we are environmental crime fighters.
And performers. Our performances are rituals to augment our
psychic powers, and then in return we use our psychic powers to
help change the world. We are building the infrastructure right
now. Everything's all happening so rapidly and really naturally.
All these people in the infrastructure are coming together like a
big family reunion--all the star-seeded children.''
I'm not sure how seriously to take Galactic Greg, for whom
metaphor and reality seem to have merged. I wonder if he realizes
that this will be the Foxy Seven's last night at Toon Town. Earth
Girl has already made her deal with Big Heart City, and Mark
Heley has already signed contracts with Chris for the new and
improved Nutrient Cafe.
But right now none of that seems to matter. Toon Town is in
absolutely full swing, and not even the apocalypse could break
the spell of the technoshamanic trance. I work my way up to the
laser controls, where I find Mark and one of his assistants
dancing as they furiously pound the consoles. They are one with
the technology. Just at the moment that Jno, who is now the
DJ, shifts from a hard, agro, techno sound to a broad, airy,
feminine, ambient one, the laser transforms from a sharp-edged
flurry into a large hollow tunnel cut through the fog in the
room. All hands on the dance floor are raised. Another sixteen
bars of techno layered with tribal rhythms begins the
120-beat-per-minute drone once again, drawing in anyone who
hasn't already reached the dance floor. Screams and whoops.
Whistles blowing. Chanting. We're at the peak. Whatever it is
that goes on at a house party that everyone talks about later is
happening now.
Mark has the uncanny ability to articulate the event as it
occurs, but the din requires that he shout, and his Oxbridge
elocution gives way to a more urban, East End accent.
It's a transposition of the fractal/harmonic. Every Toon
Town is a psychedelic event. We're the transition team. It's like
a Mayan temple, and acts as a relay station. An antenna. It's a
harmonic thing--beaming out something. It's a landing beacon for
starships. We are trying to attract something down. Through time,
toward us.''
Hands continue to reach into the air, and dancers look up
at
the ceiling ... or past the ceiling. Are they looking for the
UFOs? Do they somehow hear what Mark is saying? The music shifts
back and forth between a familiar garage'' house sound to an
amazingly dense assemblage of electronic orchestral thrusts.
Every new piece of house music is another clue. A new
strand of the DNA pattern. A new piece of information. We need to
create a synchronization wave for the planet. House is synchronic
engineering.''
Mark is referring to a recently revived Mayan idea that the
planet, in the year 2012, will have passed through the galactic
time wave of history. Time itself will end as the planet moves up
to a new plane of reality.
The weird orchestral sound gives way to a more ambient
passage. A few dancers leave the floor and head to the Smart Bar.
Others browse the clothing boutique and bookshop that Diana has
set up.
Media viruses work at the same level. Smart drugs, life
extension, house, acid, and VR most importantly exist in people's
imaginations. This is a clue. Mayan mathematics just came into
existence and disappeared. We're in the endgame. This is
postapocalyptic. We're living under the mushroom cloud. Being
busted at precisely 11:30 last week. It was a group
sacrifice--just like the Mayans.''
Mark's assistant nudges him to play with the laser a little
more. The crowd is getting hyped again, and Jno,
accordingly, is playing more agro'' beats.
I consider myself to be more of a technoshaman now than
when I was DJing. You don't need to be the one controlling the
decks. There's a feedback energy loop going on between the people
there--it's just a mind thing. The DJs that we work with are just
tuned in to these frequencies. You can influence the fractal
pattern at a different vortex, a different corner.''
We look down at the sea of bodies. The pattern their bright
clothes makes on the floor looks something like one of the
fractals being projected onto the wall. Look closer and the
pattern repeats itself in the movements of individual dancers'
bodies, then again in the patterns printed on their T-shirts. The
boy in the VR television loop discovers the torus in Bryan's demo
tour. The whole screen turns to cosmic stars. The dancers
respond. The DJ responds. The lasers respond. The pattern
iterates, feeds back, absorbs, adjusts, and feeds back again.
Heley translates:
At a house event, the dance floor is really a very complex
fractal pattern, consisting of the entirety of all the people
there, and their second-to-second interactions, and everyone is
influencing everyone else in a really interesting way. A really
nonverbal way. You can just be yourself, but you can redefine
yourself, moment to moment. That's the essence of the dance.''
Jno takes off his headphones for a moment and stares at
the crowd. Rather than look for another record or adjust the
control of the mix, he closes his eyes and begins to dance,
flailing his arms in the air.
Jno just tunes in to the frequency that's already
there and reiterates it. He is anticipating the energy changes
before they happen, not because he's tuned in to the records, but
because he's tuned in to a sort of psychic template which exists
above the people that are there and unifies them. It's the
transpersonal essence of what's going on.''
Mark has described the house version of Bohm's laws of the
implicate and explicate order. The dance floor is the explicate
order, and the DJ is the link from the dancers to their implicate
whole. They only think they are separate goldfish because they
experience life in old-fashioned space-time. Through the iterated
and reiterated samples of music, they regain access to the
experience of total unification. It is religious bliss. All is
one. And, of course, this realization occurs simultaneously on
many levels of consciousness.
Everything is important,'' Mark continues. "The Ecstasy,
the lights, even the configuration of the planets. The dance is a
holistic experience. You're there in your totality, so duality is
irrelevant. It's where your body is mind. It's a question of
reintegration. You dance yourself back into your body. It's got a
lot to do with self-acceptance. There's no level of separation as
there is in words, when there's always a linguistic separation
between subject and objects. The song is the meaning. It lets you
avoid a lot of the semantic loops that tie people in to things
like career, and other fictional ghosts that are generated by our
society for the purpose of mass control. It's a different
frequency that you tune in to when you dance than the one that's
generally broadcast by TV shows, the media, politics.''
This new frequency, finally, is the frequency of the
apocalypse. Terence McKenna's 2012, the Mayan calendar, and the
great, last rave of all time are all part of one giant
concrescence. Over the loudspeakers, samples of Terence McKenna's
meandering voice now mix with the rest of the soundtrack. He's on
a house record, his own words helping the dancers to tunnel
toward the overmind, as the overmind lovingly drills backward
through time toward them.
If we imagine ourselves in four-dimensional space-time,''
Heley explains, "in that very dubious construct of Einsteinian
space-time--we're sort of swimming towards the object from which
the frequency emanates. It's like these are fragments of DNA
information that are squeezed into a certain specific time frame.
It's a constant exploration and discovery of how those resonate
with our own DNA information in that particular moment of time.
Basically it's that fact--and the rich sampling of all the
moments placed within that context--that gives you this amazingly
flexible framework for reintegrating yourself into your body and
also communicating as a group. You're moving to a certain
time-space and you're in a group state of consciousness. You're
at one with it and you become the moment.''
I realize that Mark's perception and retelling is
LSD-enhanced; he's just beginning to feel the full effect of a
hit he took about an hour ago. Still, he's concerned that it's
not strong enough to take him to any kind of edge.'' I offer him
my two remaining Syrian Rue capsules. He pops them down
immediately, explaining that they enhance the effect of other
psychedelics and are related to ayahuasca, one of the main
ingredients (along with DMT) used by shamans to make the most
potent brews. I surmise that it puts a new twist on things the
way one might turbocharge a car with NO2, add salt to spaghetti
water to raise its boiling point, or throw a starship into warp
drive. In an ominous synchronicity, down on the dance floor Diana
helps a disoriented girl to a chair at the side of the room.
Mark goes on, the new chemical accelerating his speech
toward the climax of his cosmic drama: The human body has not
been fully danced. We don't dance our full dance yet. Time is
accelerating towards this point in the year 2012 when the story
of the human race will have been unfolded. We're reaching a
bifurcation point. There's so much instability in our current
paradigm that it's just shaking apart. A lot of people I know
feel we're reaching an endgame. There's that feeling in the air.
I feel myself being dragged through different time zones and it's
intense. When you surrender to it, it becomes even stronger.
Exponentially so. It's amazing.''
But what about the people who haven't been exposed to
house?
All those people Diana so desperately hopes to bring into the
scene before it's all over? If they aren't dancing when the
spaceships or the galactic beam comes, won't they be left out?
How are people to guide themselves toward Cyberia? As Mark tries
to reassure me, I become conscious that my questioning may be
starting to affect his trip.
Well, bliss is the most rigorous master you could
imagine,'' he says. Then suddenly his face registers a new
thought. "If your antenna is finely tuned, you'll find it
[Cyberia]. In a way, everyone is tuned in. One point in humanity
rises, all of humanity rises.'' He adds, as if he's never thought
this before: But I imagine that there are some towns in the
Midwest where a house record has never even been played.''
These kinds of conceptual uncertainties grow into
physically
realized landmines for the shamanic warrior. Mark senses his own
doubts, as the Syrian Rue drives his trip down a frictionless
psychic tunnel. Instinctively, he hands the laser controls to an
assistant. He stares at me intently. There's only so much
energy. My only tack is to just keep my head down and push ahead.
Diana may bring in more people someday. But until then, I've got
to do what I can with what I've got. We'll struggle and struggle
until we give up. Then it will break through.''
He works his way to the dance floor. The bodies are
writhing, peaking. It is in the middle of this swirl that Mark
reaches the highest part of his trip. He realizes that the
fractal pattern that surrounds him is of his own making. The
synesthesic congruities between movement, sound, and light bring
a feeling of certainty and wholeness. His body and mind are
united, as he literally steps under the looking glass that he
created. Both God and Adam at once, his very existence literally
dissolves the fiction of creator and created, beginning and end.
He has constructed his own womb and stepped inside. In his
self-conception is the essence of timelessness. The beginning is
the end.
But timelessness is only temporary. How long can this last?
In that very wondering is the initial descent. The perfection of
the fractal pattern has begun to decay. Reentry into time is
imminent. Has he become the UFO?
Damage can occur on the way back. Downloading the cogent
information requires every shamanic skill he can muster. The
Syrian Rue has caused a kind of time phasing. Mark searches for a
way to bring himself back into crystalline alignment, even if at
a different frequency from before. He doesn't care how he comes
back, as long as he can find the way home. His body is gone,
dispersed throughout the room.
He tries to recreate his body by finding his point of view.
A point of reference can serve as the seed. But his field of
vision is compressing and expanding ... expanding as far out as
the sun and even the galactic core. He is riding through the
precarious Mayan Tzolkin calendar. He closes his eyes and fixes
on the galactic core--on that time a year or so ago, tripping in
a field, in the sun. He was like a dolphin under water, swimming
under the surface yet still warmed by the sun. It was beautiful.
And as he lay there, a new Gaia program came down from the sun to
the earth, and needed his head to do it. The light used him to
download the precious information. His own body. Strange ganglia
sprouted from the back of his head straight into the soil beneath
him. Beautiful.
But no. That's not what's going on here. Everything is
phase
shifted. It's out of control. No panic or all is lost. He could
spin out and be gone forever. Mark must get down carefully. He
doesn't care what he brings back anymore, as long as he gets
back. He realizes that somehow he's gotten himself onto a flight
of steps. Real steps, somewhere in the club. Perfect image. It's
where he is. Stuck on the stairway. It's life or death now. Bliss
is merciless. The rigorous master. The music continues to pound
and eventually draws him back into the vortex. Everything spins.
This is dangerously disorienting. He's completely losing
polarity. He's on the steps, but which way is he facing? Is he
going up or down? The back and the front are the same!
But wait! This isn't so bad. There's complete knowledge of
what's on both sides! He can see in front and behind at the same
time! There's no duality--but, alas, no orientation, either.
There's no up the stairs or down. No before the trip or after. No
higher than the peak or lower. Suddenly everything is static.
Paralyzed. Stillness.
It is in this brief fulcrum of stability that the
transmission occurs. Like an electrical earthquake, an alien
thing passes up through Heley's muscles, bringing his whole being
up into a faster, shamanic shape-shifting frequency. This is the
state of being, Heley realizes, in which master shamans turn into
pumas or eagles or visit the dead.
Suddenly, then, it's all clear. The duality is not within
life as judgments or ideas. Life itself is one side of it. It's
life itself that is rooted in dimension. That's one side of the
whole thing. The explicate order. That's the place where will is
necessary. ( I'll just keep my head down and press on.'')
The will. Mark summons his will, knowing that this
navigation through the iron gate of the moment back down into
dimensional space-time requires it. He must summon his will. He
senses movement.
He passes through the I Ching sequence as if it were a
cloud
formation--the effortless binary expression of the universe. Ahh,
he realizes, the creation of time and history were necessary.
Without them, we'd never have created will. We need the will in
order to move toward something. But what? Toward 2012. Toward the
overmind. The galactic event. But now he must continue his
descent.
He passes over a shamanic conference. Eight old men sitting
in a spotlight. He is offered an apprenticeship by these dead
warriors, but refuses. He's made the right choice, he thinks, and
begins to travel faster. He's gained either power or stupidity.
He just needs to remember that everything is fractal; he
just needs to find the fractal pattern on any level and the rest
will fall into place. But stretch out too far and the pattern
breaks. The illusion of personal reality is gone, and so goes the
person with it.
Diana, Preston, and Nick come to the rescue, finding Heley
stuck on the stairs, trembling. He can't even speak to them, but
just their focus is helping. As they stare at Heley and call to
him, he becomes anchored in the present. Then all the Heleys on
each of the fractal levels are able to redefine into shape. He
finally finds himself back on the stairs, leaning against the
wall. Preston looks at him and asks simply, Are you going up or
down?''
If I only knew,'' Mark says, grinning.
Mark had a really, really bad trip,'' Nick Phillip
announces at his design studio the next day. "He took some Syrian
Rue and LSD. He got a weird side effect and he was cog-wheeling.
It took us two hours to get him into the car. He wouldn't let us
touch him!'' Nick dials Heley's number angrily. Mark picks up the
phone after about ten rings.
You should fucking reevaluate what you're doing!'' Nick
scolds him.
It was brilliant, Nick. Just brilliant!''
So brilliant!? You shouldn't do those bloody MAO
inhibitors! You could die, you know!''
Mark hides his extreme weariness by speaking in clipped
sentences.
I experienced some polarities, that's all''
Nick covers the mouthpiece and talks to the room and to the
air: That's sooo Mark Heley!''
There were just not enough people to absorb the beam,''
Mark explains logically, "and I had to do it alone.''
The responsibilities of the technoshaman never end. Like
the
shamans of ancient cultures, they must translate the wave forms
of other dimensions into the explicate reality for the purposes
of forecasting the future and charting a safe path through it.
And as Heley's adventure indicates, it's networking the potential
of this beam that defines success in spiritual Cyberia.
CHAPTER 11
Neopagan Technology
There is a growing spiritual subculture dedicated to
channeling the beam, and it is characterized by pagan ethics,
reliance on technology, and interconnectivity through vast
networks. The neopagan revival incorporates ancient and modern
skills in free-for-all sampling of whatever works, making no
distinction between occult magic and high technology. In the
words of one neopagan, The magic of today is the technology of
tomorrow. It's all magic. It's all technology.''
Again, it's easiest to get a fix on the neopagan revival
back in England, where the stones still resonate from the murders
of over 50 million pagans throughout the Dark Ages. Fraser Clark,
pater of the Zippy movement ( zen-inspired pagan
professionals''), sees the current surge of pagan spirit in the
cyberian subculture as the most recent battle in an ancient
religious struggle. Youth culture is the only answer.
As Fraser prepares to head to work (it's about one in
afternoon) he invites me to read what he's just typed onto his
computer screen:
Ever since they managed to blackball the Hippy to death,
the
correct mode of Youth (as hope and conscience of the
culture) has been systematically schizophrened from its
historical roots. And we're talking about roots that go
back
through the punks, hippies, rebels, beats, bohemians,
socialists, romantics, alchemists, the shakers and the
quakers, witches, heretics and, right back in the roots,
pagans. Yet the human spirit still revitalized itself! We
pagani (Latin for nonmilitary personnel, by the way) have
been cooperating and breeding unstoppably, together with
our
personal gods and succubi like personal computers! Until
now, just when the Roman Christian Monotheistic Mind State
reaches out to grasp the whole planet by the short hairs,
the Alternative Culture births itself.
Fraser has dedicated his life to the spread of pagan
consciousness, specifically through the youth culture, which he
sees as our last hope for planetary survival. The system cannot
be allowed to go on for another ten years or it really will
destroy us all, it's as simple as that,'' Fraser tells me as we
walk with his hairless dog from his house in Hampstead to Camden
Lock Market. His tone is always conspiratorial, reverberating a
personal paranoia left over from the sixties, and an inherited
paranoia passed down through pagan history. "If we had this
conversation in the thirteenth or fourteenth century, we'd be
burned at the stake for it. We'd never even be able to imagine
things being as good as they are now ... or as bad as they are
now.'' Fraser brings a broad perspective to the archaic revival,
helping would-be pagans to see their role in the historical
struggle against the forces of monotheistic tyranny.
The actual witch-hunts came in like waves of hysteria just
like drug stories in the press do now. You know, every so often
along comes a story about witches in their midst so let's burn a
few. So it came in waves. Another thing that came in waves is the
plague. The black death.'' I can tell that Fraser wants me to
draw the parallel myself. Deep down, this man is a teacher. His
theory (which has been espoused elsewhere in pagan literature) is
that the sudden rises in black death can always be traced to a
surge in witch killing and cat killing. The church would reward
people who killed cats because they were associated with witches.
The rat population would be free to increase, and more plague
would spread. As he puts it, "Hysteria caused the plague.''
Meanwhile, our current and potential plagues--AIDS, pollution,
nuclear war--are seen to be caused by similar repression of the
pagan spirit, which he seeks to revitalize in the youth culture
of England, in any way possible.
To this end, Fraser has become a spokesman and advocate for
the modern, urban neopagans. Like both their own ancestors and
the most current mathematicians and physicists, they have
abandoned organized rules of logic in favor of reality
hacking--riding the waves, watching for trends, keeping an open
mind, and staying connected to the flow. It's not important
whether the natural system is a forest, an interdimensional
plane, a subway, or a computer network. For the neopagan,
exploration itself is a kind of understanding, and the process of
exploring is the meaning of life.
Interdimensional Scrolling
One urban neopagan, Green Fire, is a witch who works for
Earth Girl at the Smart Drugs Lounge under Big Heart City and as
a psychic for a 900-number phone service called Ultraviolet
Visions. The house scene is like a self-similar hypertext
adventure. Each new person is like a new screen, with its own
menus and links to other screens. But they're all somehow united
in purpose and direction. As though each member of the global
neopagan network goes on his own visionquests, they are all on a
journey toward that great chaos attractor at the end of time.
Today, Earth Girl and other members of her Foxy Seven are
busy remodeling the new basement home of the Smart Bar. Toys and
trinkets are everywhere. In one corner sits a six-foot geodesic
dome lined with pink fur and foam, dubbed the Space Pussy. The
soft being inside, who believes he's a direct descendant of the
magical Shee'' beings, is Green Fire, an impish and androgynous
twenty-something-year-old whose Peter Pan gestures belie the
gravity with which he approaches his mission: to save the planet
by bringing back the Shee, the ancient fairie race that
originally inhabited Ireland before the planet was overrun with
the "Naziish alien energy'' that has been directing human
activity for the past few millenia.
Green Fire believes we are fast approaching a kind of
spiritual dawn. There is more light now than ever before. Even
Joe Blow now is starting to experience a little bit of magic
through technology.'' Green Fire is a seamless blend between the
magic of the ancients and the technology of the future. "High
technology and high magic are the same thing. They both use tools
from inner resources and outer resources. Magic from the ancient
past and technology from the future are really both one. That is
how we are creating the present; we're speeding up things, we are
quickening our energies; time and space are not as rigid as they
used to be; the belief system isn't there. Those who did control
it have left the plane; they have been forced out because it no
longer is their time. Those of us who know how to work through
time and space are using our abilities to bend time and space
into a reality that will benefit people the most.''
So, like house music and its ability to condense'' time
through juxtaposition of historical "bytes,'' Green Fire's
witchery gives him an active role in the creation of the moment.
The ancients call forward in time to the present, giving Green
Fire the techniques of sorcery, while the light from the future
calls back in time through computer technology.
Earth Girl joins us in the Space Pussy to make sure Green
Fire is presenting himself in the best possible light. Diana,
from Toon Town, follows her in. Diana has come to the Smart
Lounge as an emissary of peace. The subtext never reaches the
surface, but Diana's presence is threefold: first, to understand
exactly why Earth Girl left Toon Town for Big Heart City; second,
to gather as many facts as possible about Heley's competition;
and third, and most apparently, to make sure everyone stays
friends. No matter how stiff the competition and how hot the
tempers, everyone is in this thing together. There's only one
galactic beam.
Giving the gift of vulnerability as a peace offering, Diana
mentions Heley's bad'' trip last night at Toon Town.
He doesn't have the tools to be traveling that far out,''
Earth Girl responds in a genuinely caring tone.
No one says anything for a while. The Space Pussy, too, is
silent, itself an emblem of Earth Girl's betrayal of Toon Town
and her ex-boyfriend, Heley. Diana shifts uncomfortably: Why
would he leave her for me? Earth Girl, knowing she's being stared
at, fingers the lace on her flowing satin dress--a striking
contrast to Diana's tomboyish overalls and baseball cap.
Diana lights a cigarette and laughs. They all pretend the
moment of silence was spent contemplating Mark's weird Syrian Rue
adventure. He doesn't feel bad today. He even thinks he may have
touched the ability to shape-shift.
We humans are all shape-shifters,'' Green Fire comments,
getting the conversation back on track. "We just need to learn to
access our DNA codes. It's very computer-oriented. We are
computers; our minds are computers; our little cells are
computers. We are bio-organic computers. We are crystals. We are
made out of crystals. I even put powdered crystals into the smart
drinks.''
Green Fire's words seem a little hollow given the emotional
reality of Diana and Earth Girl's conflict, so the two girls
leave. But despite its inability to tackle everyday, real-world
strife, Green Fire's cyber pagan cosmology beautifully
demonstrates the particular eclecticism of the new spirituality.
It is not an everything-plus-the-kitchen-sink grab bag of
religious generalizations, but a synthesis of old and new ideas
whose organization is based on a postquantum notion of time. The
juxtaposition of magic and computers, shape-shifting and DNA,
crystals and pharmaceuticals, is itself indicative of a time
compression preceding the great leap into hyperspace, or
timelessness.
But until that leap, the realities of romance and business
still shape the experiences of cyberians. Diana and Earth Girl
must still cope with the fact that they're in the same business
and have shared the same boyfriend. Green Fire must cope with the
fact that his goddess, Earth Girl, will eventually realize the
futility of her comicbook-style leadership, dissolve the Foxy
Seven, and go into business for herself.
But in the Space Pussy, for the time being, all is quite
well. In the safety of his cocooned emotional playground, Green
Fire is free to take daring leaps into interdimensional zones
that a parent, professional, or reality-based adult would not.
Instead of using Heley's psychedelics and house music, or a
hacker's home computer and modem, he practices his magic using
techniques from the Celtic shamanic traditions. (Unless, of
course, he just happens upon a fairie ring of mushrooms in the
forest.)
He'll begin with a purification ritual and an herbal bath,
then some breathing techniques and chanting for an hour or so,
which brings him into a kind of psychedelic clarity.
Everything mundane leaves so I know I'm in the trance.
I'll
cast the circle and invoke the elements. Sometimes I'll have to
do a dance to help tap in to some of the Celtic energies. Then I
will begin the journey down. Now, that's just like--that's
something close to mushrooms, LSD, or DMT.''
Green Fire's fairie realm is also very close to the
computer
experience. His description of this space, his iconic presence,
the way he moves through the space, as well as the hypertext
quality of his experiences make it sound like a cyber space
fantasy game.
They'll take me inside. Sometimes I feel like I'm falling
or flying. Sometimes I just whoosh, and I'm there. Depends on
what kind of passage it is. Then I'm there, and it's a real
place. Usually once I get there my body is still in this
dimension. I've gone through my cells, my DNA, and I've opened a
doorway and I've gone to that other dimension. So I will need to
have an archetype there. It's a dreamlike state, but it's also
very physical. This is the strange part. I can feel stuff there
through that body. I can smell, I can taste, I can touch, and I
can hear. My guides will be there, my totems--and they usually
guide me to certain cities I need to go to.''
Just as I was guided through virtual reality by gentle
Bryan
Hughes, Green Fire is guided by his fairies through Celtic
Cyberia. This is a virtual world! Each doorway is another screen.
Each totem allows him to load'' more "worlds.'' Through an
archetypal virtual suit, he can see and feel his hyperdimensional
reality. And, like Mark Heley in the shamanic fractal, or me in
the Intel virtual reality demo program, he must prove he is a
worthy interdimensional traveler. As McKenna would say, thoughts
are beheld.'' As Heley would say, "bliss is a rigorous master.''
Whatever I think becomes real. Just to even get there I
have to be very clear. My emotions and my thoughts steer me.
Really, instead of me moving, the place moves. I think something,
and then I'm kind of like, there. So if I start feeling dark and
weird, I find myself in the dark places of that land. And there
are dark places.''
Things get eerie. Green Fire describes how realities
scroll'' by as on a computer screen, and it's as if he's
describing the thickest places in the "ice'' in William Gibson's
Neuromancer, where a hacker/cowboy can lose his soul. Green Fire
moves through the fairie matrix like a hacker through the
network, from system to system, always leaving a back door open.
But Green Fire is making his systems breaches without the
protection of David Troup's Bodyguard program. Instead, he must
depend on his mental discipline. He's in the ultimate designer
reality, where his thoughts become what's real, whether he likes
it or not.
It's a discipline to keep your emotions in check--to keep
certain archetypical images in my mind. I have to keep them
because they're doorways, and if I don't have those doorways
positioned correctly, they could lead me to a place that I
wouldn't want to be. It's like a puzzle or a maze and I could get
lost. Magic is a dangerous thing. There's a new age belief that
you can never get hurt; that's not true. You can get hurt very
bad. Not everybody should do magic. Even those of us who are made
to do it, we fuck up quite a bit. I fuck up quite a bit.''
While a computer hacker who ventures into the wrong system
might find the Secret Service knocking at his door, a witch who
ventures into the wrong dimension risks psychological or
spiritual damage. But just as the most aggressive cyberian
hackers make sacramental use of psychedelics to augment their
computer skills, adventurous witches make use of the computer net
to keep informed of pagan technologies. The communications and
computer networks are a self-similar extension of the pagan need
for a map to hyperspace.
Green Fire's journeys through the multidimensional net''
are also reflected in the way he conducts business through the
communications net on earth. Most of his income is generated
through a national psychic phone service, Ultraviolet Visions,
which offers psychic readings, astrology, tarot card analysis and
other psychic services through a 900 number. The office in which
the psychics operate is decorated in what Earth Girl likes to
call "New Delphic Revival''--twenty-two stations around a big
glass table with pillars, each station corresponding to one of
the twenty-two cards of the tarot's major arcana. Of course, the
billing is handled by computer through the phone company.
CHAPTER 12
Gardeners Ov Thee Abyss
The strength of any magic in Cyberia is directly
proportional to that magic's ability to permeate the network.
Like cultural viruses, the techniques of magic are thought to
gain strength as they gain acceptance by larger groups of people.
Computer technology fits in to cyberian spirituality in two ways:
as a way to spread magic, and as a magic itself.
Thee Temple Ov Psychick Youth is a nett-work for the
dissemination of majick (their spellings) through the culture for
the purpose of human emancipation. TOPY (rhymes with soapy) began
as a fan club and ideological forum for Genesis P. Orridge,
founder of industrial band Throbbing Gristle and its house
spin-off Psychic TV, but soon developed into a massive cultish
web of majick practitioners and datasphere enthusiasts. They are
the most severe example of technopaganism, consciously stretching
backward through medievalism to ancient pagan spirituality and up
through computer technology to the creation of a global,
informational being. They predate and maybe even spawned House
culture, but have remained pretty separate from the lovey-dovey,
soft and squishy Ecstasy crowd.
All male initiates to TOPY take the name Coyote, and all
women Kali. The name is followed by a number so that members can
identify one another. Kali is the name of a female sex goddess
known as the destroyer''; the coyote is found in many
mythologies, usually symbolizing wisdom and an adventurous
nature.
The nett-work consists of access points, or stations, which
are post office boxes, fax machines, computer modems, or 800
phone numbers. Each access point gathers information from places
off the web, then distributes it throughout the network, and in
turn takes information from the web and makes it available to
local members. As one initiate explains: The main memory can be
accessed from the stations, then downloaded via correspondents
through Xeroxes.'' Or, in English, someone reads his mail or
plays his message machine, then types it up and gives copies to
his friends. "The main memory'' refers to the TOPY idea that all
its members compose a single, informational being.
The information passed about consists of majickal
techniques'' from drugs and incantations to computer hardware and
engineering tricks, as well as general TOPY philosophy. In some
ways, the entire TOPY network is really just an elaborate
metaphor for the postmodern Gaian brain. The information they
pass around is much less important than the way in which it is
passed. TOPY documents are immediately recognizable because they
spell words in obsolete or newly made-up ways. This is seen as a
way of retaking control of language, which has been used and
abused for so long by the illegitimate power mongers of Western
culture, which are directing the planet toward certain doom.
However well TOPY has permeated the net, its members rarely
peep up out of the underground into the light of day and
consensus reality. For all their 800-number accessibility, very
few cyberians regularly socialize with flesh-and-blood TOPY
members. It's almost as if their presence as human beings is less
important than their presence as a cultural virus or
informational entity.
All on the Same Side
Today, Diana is on Haight Street, distributing fliers for
the next Toon Town. Unlike most promoters, who target likely''
clubgoers--kids with house-style clothes, computer-hippies,
college cliques--Diana is dedicated to spreading the house
phenomenon to the uninitiated. A freespirited club girl with a
slight Mother Theresa complex, Diana is the female, emotional,
caring counter to Toon Town's otherwise heady patriarchy,
especially now that Earth Girl works at Big Heart City. Each
human to whom she hands a flier is a potential link to dozens
more. The more people brought in to the scene, she reasons, the
more it grows, the more they grow, the further enlightened and
loving the world is. This is the philosophy that got Diana to
leave protective campus life at Berkeley and move into the city
to promote Toon Town full-time.
When Diana approaches an unlikely cluster of young men clad
in leather and army fatigues and smoking a joint in front of a
record store, she unwittingly hits the networking jackpot. Her
Toon Town promotional bill is grabbed up by the trio, who
exchange it for a leaflet of their own, The Wheel of Torture,''
a poem by Coyote 107:
EYE WAS ON THEE WHEEL OV TORTUREON THAT TABLE, I WAS SPUN LIKE AZ
A VORTICE. IN AN ACT OV ATTRACTING VIOLENCE TO MY BEING. THEE
VIOLENCE WAS EXPRESSED THROUGH TORTURE, WHICH BECAME AN ACT OV
ALCHEMICAL PROCESS. MY SENSES WERE BEING PULVERIZED. THROWN INTO
SHOCK. PULVERIZATION WAS BEING SHOVED DOWN MY THROAT. EVERY OUNCE
OV MY EMOTION WAS NULLIFIED. STEPPED ON AND SPIT ON. TOTAL
APPLICATION OV NEGATION. TOTAL ACT OV NON SERVITUDE. REJECTING MY
OWN PERSONALITY. NOT LETTING MY EGO TAKE KONTROL. VIOLATING MY
OWN EGO IZ AN ACT OV KONTROL OVER IT. A REBELLION AND A
REJECTION. HOPING FOR COMPLETE REVOLUTION WITHIN MYSELF AND NOT
WAITING FOR THEE GENERATIONZ TO CATCH UP. (FUCK THE EVOLUTIONARY
PROCESS! WHEN THINGS NEED TO CHANGE THEY WILL; THROUGH WILL.)
THIS TYPE OV NULLIFICATION IZ THEE PROCESS OV PURIFICATION
THROUGH PULVERIZATION. AN INITIATION INTO THE SELF. THE TRUE
SELF. NOT THEE ILLUZION OUR EGO FEEDZ US. LOSS OV EGO IZ PART OV
THEE AWAKENING PROCCESS. THEE LIBERATION PROCESS. TO LIBERATE
YOURSELF IZ TO NEGATE AND NULLIFY THAT WHICH RESTRICTS YOU. WHAT
RESTRICTS YOU FROM EXPRESSION AND EXPLORATION. EXPLORE YOURSELF
AND BE READY. BE ABLE AND CAPABLE. TRANZFORM AND COMMUNICATE.
TRUE COMMUNICATION ONLY HAPPENZ BETWEEN EQUALS. YOU MUST MUTATE
TO COMMUNICATE. YOU MUST SHARE VIBRATIONAL FREQUENCY, WHICH IZ
WHAT YOU ARE. ALL LIFE IZ VIBRATION AND MOVEMENT. NOTHING IZ IN A
FIXED POSITION. FIXED POSITIONS ARE ONLY TEMPORARY. TRUE STATES
ARE TEMPORAL BECAUSE CHANGE IZ INEVITABLE. CHANGE MAKES BALANCE.
CHANGE IZ MOVEMENT. MOVEMENT IZ UNIVERSAL YET DEPENDENT AND
DEFINABLE. MOVEMENT HAS VELOCITY AND DIRECTION. MOVEMENT IZ
MAJICK. MAJICK IS SETTING FORTH THEE WILL INTO MOTION TOWARDS A
GOAL. ALLEGORY IZ THEE VEHICAL. LEARN TO KONTROL THEE VEHICAL.
GET BEHIND THE WHEEL. STEER YOUR LIFE IN THEE DIRECTION YOU
CHOOSE. YOU DON'T HAVE TO MAKE PIT-STOPS FOR YOUR EGO.PULVERIZE &
PURITY.
The majick, kontrol, and steering happen in two ways.
First,
the techniques and ideas spread throughout the United States and
England empower individual pagans to develop their own personal
strategies for moving through life. Second, and more important,
the dissemination of the information itself creates a sub- or
even countercultural infrastructure. In a meta'' way, the new
lines of communication create the global, informational being, in
this case based on majick and pagan technology. Unlike Green
Fire, though, whose gentle androgyny is quite Disney in its
softness, TOPY members are medieval-styled skinheads. Pierced
lips and noses, tattoos, army clothes, spikes, leather, bizarre
beards, crew cuts, shaved heads and mohawks for the men; the
women dress either in sixties naturale or psychedelic party
clothes beneath heavy army coats and leather jackets.
Magick. Cool. We're into that, too,'' Diana says, looking
up from the small document. Unlike most with whom the TOPYs come
in contact, Diana knows that they're not punk rockers. "We have a
Nutrient Cafe, a virtual reality booth, brain machines. Plus a
lot of good information about all those things.'' Diana's attempt
at cross-culturalization opens a Pandora's box.
We're trying to achieve total control over information.''
Kurt, the leader of the group, speaks with a forced eloquence,
ironically counterpointing his belligerent styling. "That allows
us to decontrol the imprints that are implanted within the
information itself. Everyone has the right to exchange
information. What flows through TOPY is occult-lit,
computer-tech, shamanistic information and majick--majick as
actually a technology, as a tool, or a sort of correlative
technology based on intuitive will. It's an intuitive correlative
technology that is used by the individual who's realized that he
or she has his or her own will which they have the freedom to
exercise the way they want. That's kind of how I see majick.''
To TOPYs, magic is just the realization and redirection of
the will toward conscious ends. To do this, people must
disconnect from all sources of information that attempt to
program them into unconscious submission, and replace them with
information that opens them to their own magical and
technological abilities.
While Kurt is more in your face'' and confrontational
about
his majickal designs on culture than is Green Fire or Earth Girl,
Diana is confident that they all share in the basic belief that
magic and spirituality are technologies that must be utilized to
prepare and develop the planet for the coming age.
Well, we're all on the same side.'' She's hip to their
codified lifestyle and too determined to get them to her club to
let their critical tone or angry-looking fashion choices get in
the way. At Berkeley there were kids plenty more strung out than
these guys. Besides, if she can turn one TOPY into a Toon Towner,
thousands could follow. Kurt has the same intention. Toon Town
would be an excellent venue to distribute TOPY literature.
Everyone's trying to turn everyone else on to basically the
same thing. Diana takes their names down for the ever-expanding
guest list (Preston won't be happy about that) and moves on.
The Protocol of Empathy
Back at Kurt's apartment later that day, the group prepares
to go to Toon Town for the evening. They'll check out the club,
it's decided, and give out some of their latest propaganda. A new
member of the group--a runaway teenager who was found at a
concert last weekend--wonders why everyone is so preoccupied with
spreading the word. Kurt is quick to answer him.
That's what TOPY's always existed for: to help people
realize that this society is in a crisis point. People have to
wake up instead of sleeping in front of the TV, which is a window
on information which you don't even realize is subliminal `cause
the intentions aren't even known to all the people.''
Kurt's tiny black-and-white television set has the word
virus scrawled across its screen in indelible marker, a constant
reminder to all viewers that the media is carrying potentially
infectious subliminal ideas.
It's the programming that's dangerous. The television
networks create programs which program the reality of the viewer.
Each viewer is defined by nothing more than his programming.''
So, TOPY members replace regular, power-depleting
television
programming with information of their own: magick.
Majick is a map of the external reality. Pagans who've
understood that throughout history have stayed away from the
church, and used the occult as a type of underground
communication. Symbols which were agreed upon.''
The revelation of the subcultural latticework vanishes as
Kurt's girlfriend suddenly enters.
I got an electric shock,'' she announces, with a certain
amount of wonderment in relating the incident. "And it made my
finger go numb. I was plugging in my hair dryer to the socket,
and my finger's numb. I don't know what to do! It hurts like
hell. I mean, it doesn't hurt at all, but ... I got shocked and
it affected me.''
Do you have any cigarettes, Kim?'' Kurt asks her in an
even
tone.
Yeah,'' she answers. "Do you want one? Want some pot?''
She goes out, still staring at her thumb, to search for
tobacco and/or cannabis. Although these kids are far out on a
technopagan limb, their familial interactions look as
traditionally patriarchal as the Bunkers. In one sense they seem
to have taken cyber paganism the farthest. Their model of the
human being is really that of the computer with will. But in
another way, they appear to have adopted a more sexist and
radically traditional value system than their parents could have
had. The Coyotes have all become pack animals, roaming the
streets for adventure, while the Kalis stay at home, shop for
clothes, or mix potions.
When Kurt does get to the topic of socializing, he speaks
about it in a language more suited to computer modem protocol
than human interaction:
When computers talk, there's a basic handshake that
happens
between two terminals. The computer is analogous to the human
biosystem, or a neural linguistic coalitive technological
system.'' Kim sits up on Kurt's knee as he continues. She lights
Kurt's cigarette for him and puts it into his mouth.
Empathy is caused by frequencies being shared by people,
and when they interlock their frequencies, they cause a certain
level of syncopation. The closer that that level of syncopation
is together, the closer that those frequencies are locked in the
higher level of communication that you're experiencing.
Interlocking can happen in what we now call protocol: the terms
that are agreed by the two users.''
The highest level of protocol between two users is, of
course, sexual intercourse, an act of creativity that TOPY
members are trying to demystify. Since they see sex as the
connective energy in all interactions, the word of has been
replaced in TOPY-spell by the word ov, representative of ovum,''
the sexual energy, which needs to be liberated from society's
restrictions and reintegrated with the will. In a practical
sense, this means using the sexual energy for the practice of
majick.
Your dick is majick wand if you know how to use it,'' one
roommate loves to say. As another of the many leaflets around the
house insists in block type:
We are thee gardeners ov thee abyss. Working to reclaim
astrangled paradise choked with unwilled weeds,
subconsciousmanifestations ov fear and self-hate. We embrace this
fearand our shadow to assimilate all that we think we are
not.Realigning ourselves on thee lattice ov power. Change is
ourstrength. We turn the soil to expose thee roots ov
ourconditioned behavioral responses. Identifying anddissimilating
the thought structures that blind us ov our beautyand imprison us
from our power. We thrash these weeds beyondrecognition, beyond
meaning, beyond existence to theconsistency of nothingness.
Returning them to their origin,thee abyss. Thee fertile void
revealed is pure creativeinspiration. in coum-union, we
impregnate thee abyss; theeomninada; thee all nothingness, with
thee seed ov creation.Cultivating, through will and self-love,
thee infinite beauty andlove that is Creation.
The creative energy in TOPY is always linked with the
darkness. It is through recognition of the shadow (what Radzik
considers the anima liberated by Ecstasy) that new life may see
the light. The fertile void revealed is pure creative
inspiration,'' because an acknowledgment of the unconscious
programming and darkness within us opens the possibility for
their obliteration. Leaving them in the unconscious or repressing
them turns them into monsters, which will sooner or later have to
be dealt with in the form of Charlie Mansons, Chernobyl
disasters, or worse.
Still, to most of Cyberia, the TOPY view is unnecessarily
dark and its treatment of the human organism too mechanistic.
They have an almost puritanical obeisance to the forces they
believe are controlling the universe. Ecstasy produces many
experiences, but fear and paranoia are very rare.
Jody Radzik, for example, believes he once encountered the
spirit of Kali directly. To him, there was nothing dark about it,
he tells me as he makes a graffiti picture of the goddess onto a
billboard at a construction site in downtown Oakland:
I can positively describe that experience as making love
with God. I know that's what it was. Nobody can tell me
different. I will argue until the day I die that that's what my
experience was. It was a wonderful experience and it's led me to
greater opening. Every now and then I do Ecstasy again because it
brings me back to that incredible experience that I can't even
begin to describe. It's there. It's there that I learned how to
make love with God. It's how I offered myself as a sex slave to
God, through MDMA, and it's brought me to really a wonderful
experience of life.''
Several TOPYs who are walking by stop to watch Radzik
paint.
Whoah!'' exclaims one girl. They stare in astonishment.
Better be careful, man!'' warns the largest of the guys,
whose nose has at least three rings in it. "Kali is dangerous.
She'll get you really hard. She's the Destroyer.''
The TOPYs shake their heads and walk on in horror and
disdain. Radzik looks up from his work and shouts after them with
a wide smile: Kali has her fist up my ass up to her elbow and
she loves every minute of it!''
As he puts the finishing touches on his masterpiece:
Fucking art critics!''
CYBERIA PART 4
Cut and Paste: Artists in Cyberia
CHAPTER 13
The Evolution of a Cyborg
Cyberia expresses itself as art and literature. Because
Cyberia is still evolving, it is impossible to pin down a single
cyberian aesthetic. The art of Cyberia is a work in progress,
where the forefathers of each genre coexist and even collaborate
with the most recent arrivals. The conflicts over which art and
lifestyles are truly'' cyberian are less a symptom of
divisiveness than they are an indication of the fact that this
aesthetic is still in the process of unfolding. The artistic and
religious debates between the TOPYs and the house kids like Jody
Radzik arise because the different evolutionary levels of Cyberia
all exist simultaneously.
While current state-of-the-art cyberians like Radzik or
Mark
Heley claim they have no agenda and believe they are acting
against no one, their belief system was developed out of the
ideas of people who did. Just as E-generation free-form love
raves can be traced back to the radical be-ins'' of the
confrontational sixties, house music and designer beings can be
traced back to the arts and artists of a more admittedly
countercultural movement.
As we attempt to determine exactly what it means to be a
cyberian, and who is succeeding at it best, let's briefly trace
the development of the cyberian aesthetic and ethic in music,
literature, and the arts.
Anti-Muzak
Cyberians most often credit Brian Eno with fathering the
cyber music genre. His invention of the arty Ambient Music paved
the way for Macintosh musicians by taking emphasis off of
structure and placing it on texture. These aren't songs with
beginnings and endings, but extended moments--almost static
experiences. Internally, Eno's music isn't a set of particular
sounds one listens to but a space in which one breathes. Unlike
traditional rock music, which can be considered male or active in
the way it penetrates the listener, Eno's Ambient Music envelops
the listener in an atmosphere of sound. Inspired by Muzak, Eno's
recordings use similar techniques to produce the opposite
effects. In September 1978, Eno wrote the liner notes to his
first Ambient record:
Whereas the extant canned music companies proceed from the
basis of regularizing environments by blanketing their acoustic
and atmospheric idiosyncrasies, Ambient Music is intended to
enhance these. Whereas conventional background music is produced
by stripping away all sense of doubt and uncertainty (and thus
all genuine interest) from the music, Ambient Music retains these
qualities. And whereas their intention is to `brighten' the
environment by adding stimulus to it (thus supposedly alleviating
the tedium of routine tasks and leveling out the natural ups and
downs of the body rhythms) Ambient Music is intended to induce
calm and space to think. Ambient Music must be able to
accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing
one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is
interesting.''
Eno quickly gained popularity on headier college campuses
and even inspired famous precyberian Ambient tripping parties at
Princeton University, where each room of a house called the
Fourth World Center would be set up with a different decor and
Eno record. His was the ideal music for fledgling collegiate
cyberians in their first attempts to synthesize new intellectual
discoveries like the fractal and chaos mathematics with the
equally disorienting psychedelic perspective. This uncertainty is
precisely the territory of Eno's creativity.
One of the motives for being an artist,'' he relates from
personal experience, "is to recreate a condition where you're
actually out of your depth, where you're uncertain, no longer
controlling yourself, yet you're generating something, like
surfing as opposed to digging a tunnel. Tunnel-digging activity
is necessary, but what artists like, if they still like what
they're doing, is the surfing.'' The image of artist-as-surfer
was born, soon to be iterated throughout popular culture.
Eno speaks of riding the dynamics of the system'' rather
than attempting to control things with rules and principles--good
advice for those who would dare venture into the dangerous surf
of future waters, but even more significant for his use of new
mathematics terminology as a way of describing the artistic
endeavor. His musical compositions follow what he calls a
"holographic'' paradigm, where the whole remains unchanged but
texture moves about as individual timbres and resonances are
altered. To some, the music appears as cold, neutral, and boring
as a Siber-Cyberia. To others, it is a rich world of sound,
bursting with boundless creativity and imagination, uninhibited
by the arbitrary demands of drama, structure, and audience
expectation. Eno epitomizes the art student turned musician, and,
true to form, he refuses to shape his compositions around the
skeletal structure of standard songwriting.
His recording techniques become as much his guides as his
tools, and he surfs'' his pieces toward completion, cutting,
pasting, dubbing, and overdubbing. His collaboration with David
Byrne, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, best demonstrates his use
of these techniques and was the inspiration for the industrial,
house, and even rap and hip-hop recording artists who followed.
Like the house song "Your Son is Dead,'' these compositions form
an anthropological scrapbook, sampling voices and sounds from
real life. The record jacket lists the sound bytes used in each
song, which include a radio-show host, a Lebanese mountain
singer, Algerian Muslims, and even an unidentified New York City
exorcist. Each voice is layered over different percussive and
instrumental tracks, sometimes modern sounds over tribal beats,
or vice versa. The effect is a startling compression of time and
culture, where the dance beat of the music is the only regulated
element in a barrage of bird, animal, industrial, television,
radio, random, musical, and human noises. The industrial noises
were soon to become an entire genre of their own.
Eno has remained central to the creation of a cyberian
aesthetic. He gives regular interviews to Mondo 2000 magazine and
is often spotted at virtual reality events and house parties. His
forecast for the future of his own and the rest of popular music
mirrors the evolution of the computer subculture, which abandoned
the clean lines of the Space Odyssey vision for the gritty, urban
realism of Bladerunner and, as we'll see, cyberpunk books like
Neuromancer. Eno says that the new music is built up by
overlaying unrelated codes and bits and pieces of language,
letting them collide to see what new meanings and resonances
emerge. It is music that throws you off balance. It's not all
tightly organized ... a network rather than a structure.''
Coyote 1
The TOPYs, of course, took the idea of a collision-based
nett-work even further. Industrial'' pioneer and TOPY founder
Genesis P. Orridge also bases his music on Muzak, attempting to
create an even more violently antibrainwashing style of
songwriting than Eno's. His original group, Throbbing Gristle,
was the first major industrial band, and even his current
industrial/house band, Psychic TV, incorporates industrial sounds
to deprogram what he sees as a Muzak-hypnotized youth culture. In
his treatise on fighting Muzak, P. Orridge testified:
We openly declared we were inventing an anti-muzak that,
instead of cushioning the sounds of a factory environment, made
use of those very sounds to create rhythmic patterns and
structures that incorporated the liberating effects of music by
unexpected means. This approach is diametrically opposed to the
position of official muzak, as supplied by the Muzak Corporation
of America. Their intention is to disguise stress, to control and
direct human activity in order to generate maximum productivity
and minimum discontent.''
Throbbing Gristle's mission was a social reengineering
effort to decode brainwashing stimuli from the oppressive status
quo. This motivated them to create what they called metabolic''
music, for which cut-and-paste computer techniques were
necessary. They took irritating machine noises, factory sounds,
and other annoying postmodern samples and overlaid them using the
computer to create a new kind of acoustic assault. They knew the
new sound was unpleasant--so much so that they considered it a
"nonentertainment-motivated music.'' Orridge was more interested
in affecting the body directly through the textures of his sounds
than he was in making any aesthetic statement through
entertaining songs or ear-pleasing harmonic structures.
The bare-bones quality of his music was thought to go right
past the analytic mind, de-composing the listener's expectations
about music. Making use of Muzak's painstaking research into the
effects of various frequencies and pulses on the physiology and
psychology of listeners, Orridge picked his sounds on the basis
of their ability to decondition social restraints on thought and
the body.'' Orridge claims certain passages of his songs can even
induce orgasms. In industrial music, it was not important that
listeners understood what was happening to them any more than it
was in Muzak technology. The music needed only to deprogram the
audience in any way available.
For his current, more house-oriented Psychic TV project,
Orridge has made a more self-conscious effort to expose Muzak and
the societal values it supports. The music still contains
deconditioning elements, but is a more transparent parody of
Muzak techniques. Listeners can feel the way the music works and
enjoy it. It is less angry and abrasive because it no longer
seeks to provoke fear and anxiety as its weapon against
passivity-inducing Muzak. Instead, this lighter music invites
thought and even humor by creating new and greater pleasures.
Orridge is not merely fighting against Muzak; he is trying to do
it better than they are. He not only deprograms his audience but
reprograms as well, and makes listeners fully aware of the
conditioning techniques of modern society in the process. This
creates what Orridge calls a distorted mirror reflecting Muzak
back on itself.'' He believes he can show his listeners and
followers--through self-consciously cut-and-paste house
music--that the technologies in place around them can be
successfully analyzed and reversed. They contain, in code, "the
seeds of their own destruction and hopefully the structure that
nurtures it.''
Cut and paste technology, applied to music, becomes a
political statement. While beginning as a confrontational assault
on programming, it developed into a race to beat Muzak at its own
game. Muzak teaches that the world is smooth and safe. There is
no such thing as a discontinuity. If a shopper in the grocery
store experiences a discontinuity, he may take a moment to
reevaluate his purchases: Did I buy that because I wanted it, or
was I still influenced by the commercial I saw yesterday?'' If a
voter experiences a discontinuity, the incumbency is challenged.
Muzak's continuous soundtrack promotes the notion that we are in
a world that behaves in an orderly, linear fashion. Cut-and-paste
music like Psychic TV is an exercise in discontinuity. But rather
than angrily shattering people's illusions about a continuous
reality, it brings its listeners into a heightened state of
pleasure. The teaching technique is bliss induction directly
through the sound technology:
We've been saying that pleasure has become a weapon now.
You know, confrontation just doesn't work. They know all about
that game, the authorities, the conglomerates, and even the
supermarkets, they know all those scams. So straight-on
confrontation isn't necessarily the most effective tactic at the
moment. Ironically, what used to be the most conservative thing,
which was dance music, is now the most radical. And that's where
the most radical ideas are being put across, and the most jarring
combinations of sounds and sources as well.''
Filtering Down to the Posse
Many musical groups in various corners of Cyberia took
their
cue from the industrial and early house eras. We link up with our
own crowd in the form of a house band Jody Radzik promotes, Goat
Guys from Hell. The guys in this group got to know one another at
Barrington, a cooperative house for some of the most artsy and
intellectual students at Berkeley. This was the sort of place you
could easily find forty people tripping to Eno records or Psychic
TV and, needless to say, a household the university was happy to
have an excuse to shut down after one student committed suicide
on the premises.
But even after their building was confiscated, a core group
remained true to the Barrington ideals modeled after the
philosophies of musical pioneers like G.P. Orridge. As the band
GGFH first formed, they chose to use anti-Muzak recording
techniques similar to those by Psychic TV, but for less overtly
political purposes. The closer we get to today's house music and
pure cyberian enthusiasm, in fact, the farther we get from any
external agenda. To GGFH, the enemy is not the authorities, but
the repression of the darkness within ourselves.
But as I sit at Pico Paco Tacos with GGFH members Ghost, a
slightly scary-looking big white guy in black guy's rapper
clothes, and Brian, a toonish, long-haired Iro-Celtic
keyboardist, I learn that implicit in their sampling techniques
are some strong points of view about our society. Brian (the
Celt) takes a break from his veggie burrito to explain:
We take American culture in all its fucked-up-ness, its
expressions of violence and sensationalism of violence--and stick
it back in its face. Our culture tries to suppress and repress
the negative impulses and then people like Ricky Ramirez go off
and do these sick things. Then the culture feeds on the sick
things and trivializes or sensationalizes them.''
As a Spanish-language muzaky version of I've Got You Under
My Skin'' plays on a radio in the kitchen, more tacos arrive,
along with Jody Radzik, who begins to iterate his take on the
band: "GGFH is the shadow of our culture. These guys are
channeling the global shadow. Their album is a kind of Jungian
therapy on a social level.'' Ghost shrugs. Brian nods, but
doesn't fully agree:
The guys that we're talking about are people like Ricky
Ramirez, being sentenced to death saying, `See you at
Disneyland,' or mass murderers at McDonald's.'' He swallows his
food and continues in a more collegiate dialect: "The polar
opposites in our culture are very interesting to us.''
Radzik's enthusiasm prevents him from allowing his prodigy
to speak further. The more of a good person you think you are,
the more of a model citizen you think you are, the bigger the
evil shit you've got stored away back there. You can never purge
it. You've got to accept it. You allow for it, and then it
becomes harmless. The cultural repression of the shadow is what
is leading to the high level of violence in the world today.''
The juxtapositions of these polar opposites--the post
office
order and chaotic bloody death, McDonald's clowns and automatic
weapons, Ramirez and Disneyland--are the subject matter of GGFH.
This is why their style, then, is correspondingly polar and
depends on the cut-and-paste computer techniques that can bring
disparate elements together. Melody takes a back seat to texture,
and again we see musicians creating atmospheres and timeless
moments instead of structured pieces with heroic journeys. The
music has moved from an LSD sensibility to one of Ecstasy.
Likewise, Brian's composition process is a
feel-your-way-through-it experience. He'll begin with a sampled
sound, then tweak knobs and dials until he's developed a texture.
Like Eno, he thinks of sound waves as currents to be surfed, and
consciously gives himself over to the sound, working as a mere
conduit for its full expression. ( The sound simply demands to be
treated a certain way.'') But this Brian's surfboard is language
and image from popular culture: "We find samples and cut-ups that
fit with the atmosphere of the sound. We've got one that's very
dreamy so we used a sample of Tim Leary saying `flow to the pulse
of life.' Another is a real hard dance beat, so it has Madonna
sampled saying `fuck me'--which I think is really cool because if
you wanted to put Madonna into two words, `fuck me' is pretty
good.''
Radzik can't resist making another comparison: It's like
me! I've sampled all these different religions, and created my
own belief system. That includes psychedelics.''
House music is never remembered for its melody but for a
particular texture--what genre songwriters call the main
ingredient.'' Like Eno, house composers start with the sound,
then surf the system that forms around it. The songwriting
process is not exactly random--it depends on the composer's taste
and the samples he's assembled, but the machinery does take on a
life of its own. Cyber artists like GGFH experience a kind of
cyber journey as they create and layer a given piece. Although
listeners might detect only one basic set of textures, each
moment of the song can be decompressed like a DMT trip into any
number of more linear experiences.
Climax
Sarah Drew, girlfriend of Mondo chief R.U. Sirius, is a
house musician/performance artist who herself needs to be
decompressed in order to be understood. The final frontier of
house artist, she's a consciously self-mutated psychedelic
cyborg. Eno developed the idea of music as a texture; Orridge
exploited it; GGFH plays with it; Sarah Drew lives it.
She just showed up at the door one day,'' recalls R.U.
Sirius about Sarah's arrival at the Bay Area and the Mondo 2000
headquarters. "And I just said. 'Okay. Yeah. Looks good to me!' I
guess it was a sexual thing.''
Sarah--a beautiful young woman from an extremely wealthy
family--turned on to psychedelics and the notion of designer
reality as a child. Her social status gave her the luxury and
time to choose exactly who--and what--she wanted to be. By the
time Sarah entered college, her life had become an ongoing art
project. When she saw a Mondo magazine, she knew it was something
she wanted to be part of--not simply to get on the staff, but to
become Mondo 2000.
First step: to link her body with the brain from which
Mondo
emanates. Within a few weeks, she and R.U. Sirius were a couple,
so to speak, and they lived together in a room in the Mondo 2000
mansion, publisher Queen Mu's cyberdelic answer to the Hefner
estate.
We're at the aftermath of Queen Mu's birthday party. It is
about three in the morning, and almost everyone is in the same
altered state. The remaining guests include Walter Kirn, a GQ
reporter doing a piece on Mondo, to whom Sarah is speaking in a
psychedelic gibberish. The poor boy is having a hard time telling
whether Sarah's trying to seduce him or drive him insane.
She's been talking about a past DMT experience, then
suddenly she cuts herself off in midsentence and pins the
journalist against the refrigerator, making a rapid
ch-ch-ch-ch-ch'' sound while widening her eyes. Perhaps she is
describing the frame-within-a-frame-within-a-frame zoom-out
feeling on psychedelics, when one suddenly experiences a broad
and sudden shift in perspective. Or maybe she's pretending to be
a snake. A few other heads turn as she looks into Walter's eyes,
flips back her long brown hair, and, her mouth an inch from his,
again spits out "ch-ch-ch-ch-ch''
One Mondo newcomer explains to the mesmerized New Yorker
that Sarah means to express the feeling of many scenes receding
suddenly and the accompanying realization of the kind one gets
when he conceives an idea from hundreds of points of view at
once. But the veterans know what's really going on: Sarah is a
media personality. She's a multimedia manifestation of the
magazine itself. She's leaped off the page. She's a house song.
She's a human cyborg.
At about four o'clock, Sarah turns off the lights for the
half-dozen survivors of the psychedelic excursion and plays a
cassette of freshly recorded music called Infinite Personality
Complex.
The listeners close their eyes and the stereo speakers
explode with a vocal fission. Moaning, keening, and howling make
up most of the sound, but it is so deep, so rich, so layered--or
at least so damn loud--that it creates a definite bodily
response. To listen to her music is to have the experience of
your brain being dehydrated and reconstituted many times per
second. Come inside my little yoni,'' her lyrics iterate over
themselves. Somehow, Sarah Drew's music is the real thing. This
is a woman on the very edge of something, and even if that
something is sanity itself, her work and persona merit
exploration.
By dawn, everyone has gone to bed except Sarah, Walter (who
is no longer in this thing for the story), and R.U. Sirius, who
watches the whole scene with detached amusement, utterly unafraid
of losing his girlfriend to the journalist.
As Walter talks to Sarah, she manifests totally. Sarah is a
magazine article. She groks'' what he says, making an mm sound
again and again as she nods her head. This is not a normal,
conversational acknowledgment she's making, but a forced feedback
loop of rapidly accelerating mms--as if the faster Sarah mms, the
more she's understanding, and the more she's prodding him on to
explore deeper into the phenomenon he's describing. He's simply
trying to tell her he's attracted to her.
But Sarah is a cyborg, and finally answers his question
with
a long discourse about virtual space. Our current forms of
communication--verbal and physical--are obsolete, she explains.
Someday she will be able to project, through thought, a
holographic image into the air, into which someone will project
his own holographic mental image.
Then we would literally see what the other means,'' she
borrows from Terence McKenna, "and see what we both mean
together.'' It would be the ultimate in intimacy, she tells him,
touching his arm gently, because they would become linked into
one being.
The reporter has had enough. But wouldn't it be much
easier
to just fuck?''
Six months later, having moved to the next evolutionary
level, Sarah recalls what she was going through in the Infinite
Personality period. I remember I would reach into my mind and
... ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch. It was the way I had of expressing what I
was experiencing at that time. Sometimes I'm a very, very, very
high conduit. It was like a huge information download.''
For Sarah, the relationship of DNA, computers,
psychedelics,
and music is not conceptual but organic. According to Drew, her
Infinite Personality Complex served as a highly dense
information loop.'' But, like her work, her own DNA was
mutating--evolving into a denser informational structure. As an
artist, she became capable of downloading the time-wave-zero
fractal through her own resonating DNA, and then translating it
into music. Meanwhile, she was also becoming a human, biological
manifestation of the downloading process, evolving--like her
society--by becoming more intimately linked to technology.
I was becoming what you can call a cyborg. It was time for
me to make that synthesis. In this kind of work, you are the
becoming--not an artist separate from the medium. Then you can
even be in multiple places at once. Ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch!''
Artist as art object goes way back, but not artist as
cyborg
or information loop time traveler. The other particular advantage
of becoming a cyborg is, of course, that it enables the artist to
interact fully with her computer and other high-tech recording
equipment. Sarah's current house project is an adaptation of the
Bacchae, for which she's using an EMU synthesizer/sampler. She
makes a moan or a whisper into a microphone that the EMU records
digitally. Then she replays, overdubs, and manipulates the sounds
with computers. Finally, she ends up with a house recording that,
again, recreates a timeless, skinless sexual experience through
computers.
It starts out with soft, light sounds and whisperings,
then
moves into a sort of ecstasy. As it starts to build, the
breathing becomes the rhythms, and the rhythms become the
breathing. It's the sound of ecstasy happening. And I have a
male, Dionysian figure, going into orgasm as he's being torn
apart. And it ends up in a climax. All in five minutes.''
In addition, using the 3-D holographic'' sound techniques
developed for virtual reality systems, Sarah creates a
three-dimensional acoustic sound space where the audience can
experience sounds as real, physical presences. The whispers seem
to come from all sides. This is not just a "sens-u-round'' effect
but a genuine cyberian effort in structure, style, and meaning.
I'm talking about a holographic sense of presence and
movement,'' she insists. "We can take people through time that
way by creating a space with sound. It'll move people back in
time.''
By creating a space with sound, Sarah makes a time machine
in which she can transport her audience--not by bringing them
into a different space but by changing the space that they're
already in. The implication of her music is that time does not
really exist, since it can be compressed into a single moment.
The moment itself, of course, is Dionysian; orgiastic bliss is
the only inroad to timelessness. Because Sarah creates her sound
space out of her own voice and cyborg presence, she feels her
music is a way of taking her audience into herself. Her ultimate
sexual statement is to make love to her entire audience and
create in them the bliss response.
Despite her flirtatious manner and flippancy about orgasm,
Sarah takes human sexuality quite seriously. As several recording
engineers carry equipment into Sarah's basement studio to mix the
final tracks for her Bacchae record, she makes a startling
admission: she'll probably perform with low energy'' today
because she had an abortion yesterday. For lack of anything
better to say, one of the engineers asks her how it was.
I took acid before I went in,'' she says, "because I
really
wanted to experience it. It was a purge.''
To average ears, this sounds like intense, artsy beatnik
nonsense, but Sarah's unflinching commitment to experiencing and
understanding her passage through time has earned her recognition
as one of the most fully realized participants in Cyberia.
Everyone in the scene who knows Sarah--and almost everybody
does--is a little frightened of her, but also just a wee bit in
awe.
She is most definitely for real, and however bizarre she
gets, everything she says and does is in earnest. Even her
affectations--weird sounds, strange hats, pseudointellectual
accent, and name dropping--are done innocently, almost like a
child trying on costumes to test the reality of each. Sarah's
life is absolutely a work in progress, and her pieces are
indistinguishable from her self.
To have an abortion on acid,'' muses R.U. Sirius the day
afterward. "It hasn't seemed to affect her too much. It was
intense, and she cried, but one of the things I like about her is
she can have these incredibly intense experiences, and she
expects them.''
The discontinuity training is complete. Cyberian music has
evolved into a cyborg.
CHAPTER 14
Hypertextual Forays
The writers of Cyberia underwent a similar evolution. The
literary culture of Cyberia began as a dark, negative worldview
but later developed into a multimedia celebration of timelessness
and designer reality. Today, the literature of Cyberia--like its
music--has become personified by cyberians themselves, who adopt
into their own lives the ethos of a fictional designer reality.
The Interzone
Beat'' hero William Burroughs didn't start the cyberpunk
movement in literature, but he foresaw it, most notably in his
novel Naked Lunch (1959). Although written long before video
games or the personal computer existed, Burroughs's works utilize
a precybernetic hallucinatory dimension called the Interzone,
where machines mutate into creatures, and people can be
controlled telepathically by "senders'' who communicate messages
via psychedelics introduced into the victims' bloodstreams.
Burroughs's description of the psychic interface
prophesizes
a virtual reality nightmare: Senders gain control of physical
movements, mental processes, emotional responses, and apparent
sensory impressions by means of bioelectrical signals injected
into the nervous system of the subject. ... The biocontrol
apparatus [is] the prototype of one-way telepathic control.''
Once indoctrinated, the drug user becomes an unwilling agent for
one of the Interzone's two main rivaling powers. The battle is
fought entirely in the hallucinatory dimension, and involves
"jacking in'' (as William Gibson will later call it) through
intelligent mutated typewriters.
Burroughs's famed prismatic'' style of writing--almost a
literary equivalent of Brian Eno's Ambient Music--reads more like
jazz than the narrative works of his contemporaries. Each word or
turn of phrase can lead the reader down an entirely new avenue of
thought or plot, imitating the experience of an interdimensional
hypertext adventure. But as the pioneer of nonmimetic
hallucinatory and even pornographic literature, Burroughs
suffered condemnation from the courts and, worse, occasional
addiction to the chemicals that offered him access to the far
reaches of his consciousness. Unlike the cyberian authors of
today, Burroughs was not free simply to romp in the uncharted
regions of hyperspace, but instead--like early psychedelic
explorers--was forced to evaluate his experiences against the
accepted, "sane'' reality of the very noncyberian world in which
he lived. The morphogenetic field, as it were, was not yet fully
formed.
This made Burroughs feel alone and mentally ill. In a
letter
to Allen Ginsburg, he wrote that he hoped the writing of Naked
Lunch would somehow cure'' him of his homosexuality. As David
Cronenberg, who later made a film adaptation of the book,
comments, "even at that time ... even these guys, the hippest of
the hip, were still capable of thinking of themselves as sick
guys who could be cured by some act of art or will or drugs.''
Burroughs's early pre-Cyberia, as a result, became as dark,
paranoid, and pessimistic as the author himself. It was three
decades before cyberian literature could shake off this tone. In
the current climate, Burroughs has been able to adopt a more
full-blown cyber aesthetic that, while still cynically expressed,
calls for the liberation of humanity from the constraints of the
body through radical technologically enhanced mutation:
Evolution did not come to a reverent halt with homo
sapiens. An evolutionary step that involves biologic alterations
is irreversible. We now must take such a step if we are to
survive at all. And it had better be good. ... We have the
technology to recreate a flawed artifact, and to produce improved
and variegated models of the body designed for space conditions.
I have predicted that the transition from time into space will
involve biologic alteration. Such alterations are already
manifest.''
It wasn't until the 1990s (and close to his own nineties)
that Burroughs gained access to other forms of media, which more
readily accepted his bizarre cyberian aesthetic. Filmmaker Gus
Van Sant (Drugstore Cowboy; My Own Private Idaho) collaborated
with Burroughs on a video version of the satiric poem
Thanksgiving Prayer,'' which later appeared in freeze-frame form
in Mondo 2000. But long before Burroughs had himself successfully
crossed over into other media, his aesthetic and his worldview
had found their way there.
Jacking in to the Matrix
Cyberpunk proper was born out of a pessimistic view similar
to that of William Burroughs. The people, stories, and milieu of
William Gibson's books are generally credited with spawning an
entirely new aesthetic in the science fiction novel, and
cross-pollinating with films like Bladerunner, Max Headroom, and
Batman. Taking its cue from comic books, skateboard magazines,
and video games more than from the lineage of great sci-fi
writers like Asimov and Bradbury, cyberpunk literature is a
gritty portrait of a future world not too unlike our own, with
computer hackers called cowboys,'' black market genetic
surgeons, underground terrorist-punkers called Moderns who wear
chameleonlike camouflage suits, contraband software, drugs, and
body parts, and personality imprints of dead hackers called
"constructs'' who jet as disembodied consciousness through the
huge computer net called the matrix.'' The invention of the
matrix, even as a literary construct, marks the birth of
cyberpunk fiction. Here, the matrix describes itself to Case,
Gibson's reluctant cowboy hero:
The matrix has its roots in primitive arcade games,'' said
the voice-over, "in the early graphics programs and
military
experimentation with cranial jacks.'' On the Sony, a
two-dimensional space war faded behind a forest of
mathematically generated ferns, demonstrating the spacial
possibilities of logarithmic spirals; cold blue military
footage burned through, lab animals wired into test
systems,
helmets feeding into fire control circuits of tanks and war
planes. Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced
daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation,
by children being taught mathematical concepts. ... A
graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of
every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity.
Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters
and constellations of data. Like city lights ... receding
...''
The matrix is a fictional extension of our own worldwide
computer net, represented graphically to the user, much like VR
or a video game, and experienced via dermatrodes, which send
impulses through the skin directly into the brain. After years
away from cyberspace, Case is given the precious opportunity to
hack through the matrix once again. Gibson's description voiced
the ultimate hacker fantasy for the first time:
He closed his eyes.
Found the ridged face of the power stud.
And in the bloodlit dark behind his eyes, silver phosphenes
boiling in from the edge of space, hypnagogic images
jerking
past like film compiled from random frames. Symbols,
figures, faces, a blurred, fragmented mandala of visual
information.
Please, he prayed, now--
A gray disk, the color of Chiba sky.
Now--
Disk beginning to rotate, faster, becoming a sphere of
paler
gray. Expanding--
And flowed, flowered for him, fluid neon origami trick, the
unfolding of his distanceless home, his country,
transparent
3D chessboard extending to infinity. Inner eye opening to
the stepped scarlet pyramid of the Eastern Seaboard Fission
Authority burning beyond the green cubes of Mitsubishi Bank
of America, and high and very far away he saw the spiral
arms of military systems, forever beyond his reach.
And somewhere he was laughing, in a white-painted loft,
distant fingers caressing the deck, tears of release
streaking his face.''
The invention of cyberspace as a real place is the most
heralded of the cyberpunk genre's contributions to fiction and
the arts. William Gibson and his colleague/collaborator Bruce
Sterling paint vivid portraits of a seamy urban squalor
contrasted by an ultra-high-tech web of electronic sinews,
traveled by mercenary hackers, digital cowboys, artificial
intelligences, and disembodied minds.
These authors acknowledge the discrepancy between the
promise of technological miracles, such as imprinting
consciousness onto a silicon chip, and their application in a
real world still obsessed with power, money, and sex. Their backs
are the literary equivalent of industrial music, exploring a
world where machines and technology have filled every available
corner, and regular people are forced to figure out a way to turn
these technologies against the creators and manipulators of
society.
Contributing to the pessimistic quality of these works is
another idea shared with the industrial movement--that human
beings are basically programmable. I saw his profile,'' one
character remarks about another. "He's a kind of compulsive
Judas. Can't get off sexually unless he knows he's betraying the
object of his desire. That's what the file says.'' And we know
that means he can't act otherwise. Characters must behave
absolutely true to their programming, having no choice but to
follow the instructions of their emotional templates. Even Molly,
the closest thing to a love-interest in Neuromancer, leaves her
boyfriend with a written, self-defeating apology: ITS THE WAY IM
WIRED I GUESS.''
Like Burroughs's reluctant hero in Naked Lunch, Case's
addictive personality is exploited by higher powers, and he must
pay for the joy of jacking in by becoming an agent for a dark,
interdimensional corporation. Also like Burroughs's prismatic
style, the feeling of these books is more textural than
structural. Like fantasy role-playing, computer games, or
Nintendo adventures, these books are to be appreciated for the
ride. Take the opening of Gibson and Sterling's novel, The
Difference Engine:
Composite image, optically encoded by escort-craft of the
trans-Channel airship Lord Brunel: aerial view of suburban
Cherbourg, October 14, 1905.
A villa, a garden, a balcony.
Erase the balcony's wrought-iron curves, exposing a
bath-chair and its occupant. Reflected sunset glints from
the nickel-plate of the chair's wheel-spokes.
The occupant, owner of the villa, rests her arthritic hands
upon fabric woven by a Jacquard loom.
These hands consist of tendons, tissue, jointed bone.
Through quiet processes of time and information, threads
within the human cells have woven themselves into a woman.
Her name is Sybil Gerard.
Like the characters in Fantastic Voyage, we move through a
multitiered fractal reality, enjoying the lens of a camera, the
dexterity of a computer design program, the precision of a
microscope, the information access of an historical database, the
intimacy of a shared consciousness, and, finally, the distance
and objectivity of a narrative voice that can identify this
entity by its name. The way in which we move through the text
says as much if not more about the cyberpunk worldview than does
its particular post-sci-fi aesthetic. Writers like Gibson and
Sterling hate to be called cyberpunk'' because they know their
writing is not just an atmosphere or flavor. While this branch of
fiction may have launched the cyberpunk milieu, it also embodies
some of the principles of the current renaissance in its thematic
implications.
Even the above passage from The Difference Engine
demonstrates a sense of holographic reality, where identity is
defined by the consensual hallucination of a being's component
parts. Similarly, like a DMT trip, a shamanic journey, or a
hypertext computer program, reality in these books unfolds in a
nonlinear fashion. A minor point may explode into the primary
adventure at hand, or a character may appear, drop a clue or
warning, and then vanish. Furthermore, these stories boldly
contrast the old with the new, and the biological with the
technical, reminding us that society does not progress in a
smooth, curvilinear fashion.
Sterling's Schismatrix, for example, pits the technical
against the organic in a world war between Mechanists, who have
mastered surgical manipulation of the human body through advanced
implant technology, and Shapers, who accomplish similar
biological manipulation through conscious control over their own
DNA coding. This is the same metaphorical struggle that systems
mathematician Ralph Abraham has explored throughout human
history, between the organic spiritual forces--which he calls
Chaos, Gaia, and Eros--and the more mechanistic forces embodied
by technology, patriarchal domination, and monotheism. In fact,
Sterling's own worldview is based on a nonlinear systems
mathematics model.
Society is a complex system,'' he writes for an article in
Whole Earth Review "and there's no sort of A-yields-B business
here. It's an iteration. A yields B one day and then AB is going
to yield something else the next day, and it's going to yield
something else the next and there's 365 days in a year, and it
takes 20 years for anything to happen.''
Just as these writers incorporate the latest principles of
chaos math, new technology, and computer colonization into their
stories and milieu, they are also fascinated by exploring what
these breakthroughs imply about the nature of human experience.
William Gibson knew nothing about computers when he wrote
Neuromancer. Most of the details came from fantasy: If I'd
actually known anything about computers, I doubt if I'd been able
to do it.'' He was motivated instead by watching kids in video
arcades: "I could see in the physical intensity of their postures
how rapt these kids were. It was like one of those closed systems
out of a Pynchon novel: you had this feedback loop, with photons
coming off the screen into the kids' eyes, the neurons moving
through their bodies, electrons moving through the computer. And
these kids clearly believed in the space these games projected.
Everyone who works with computers seems to develop an intuitive
faith that there's some kind of actual space behind the screen.''
Gibson's inspiration is Thomas Pynchon, not Benoit
Mandelbrot, and his focus is human functioning, not computer
programming. The space behind the screen--the consensual
hallucination--is Cyberia in its first modern incarnation. Gibson
and his cohorts are cyberpunk writers not because they're
interested in hackers but because they are able to understand the
totality of human experience as a kind of neural net. Their
stories, rooted partially in traditional, linear fiction and
common sense, mine the inconsistencies of modern culture's
consensual hallucinations in the hope of discovering what it
truly means to be a human being. Their permutations on
consciousness--a cowboy's run in the matrix, an artificial
intelligence, an imprinted personality--are not celebrations of
technology but a kind of thought experiment aimed at
conceptualizing the experience of life.
As ushers rather than participants in Cyberia, Gibson and
Sterling are not optimistic about the future of such experience.
Most criticism of their work stems from the authors' rather
nihilistic conclusions about mankind's relationship to technology
and the environment. Gibson's characters in Neuromancer enjoy
their bodies and the matrix, but more out of addictive
impulsiveness than true passion.
Gibson admits, One of the reasons, I think, that I use
computers in that way is that I got really interested in these
obsessive things. I hadn't heard anybody talk about anything with
that intensity since the Sixties. It was like listening to people
talk about drugs.'' The cyberian vision according to these, the
original cyberpunk authors, is a doomed one, where the only truth
to be distilled is that a person's consciousness has no spirit.
In a phone conversation, Bruce Sterling shares his similar
worldview over the shouts and laughter of his children: If you
realize that the world is nonlinear and random, then it means
that you can be completely annihilated by chaos for no particular
reason at all. These things happen. There's no cosmic justice.
And that's a disquieting thing to have to face. It's damaging to
people's self-esteem.''
Both Sterling and Gibson experienced the cyberian
vision,''
but their conclusions are dark and hopeless. Rather than trashing
the old death-based paradigm, they simply incorporate chaos,
computers, and randomness into a fairly mechanistic model.
Sterling believes in systems math, cultural viruses, and the
promise of the net, but, like Bruce Eisner, he doesn't see
technology as inherently liberating. "I worry about quotidian
things like the greenhouse effect and topsoil depletion and
desertification and exploding populations and species extinction.
It's like it's not gonna matter if you've got five thousand meg
on your desktop if outside your door its like a hundred twelve
degrees Fahrenheit for three weeks in a row.''
While they weren't ready to make the leap into cyberian
consciousness, Gibson and Sterling were crucial to the formation
of Cyberia, and their works took the first step toward imagining
a reality beyond time or locational space. These writers have
refused, however, to entertain the notion of human beings
surviving the apocalypse, or even of real awareness outside the
body. Hyperspace is a hallucination, and death is certainly real
and permanent. Even Case's friend, the one disembodied
consciousness in Neuromancer, knows he's not real: his only wish
is to be terminated.
It has been left to younger, as-yet less recognized
writers,
like WELL denizen Mark Laidlaw, to invent characters whose
celebration of Cyberia outweigh the futility of life in a
decaying world. One of his stories, Probability Pipeline,''
which he wrote with the help of cyber novelist and mathematician
Rudy Rucker, is about two friends, Delbert, a surfer, and Zep, a
surfboard designer, who invent the ultimate board, or "stick'':
one that, utilizing chaos mathematics, can create monster waves.
Dig it, Del, I'm not going to say this twice. The ocean is
a chaotic dynamical system with sensitive dependence on
initial conditions. Macro info keeps being folded in while
micro info keeps being excavated. ... I'm telling you,
dude.
Say I'm interested in predicting or influencing the waves
over the next few minutes. Waves don't move all that fast,
so anything that can influence the surf here in the next
few
minutes is going to depend on the surfspace values within a
neighboring area of, say, one square kilometer. I'm only
going to fine-grain down to the millimeter level, you wave,
so we're looking at, uh, one trillion sample points.
Million
squared. Don't interrupt again, Delbert, or I won't build
you the chaotic attractor.''
You're going to build me a new stick?''
I got the idea when you hypnotized me last night. Only I'd
forgotten till just now. Ten fractal surf levels at a
trillion sample points. We model that with an imipolex CA,
we use a nerve-patch modem outset unit to send the rider's
surfest desires down a co-ax inside the leash, the CA does
a
chaotic back simulation of the fractal inset, the board
does
a jiggly-doo, and ...''
`TSUUUNAMIIIIII!'' screamed Delbert, leaping up on the
bench
and striking a boss surfer pose.
Laidlaw and Rucker's world is closer to the cyberian
sentiment because the characters are not politicians, criminals,
or unwilling participants in a global, interdimensional battle.
They are surfers, riding the wave of chaos purely for pleasure.
To them, the truth of Cyberia is a sea of waves--chaotic, maybe,
but a playground more than anything else. The surfers'
conclusions about chaos are absolutely cyberian: sport, pleasure,
and adventure are the only logical responses to a fractal
universe. Like the first house musicians who came after Genesis
P. Orridge's hostile industrial genre, dispensing with leather
and chains and adopting the fashions of surfwear and
skateboarding, these younger writers have taken the first leap
toward ecstasy by incorporating surf culture into their works.
Laidlaw first thought of writing the story, he explains to
me in the basement office of his San Francisco Mission District
home, at Rudy's house, where he had a Mandelbrot book with a
picture of a wave. I looked at it, and realized that a surfboard
can take you into this stuff.'' Laidlaw rejects the negative
implications of Gibson's hardwired world and refuses to believe
that things are winding down.
The apocalypse? I see that as egotism!'' Likewise,
abandoning the rules of traditional structure ("plot,'' Laidlaw
explains, merely affords comfort in a hopeless situation''),
Laidlaw follows his own character's advice, and surfs his way
through the storytelling.
Get rad. Be an adventurist. You'll be part of the system,
man,'' explains the character Zep, and eventually that's what
happens. Like Green Fire, who on his visionquests must control
his imagination lest his fantasies become real, Del accidentally
sends too many thought signals through his surfboard/chaotic
attractor to the nuclear power plant at the ocean shore and blows
it up; but, as luck would have it, he, Zep, and their girl Jen
escape in an interdimensional leap:
The two waves intermingled in a chaotic mindscape
abstraction. Up and up they flew, the fin scraping sparks from
the edges of the unknown. Zep saw stars swimming under them, a
great spiral of stars.
Everything was still, so still.
And then Del's hand shot out. Across the galactic wheel a
gleaming figure shared their space. It was coming straight at
them. Rider of the tides of night, carver of blackhole beaches
and neutron tubes. Bent low on his luminous board--graceful,
poised, inhuman.
`Stoked,' said Jen. `God's a surfer!'''
The only real weapon against the fearful vision of a cold
siber-Cyberia is joy. Appreciation of the space gives the surfer
his bearings and balance in Cyberia.
This is why art and literature are seen as so crucial to
coping there: they serve as celebratory announcements from a
world moving into hyperspace. No matter how dark or pessimistic
their milieus, these authors still delight in revealing the
textures and possibilities of a world free of physical
constraints, boring predictability, and linear events.
Toasters, Band-Aids, Blood
Comic book artists, who already prided themselves on their
non-linear storytelling techniques, were the first to adopt the
milieu of cyberian literature into another medium. Coming from a
tradition of superheroes and clearcut battles between good and
evil, comics tend to focus on the more primitive aspects of
Cyberia, and are usually steeped in dualism, terror, and
violence. While younger comic artists have ventured into a
post-nihilistic vision of Cyberia, the first to bring cyberian
aesthetics into the world of superheroes, like the original
cyberpunk authors, depicted worlds as dark as they could draw
them.
Batman, the brooding caped crusader, was one of the first
of
the traditional comic book characters to enjoy a cyberpunk
rebirth, when Frank Miller created The Dark Knight Returns series
in the 1980's. As Miller surely realized, Batman is a
particularly fascinating superhero to bring to Cyberia because he
is a mere motal and, like us, he must use human skills to cope
with the post-modern apocalypse. The mature Batman, as wrought by
Miller, is fraught with inconsistencies, self-doubt, and
resentment toward a society gone awry. He is the same Batman who
fought criminals in earlier, simpler decades, who now, as an
older man, is utterly unequipped for the challenges of Cyberia.
Miller's Dark Knight series interpolates a human superhero
into the modern social-media scheme. Commentators in frames the
shape of TV sets interpret each of Batman's actions as they
occur. Newsmedia criticism running throughout the story reminds
the audience that Batman's world has become a datasphere: Each of
his actions effect more than just the particular criminal he has
beaten up--they have an iterative influence on the viewing
public.
For example, a Ted Koppel-like newsman conducts a TV
interview with a social scientist about Batman's media identity.
The psychologist responds:
Picture the public psyche as a vast, moist membrane--
through
the media, Batman has struck this membrane a vicious blow,
and it has recoiled. Hence your misleading statistics. But
you see, Ted, the membrane is flexible. Here the more
significant effects of the blow become calculable, even
predictable. To wit--every anti-social act can be traced to
irresponsible media input. Given this, the presence of such
an aberrant, violent force in the media can only lead to
anti-social programming.
The iterative quality of the media within the comic book
story creates a particularly cyberian looking glass'' milieu
that has caught on with other comic book writers as a
free-for-all visual sampling of diary entries, computer
printouts, television reports, advertisements, narratives from
other characters as well as regular dialogue and narration. In
addition, the comic books make their impact by sampling brand
names, media identities, and cultural icons from the present, the
past, and an imagined future. Comics, always an ideal form for
visual collage, here become vehicles for self-consciously
gathered iconic samples. This chaos of imagery, in a world Batman
would prefer to dominate with order and control is precisely what
cause his anguish.
In the Batman comics we witness the ultimate battle of
icons, as Batman and Joker conduct a cyberian war of images in a
present-day datasphere. They no longer battle physically but
idealistically, and their weapons are the press and television
coverage. This becomes particulary ironic when the reader pauses
to remember that Batman and the Joker are comic book characters
themselves--of course they would behave this way. They are their
media identities, which is why their manifestation in the
datasphere is so important to them. Their battle is a
metaconflict, framed within a cut-and-paste media.
So poor Batman, a character out of the patriarchy (he is,
after all, avenging the murder of his father), finds himself
caught in a nightmare as he tries to control post-modern chaos.
In Frank Miller's words, Batman imposes his order on the world;
he is an absolute control freak. The Joker is Batman's most
maddening opponent. He represents the chaos Batman despises, the
chaos that killed his parents.'' Living in a comic book world,
it's no wonder that Batman is going crazy while the Joker seems
to gain strength over the years.
This is why the experience of Miller's world is more like
visiting an early acid house club than reading a traditional
comic book. Miller initiates a reexploration of the nonlinear and
sampling potential of the comic-book medium, pairing facing pages
that at first glance seem unrelated but actually comment on each
other deeply. A large, full-page abstract drawing of Batman may
be juxtaposed with small cells of action scenes, television
analysis, random comments, song lyrics, or newsprint. As the eye
wanders in any direction it chooses, the reader's disorientation
mirrors Batman's confusion at fighting for good in a world where
there are no longer clear, clean lines to define one's position.
The comic-book reader relaxes only when he is able to accept the
chaotic, nonlinear quality of Miller's text and enjoy it for the
ride. Then, the meaning of Batman's story becomes clear, hovering
somewhere between the page and the viewer's mind.
Even more grotesque, disorienting, and cyber-extreme is the
work of Bill Sienkiewicz, whose Stray Toasters series epitomizes
the darkest side of the cyberpunk comic style. The story--a
mystery about a boy who, we learn, has been made part machine--is
depicted in a multimedia comic-book style, with frames that are
include photographs of nails, plastic, fringe, packing bubbles,
toaster parts, leather, Band-Aids, and blood. This world of
sadomasochism, crime, torture, and corruption makes Neuromancer
seem bright by comparison. There is very little logic to the
behaviors and storyline here--it's almost as if straying from the
nightmarish randomness of events and emotions would sacrifice the
nonlinear consistency. In essence, Stray Toasters is a world of
textures, where the soft, hard, organic, and electronic make up a
kind of dreamscape through which both the characters and the
readers are moved about at random. As Bruce Sterling would no
doubt agree, an accidental or even an intentional electrocution
could come at any turn of a page.
Finally, though, cyber-style comics have emerged that are
as
hypertextual as Miller or Sienkiewicz's, but far more optimistic.
Like the characters of Marc Laidlaw and Rudy Rucker, the Teenage
Mutant Ninja Turtles are fun-loving, pizza-eating surfer dudes,
for whom enjoying life (while, perhaps, learning of their origin
and fighting evil) is of prime importance. They are just as
cyberpunk and nonlinear as Batman or the Joker, but their
experience of life is playful. While the characters and stories
in the subsequent films and TV cartoons are, admittedly, fairly
cardboard, the original comic books produced out of a suburban
garage by Eastman and Laird are cyberpunk's answer to The
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Four turtles, minding their own
business, fall off a truck and into a puddle of ooze that turns
them into human-size talking turtles. They are trained by a rat
to become ninja warriors, and then they go on an interdimensional
quest to the place where the transformative ooze originated.
Throughout their adventures, the turtles maintain a lighthearted
attitude, surfing their way through battles and chases.
The violence is real and the world is corrupt, but the
turtles maintain hope and cheer. The comic itself, like the Toon
Town atmosphere, is a sweet self-parody, sampling nearly all of
the comic-book-genre styles. But instead of creating a
nightmarish panoply, Eastman and Laird use these elements to
build a giant playground. Challenges are games, truly evil
enemies are bad guys,'' and the rewards are simple--pizza and a
party. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series offers the only
optimistic response to a nonlinear and chaotic world: to become
softer, sweeter, more adventurous for its own sake, and not to
take life too seriously.
Signal Compression and Mind Expansion
The multimedia quality of cyber comic books spills over
into
cyberian video production, which has begun to reinterpret its own
dynamic in relation to the fantasy games, novels, and comics.
While these media borrow from video's quick-cut electronic
immediacy, videographers now borrow back from the cyberpunk style
and ethics to create a new graphic environment--one that
interacts much more intimately with the viewer's body and
consciousness than does the printed page.
At any Toon Town house event, television monitors
throughout
the club flash the computer-generated imagery of Rose X, a
company created by Britt Welin and Ken Adams, a young married
couple who moved Petaluma, California, to be close to their
mentor, Terence McKenna. Global Village enthusiasts, they hope
their videos will help to awaken a network of like-minded people
in remote regions throughout the nation. Their vision, inspired
in part by McKenna, is of a psychedelic Cyberia, where techniques
of consciousness, computers, and television co-evolve.
Like McKenna, Ken and Britt believe that psychedelics and
human beings share a morphic, co-evolutionary relationship, but
they are quick to include technology in the organic dance. As
they smoke a joint and splice wires in their garage-studio (where
else?), Ken explains the video-psychedelic evolutionary model.
Psychedelic experiences are almost like voices from your
dream state. They call you and they seduce you. People are also
constantly seduced by psychedelic techniques on TV that have to
do with fluid editing and accelerated vision processing. People
love that stuff because it strikes them in a very ancient place,
something that spirals back down into the past for everybody
whether or not they're using psychedelics. It's there already.''
Like MTV videos that substitute texture for story and quick
cuts for plot points, Rose X videos work on an almost subliminal
level. Meaning is gleaned from the succession of images more than
their linear relationship. Viewers process information moment to
moment, thus the amount processed increases with the number of
cuts, even if the data is less structured. Rose X takes these
techniques a step further by intentionally appealing to the
viewer's ability to experience a kind of morphic resonance with
the patterns and data flashing on the screen. Even their subject
matter--their most popular videos are talks by Terence McKenna
and Ralph Abraham--is intended to awaken dormant zones of human
consciousness.
Britt, a perky, dark blonde with a southern accent, pops in
a video collage'' and details her take on the relationship of
technology, psychedelics, and consciousness. The images swirl on
a giant video screen flanked by banks of computer equipment and
wires. It's difficult to figure out the difference between what's
around the screen and what's being projected onto it.
We work in a psychedelic state when we're able to. And
then
we have a different relationship to our technology. We're into a
concept called `technoanimism,' where we really think of
technology itself as an animistic dynamic that filters through
the individual machines, bringing an overspirit to them--an
animistic spirit that's way beyond what humans are comprehending
on their own level.''
Britt, like Sarah Drew from the music world, has developed
herself into a cyborg. Both women unite with their technology in
order to channel information they believe is new to humanity.
Just as house musicians start with a sound, then go where the
sound takes them, Britt allows her video and computer equipment
to lead her into artistic discoveries. When you are functioning
at a high psychedelic level and you go into a cyberspace
environment, you lose your parameters and you find yourself
entirely within the electronic world. It breeds its own
surprises.''
Unlike most men in the cyber-arts scene, who tend to think
of themselves as dominators of technology, Ken, like Britt,
strives to become one'' with the machine. "Our video-computer
system's set up to ease us into a level of intimacy where we can
use it in a transparent sense. If I enter into a trance
relationship with it, then it ends up having a spiritlike
existence.''
Rose X's current project, a feature-length video call
Strange Attractor emerges out of their interest in the
relationship of technology to organic interdimensional
consciousness. In the story, a reversal of the Adam and Eve myth,
Rose is a strange attractor'''-- a person who, through lucid
dreaming, can access the vast network of artificial environments
normally entered through computers or virtual reality. On one of
her journeys into cyberspace, she befriends another strange
attractor--a young man who has gotten lost in the consensual
hallucination. Her task is to rescue this lost soul by getting
him to experience his body--through virtual sex--or his
spirit--by getting him to eat a psychoactive apple. On the way,
she is helped by an interdimensional sect who use organic methods
to access Cyberia, and thwarted by an evil race of authorities,
who hope to curd interdimensional travel and trap the human race
forever in its earthly, single-dimensional reality.
The battle is typically cyberpunk, but here the forces of
chaos are the good guys, and those who put a lid on
interdimensional travel are the bad guys. The good guys are true
cyberians, who use ancient techniques, psychedelics, and
computers in a nondiscriminatory cybersampling of whatever works.
Britt and Ken believe Eve was right, and that had Adam followed
his own impulses rather than God's orders, everything would have
been okay.
Unlike earlier voyagers like Burroughs, Britt embraces the
ambiguous impulses that can feel so unsettling:
Westerners tend to try to suppress them and ignore them,
probably out of fear of insanity. If there are voices or beings
in your mind that you don't seem to have any control over--that
can be a terrifying prospect.''
Similarly, rather than be afraid of technology's influence
over them, they lovingly embrace their machinery as an equal
partner in the race toward hyperspace. The printed, official''
version of Britt and Ken's psychedelic and technological agenda
equates the experience of drugs with the promise of technology
and the lost art of ecstasy:
Strange but efficient organic forms appearing and
disappearing resemble visions before sleep when two worlds touch.
This is computer video signal compression. Like peyote, like
psilocybin, silicon has songs to sing, stories to tell you won't
hear anywhere else.''
Likewise, the Rose X company is true to cyberian ideals of
tribal, open interaction--a new garage-band ethic based on
pooling resources and hacking what's out there. Britt trained
herself on the Amiga Video Toaster after she convinced her
employer to buy one. Ken bought his with money from an NEA grant.
But even without elaborate social hacking, the Video Toaster's
low cost makes it as available now as a guitar and amplifier were
in the sixties. The device links the personal computer to the
television, giving the viewing public its first opportunity to
talk back to the screen. Britt explains enthusiastically: Look
how many bands got formed since the Beatles.''
Low-cost guerrilla production techniques have also led
artists toward the cut-and-paste aesthetic. No longer concerned
with making things look real,'' videographers like Ken and Britt
do most of their work in postproduction, manipulating images they
shoot or scrounge. Like house music recording artists, their
techniques involve sampling, overlaying, and dubbing. Ken is
proud that his work never tries to imitate a physical reality and
is especially critical of filmmakers who waste precious resources
on costly special effects. Video art in Cyberia is cut-and-paste
impressionism. Just as comic-book artists include television
images or even wires and blood in their cells, videographers
include pictures of the Iraq bombings, virtual reality scenes,
and even old sitcoms.
We're much more like a cyberpunk comic book. We don't want
it to look like it takes place in a natural setting. We want it
to all be self-contained in a conceptual space that's primarily
videographic--like virtual reality. It'll be the reality of the
imagination. We've quit trying to mimic reality; we try to mimic
our imagination, which is the root of all reality anyway.''
Again, the final stage in the development of a cyberian
genre is the designer being, mated both with technology and with
psychedelics in the hope of creating a new territory for human
consciousness. But what the designers of the new literary milieu
may not realize is that around the world, thirsty young minds
absorb these ideas and attempt to put them into effect in their
own lives. The fully evolved cyberian artists aren't making any
art at all. They're living it.
CHAPTER 15
Playing Roles
Ron Post, aka Nick Walker, is a gamemaster and aikido
instructor from suburban New Jersey. In his world, fantasy and
reality are in constant flux. Having fully accepted ontological
relativism as a principle of existence, Ron and his posse of
gamers'' live the way they play, and play as a way of life. It's
not that life is just a game, but that gaming is as good a model
as any for developing the skills necessary to journey
successfully through the experience of reality. It is a constant
reminder that the rules are not fixed and that those who
recognize this fact have the best time. Ron, his "adopted''
brother Russel (they named themselves after the comic-book
characters Ron and Russel Post), and about a dozen other
twenty-something-year-olds gather each week at Ron's house to
play fantasy role-playing games. Like the psychedelic trips of
the most dedicated shamanic warriors, these games are not mere
entertainment. They are advanced training exercises for cyberian
warriors.
Fantasy role playing games, unlike traditional board games,
are unstructured and nonlinear. There is no clear path to follow.
Instead, the game works like an acting exercise, where the
players improvise the story as they go along. There is no way to
win'' because the only object is to create, with the other
players, the best story possible. Still, players must keep their
characters alive, and having fun often means getting into trouble
and then trying to get out again.
Ron's game is based in GURPS, the Generic Universal Role
Playing System, by Steve Jackson; it is a basic set of numerical
and dice-roll rules governing the play of fantasy games. In
addition, Jackson has provided modules,'' which are specific
guidelines for gaming in different worlds. These modules specify
realistic rules for play in worlds dominated by magic, combat,
high-tech, even cyberpunk--a module that depicts the future of
computer hacking so convincingly that the U.S. Secret Service
seized it from Jackson's office believing it was a dangerous,
subversive document.
I meet Ron and Russel at Ron's house, which is next to the
train overpass in South New Brunswick. It's the kind of day where
everyone blames the sweltering heat on the greenhouse effect--too
many weather records are being broken for too many days straight.
The gamers sit on the front steps of Ron's house with their
shirts off, except for the two girls. The group defies the
stereotypically nerdy image of role players--this is an
attractive bunch; they don't need gaming just to have a group of
friends. Ron smiles and shakes my hand. His build is slight but
well defined, which I imagine is due to hours of aikido practice.
His hard-edged, pointy face and almost sinister voice
counterbalance his quirky friendliness. He laughs at the cookies
and wine I've brought as an offering of sorts, recognizing the
gesture as one of unnecessary respect. He hands off the gifts to
one of the other gamers, and as several begin to devour the food
(these are not wealthy kids), Ron takes me upstairs to his room.
On his drafting table are the map and documents for
Amarantis, the game Ron spent about a year designing for his
group to play. It's a world with a story as complex as any novel
or trilogy--but one that will be experienced by only about a
dozen kids. Amarantis is a continent that floats
interdimensionally--that is, the land mass at its eastern coast
changes over time. It could be one civilization one year and a
completely different one the next. The western coast of the
continent is called the edge.'' It's a sharp drop into no one
knows what--not even Ron, the creator of this world. He'll decide
what's there if anyone ventures out over it. The "tech level'' of
this world is relatively low--crossbows are about as advanced as
the weaponry gets, but there is magic. The power and accuracy of
magic on Amarantis fluctuate with what Ron calls the weather,''
which refers not to atmospheric conditions but to the magical
climate. The world is of particular interest to the IDC (the
InterDimensional Council, which regulates such things), whose
members recognize it as a nexus point for interdimensional
mischief. Amarantis also has metaphorical influence over the rest
of the fictional universe and even on other fantasy game worlds.
What happens here--in a fractal way--is rippled out through the
rest of that universe's time and space. If the IDC can maintain
decorum here, they can maintain it throughout the cosmos.
Ron wants me to play along today, so we must invent a
character. I am to enter Amarantis as an IDC cadet, who has
escaped the academy via its interdimensional transport system.
But first we must create my character's profile. My strengths and
weaknesses are determined by a point system out of the GURPS
manual. Each character has the same number of total points, but
they are distributed differently. The more points a character has
dedicated to agility, for example, the more tasks he can perform
which require this asset.
During play, rolls of the dice are matched against skills
levels to determine whether a character wins a fight, picks a
lock, or learns to fly. If a character has spent too many points
on wit and not enough on brute strength, he better not get
cornered by a monster. GURPS has come up with numerical values
for almost every skill imaginable, from quarterstaff combat to
spaceship repair. Players may also acquire disabilities--like a
missing arm or an uncontrollable lust for sex--which gives them
points to use elsewhere. As in Neuromancer, characters must
behave according to their profiles. Ron rewards players who,
while maintaining their weaknesses, still manage to play
skillfully.
For all the mathematics of character creation, the playing
of the game itself is quite relaxed and chaotic. When Ron and I
emerge from his bedroom we find today's players sitting in the
living room, shirts still off, ready for action. Ron sets up a
table for himself in the corner with his map, a notebook of
information, and a box of index cards for every character in
Amarantis.
What's going on here, essentially, is the creation of a
fantasy story, where game rules and character points dictate the
progression of the plot. A player thinks up an idea and is
allowed to run with it as far as he can go until a conflict
arises. Each character has an agenda of a sort, but these agendas
do not get satisfied to the point where the game can end. For
example, an agenda might be to extend the power of a large
corporation, to destabilize the government of a city, or, as in
my character's case, to spread goodwill throughout the universe.
Ron declares my arrival: Suddenly, in a blaze of light, a
large metal obelisk crashes through the floor of the stage. Smoke
and sparks fly everywhere. The obelisk opens to reveal ...'' And
there I am. After I excuse away my arrival as a space-surfing
accident--which no one believes--Russel, who plays a corporate
businessman, invites everyone over to the Bacchic temple, a
religious organization and megacorporation, to join the revelry
already in progress. When we go there, Russel proceeds to seduce
the young dancer (whose show I interrupted) with the promise of
career advancement. As he takes her to his bedroom, I wander
around the castlelike church. I hope to steal Russel's prize
possession: a flying dragon.
Rolls of the dice decide my fate. The other players,
especially Russel, watch on in horror, powerless: his character
is in bed with the dancer and can't hear or see me even though
the real Russel can. Other players worry for me--they know things
about Russel's immense powers that I don't. But my character has
a weakness for taking risks, and, disappointed by the lack of
enthusiasm for my message of peace and harmony, I feel my only
choice is to head straight for the edge and thus either certain
doom or certain awakening. I find the dragon in an open
courtyard. If I can get it to fly I'll have an easy getaway, but
the creature is unbridled. I use my skill of
resourcefulness-- scrounging,'' as it's called in the game--to
find a rope to fashion into a bridle. I roll the three dice--two
2's and a 1. The other players moan. I'm a lucky roller, and the
dice indicate that I easily find the rope. But the hard part is
flying the creature. My dexterity is the skill that Ron pits
against the dice. He calls this task a "D minus 8''--very hard. I
need to roll a 10 or lower to succeed. I roll a 9. Amazing.
Players cheer as gamemaster Ron describes the wiburn taking off
into the night. I use the stars to navigate west, toward the
edge. Russel stares at me from across the room and chills go up
my spine. He reaches for the GURPS Magic Module to find a spell
to get his dragon back ... and to destroy me. He plans on using
corporate/church money to hire a powerful professional wizard.
Is the Wizard's Hall open this late?'' he asks Ron.
I look at Ron, who smiles knowingly at me. He had advised
me
to take magic-protection'' as a strength, and I reluctantly had
done so. Thanks to Ron's insistence in adding this feature to my
character, none of Russel's spells will work on me. I'm on my way
to the edge.
FRP's (fantasy role-playing games) are surprisingly
engrossing. They share the hypertext, any-door-can-open feeling
of the computer net. And, like on a computer bulletin board,
FRP's do not require that participants play in the same room or
even the same city. Play is not based in linear time and space. A
character's decision might be mailed in, phoned in, enacted live,
or decided ahead of time. Also, there is no object'' to the
game. There is no finish line, no grand finale, no winner or
loser. The only object would be, through the illusion of
conflict, for players to create the most fascinating story they
can, and keep it going for as long as possible. As with cyberian
music and fiction, role-playing games are based on the texture
and quality of the playing experience. They are the ultimate
designer realities, and, like VR, the shamanic visionquest, or a
hacking run, the adventurer moves from point to point in a path
as nonlinear as consciousness itself. The priorities of FRPs
reflect the liberation of gamers from the mechanistic boundaries
imposed on them by a society obsessed with taking sides, winning,
finishing, and evaluating.
Edge Games
These kids are not society's unwitting dropouts. Indeed,
they are extremely bright people. Ron and Russel met at a school
for gifted yet underachieving high-schoolers in the Princeton
area. They were smarter than their teachers, and knew it, which
made them pretty uncontrollable and unprogrammable. Their
brilliance was both their weakness and their strength. Because
the subjects in school bored them, they turned to fantasy games
that gave their minds the intellectual experience for which they
thirsted. Of course, their elders never understood.
Parental reaction is negative towards anything that
teaches
kids to think in original or creative ways,'' Russel reflects.
"Playing the games is an exercise in looking at different
realities--not being stuck in a single reality. It gives you
courage to see how you're following many rules blindly in real
reality.''
Russel explains his childhood to me as we share a
shoplifted
cigarette beneath the train overpass. He has learned that the
rules of this world are not fixed, and both he and Ron live
according to the principles of uncertainty and change. Like the
heroes in a cyberpunk novel, they are social hackers who live
between the lines of the system and challenge anything that seems
fixed. When Russel is hungry and has no money, he steals food
from the supermarket ... but he doesn't believe he'll get caught.
Geniuses take precautions that regular shoplifters don't, I'm
told, and survival to them becomes yet another edge game.''
What is the edge? The edge is the imaginary or imposed
limit beyond which you're not supposed to go, says Russel. Where
you'll get yourself really hurt. Pushing or testing the
boundaries. Usually we find out the boundaries aren't really
there. It's matter of putting yourself through the test of your
own fear.''
Ron and Russel's comfortable suburban upbringing offered
them few opportunities to test their tolerance for fear. The boys
were forced to create their own edge in the form of behavioral
games, so that they could experience darker, scarier realities.
These edge games ranged from stealing things from school and
playing elaborate hoaxes on teachers to assuming new identities
and living in these invented roles for weeks at a time. Once,
after taking LSD, Ron, Russel, and their friend Alan went to the
mall to play an edge game they called space pirates.'' Ron and
Russel played interdimensional travelers, and Alan, who was
temporarily estranged from them for social reasons, played a
CIA-like spy trying to catch them. By the end of the acid trip
and the game, Alan was crying hysterically in his mother's
kitchen, and the Post brothers had to decide "whether we were
going to help Alan get himself back together from this and
rebuild things, or let him crumble into the kitchen floor and
become permanently alienated.''
Unlike the western border of the continent of Amarantis, to
Russel and Ron the edge is no fantasy. Even Sarah Drew's abortion
on acid could be called an edge game. The consequences of playing
too close can be extremely real and painful. Ron spends as much
time as possible on the edge, but he takes the risks seriously.
If you fuck up on the edge, you die. Edge games involve real
risk. Physical or even legal risk. Try this: Take a subway or a
city street, walk around, and make eye contact with everyone you
meet, and stare them down. See how far you can take it. You'll
come up to someone who won't look away.''
Part of the training is to incorporate these lessons into
daily life. All of life is seen as a fantasy role-playing game in
which the stakes are physically real but the lessons go beyond
physical reality. Unlike the characters of a cyberpunk book,
human beings are not limited to their original programming.
Instead, born gamers, humans have the ability to adopt new
skills, attitudes, and agendas. They just need to be aware of the
rules of designer reality in order to do so. Fantasy role-playing
and playing edge games in real life are ways of developing a
flexible character profile that can adapt to many kinds of
situations. As Ron explains: The object in role-playing games is
playing with characters whose traits you might want to bring into
your own life. You can pick up their most useful traits, and
discard their unuseful ones from yourself.'' One consciously
chooses his own character traits in order to become a designer
being.
Ron slowly slips into the Zen-master tone he probably uses
with his students at the dojo. As the gamemaster, too, he serves
as a psychologist and spiritual teacher, rewarding and punishing
players' behaviors, creating situations that challenge their
particular weaknesses, and counseling them on life strategies.
Like a guided visualization or the ultimate group therapy, a
gaming session is psychodramatic. Moreover, adopting this as a
life strategy leads gamers to very cyberian conclusions about
human existence.
I regard any behavior we indulge in as a game,'' Ron says,
waxing Jungian. "The soul is beyond not only three-dimensional
space but beyond the illusion of linear time. Any method we use
to move through three- or four-dimensional space is a game. It
doesn't matter how seriously we take it, or how serious its
consequences are.''
Ron's wife of just two weeks looks over at him, a little
concerned. He qualifies his flippant take on designer reality:
To play with something is not necessarily to trivialize it.
Anything you do in your life is a role-playing game. The soul
does not know language--any personality or language we use for
thinking is essentially taking on a role.''
To Ron, basically everything on the explicate order is a
game--arbitrarily arranged and decided. Ron and Russel have
adopted the cyberian literary paradigm into real life. Fantasy
role-playing served as a bridge between the stories of cyberpunk
and the reality of lives in Cyberia. They reject duality
wholesale, seeing reality instead as a free-flowing set of
interpretations.
Again, though, like surfers, they do not see themselves as
working against anything. They do not want to destroy the system
of games and role-playing that defines the human experience. They
want only to become more fully conscious of the system itself.
Ron admits that they may have an occasional brush with the
law, but, we're not rebels. There's nothing to rebel against.
The world is a playground. You just make up what to play today.''
These people don't just trip, translate, and download. They
live with a cyberian awareness full-time. Unlike earlier
thinkers, who enjoyed philosophizing that life is a series of
equations (mathematician Alfred North Whitehead's observation
that understanding is the a-perception of patterns as such''),
or Terence McKenna, who can experience "visual language'' while
on DMT, Ron guides his moment-to-moment existence by these
principles.
I'm aware that time is an illusion and that everything
happens at once.'' Ron puts his arm around his young wife, who
tries not to take her husband too seriously. "I've got to
perceive by making things into a pattern or a language. But I can
choose which pattern I'm going to observe.''
Role-playing and edge games are yet another way to download
the datastream accessed through shamanic journeys and DMT trips.
But instead of moving into a completely unfiltered perception of
this space and then integrating it piecemeal into normal
consciousness, the gamer acknowledges the impossibility of
experiencing reality without an interpretive grid, and chooses
instead to gain full control over creation of those templates.
Once all templates or characters become interchangeable, the
gamer can infer'' reality, because he has the ability to see it
from any point of view he chooses.
The whole idea of gaming is to play different patterns and
see which ones you like. I like playing the game where I live in
a benevolent universe, where everything that happens to me is a
lesson to help enlighten me further. I find that a productive
game. But there are other games. Paranoia is a really good edge
game. Or one can play predator: I live in a benevolent universe
and I'm the other team.''
That's probably why society has begun to react against
designer beings: They don't play by the rules. Cyberian art,
literature, game-playing, and even club life are tolerated when
they can be interpreted as passing entertainment or fringe
behavior. Once the ethos of these fictional worlds trickles down
into popular culture and human behavior, the threat of the
cyberian imagination becomes real. And society, so far, is
unwilling to cope with a reality that can be designed.
PART 5
Warfare in Cyberia: Ways and Memes
CHAPTER 16
Cracking the Ice
Like a prison escape in which the inmates crawl through the
ventilation ducts toward freedom, rebels in Cyberia use the
established pathways and networks of our postmodern society in
unconventional ways and often toward subversive goals. Just as
the American rail system created a society of hobos who
understood the train schedule better than the conductors did, the
hardwiring of our world through information and media networks
has bred hackers capable of moving about the datasphere almost at
will. The nets that were designed to hold people captive to the
outworn modalities of a consumer society are made from the same
fibers cyberians are now using in their attempt to climb out of
what they see as a bottomless pit of economic strife, ecological
disaster, intellectual bankruptcy, and moral oblivion.
Warfare in Cyberia is conducted on an entirely new
battleground; it is a struggle not over territory or boundaries
but over the very definitions of these terms. It's like a
conflict between cartographers, who understand the ocean as a
grid of longitude and latitude lines, and surfers, who understand
it as a dance of chaotic waves. The resistance to renaissance
comes out of the refusal to cope with or even believe in the
possibility of a world free of precyberian materialism and its
systems of logic, linearity, and duality. But, as cyberians
argue, these systems could not have come into existence without
dangerous patriarchal domination and the subversion of thousands
of years of nondualistic spirituality and feminine, earth-based
lifestyles.
Pieced together from the thoughts and works of philosophers
like Terence McKenna and Ralph Abraham, the ancient history of
renaissance and antirenaissance from the cyberian perspective
goes something like this: People lived in tribes, hunting,
gathering, following animal-herd migrations for ready food
supplies, enjoying free sex, and worshipping the elements. As
they followed the herds, these nomads also ate the psychedelic
mushrooms that grew on the animals' dung, and this kept any ego
or dominator tendencies in check. The moment when people settled
down in agricultural communities was the moment when everything
went wrong. Instead of enjoying the earth's natural bounty,
people worked the soil for food--an act considered by extremists
to represent the rape of Gaia and the taming of nature.
Psychedelics fell out of the daily diet because people weren't
wandering around anymore. They had time to sit around and invent
things to make life easier, like the wheel, and so came the
notions of periodicity and time.
Time was a particular problem, because if anything was
certain to these people, it was the fact that after a certain
amount of time, everybody dies. The only way to live on after
death is through offspring--but ancient men did not know who
their offspring were. Only women knew for sure which children
were their own. In previous, psychedelics-influenced tribes, the
idea of one's own personal children mattered less, because
everyone identified with the tribe. Now, with developed egos, men
became uncomfortable with free love; thus patriarchal domination
was born. Men began to possess women so that they would know
which children were their own. The ideas of property,''
"yours,'' mine,'' and a host of other dualities were created. In
an attempt to deny the inevitability of death, a society of
possessors was born, which developed into a race of conquerors
and finally evolved into our own nation of consumers.
Others blame the invention of time for the past six
thousand
years of materialist thought. Fearing the unknown (and, most of
all, death), ancient man created time as a way to gauge and
control his unpredictable reality. Time provided a framework in
which unpredictable events could appear less threatening within
an overall order'' of things. Of course the measured increments
were not the time itself (any more than the ticks of a watch say
anything about the space between them when the real seconds go
by), but they provided a kind of schedule by which man could move
through life and decay toward death in an orderly fashion.
Whenever man came upon something he did not understand, he put
over it a grid, with which he could cope. The ocean and its
seemingly random sets of waves is defined by a grid of lines, as
are the heavens, the cities, and the rest of reality. The
ultimate lines are the ones made into boxes to categorize and
control human behavior. They are called laws, which religions and
eventually governments emerged to write and enforce.
According to cyberian logic, the grids of reality are
creations. They are not necessarily real. The Troubadours
believed this. People burned at the stake as witches in the
fourteenth century died for this. Scientists with revolutionary
ideas must commit to this. Anyone who has taken a psychedelic
drug experiences this. Fantasy gamers play with this. Hackers who
crack the ice'' of well-protected computer networks prove this.
Anyone who has adopted the cyberian vision lives this.
The refusal to recognize the lines drawn by dominator
society'' is a worse threat to that society than is the act of
consciously stepping over them. The exploitation of these lines
and boxes for fun is like playing hopscotch on the tablets of the
Ten Commandments. The appropriation of the strings of society's
would-be puppeteers in order to tie their fingers and liberate
the marionettes is a declaration of war.
Such a war is now being waged, and on many levels at once.
The cyberian vision is a heretical negation of the rules by which
Western society has chosen to organize itself. Those who depend
on this organization for power vehemently protect the status quo
by enforcing the laws. This is not a traditional battle between
conservative and liberal ideologies, which are debates over where
to put the lines and how thick to draw them. Today's renaissance
has led to a war between those who see lines as real boundaries,
and those who see them as monkey bars. They can be climbed on.
Cyberian warriors are dangerous to the line people''
because they can move in mysterious ways. Like ninjas, they can
creep up walls and disappear out of sight because they don't have
to follow the rules. Cyberian activities are invisible and render
the time and money spent on prison bars and locks worthless. The
inmates disappear through the vents.
As Marshall McLuhan and even George Orwell predicted, the
forces in power'' have developed many networks with which they
hope to control, manipulate, or at least capitalize on the
behaviors and desires of the population. Television and the
associated media have bred a generation of conditioned consumers
eager to purchase whatever products are advertised. Further, to
protect the sovereignty of capitalist nations and to promote the
flow of cash, the defense and banking industries have erected
communications networks that hardwire the globe together. Through
satellites, computers, and telecommunications, a new
infrastructure--the pathways of the datasphere--has superimposed
itself over the existing grids like a metagrid, enforcing
underlying materialism, cause and effect, duality and control.
But cyberians may yet prove that this hardwiring has been
done a little too well. Rather than create an easy-to-monitor
world, the end of the industrial era left us with an almost
infinite series of electronic passages. The passages proved the
perfect playground for the dendrites of expanding young
consciousnesses, and the perfect back doors to the power centers
of the modern world. A modem, a PC, and the intent to destabilize
might prove a more serious threat to the established order than
any military invasion. Nowhere is the fear of Cyberia more
evident than in the legislation of computer laws and the
investigation and prosecution of hackers, crackers, and
data-ocean pirates.
Forging Electronic Frontiers
There are as many points of view about hacker ethics,
responsibility, and prosecution as there are players. Just how
close to digital anarchy we move depends as much on the way we
perceive law and order in the datasphere as it does on what's
actually going on. While many young people with modems and
personal computers are innocently exploring networks as they
would the secret passages in an interactive fantasy game, others
are maliciously destroying every system they can get into. Still
other computer users are breaking in to networks with purpose: to
gain free telephone connections, to copy information and code, or
to uncover corporate and governmental scandals. No single
attitude toward computer hacking and cracking will suffice.
Unfortunately, the legal and law-enforcement communities
understand very little about computers and their users. Fear and
ignorance prevail in computer crime prosecution, which is why
kids who steal'' a dollar's worth of data from the electronic
world suffer harsher prosecution than do kids who steal bicycles
or even cars from the physical world. Raids have been disastrous:
Bumbling agents confiscate equipment from nonsuspects, destroy
legally obtained and original data, and even, on one occasion,
held at gunpoint a suspected hacker's uninvolved young sister.
After a series of investigations and botched, destructive arrests
and raids (which proved more about law enforcement's inability to
manage computer use, abuse, and crime than it did about the way
hackers work, play, and think), two interested parties--Mitch
Kapor, founder of Lotus, and John Barlow, Grateful Dead lyricist
and computer-culture journalist--founded the Electronic Frontiers
Foundation.
The EFF hopes to serve as a bridge of logic between
computer
users and law enforcement so that cyberspace might be colonized
in a more orderly, less antagonistic fashion. In Barlow's words,
the seemingly brutal tactics of arresting officers and
investigators isn't so much a planned and concerted effort to
subvert the Constitution as the natural process that takes place
whenever there are people who are afraid and ignorant, and when
there are issues that are ambiguous regarding constitutional
rights.''
The EFF has served as a legal aid group defending hackers
whom they believe are being unjustly prosecuted and promoting
laws they feel better regulate cyberspace. But while the EFF
attempts to bring law and order to the new frontier, many hackers
still feel that Barlow and Kapor are on the other side'' and
unnecessarily burdening virgin cyberspace with the failed legal
systems of previous eras.
Barlow admits that words and laws can never adequately
define something as undefinable as Cyberia: I'm trying to build
a working scale model of a fog bank out of bricks. I'm using a
building material that is utterly unsuited to the representation
of the thing I'm trying to describe.''
And while even the most enlightened articulators of Cyberia
find themselves tongue-tied when speaking about the new frontier,
other, less-informed individuals think they have the final word.
The media's need to explain the hacker scene to the general
public has oversimplified these issues and taken us even farther
from understanding them. Finally, young hackers and crackers feed
their developing egos with overdramatized reports on their
daring, and any original cyberian urge to explore cyberspace is
quickly overshadowed by their notoriety as outlaws.
Phiber Optik, for example, a twenty-year-old hacker from
New
York, plea-bargained against charges that he and his friends
stole access to 900'' telephone services. When he was arrested,
his television, books, telephone, and even his Walkman
confiscated along with his computer gear. While he sees the media
as chiefly responsible for the current misconceptions about the
role of hackers in cyberspace, he appears to take delight in the
media attention that his exploits have brought him.
People tend to think that the government has a lot to fear
from a rebellious hacker lashing out and destroying something,
but we think we have a lot more to fear from the government
because it's within their power to take away everything we own
and throw us in jail. I think if people realize we aren't a
dissident element at all, they would see that the government is
the bad one.''
Phiber claims that the reason why hackers like himself
break
into systems is to explore them, but that the media, controlled
by big business, presents them as dangerous. The term they love
to use is `threat to society.' All they see are the laws. All
they see is a blip on the computer screen, and they figure the
person broke the law. They don't know who or how old he is. They
get a warrant and arrest him. It's a very inhuman thing.''
But this is the very argument that most law enforcement
people use against hackers like Phiber Optik: that the kids don't
get a real sense of the damage they might be inflicting because
their victims are not real people--just blips on a screen.
Gail Thackery served as an assistant attorney general for
Arizona and is now attorney for Maricopa County. She has worked
on computer crime for two decades with dozens of police agencies
around the country. She was one of the prosecuting attorneys in
the Sun Devil cases, so to many hackers she is considered the
enemy,'' but her views on the legislation of computer laws and
the prosecution of offenders are, perhaps surprisingly, based on
the same utopian objective of a completely open system.
I see a ruthless streak in some kids,'' says Thackery,
using the same argument as Phiber. "Unlike a street robbery, if
you do a computer theft, your victim is unseen. It's a fiction.
It's an easy transition from Atari role-modeling games to
computer games to going out in the network and doing it in real
life.''
The first hacker with whom she came in contact was a
university student who in 1973 took over'' a class. Intended for
social workers who were afraid of computers, the class was
designed to acquaint them with cyberspace. "What happened,''
explains Thackery, was this kid had planted a Trojan horse
program. When the students logged on for their final exam, out
came, instead of the exam, a six-foot-long typewriter-art nude
woman. And these poor technophobic social workers were pounding
keys. They went cuckoo. Their graduation was delayed, and in some
cases it delayed their certification, raises, and new titles.''
Thackery sees young hackers as too emotionally immature to
cope with a world at their fingertips. They are intellectually
savvy enough to create brilliant arguments about their innocent
motivations, but in private they tell a different story. I
always look at their downloads from bulletin boards. They give
legal advice, or chat and talk about getting busted, or even
recite statutes. Kids gang up saying, `Here's a new system. Let's
trash this sucker! Let's have a contest and see who can trash it
first!' They display real callous, deliberate, criminal kinds of
talk.''
Gail's approach to law enforcement is not to imprison these
young people but to deprogram them. She feels they have become
addicted to their computers and use them to vent their
frustrations in an obsessive, masturbatory way. Just as a drug
user can become addicted to the substances that provide him
access to a world in which he feels happier and more powerful, a
young computer user, who may spend his days as a powerless geek
in school, suddenly gains a new, powerful identity in cyberspace.
Like participants in role-playing games, who might shoplift or
play edge games under the protective veils of their characters,
hackers find new, seemingly invulnerable virtual personas.
After we took one kid's computer away,'' Gail says,
speaking more like a social worker than a prosecuting attorney,
"his parents said the change is like night and day. He's doing
better in school, he's got more friends, he's even gone out for
the ball team. It's like all of a sudden this repressed human
arises from the ashes of the hacker.''
The hacker argument, of course, is that another brilliant
young cyberian may have been reconditioned into boring passivity.
Thackery argues that it's a victory for the renaissance. I have
a philosophical, idealistic view of where computers started to
head, and where the vandals actually kicked us off the rails. We
wanted everybody to have a Dick Tracy wristradio, and at this
point I know so many people, victims who have had their
relationship to technology ruined. All you have to do is have
your ATM hacked by a thief and you start deciding technology's
not worth it.''
So, in the final analysis, Gail Thackery is as cyberian as
the most truly radical of the hackers. These are the ones who
hack not for a specific purpose or out of resentment but for the
joy of surfing an open datastream. The padlocking of the
electronic canals is the result of society's inability to cope
with freedom. Corporate and governmental leaders fear the
potential change or instability in the balance of power, while
macho, pubescent hackers act out the worst that their
ego-imprisoned personalities can muster. In both analyses, the
utopian promise of Cyberia is usurped by a lust for domination
and a deeply felt resentment.
Several months after speaking with Thackery, I get a phone
call late at night. She is crying; she's furious and needs
someone to listen.
Phiber's been busted again! Dammit!'' She goes on to
explain that the Secret Service in New York, along with the FBI
and the Justice Department, have just arrested Phiber and several
of his friends, including Outlaw and Renegade Hacker--the famed
MOD (Masters of Deception) group. She takes it as a personal
defeat:
I always think when we catch these kids, we've been given
a
chance to show them a better way to spend their lives,'' her
voice cracks in despair, "to finish school, get real jobs, stay
out of trouble because it's a big bad world out there. Now
Phiber's gonna go to jail. A kid's going to jail! I thought we
made a dent but we blew it! I saw it coming.''
What Gail had observed was undue media attention and praise
for a boy who deserved better--he deserved scorn and derision.
According to Gail, the positive reinforcement bestowed on him by
reporters, computer-company owners, and sixties' heroes since his
first arrest steered him toward more crime and antisocial
behavior.
Phiber was the only hacker to go on Geraldo. Where's
Geraldo now? Nowhere! The kid's an embarrassment to him now!''
Gail is fuming--"flaming,'' as they say on the WELL. Looking at
it from a cyberian vantagepoint, Phiber became a victim of the
fact that observers always affect the object they are observing.
Media observation--from the likes of Geraldo or even me--threw
Phiber farther off course than he already was. His problems were
iterated and amplified by the media attention.
What really irks me,'' adds Gail, "is guys like Kapor
[Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus] and Jobbs [founder of Apple]
misleading these kids by not scolding them for hacking. They
shouldn't pat them on the shoulder! Kapor has no idea what's
really going on out there today. When he was hacking, things were
very different. It was a few pieces of code or a university
prank. They're scared to tell these kids the truth because of
their liberal guilt.''
She calls them hypocrites: These guys certainly protect
their own software. The money that's funding the EFF is the same
money that's paying for Lotus's attorneys, and they protect their
proprietary rights, believe me! Guys like Kapor and Jobbs are
fighting an old sixties' battle, and getting kids put in jail
with their misleading touchy-feely rhetoric. The kids shouldn't
be made to fight these battles for them. It's the kids who are on
the front line!''
Gail explains that the young hackers blindly follow the
wisdom of the original computer hackers--but that this is a logic
no longer appropriate on today's violent computer frontier.
Organized crime and Colombian drug cartels now hire young hackers
to provide them with secure, untraceable communications and
intelligence.
Now these kids are being used by drug dealers! They are
being prostituted, but it's the kids who go to jail! Where's the
EFF now?''
Cyberia is not real yet, but the problems facing it are. On
one hand, fledgling cyberians are still rooted in the political
activism and cultural extremism of the 1960s and 70s, and eager
to please the people they consider their forefathers--Tim Leary,
Steven Jobbs, Mitch Kapor, William Burroughs--by wholeheartedly
embracing their lifestyles and priorities. Kids who attempt to
emulate William Burroughs will probably become addicted to drugs,
and kids who take Steven Jobbs's words at face value may end up
prosecuted for computer crime. On the other hand, the
technologies and pathways that young, brilliant cyberians forge
are irresistible both to themselves and their would-be
exploiters. Ego invades hyperspace.
Maybe the detractors are right. Maybe the cyberian
technologies are not intrinsically liberating. While they do
allow for cultural change through principles such as feedback and
iteration, it appears that they can almost as quickly be
subverted by those who are unready or unwilling to accept the
liberation they could offer. But others present convincing
arguments that the operating principles of Cyberia eventually
will win out and create a more just Global Village.
CHAPTER 17
The New Colonialism
As we slouch farther toward the chaos attractor at the end
of time, we find most of our networks, electronic or otherwise,
working against their original aims or being diverted toward
different ends. Subnetworks and metanetworks grow like mold over
the original medium. Be it a symptom of social decay, cyberian
genesis, or both, the growth of new colonialism around and within
our old systems and structures brings a peculiar sort of
darkness-before-dawnishness to the close of this millennium.
Compare our subculture of cyberians to Hogan's Heroes
carrying out rebellious acts under the noses of guards and
through underground tunnels in the prison camp. Perhaps the most
telling sign of our times is that the United States has a greater
percentage of its population in jail than does any other country,
and is breeding a criminal subculture further and further removed
from accepted social scheme.
It was in prison that legendary phone phreaque Cap'n Crunch
(who got his name for using a two-note whistle he found in a box
of Cap'n Crunch cereal to make free long-distance phone calls)
was forced to join the ranks of the criminal subculture. His real
name is John Draper, and I find him at Toon Town operating with a
computer-video interface.
After several meteoric climbs to the top of the programming
profession, Draper is in the low phase of an endless
rags-to-riches-to-rags curve that has defined the past twenty or
so years of his life. It seems as though every time he develops a
brilliant new program, an investigation links one of his friends,
or friends of his friends, to something illegal, and then
Draper's equipment--along with his livelihood--gets confiscated,
delaying his progress and costing him his contract. The large,
gray-haired, bespectacled cyber veteran suggests that we duck
into the brain-machine room to speak about his prison experience.
In order for me to survive in jail, I had to make myself
valuable enough so they wouldn't harass me or molest me. So I had
to tell everybody how to make calls, how to get in to the system,
and what to do when they got in there. We'd have little classes.
Out of pure survival I was forced to tell all and, believe me, I
did.''
Draper believes that thousands of telephone and computer
crimes resulted from his prison classes. When his technologies
got in the hands of inmates serving time for embezzlement or
fraud, they in turn developed some of the most advanced
industrial hacking done today.
Draper's experiences mirror the ways in which cyberian
counterculture movements form in society at large. For
intellectual, emotional, or even physical survival, clusters of
people--not always linked by geography--form posses characterized
by the specific networks holding them together. This, then,
initiates a bottom-up iteration of cyberian ideals.
One startling example is the growing community of Mole
People,'' who inhabit the forgotten tunnels of New York's subway
system. The New York City Transit Authority estimates that about
five thousand people live on the first level, but that accounts
for only one-third of the tunnel system. Other officials estimate
that closer to twenty-five thousand people live in the entire
system, which goes much farther down than police or transit
workers dare trek, and consists of hundreds of miles of abandoned
tunnels built in the 1890s. The ash-colored denizens of the
subways elect their own mayors, furnish their underground
apartments, find electricity, and in some cases install running
water. Sounding more like an urban myth than a real population,
mole people claim that their children, born in the tunnels, have
never seen the light of day. Others speak of patrols, organized
by mole leaders to prevent their detection by making sure that
outsiders who stray into their campsites and villages never stray
out again. Whether or not this is an exaggeration, we do know
that numerous television news crews who have attempted to reach
the lower tunnels were pelted with rocks and forced to retreat.
It's for security,'' explains J.C., who was asked by the
mayor of his Mole community to explain their philosophy of life
to Jenny Toth, a New York journalist who befriended the Mole
People in 1990. "Society lives up in a dome and locks all its
doors so it's safe from the outside. We're locked out down here.
They ignore us. They've forgotten what it is to survive. They
value money, we value survival. We take care of each other.''
Alienation, disorientation, and, most of all, necessity, form new
bonds of community cooperation not experienced above ground.
A man who lives hundreds of feet under Grand Central
Station
explains: You go down there, play with some wires, and you got
light. And before you know it, there are twelve to fifteen people
down there with you. They become like neighborhoods; you're
friends with everyone. You know the girls at the end and the
family in the middle. When someone gets sick, we put our money
together to get medicine. Most people team up. You can just about
make it that way.''
This bottom-up networking is analogous to the formation of
the Global Electronic Village, which also depends on bonds of
mutual interest and like-minded politics. Each system is made up
of people whose needs are not met or are even thwarted by
established channels and each system exploits an existing
network, using it for a purpose that was not intended. These
kinds of communities make up an increasingly important component
in the overall dynamical system of society. Programmer Marc de
Groot compares this social landscape with the conclusions of
systems math:
The classic example of the feedback loop is the
thermostat,
which controls itself. I think we're becoming aware of the fact
that the most common type of causality is feedback, and not
linear or top-down. The effect goes back and effects the cause,
and the cause effects the effect. We have a society where power
becomes decentralized, we get feedback loops, where change can
come from below. People in power will try to eliminate those
threats.''
The fears about cyberian evolution may stem from a partial
awareness of these new channels of feedback and iteration. Those
who believe they are currently in power attempt to squash the
iterators, but find that their efforts are ineffectual. Like
mutating bacteria or even cockroaches, feedback loops will foster
adaptive changes faster than new antibiotics or bug sprays can be
developed to combat them. Meanwhile, the formerly powerless who
now see themselves as vitally influencing the course of history
through feedback and iteration become obsessed with their causes
and addicted to their techniques. But however obsessed or
addicted they get, and however fearfully or violently society
reacts, feedback and iteration slowly and inevitably turn the
wheel of revolution, anyway.
Negative Feedback Iteration
Feedback loops are mathematics' way of phrasing revolution
and are as natural a part of existence as plankton, volcanoes, or
thyroid glands. The negative feedback loops to a mechanistic,
consumption-based culture are irate labor, ecoterrorists, and
consciousness-expansion advocates, who conduct their iterations
through cheap communications, printing, and video production.
Take Chris Carlsson, for example, editor of Processed
World,
a magazine that he says is about the underside of the
information age and the misery of daily life in a perverse
society based on the buying and selling of human time.'' Carlsson
looks more like a college professor than an office worker; he's a
brilliant, ex-sixties radical who dropped out of the rat race to
make his living as an office temp data processor in San
Francisco.
On a lazy Sunday morning, Carlsson explains the intricacies
of his historical-philosophical perspective as he changes the
screen in his pipe and the grounds in his espresso pot. He
believes that we are currently living in a socially constructed
perversion,'' an unnatural reality that will be forced to change.
According to Carlsson, our society is addicted to consumption,
and this addiction leads us to do things and support systems that
benefit only the dollar, not the individual. The systems
themselves are constructed, like Muzak, to squash the notion of
personal power.
It's hard to imagine how else it could be. The only
questions you are asked in this society are, `What do you want to
buy?' and, `What are you going to do for money?' You don't get to
say, `What do I want out of life and how can I contribute to the
totality?' There's no mechanism at all in our society that
promotes some sort of role for the individual.''
The processed world'' is a place where the bottom line is
all that matters. Workers are paid as little as possible to
produce goods that break as quickly as possible, or serve no
function whatsoever other than to turn a buck. For this final
phase in the era of credit and GNP expansion, there can never be
enough stuff--if there were, the corporations would go out of
business. The motivation is to sell; the standard of living, the
environment, cultural growth, and meaning to life do not enter
into the equation.
Chemical companies who want to sell chemicals, for example,
thrive on weak crops and cattle; they hope to create a chemically
dependent agriculture. Thus, the first application of
gene-splicing technology will be bovine growth hormone,''
Carlsson says. "Not that we need more milk in this country; we
have a surplus!'' But the growth hormone will increase a cow's
output of milk. Farmer Jones will need to keep up with Farmer
Smith, so he, too, will buy the hormone. Unfortunately, the
hormone also weakens the cows' knees, which requires that the
farmers purchase more antibiotics as well as other drugs,
bringing more dollars to the chemical companies. Another example:
It is to the chemical company's advantage to lobby against
sterile fruit flies as a way of combating the medfly crisis in
California. By persuading'' the government to allow the use of
pesticides, chemical companies weaken the plants they are
"saving,'' and thus create further dependence on fertilizers and
medications--more money, less effectiveness, greater pollution.
Carlsson does not blame the people in charge'' for our
predicament. "The chairman of the board doesn't feel like he has
any power. He's just as trapped in. Nothing matters to the
stockholders but how the balance sheet looks.'' Further, as the
work environment increasingly dehumanizes, the system loses
precious feedback channels with which it can correct itself. The
dollar oversimplifies the complexities of a working society (and
its needs--as we'll see later in this chapter--have simplified
the global ecology to disastrous levels). As the workplace gets
more automated, workers become merely a part of the spreadsheet:
their input and output are monitored, regulated, and controlled
by computer. As jobs are replaced by machines (which do the work
more efficiently), workers are demoted rather than promoted. Any
special skills they developed over time now become obsolete.
The way out, according to Carlsson, is subversion and
sabotage.
When you sell your time, you are giving up your right to
decide what's worth doing. The goal of the working class should
be to abolish what they do! Not being against technology, but
being against the way it's being used. Human beings can find
subversive uses for things like computers and photocopy machines.
They were not made to enhance our ability to communicate, and yet
they do. They provide everybody with a chance to speak through
the printed medium. The work experience tells the worker that he
has no say, and that what he is doing is a complete waste of
time. But this profound emptiness and discontent is not evident
on TV. Everything in society erodes your self-esteem.''
Processed World magazine hopes to enhance the worker's
self-esteem by appealing to his intellect and giving him tips on
how to subvert the workplace. It's a homespun publication that
articulates the experience of office workers so that they may
realize they're not going crazy and their situations are not
unique. It serves also as a forum for workers to share their
observations on consumer society, abuses at work and techniques
for fighting back. Slogans like sabotage ... it's as simple as
pulling a plug'' and joke ads for "cobalt-magnet data-zappers''
for erasing office hard disks accompany the articles and
testimonials written by reader/workers about ways in which to
disable the workplace and thus disrupt the evil practices of big
companies.
The computer is the primary instrument of sabotage in the
workplace. The techniques that industrial hackers use against
competitive companies are now being used by workers against their
own companies. Usually--as throughout Cyberia--the routes to the
greatest destruction have already been established unwittingly by
the company bosses in the hope of better monitoring and
controlling their employees.
On a tour of the data entry department at a major insurance
firm, a computer serviceman and office saboteur explains the way
things can get reversed. Our office managers monitor the workers
through a special intercom feature in the worker's telephone,''
he whispers as we stroll through the tract-deskscape. "I know
this because I installed the phone system, and I taught the
office managers how to use it, and I know that they do use it,
because I monitor them!'' We arrive at the desk of another
worker, who plays video games on his computer. When he hits the
escape key, a dummy spreadsheet covers the screen.
Show him how the phone works,'' my escort requests.
The worker punches some keys on his phone and hands me the
receiver. Someone is dictating a memo about how to order paper.
That's the floor manager's office,'' the worker says,
smiling proudly as he takes back the receiver and carefully hangs
it up.
My guide boasts about the achievement. You can repair a
Rolm (a subsidiary of IBM) phone system through a modem to act
like a bugging device--useful for bosses to spy on their workers.
But if you modify the software--which is easy enough to do
through the modem by remote control without ever entering the
boss's office--you can take advantage of the same feature in
reverse!''
He did it right from my desk with my computer!'' adds the
worker, thankfully.
As we walk, most of the workers smile knowingly at my
guide.
They all are in this together. In the lingo of office sabotage,
he confides proudly, We've got this place pretty well locked
up.''
Sabotage, like computer hacking, can be seen as both a
natural iteration and a destructive urge. True, it makes people
feel more powerful and sends a warning signal--in the form of
negative feedback--to the system as a whole. But it's also an
opportunity for people to vent their frustration in general. A
child who feels powerless and unpopular suddenly gains strength
and status with a computer modem. An anonymous worker who cannot
see any purpose to his life gets an ego boost when his
well-planned prank disables an entire company.
Whether the motives are cyberian idealism or masturbatory
ego gratification, these actions still serve as iterative
feedback. We cannot dismiss these efforts as neurotic impulse or
childish power fantasy just because their perpetrators cannot
justify themselves with cyberian rhetoric. Even the most
obsessive or pathological urges of saboteurs, when viewed in a
cyberian context, appear to be the natural reactions of an
iterative system against the conditions threatening its
existence.
The most pressing of these conditions, of course, are the
ones currently destroying the biosphere. As James Lovelock
observed, Gaia defends herself through iterative feedback loops
like plankton, algae, trees, and insects, which help maintain a
balanced earth environment and conditions suitable for biological
life. One such iterative loop may be the radical environmental
group Earth First! These self-proclaimed ecoterrorists,'' like
their founder, the burly Arizonan Dave Foreman, have developed an
extraordinarily virulent sociopolitical virus called "ecotage''
or ecodefense.''
Ecotage is a terrorist approach to the defense of the
environment. Rather than conduct protests, stage blockades, or
influence legislation through lobbying, ecoterrorists perform
neat, quick, surgical maneuvers that thwart the aims of those who
would violate the environment. These actions, called
monkeywrenching,'' take the form of burying spikes in trees so
that they may not be cut down; disabling vehicles; pulling down
signs or electric wires; destroying heavy machinery or aircraft;
spiking roads or woods to make them impassable; triggering animal
traps; and, most important, getting away with it. Their acts are
never random, but carefully planned to make the greatest impact
with the least effort and risk. Cutting two cables on a
helicopter rotor the evening before an insecticide spray, for
example, does more damage than stealing the distributor caps out
of forty jeeps in a company's parking lot. A few low-cost,
well-planned ecotage attacks can make an entire deforestation
project unprofitable and lead to its cancellation.
As Foreman explains in his Ecodefense: A Field Guide to
Monkeywrenching--a kind of Anarchist's Cookbook with a
purpose--monkeywrenching is powerful because it is nonviolent (no
forms of life are targeted, only machines), not organized
(impossible to be infiltrated), individual, specifically
targeted, timely, dispersed throughout the country, diverse, fun,
essentially nonpolitical, simple, deliberate, and ethical. Of
course the ethics are arguable. Businesses have a legal'' right
to destroy the environment (especially if they've paid big bills
lobbying or bribing for that right). The monkeywrenchers feel
that the current political system is merely a gear in the
destruction machine, and that the only tactic left is direct
action.
Bob and Kali (yes, she's a TOPY member) are ecoterrorists
from the Northwest. They have limited their activities (or at
least the ones they're willing to talk about) to billboard
trashing and revision.'' Their hope is to preserve national parks
and reverse the propaganda campaigns of would-be environmental
violators. Kali, who works as a waitress in an interstate highway
rest stop, is an odd mix of American sweetheart blonde and
ankle-braceleted Deadhead--on her way from the counter to the
tables she can be heard humming "Sugar Magnolia'' through her
Colgate smile. Her unthreatening demeanor allows her to listen in
on and even provoke truckers' and construction workers'
conversations about ongoing projects. Her boyfriend, Bob, then
gives this information to more serious monkeywrenchers in their
area over his school's computer network.
Bob is an art-studio assistant at the state university
farther up the highway. He was motivated to take action against
billboarding on his long drives down to the diner to pick Kali up
from work each evening. There's more and more billboards every
week. There was a law passed to limit the number of billboards,
but every time we pass a good law like that, the opposite thing
happens in reality.'' Taking his pseudonym Bob from the "savior''
of the Church of the Subgenius, a satirical cyberian cult, the
young man has a tongue-in-cheek attitude toward his
monkeywrenching and delights in the efficiency of his visual wit.
One two-dollar can of spray paint can reverse a
hundred-thousand dollar media campaign. You use their own words
against them, expose their lies with humor.'' Using his own
version of a device diagramed in Foreman's Field Guide, Bob puts
a can of spray paint on top of a long metal rod with a string and
trigger in the handle. From the ground, he can alter or add to a
billboard many feet above his reach. Following Foreman's advice,
he keeps the tool dismantled and hidden in a locked compartment
of his truck, and varies the locations and times of his "hits''
so that he won't get caught. The book says answer the
billboards. That's what we do. It's like they leave space for our
comments.'' Among Bob's favorites are painting tombstones on the
horizons of Marlboro Country and changing campaign slogans from
"elect'' to eRect.''
Both Bob and Kali support the activities of more aggressive
monkeywrenchers, but fear keeps them from going on those
missions. Not everyone's gotta risk their lives,'' Kali
explains. "They've gotten chased by guys with bats.''
But what they're doing is essential,'' Bob adds. "It's a
completely natural response. When the body gets sick, it makes
more white blood cells. These guys are like that. We're like
that, too, to an extent.''
From a cyberian perspective, ecoterrorists are natural
generators of negative feedback in the great Gaian organism. Even
Brendan O'Regan, the reserved and mild-mannered vice president
for research at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, acknowledges
the place of ecotage as a valuable meme against the violation of
the planet:
Even if you disagree with the tactic, they're pointing out
that industry is generating a kind of anarchy toward the
environment. Ecoterrorists generate an anarchy back. There is an
extreme that is driving it. Ecotage is sabotage on behalf of the
environment. It's done rationalizing that due process of law and
ethical concern is not being followed by the owners of the
system, so `fuck them.' And a lot of this stuff will be happening
in concert with and through technologies like the fax, copiers,
the computer network. It's chaos against chaos.''
The systems set in place by the establishment,'' as long
as
we're using blanket terminology, created a new series of feedback
loops and iterators to replace or at least make us as aware of
the natural ones destroyed by deforestation and environmental
tyranny. Large organizations like Greenpeace depend on computer
hackers and satellite experts both to set up their own
communications networks and to intercept law enforcement
communications about planned actions. Illegal television
broadcasting vans, which have already been used in Germany, are
currently under construction in the Bay Area; they will be
capable of substituting scheduled programming with radical
propaganda, or even superimposing text over regular
transmissions.
Ecoterrorists are never antitechnology. They see high tech
as a tool for faster and more effective feedback and iteration.
For these and other reasons, the developers of the Gaia
hypothesis do not predict doom for our planet--especially from
the development of inventions that appear unnatural. They realize
the place of technology in the bigger picture, and even its value
in regulating the biosphere. As James Lovelock, originator of the
Gaia hypothesis, assures us:
In the end we may achieve a sensible and economic
technology and be more in harmony with the rest of Gaia. There
can be no voluntary resignation from technology. We are so
inextricably part of the technosphere that giving it up is as
unrealistic as jumping off a ship in mid-Atlantic to swim the
rest of the journey in glorious independence.''
Howard Rheingold, a social theorist, editor of the Whole
Earth Review and author of computer culture books including
Virtual Reality, also admits: It might be correct that
technology was the wrong choice a long time ago and that it led
to a really fucked up situation. But I don't see a way of getting
out of this--without most of the people on Earth dying--without
learning how to manage technology.''
The danger here, of course, is in overestimating our
potential to see our situation clearly and to implement
technology toward the ends necessary. An oversimplification of
the issues is as dangerous to our survival and, even more, our
liberation, as is the reduction and simplification of our
biosphere through the elimination of the millions of species upon
which Gaia depends for feedback and iteration.
CHAPTER 18
May the Best Meme Win
It's by using the technologies and pathways laid down by
promoters of control that cyberians believe they must conduct
their revolution. The massive television network, for example,
whose original purpose was to sell products and--except for a
brief period during the Vietnam war--to manufacture public
consent for political lunacy, has now been coopted as a feedback
mechanism by low-end home video cameramen. Coined Video
Vigilantes'' on a Newsweek cover, private citizens are bringing
reality to the media. When a group of cops use excessive force on
a suspect, chances are pretty good that someone with a camcorder
will capture the images on tape, and CNN will have broadcast it
around the world within a couple of hours. In addition, groups
such as Deep Dish TV now use public access cable channels to
disseminate convincing video of a reality quite different from
the one presented on the network newscasts.
The gun used to be the great equalizer,'' explains Jack
Nachbar, professor of popular culture at Bowling Green
University, in reference to camcorders. "You can say this is like
the new six gun, in a way. It can really empower ordinary
people.'' Police departments now bring their own video cameras to
demonstrations by groups like DIVA (Damned Interfering Video
Activists) in order to make a recording of their own side of the
story. The new war--like Batman's media battle against the
Joker--is fought not with conventional weapons but with images in
the datasphere. The ultimate weapon in Cyberia is not the sword
or even the pen but the media virus.
The media virus is any idea that infiltrates the host
organism of modern society. It can be a real thing, like Mark
Heley's Smart Bar, which functions on an organic level yet also
acts as a potent concept capable of changing the way we feel
about drugs, health care, and intelligence. A virus can also be a
pure thought or idea, like Gaia'' or "morphic resonance,''
which, when spread, changes our model of reality. The term virus
itself is a sort of metamedia virus, depicting society as a
immunodeficient host organism vulnerable to attack from better''
thoughts and messages. A virus contains genetic code, what
cyberians call "memes,'' which replicate throughout the system as
long as the information or coding is useful or even just
attractive. Cyberian activists are marketing experts who launch
media campaigns instead of military ones, and wage their battles
in the territory of cyberspace. How the computer nets, news, MTV,
fashion magazines, and talk show hosts cover a virus will
determine how far and wide it spreads.
The public relations game is played openly and directly in
Cyberia. As we've seen, people like Jody Radzik, Earth Girl, and
Diana see their marketing careers as absolutely compatible with
their subversive careers. They are one and the same because the
product they market--house culture--is a media virus. The fuel
that's going to generate the growth of this culture is going to
be trendiness and hipness,'' Radzik says. "We're using the
cultural marketing thing against itself.'' So, to be hipper and
trendier, people buy Radzik's clothing and are exposed to the
memes of house culture: fractals, chaos, ecstasy and Ecstasy,
shamanism, and acceptance. Making love groovy.
But older, more practical generations cannot be so easily
swayed by fashion or hipness. Cyberians who hope to appeal to
this market segment use different sorts of viruses--ones that are
masked behind traditional values, work ethics, and medical
models. Michael Hutchinson, author of The Book of Floating,
Megabrain, and Sex and Power, makes his living distributing
information about brain machines and other stress-reduction
devices. He is a tough and determined New Yorker dressed in local
Marin County garb: pastels, khaki, and tennis shoes. Similarly,
the cyberian motives behind his stress-reduction'' systems are
dressed in quite innocent-sounding packaging.
When we took acid in the sixties,''Hutchinson admits, "we
felt our discovery could change the world. A lot of the spirit at
the time was, `Hey, let's dump this stuff in the reservoir and
turn on America...the world! We can get everybody high and there
won't be any war!'''
But it's hard to get people to drop acid. Getting them to
put a set of goggles on their eyes is a whole lot easier and can
even be even be justified medically. Numerous studies have
demonstrated that the flashing lights and sounds produced by
brain machines can relax people, invigorate them, and even
relieve them from substance abuse, clinical depression, and
anxiety. The machines work by coaxing the brain to relax into
lower frequencies, bringing a person into deep meditative states
of consciousness. This can feel like a mild psychedelic trip
according to Hutchinson, and has many of the same
transformational qualities.
The subconscious material tends to bubble to the surface,
but you are so relaxed by the machine that you're able to cope
with whatever comes up. Over a period of time, people can release
their demons in a very gentle way. If it were as intense as an
acid trip, it would scare people away.'' Hutchinson smiles. In a
way he is glad to admit that brain machines are really
transformational wolves in therapeutic sheep's clothing. "There's
something really subversive to what we're working on here. We've
convinced businesses to use these devices for stress reduction,
schools for better learning curves, doctors for drug
rehabilitation. The hidden agenda is that we actually get them
into these deep brain states and produce real personality
transformation. That's the secret subtext. I think in the long
run this machine's going to have a very revolutionary effect. if
everybody in the world...''
His sentence trails off as he muses on global brain-machine
enlightenment. But the Food and Drug Administration has other
plans for these devices. Manufacturers may no longer make medical
claims about the machines before they have received FDA
approval-- a process requiring millions of dollars. Hutchinson is
convinced that there are powers behind the suppression of the
brain virus machine.
George Bush once said, `The only enemy we have is
unpredictability.' Authoritarian systems depend on their citizens
to act with predictability. But anything that enhances states of
consciousness is going to increase unpredictability. These
machines lead people to new, unpredictable information about
themselves. The behavior that results is unpredictable, and, in
that sense, these tools are dangerous. Big Brother is threatened
when people take the tools of intelligence into their own
hands.''
This is why Hutchinson spends his efforts educating people
about brain machines rather than distributing the machines
himself. His newsletters detail where to purchase machines, how
they work, why they're good, and how to make them. Mass
education is mass production,'' he says. "Even if the machines
are outlawed, the circuit diagrams we've printed will keep the
technology accessible.''
Finally, though, the most cyberian element of the brain
virus machine is the idea, or meme, that human beings should feel
free to intentionally alter their consciousnesses through
technology. As the virus gains acceptance, the cyberian ideal of
a designer reality moves closer to being actualized.
Meme Factory
For the survival of a virus, what promoters call
placement'' is everything. An appearance on The Tonight Show
might make a radical idea seem too commonplace, but an article in
Meditation might associate it with the nauseatingly "new'' age. A
meme's placement is as important to a media virus as the protein
shell that encases the DNA coding of a biological virus. It
provides safe passage and linkage to the target cell, so that the
programming within the virus may be injected inside successfully.
One such protein shell is R.U. Sirius's Mondo 2000.
Originally birthed as High Frontiers, a `zine about drugs,
altered states of consciousness, and associated philosophies, the
publication spent a brief incarnation as Reality Hackers,
concerning itself with computer issues and activism as Cyberia's
interests became decidedly more high tech. Now known to all
simply as Mondo, the two or so issues that make their way down
from the Berkeley Hills editorial coven each year virtually
reinvent the parameters of Cyberia every time they hit the
stands. If a virus makes it onto the pages of Mondo, then it has
made it onto the map. Cyberia's spotlight, Mondo brings together
new philosophy, arts, politics, and technology, defining an
aesthetic and an agenda for those who may not yet be fully
online. Mondo is the magazine equivalent of a house club. But
more than gathering members of a geographical region into a
social unit, Mondo gathers members of a more nebulous region into
a like-minded battalion of memes. Its readers are its writers are
its subjects.
Jas Morgan, a pre-med student in Athens, Georgia, knew
there
was something more to reality but didn't know where to find it.
Like most true cyberians, drugs, music, and media had not made
Jas dumb or less motivated--they had only made it imperative for
him to break out of the fixed reality in which he had found
himself by the end of high school. (He once placed one of his
straight-A report cards on his parents' kitchen table next to a
small bag of pot and a note saying We'll talk.'')
Like many other fledging cyberians around the United
States,
Jas had few sources of information with which to confirm his
suspicions about life. He listened to alternative FM radio late
into the night and read all of Timothy Leary's books twice. Jas
had been particularly inspired by Leary's repeated advice to the
turned-on: Find the others.'' When Jas came upon an issue of
High Frontiers, he knew he'd found them.
High Frontiers was the first magazine to put a particular
selection of memes together in the same place. Ideas that had
never been associated with one another before--except in
pot-smoke-filled dorm rooms--could now be seen as coexistent or
even interdependent. The discontinuous viral strands of an
emerging culture found a home. Leary wrote about computers and
psychedelics. Terence McKenna wrote about rain-forest
preservation and shamanism. Musicians wrote about politics,
computer programmers wrote about God, and psychopharmacologists
wrote about chaos. This witches' brew of a magazine put a
pleasant hex on Jas Morgan, who found himself knocking on the
door of publisher/ Domineditrix'' Queen Mu's modest mansion
overlooking Berkeley, and, he says, being appointed music editor
on the spot. The Mondo House, as it's admiringly called by those
who don't live there, is the hilltop
castle/kibbutz/home-for-living-memes where the magazine is
written, edited, and, for the most part, lived. The writers of
Mondo are its participants and its subjects. Dispensing with the
formality of an objectified reality, the magazine accepts for
publication whichever memes make the most sense at the time. The
man who decides what makes sense and what doesn't is R.U. Sirius,
aka Ken Goffman, the editor in chief and humanoid mascot.
Jas moved in and quickly became Mondo's jet-setting
socialite. His good looks and preppy manner served as an
excellent cover for his otherwise illicit'' agenda, and he
helped get the magazine long-awaited recognition from across the
Bay (the city of San Francisco) and the Southland (Los Angeles).
But as Jas developed the magazine's cosmopolitan image, R.U.
Sirius developed Jas's image of reality. Jas quickly learned to
see his long-standing suspicions about consensus reality as
truths, and his access to new information, people (Abbie
Hoffman's ex-wife became his girlfriend), and chemicals gave him
the lingo and database to talk up a storm.
Every time I want a CD, I have to go out and spend fifteen
dollars to get one when it would be really nice just to dial up
on the computer, or, better, say something to the computer and
get the new release and pay a penny for it. And to not have it
take up physical space and to not have all these people in the CD
plant physically turning them out to earn money to eat. I want a
culture where everybody's equally rich. People will work out of
their homes or out of sort of neotribal centers with each other,
the way the scientists work together and brainstorm. Everyone
worries about motivation. Don't worry--people wouldn't just sit
around stoned watching TV.''
He ponders that possibility for a moment. Maybe people
will
want to take a year off, smoke some grass and watch TV. But then
they'll get bored and they'll discover more and more of
themselves.''
The boys and girls at Mondo have made a profession of
quitting the work force, getting stoned, and sitting around
talking like this. (Since my shared experience with the Mondo
kids, publisher Queen Mu has worked to make the magazine more
respectable. Most references to drugs are gone, and the original
band of resident renegades--who Mu now calls groupees''--has
slowly been replaced by more traditional writers and editors as
the magazine tries to compete with the tremendously successful
Wired magazine. This strategy seems to have back fired, and
having lost its founding contingent of diehard cyberians, Mondo
2000's days appear to be numbered. But, in its heyday, Mondo was
as vibrant as "The Factory,'' Andy Warhol's loft/commune/film
studio/drug den of 1960s New York City. Mondo the magazine and
Mondo the social setting provided a forum for new ideas, fashion,
music, and behavior.)
Like their counterparts in Warhol's New York, the kids I
meet at this, the original wild-hearted Mondo 2000 have dedicated
their lives to getting into altered states and them discussing
fringe concepts. Their editorial decisions are made on the if it
sounds interesting to us, then it'll be interesting to them''
philosophy, and their popularity has given them the authority to
make a meme interesting to "them'' simply by putting it in print.
The entire clan found itself on the Mondo staff pretty much
in the same way as Jas. Someone shows up at the door, talks the
right talk, and he's in. The current posse numbers about twenty.
At the center of this circus is R.U. Sirius. He's Cyberia's Gomez
Addams, and he makes one wonder if he is a blood relation to the
menagerie surrounding him or merely an eccentric voyeur. It's
hard to say whether Sirius is the generator of Cyberia or its
preeminent detached observer, or both. Maybe his success proves
that the ultimate immersion in hyperspace is a self-styled
metaparticipation, where one's surroundings, friends, and lovers
are all part of the information matrix, and potential text for
the next issue. While some social groups would condemn this way
of treating one's intimates, the Mondoids thrive off it. They are
human memes, and they depend on media recognition for their
survival.
We're living with most of our time absorbed in the
media,''
Ken speculates on life in the media whirlwind. "Who we are is
expressed by what we show to the world through media extensions.
If you're not mentioned in the press, you don't exist on a
certain level. You don't exist within the fabric of the Global
Village unless you're communicating outwards.''
So, by that logic, Sirius decides what exists and what
doesn't. He has editorial privilege over reality. Oppose it if
you want,'' he tells me as we drive back from a Toon Town event
to the Mondo house late one night, "but you're already existing
in relation to the datastream like the polyp to the coral reef or
the ant to the anthill or the bee to the beehive. There's just no
getting away from it.'' And Sirius is Cyberia's genetic engineer,
designing the reality of the media space through the selection of
memes.
R.U. Sirius's saving grace--when he needs one to defend
himself against those who say he's playing God--is that he
doesn't choose the memes for his magazine with any conscious
purpose or agenda. The reason he left Toon Town so early (before
2:00 A.M.) is that, in his opinion, they present their memes too
dogmatically. Mark Heley and the house scene are a bit religious
about what they're doing. Mondo 2000 doesn't have an ideology.
The only thing we're pushing is freedom in this new territory.
The only way to freedom is not to have an agenda. Protest is not
a creative act, really.''
The memes that R.U. Sirius chooses for his magazine,
though,
are politically volatile issues: sex, drugs, revolutionary
science, technology, philosophy, and rock and roll. Just putting
these ideas into one publication is a declaration of an
information war. Sirius claims that one fan of theirs, a
technical consultant for the CIA and the NSA, always sees the
magazine on the desks of agents and investigators. He told us
`they all love you guys. They read you to try to figure out
what's going on.' Why that's pretty pathetic. I told him we're
just making it up.''
In spite of his lampoonish attitude, Sirius admits that his
magazine reflects and promotes social change, even though it has
no particular causes. We're not here to offer solutions to how
to make the trains run on time. We're coming from a place of
relative social irresponsibility, actually. But we're also
offering vision and expansion to those who want it. We don't have
to answer political questions. We just have to say `here we
are.'''
And with that we arrive at the Mondo house. Sirius has a
little trouble getting out of the car. I'm kicking brain drugs
right now,'' he apologizes. "I was experiencing some back pain so
I'm staying away from them, for now.'' Yet, he manages to round
off his exit from the vehicle with a little flourish of his cape.
He moves like a magician--a slightly awkward magician--as if each
action is not only the action but a presentation of that action,
too. No meaning. Just showmanship.
As he walks the short footpath to house, he comes upon
journalist Walter Kirn, who is urinating off the front porch into
the bushes below.
We have a bathroom, Walter.'' Sirius may be the only
person
in Cyberia who can deliver this line without sarcasm.
Walter apologizes quickly. This was actually part of an
experiment,'' he says, zipping up, and thinking twice about
offering his hand to shake. He proceeds to explain that he's been
waiting to get in for almost an hour. He thought he saw movement
inside, but no one answered the bell. Then he began to wait. And
wait. Then he remembered something odd: "That whenever I take a
piss, something unusual happens. It acts as a strange attractor
in chaos math. When I introduce the seemingly random, odd action
into the situation, the entire dynamical system changes. I don't
really believe it, but it seems to work.''
Sirius stares at Kirn for a moment. This is not the same
journalist who arrived in Berkeley last week. He's been
converted.
So you peed us here, I guess.''
Walter laughs at how ludicrous it all sounds. It was worth
a try.''
Apparently so,'' concludes Sirius, opening the door to the
house with that strange hobbitlike grace of his.
Why no one heard Kirn's ringing and knocking will remain a
mystery. About a dozen Mondoids sit chatting in the large,
vaulted-ceiling living room. The cast includes Eric Gullichsen
(the VR designer responsible for Sense8--the first low-cost
system), two performance artists, one of Tim Leary's assistants
(Tim left earlier in the evening to rest for a lecture tomorrow),
one member of an all-girl band called DeCuckoo, plus Sarah Drew,
Jas Morgan, a few other members of the editorial staff, and a few
people who'd like to be.
Queen Mu concocts coffee in the kitchen (hopefully strong
enough to oust the most sedentary of couch potatoes from their
cushions), as a guy who no one really knows sits at the table
carefully reading the ingredients on the cans of Durk and Sandy
mind foods that are strewn about. Back in the living room, the
never-ending visionary exchange-cum-editorial meeting prattles
on, inspiring, boring--abstract enough to confuse anyone whose
brain chemistry profile doesn't match the rest of the room's at
the moment, yet concrete enough to find its way onto the pages of
the next issue, which still has a couple of openings. The VR
designer might get his next project idea at the suggestion of a
writer who'd like to cover the as-yet nonexistent what if ...
?'' technology. Or a performance artist might create a new piece
based on an adaptation of the VR designer's hypothetical
interactive video proposal. This is at once fun, spaced, intense,
psychedelic, and, perhaps most of all, business.
It's interesting to see what happens to the body on
psychedelics,'' someone is saying. "The perceptions of it. Some
of it can be quite alien-looking. Some of it's very fluffy and
soft and wonderful. Sort of gives you some hints of what the
physical evolution of the body is going to be like.''
And the senses. Especially hearing and sound,'' adds
Sarah,
looking deep into the eyes of one of her admirers. She's this
Factory's Edie Sedgewick except with a shrewd mind and a caring
soul. "Think if, instead of developing TV, we had taken sound
reproduction into art. It would have created a different
society.'' No one picks up on the idea, but Sarah has nothing to
worry about. A huge spread on her music is already slated for the
next issue.
Sirius sits down next to Sarah, and her admirers back off a
little. Kirn watches the couple interact, silently gauging their
level of intimacy. Perhaps Sirius is only a cyber Warhol, after
all. Sarah might be his art project more than his lover.
Meanwhile, others wait for Sirius to direct the conversation. Is
he in the mood to hear ideas? How was Toon Town? Did he think of
the theme for the next issue?
Journalist-turned-starmaker R.U. Sirius is the head head''
at Mondo, and he serves as the arbiter of memes to his growing
clan. It is Sirius who finally decides if a meme is worth
printing, and his ability to stay removed from "the movement''
gives him the humorist's-eye view of a world in which he does not
fully participate, yet absolutely epitomizes. Having made it
through the 1960s with his mind intact, Sirius shows amazing
tolerance for the eager beavers and fist wavers who come through
the Mondo house every day. In some ways the truest cyberian of
all, R.U. Sirius'' asks just that question to everyone and
everything that presents itself to him. His smirkishly
psychedelic "wink wink'' tone makes him impervious to calamity.
His no agenda'' policy infuriates some, but it coats the memes
in his glossy magazine with an unthreatening candy shell. Hell,
some of the strongest acid in the sixties came on Mickey Mouse
blotter.
Sirius sits in a rocker and smiles in silence awhile. He
knows these people are his willing subjects--not as peasants to
king, but as audio samples to a house musician. As Sirius said
earlier that day, I like to accumulate weird people around me.
I'm sort of a cut-and-paste artist.'' He waits for someone to
provide a few bites.
We were talking about the end of time,'' one of the
performance artists finally says. "About who will make it and who
won't.''
Through the great attractor at the end of time, she
means,'' continues another. "Into the next dimension.''
Only paying Mondo 2000 subscribers will make it into
hyperspace,'' Sirius snickers, "and, of course, underpaid
contributors.''
Everyone laughs. The mock implication is that they will be
rewarded in the next dimension for their hard work and dedication
to Mondo now--especially writers who don't ask for too much
money. Sirius puts on a more genuinely serious tone, maybe for
the benefit of Kirn, who still jots occasional notes into his
reporter's notebook. This is media talking about metamedia to
other media.
I'm not sure how this is all going to come to pass,
really.'' Sirius says slowly, so that Kirn's pen can keep up with
his him. "Whether all of humanity will pop through as a huge
group, or as just a small part, is hard to speculate. I don't
think it'll be rich, dried-up Republican white men who come
through it in the end. It's more likely to be people who can cope
with personal technologies, and who do it in their garages. You
have to have your own DNA lab in your basement.''
I've got this theory about New Age people and
television.''
Jas sits up in his chair, gearing up for a pitch. The relaxed
setting in no way minimizes the personal and professional stakes.
To them, this is an editorial meeting.
New Age people are very much like the Mondo or the
psychedelic people are--they just go outdoors and camping because
they are scared of technology. That's because growing up in the
sixties, parents would take TV time away as a punishment. Plus,
TV became an electronic babysitter, and took on an authoritarian
role. And I think a certain amount of TV had to be watched at the
time in order to get the full mutation necessary to become one of
us. They didn't get enough, so they became New Age people with
mild phobias towards technology.''
There's a pause. Most eyes in the room turn to Sirius for
his judgment on the theory, which could range anywhere from a
sigh to an editorial assignment. Would the idea become a new
philosophical virus?
Hmmph. Could be ...'' He smiles. Nothing more.
Jas goes downstairs, covering the fact that he feels
defeated. Someone lights a bowl. Queen Mu serves more coffee. The
guy in the kitchen has passed out. Someone pops in a
videocassette. Walter, wondering now what he liked about Sarah,
checks his watch. Somehow, it's hard to imagine this gathering as
our century's equivalent of the troubadours. (Queen Mu later
informed me that the magazine actually conducted its business in
a much more conventional and businesslike fashion than I was
exposed to in my limited time with RU Sirius's crowd.)
But maybe this is the real Cyberia. It's not tackling
complex computer problems, absorbing new psychedelic substances,
or living through designer shamanic journeys. It's not learning
the terminology of media viruses, chaos math, or house music.
It's figuring out how two people can sell smart drugs in the same
town without driving each other crazy. It's learning how to match
the intentions of Silicon Valley's most prosperous corporations
with the values of the psychedelics users who've made them that
way. It's turning a nightclub into the modern equivalent of a
Mayan temple without getting busted by the police. It's checking
your bank statement to see if your ATM has been cracked, and
figuring out how to punish the kid who did it without turning him
into a hardened criminal. It's not getting too annoyed by the
agendas of people who say they have none, or the inane, empty
platitudes of those who say they do. It's learning to package the
truth about our culture into media-friendly, bite-size pieces,
and then finding an editor willing to put them in print because
they strike him as amusing.
Coping in Cyberia means using our currently limited human
language, bodies, emotions, and social realities to usher in
something that's supposed to be free of those limitations. Things
like virtual reality, Smart Bars, hypertext, the WELL,
role-playing games, DMT, Ecstasy, house, fractals, sampling,
anti-Muzak, technoshamanism, ecoterrorism, morphogenesis, video
cyborgs, Toon Town, and Mondo 2000 are what slowly pull our
society--even our world--past the event horizon of the great
attractor at the end of time. But just like these, the next
earth-shattering meme to hit the newsstands or computer nets may
be the result of a failed relationship, a drug bust, an abortion
on acid, or even a piss over the side of the porch.
Cyberia is frightening to everyone. Not just to
technophobes, rich businessmen, midwestern farmers and suburban
housewives, but, most of all, to the boys and girls hoping to
ride the crest of the informational wave.
Surf's up.
Brought to you
by
_T_h_e_ _C_y_b_e_r_p_u_n_k_ _P_r_o_j_e_c_t