Archive for August, 2005
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.
August 31st, 2005
A woman was shopping at her local supermarket where she selected:
a half-gallon of 2% milk,
a carton of eggs,
a quart of orange juice,
a head of romaine lettuce,
a 2 lb. can of coffee,
a 1 lb. package of bacon.
As she was unloading her items on the conveyor belt to check out, a drunk standing behind her watched as she placed the items in front of the cashier. !
While the cashier was ringing up her purchases, the drunk calmly stated,
“You must be single.”
The woman was a bit startled by this proclamation, but she was intrigued by the derelict’s intuition, since she was indeed single.
She looked at her six items on the belt and saw nothing particularly unusual about her selections that could have tipped off the drunk to her marital status.
Curiosity getting the better of her, she said “Well, you know what, you’re absolutely correct. But how on earth did you know that?”
The drunk replied, “Cause you’re ugly.”
August 30th, 2005
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.”
August 30th, 2005
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.
August 29th, 2005
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.
August 28th, 2005
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.
August 27th, 2005
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 kødz 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?
August 26th, 2005
FukiTol <-read more here
Thanks to Shayne for discovering this bit.
Life moves fast. The majority of us have become obsessed with the endless pursuit of more money, more possessions, more energy, more fun, more achievement, more recognition, more power, etc… Not only do we want more of it, but we want it faster and cheaper than ever before.
Some will argue that this pursuit is a positive one, pushing us to better our best and test the limits of our potential. Others would argue that it’s bullshit. You see candidates for “Fukitol” everyday: people so wound up that you’re sure they could just snap at any moment. Maybe you’re one of those people. Luckily for you, the pharmaceutical companies have come up with all kinds of “cures” for you.
Pharmacology: The Science of Drugs.
Like any other technology, pharmacology has advanced rapidly in the past 10 years. We now live in a world where there is a drug for everything:
Depressed? Over Worked? Job Sucks? Unappreciated?
Relationship Problems? “Romantic” Problems?
No worries, there’s a drug for all of them. From Prozac to Viagra, there’s a plethora of drugs out there offering you the cure for what ails you.
This may be great for the pharmaceutical companies who sell the drugs to cure the side effects that result from taking the drugs they sell, but what about your needs? Why should you have to buy one pill if your stressed, another if you can’t get it up, and another if you’re paranoid about getting fired from your job? Why isn’t there one drug that will cure all of these things? A “super-pill” that takes care of all of your problems with no adverse side effects.
Fukitol: The all purpose lifestyle pharmaceutical.
“Fukitol” has come together with the objective of developing an all-purpose drug to assist with psychologically influenced mental conditions. It is anticipated that the success of “Fukitol” will be similar to Viagra and other wonder-drugs that have flooded the marketplace, with one key difference: “Fukitol” will work. It will relieve all the symptoms that the other drugs do, with no side effects.
Until the release and approval of “Fukitol” by the FDA and other global drug-control agencies, we’re here to spread the methodology of “Fukitol”; because it is more than a drug, it’s a lifestyle.
We received thousands of hits to our web site every day from all different walks of life. Some don’t approve of our message (which is expected), whereas others help us promote this lifestyle in their own practices (with varying degrees of affiliation with “Fukitol”).
One of our valued visitors writes…
The Fukitol concept is a pretty good fit for a motivational speech concept that I have been toying with as an alternative to really working for a living. The “mantra” I will be promoting, indeed the lifestyle I hope to promulgate, is “I don’t give a shit!”.
The purpose is of course stress reduction and putting things into perspective and it’s only partly tongue in cheek. The test question to designate decisions to recieve the most careful consideration is, “Will anyone die if I screw this up?” and it’s followed by a hierarchy of lesser consequences.
Keep people laughing, it keeps them healthy!
This is just the beginning.
August 26th, 2005
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.
August 25th, 2005
The VoIP Phone System: Packet Switching
Data networks do not use circuit switching. Your Internet connection would be a lot slower if it maintained a constant connection to the Web page you were viewing at any given time. Instead, data networks simply send and retrieve data as you need it. And, instead of routing the data over a dedicated line, the data packets flow through a chaotic network along thousands of possible paths. This is called packet switching.
While circuit switching keeps the connection open and constant, packet switching opens a brief connection — just long enough to send a small chunk of data, called a packet, from one system to another. It works like this:
* The sending computer chops data into small packets, with an address on each one telling the network devices where to send them.
* Inside of each packet is a payload. The payload is a piece of the e-mail, a music file or whatever type of file is being transmitted inside the packet.
* The sending computer sends the packet to a nearby router and forgets about it. The nearby router send the packet to another router that is closer to the recipient computer. That router sends the packet along to another, even closer router, and so on.
* When the receiving computer finally gets the packets (which may have all taken completely different paths to get there), it uses instructions contained within the packets to reassemble the data into its original state.
Packet switching is very efficient. It lets the network route the packets along the least congested and cheapest lines. It also frees up the two computers communicating with each other so that they can accept information from other computers, as well.
The Advantage
VoIP technology uses the Internet’s packet-switching capabilities to provide phone service. VoIP has several advantages over circuit switching. For example, packet switching allows several telephone calls to occupy the amount of space occupied by only one in a circuit-switched network. Using PSTN, that 10-minute phone call we talked about earlier consumed 10 full minutes of transmission time at a cost of 128 Kbps. With VoIP, that same call may have occupied only 3.5 minutes of transmission time at a cost of 64 Kbps, leaving another 64 Kbps free for that 3.5 minutes, plus an additional 128 Kbps for the remaining 6.5 minutes. Based on this simple estimate, another three or four calls could easily fit into the space used by a single call under the conventional system. And this example doesn’t even factor in the use of data compression, which further reduces the size of each call.
Let’s say that you and your friend both have service through a VoIP provider. You both have your analog phones hooked up to the service-provided ATAs. Let’s take another look at that typical telephone call, but this time using VoIP over a packet-switched network:
1. You pick up the receiver, which sends a signal to the ATA.
2. The ATA receives the signal and sends a dial tone. This lets you know that you have a connection to the Internet.
3. You dial the phone number of the party you wish to talk to. The tones are converted by the ATA into digital data and temporarily stored.
4. The phone number data is sent in the form of a request to your VoIP company’s call processor. The call processor checks it to ensure that it is in a valid format.
5. The call processor determines to whom to map the phone number. In mapping, the phone number is translated to an IP address (more on this later). The soft switch connects the two devices on either end of the call. On the other end, a signal is sent to your friend’s ATA, telling it to ask the connected phone to ring.
6. Once your friend picks up the phone, a session is established between your computer and your friend’s computer. This means that each system knows to expect packets of data from the other system. In the middle, the normal Internet infrastructure handles the call as if it were e-mail or a Web page. Each system must use the same protocol to communicate. The systems implement two channels, one for each direction, as part of the session.
7. You talk for a period of time. During the conversation, your system and your friend’s system transmit packets back and forth when there is data to be sent. The ATAs at each end translate these packets as they are received and convert them to the analog audio signal that you hear. Your ATA also keeps the circuit open between itself and your analog phone while it forwards packets to and from the IP host at the other end.
8. You finish talking and hang up the receiver.
9. When you hang up, the circuit is closed between your phone and the ATA.
10. The ATA sends a signal to the soft switch connecting the call, terminating the session. Probably one of the most compelling advantages of packet switching is that data networks already understand the technology. By migrating to this technology, telephone networks immediately gain the ability to communicate the way computers do.
It will still be at least a decade before communications companies can make the full switch over to VoIP. As with all emerging technologies, there are certain hurdles that have to be overcome.
*** VoIP Terms ***
The central call processor is a piece of hardware running a specialized database/mapping program called a soft switch. See the “Soft Switches” section to learn more.
VoIP Hurdles
The current Public Switched Telephone Network is a robust and fairly bulletproof system for delivering phone calls. Phones just work, and we’ve all come to depend on that. On the other hand, computers, e-mail and other related devices are still kind of flaky. Let’s face it — few people really panic when their e-mail goes down for 30 minutes. It’s expected from time to time. On the other hand, a half hour of no dial tone can easily send people into a panic. So what the PSTN may lack in efficiency it more than makes up for in reliability. But the network that makes up the Internet is far more complex and therefore functions within a far greater margin of error. What this all adds up to is one of the major flaws in VoIP: reliability.
* First of all, VoIP is dependant on wall power. Your current phone runs on phantom power that is provided over the line from the central office. Even if your power goes out, your phone (unless it is a cordless) still works. With VoIP, no power means no phone. A stable power source must be created for VoIP.
* Another consideration is that many other systems in your home may be integrated into the phone line. Digital video recorders, digital subscription TV services and home security systems all use a standard phone line to do their thing. There is currently no way to integrate these products with VoIP. The related industries are going to have to get together to make this work.
* Emergency 911 calls also become a challenge with VoIP. As stated before, VoIP uses IP-addressed phone numbers, not NANP phone numbers. There is no way to associate a geographic location with an IP address. So if the caller can’t tell the 911 operator where he or she is located, then there is no way to know which call center to route the emergency call to and which EMS should respond. To fix this, perhaps geographical information could somehow be integrated into the packets.
* Because VoIP uses an Internet connection, it is susceptible to all the hiccups normally associated with home broadband services. All of these factors will affect call quality:
o Latency
o Jitter
o Packet loss
Phone conversations can become distorted, garbled or lost because of transmission errors. Some kind of stability in Internet data transfer needs to be guaranteed before VoIP could truly replace traditional phones.
* VoIP is susceptible to worms, viruses and hacking, although this is very rare and VoIP developers are working on VoIP encryption to counter this.
* Another issue associated with VoIP is having a phone system dependant on individual PCs of varying specifications and power. A call can be affected by processor drain. Let’s say you are chatting away on your softphone, and you decide to open a program that saps your processor. Quality loss will become immediately evident. In a worst case scenario, your system could crash in the middle of an important call. In VoIP, all phone calls are subject to the limitations of normal computer issues.
One of the hurdles that was overcome some time ago was the conversion of the analog audio signal your phone receives into packets of data. How it is that analog audio is turned into packets for VoIP transmission? The answer is codecs.
Why do I care?
I am the Vice President of Marketing for a VoIP service provider. I love that every day I get to learn something new. Scratch that. I love that every day I get to learn a million new things. I have no choice. Things change so fast I don’t have a chance to get bored with it.
I’ve always been a bit of a techno-dork – which I think comes across if you stare at this website long enough. Even with all my years of technology fiddling I can’t help but be amazed at how it all continues to keep rolling full-steam ahead. VoIP is an area that I’ve found great interest in – take the culmination of my experience in the web hosting and internet access provisioning business and smash it head on into the world of old-school telecom… and you have one hell of an explosive marketplace.
Stay tuned for more on the adventures of Gus in VoIP land – I’m sure it will be a fun ride.
August 24th, 2005
Previous Posts
