Archive for September, 2005
Core competencies are those capabilities that are critical to a business achieving competitive advantage. The starting point for analysing core competencies is recognising that competition between businesses is as much a race for competence mastery as it is for market position and market power. Senior management cannot focus on all activities of a business and the competencies required to undertake them. So the goal is for management to focus attention on competencies that really affect competitive advantage.
The Work of Hamel and Prahalad
The main ideas about Core Competencies where developed by C K Prahalad and G Hamel through a series of articles in the Harvard Business Review followed by a best-selling book - Competing for the Future. Their central idea is that over time companies may develop key areas of expertise which are distinctive to that company and critical to the company’s long term growth.
‘In the 1990s managers will be judged on their ability to identify, cultivate, and exploit the core competencies that make growth possible - indeed, they’ll have to rethink the concept of the corporation it self.’
–C K Prahalad and G Hamel 1990
These areas of expertise may be in any area but are most likely to develop in the critical, central areas of the company where the most value is added to its products.
For example, for a manufacturer of electronic equipment, key areas of expertise could be in the design of the electronic components and circuits. For a ceramics manufacturer, they could be the routines and processes at the heart of the production process. For a software company the key skills may be in the overall simplicity and utility of the program for users or alternatively in the high quality of software code writing they have achieved.
Core Competencies are not seen as being fixed. Core Competencies should change in response to changes in the company’s environment. They are flexible and evolve over time. As a business evolves and adapts to new circumstances and opportunities, so its Core Competencies will have to adapt and change.
Identifying Core Competencies
Prahalad and Hamel suggest three factors to help identify core competencies in any business:
What does the Core Competence Achieve?
Comments / Examples
Provides potential access to a wide variety of markets
The key core competencies here are those that enable the creation of new products and services.
Example: Why has Saga established such a strong leadership in supplying financial services (e.g. insurance) and holidays to the older generation?
Core Competencies that enable Saga to enter apparently different markets:
- Clear distinctive brand proposition that focuses solely on a closely-defined customer group
- Leading direct marketing skills - database management; direct-mailing campaigns; call centre sales conversion
- Skills in customer relationship management
Makes a significant contribution to the perceived customer benefits of the end product
Core competencies are the skills that enable a business to deliver a fundamental customer benefit - in other words: what is it that causes customers to choose one product over another? To identify core competencies in a particular market, ask questions such as “why is the customer willing to pay more or less for one product or service than another?” “What is a customer actually paying for?
Example: Why have Tesco been so successful in capturing leadership of the market for online grocery shopping?
Core competencies that mean customers value the Tesco.com experience so highly:
- Designing and implementing supply systems that effectively link existing shops with the Tesco.com web site
- Ability to design and deliver a “customer interface” that personalises online shopping and makes it more efficient
- Reliable and efficient delivery infrastructure (product picking, distribution, customer satisfaction handling)
Difficult for competitors to imitate
A core competence should be “competitively unique”: In many industries, most skills can be considered a prerequisite for participation and do not provide any significant competitor differentiation. To qualify as “core”, a competence should be something that other competitors wish they had within their own business.
Example:Why does Dell have such a strong position in the personal computer market?
Core competencies that are difficult for the competition to imitate:
- Online customer “bespoking” of each computer built
- Minimisation of working capital in the production process
- High manufacturing and distribution quality - reliable products at competitive prices
A competence which is central to the business’s operations but which is not exceptional in some way should not be considered as a core competence, as it will not differentiate the business from any other similar businesses. For example, a process which uses common computer components and is staffed by people with only basic training cannot be regarded as a core competence. Such a process is highly unlikely to generate a differentiated advantage over rival businesses. However it is possible to develop such a process into a core competence with suitable investment in equipment and training.
It follows from the concept of Core Competencies that resources that are standardised or easily available will not enable a business to achieve a competitive advantage over rivals.
September 10th, 2005
CHAPTER 18
May the Best Meme Win
It’s by using the technologies and pathways laid down by promoters of control that cyberians believe they must conduct their revolution. The massive television network, for example, whose original purpose was to sell products and–except for a brief period during the Vietnam war–to manufacture public consent for political lunacy, has now been coopted as a feedback mechanism by low-end home video cameramen. Coined “Video Vigilantes” on a Newsweek cover, private citizens are bringing reality to the media. When a group of cops use excessive force on a suspect, chances are pretty good that someone with a camcorder will capture the images on tape, and CNN will have broadcast it around the world within a couple of hours. In addition, groups such as Deep Dish TV now use public access cable channels to disseminate convincing video of a reality quite different from the one presented on the network newscasts.
“The gun used to be the great equalizer,” explains Jack Nachbar, professor of popular culture at Bowling Green University, in reference to camcorders. “You can say this is like the new six gun, in a way. It can really empower ordinary people.” Police departments now bring their own video cameras to demonstrations by groups like DIVA (Damned Interfering Video Activists) in order to make a recording of their own side of the story. The new war–like Batman’s media battle against the Joker–is fought not with conventional weapons but with images in the datasphere. The ultimate weapon in Cyberia is not the sword or even the pen but the media virus.
The media virus is any idea that infiltrates the host organism of modern society. It can be a real thing, like Mark Heley’s Smart Bar, which functions on an organic level yet also acts as a potent concept capable of changing the way we feel about drugs, health care, and intelligence. A virus can also be a pure thought or idea, like “Gaia” or “morphic resonance,” which, when spread, changes our model of reality. The term virus itself is a sort of metamedia virus, depicting society as a immunodeficient host organism vulnerable to attack from “better” thoughts and messages. A virus contains genetic code, what cyberians call “memes,” which replicate throughout the system as long as the information or coding is useful or even just attractive. Cyberian activists are marketing experts who launch media campaigns instead of military ones, and wage their battles in the territory of cyberspace. How the computer nets, news, MTV, fashion magazines, and talk show hosts cover a virus will determine how far and wide it spreads.
The public relations game is played openly and directly in Cyberia. As we’ve seen, people like Jody Radzik, Earth Girl, and Diana see their marketing careers as absolutely compatible with their subversive careers. They are one and the same because the product they market–house culture–is a media virus. “The fuel that’s going to generate the growth of this culture is going to be trendiness and hipness,” Radzik says. “We’re using the cultural marketing thing against itself.” So, to be hipper and trendier, people buy Radzik’s clothing and are exposed to the memes of house culture: fractals, chaos, ecstasy and Ecstasy, shamanism, and acceptance. Making love groovy.
But older, more practical generations cannot be so easily swayed by fashion or hipness. Cyberians who hope to appeal to this market segment use different sorts of viruses–ones that are masked behind traditional values, work ethics, and medical models. Michael Hutchinson, author of The Book of Floating, Megabrain, and Sex and Power, makes his living distributing information about brain machines and other stress-reduction devices. He is a tough and determined New Yorker dressed in local Marin County garb: pastels, khaki, and tennis shoes. Similarly, the cyberian motives behind his “stress-reduction” systems are dressed in quite innocent-sounding packaging.
“When we took acid in the sixties,”Hutchinson admits, “we felt our discovery could change the world. A lot of the spirit at the time was, `Hey, let’s dump this stuff in the reservoir and turn on America…the world! We can get everybody high and there won’t be any war!”‘
But it’s hard to get people to drop acid. Getting them to put a set of goggles on their eyes is a whole lot easier and can even be even be justified medically. Numerous studies have demonstrated that the flashing lights and sounds produced by brain machines can relax people, invigorate them, and even relieve them from substance abuse, clinical depression, and anxiety. The machines work by coaxing the brain to relax into lower frequencies, bringing a person into deep meditative states of consciousness. This can feel like a mild psychedelic trip according to Hutchinson, and has many of the same transformational qualities.
“The subconscious material tends to bubble to the surface, but you are so relaxed by the machine that you’re able to cope with whatever comes up. Over a period of time, people can release their demons in a very gentle way. If it were as intense as an acid trip, it would scare people away.” Hutchinson smiles. In a way he is glad to admit that brain machines are really transformational wolves in therapeutic sheep’s clothing. “There’s something really subversive to what we’re working on here. We’ve convinced businesses to use these devices for stress reduction, schools for better learning curves, doctors for drug rehabilitation. The hidden agenda is that we actually get them into these deep brain states and produce real personality transformation. That’s the secret subtext. I think in the long run this machine’s going to have a very revolutionary effect. if everybody in the world…”
His sentence trails off as he muses on global brain-machine enlightenment. But the Food and Drug Administration has other plans for these devices. Manufacturers may no longer make medical claims about the machines before they have received FDA approval– a process requiring millions of dollars. Hutchinson is convinced that there are powers behind the suppression of the brain virus machine.
“George Bush once said, `The only enemy we have is unpredictability.’ Authoritarian systems depend on their citizens to act with predictability. But anything that enhances states of consciousness is going to increase unpredictability. These machines lead people to new, unpredictable information about themselves. The behavior that results is unpredictable, and, in that sense, these tools are dangerous. Big Brother is threatened when people take the tools of intelligence into their own hands.”
This is why Hutchinson spends his efforts educating people about brain machines rather than distributing the machines himself. His newsletters detail where to purchase machines, how they work, why they’re good, and how to make them. “Mass education is mass production,” he says. “Even if the machines are outlawed, the circuit diagrams we’ve printed will keep the technology accessible.”
Finally, though, the most cyberian element of the brain virus machine is the idea, or meme, that human beings should feel free to intentionally alter their consciousnesses through technology. As the virus gains acceptance, the cyberian ideal of a designer reality moves closer to being actualized.
Meme Factory
For the survival of a virus, what promoters call “placement” is everything. An appearance on The Tonight Show might make a radical idea seem too commonplace, but an article in Meditation might associate it with the nauseatingly “new” age. A meme’s placement is as important to a media virus as the protein shell that encases the DNA coding of a biological virus. It provides safe passage and linkage to the target cell, so that the programming within the virus may be injected inside successfully. One such protein shell is R.U. Sirius’s Mondo 2000.
Originally birthed as High Frontiers, a `zine about drugs, altered states of consciousness, and associated philosophies, the publication spent a brief incarnation as Reality Hackers, concerning itself with computer issues and activism as Cyberia’s interests became decidedly more high tech. Now known to all simply as Mondo, the two or so issues that make their way down from the Berkeley Hills editorial coven each year virtually reinvent the parameters of Cyberia every time they hit the stands. If a virus makes it onto the pages of Mondo, then it has made it onto the map. Cyberia’s spotlight, Mondo brings together new philosophy, arts, politics, and technology, defining an aesthetic and an agenda for those who may not yet be fully online. Mondo is the magazine equivalent of a house club. But more than gathering members of a geographical region into a social unit, Mondo gathers members of a more nebulous region into a like-minded battalion of memes. Its readers are its writers are its subjects.
Jas Morgan, a pre-med student in Athens, Georgia, knew there was something more to reality but didn’t know where to find it. Like most true cyberians, drugs, music, and media had not made Jas dumb or less motivated–they had only made it imperative for him to break out of the fixed reality in which he had found himself by the end of high school. (He once placed one of his straight-A report cards on his parents’ kitchen table next to a small bag of pot and a note saying “We’ll talk.”)
Like many other fledging cyberians around the United States, Jas had few sources of information with which to confirm his suspicions about life. He listened to alternative FM radio late into the night and read all of Timothy Leary’s books twice. Jas had been particularly inspired by Leary’s repeated advice to the turned-on: “Find the others.” When Jas came upon an issue of High Frontiers, he knew he’d found them.
High Frontiers was the first magazine to put a particular selection of memes together in the same place. Ideas that had never been associated with one another before–except in pot-smoke-filled dorm rooms–could now be seen as coexistent or even interdependent. The discontinuous viral strands of an emerging culture found a home. Leary wrote about computers and psychedelics. Terence McKenna wrote about rain-forest preservation and shamanism. Musicians wrote about politics, computer programmers wrote about God, and psychopharmacologists wrote about chaos. This witches’ brew of a magazine put a pleasant hex on Jas Morgan, who found himself knocking on the door of publisher/”Domineditrix” Queen Mu’s modest mansion overlooking Berkeley, and, he says, being appointed music editor on the spot. The Mondo House, as it’s admiringly called by those who don’t live there, is the hilltop castle/kibbutz/home-for-living-memes where the magazine is written, edited, and, for the most part, lived. The writers of Mondo are its participants and its subjects. Dispensing with the formality of an objectified reality, the magazine accepts for publication whichever memes make the most sense at the time. The man who decides what makes sense and what doesn’t is R.U. Sirius, aka Ken Goffman, the editor in chief and humanoid mascot.
Jas moved in and quickly became Mondo’s jet-setting socialite. His good looks and preppy manner served as an excellent cover for his otherwise “illicit” agenda, and he helped get the magazine long-awaited recognition from across the Bay (the city of San Francisco) and the Southland (Los Angeles). But as Jas developed the magazine’s cosmopolitan image, R.U. Sirius developed Jas’s image of reality. Jas quickly learned to see his long-standing suspicions about consensus reality as truths, and his access to new information, people (Abbie Hoffman’s ex-wife became his girlfriend), and chemicals gave him the lingo and database to talk up a storm.
“Every time I want a CD, I have to go out and spend fifteen dollars to get one when it would be really nice just to dial up on the computer, or, better, say something to the computer and get the new release and pay a penny for it. And to not have it take up physical space and to not have all these people in the CD plant physically turning them out to earn money to eat. I want a culture where everybody’s equally rich. People will work out of their homes or out of sort of neotribal centers with each other, the way the scientists work together and brainstorm. Everyone worries about motivation. Don’t worry–people wouldn’t just sit around stoned watching TV.”
He ponders that possibility for a moment. “Maybe people will want to take a year off, smoke some grass and watch TV. But then they’ll get bored and they’ll discover more and more of themselves.”
The boys and girls at Mondo have made a profession of quitting the work force, getting stoned, and sitting around talking like this. (Since my shared experience with the Mondo kids, publisher Queen Mu has worked to make the magazine more respectable. Most references to drugs are gone, and the original band of resident renegades–who Mu now calls “groupees”–has slowly been replaced by more traditional writers and editors as the magazine tries to compete with the tremendously successful Wired magazine. This strategy seems to have back fired, and having lost its founding contingent of diehard cyberians, Mondo 2000’s days appear to be numbered. But, in its heyday, Mondo was as vibrant as “The Factory,” Andy Warhol’s loft/commune/film studio/drug den of 1960s New York City. Mondo the magazine and Mondo the social setting provided a forum for new ideas, fashion, music, and behavior.)
Like their counterparts in Warhol’s New York, the kids I meet at this, the original wild-hearted Mondo 2000 have dedicated their lives to getting into altered states and them discussing fringe concepts. Their editorial decisions are made on the “if it sounds interesting to us, then it’ll be interesting to them” philosophy, and their popularity has given them the authority to make a meme interesting to “them” simply by putting it in print.
The entire clan found itself on the Mondo staff pretty much in the same way as Jas. Someone shows up at the door, talks the right talk, and he’s in. The current posse numbers about twenty. At the center of this circus is R.U. Sirius. He’s Cyberia’s Gomez Addams, and he makes one wonder if he is a blood relation to the menagerie surrounding him or merely an eccentric voyeur. It’s hard to say whether Sirius is the generator of Cyberia or its preeminent detached observer, or both. Maybe his success proves that the ultimate immersion in hyperspace is a self-styled metaparticipation, where one’s surroundings, friends, and lovers are all part of the information matrix, and potential text for the next issue. While some social groups would condemn this way of treating one’s intimates, the Mondoids thrive off it. They are human memes, and they depend on media recognition for their survival.
“We’re living with most of our time absorbed in the media,” Ken speculates on life in the media whirlwind. “Who we are is expressed by what we show to the world through media extensions. If you’re not mentioned in the press, you don’t exist on a certain level. You don’t exist within the fabric of the Global Village unless you’re communicating outwards.”
So, by that logic, Sirius decides what exists and what doesn’t. He has editorial privilege over reality. “Oppose it if you want,” he tells me as we drive back from a Toon Town event to the Mondo house late one night, “but you’re already existing in relation to the datastream like the polyp to the coral reef or the ant to the anthill or the bee to the beehive. There’s just no getting away from it.” And Sirius is Cyberia’s genetic engineer, designing the reality of the media space through the selection of memes.
R.U. Sirius’s saving grace–when he needs one to defend himself against those who say he’s playing God–is that he doesn’t choose the memes for his magazine with any conscious purpose or agenda. The reason he left Toon Town so early (before 2:00 A.M.) is that, in his opinion, they present their memes too dogmatically. “Mark Heley and the house scene are a bit religious about what they’re doing. Mondo 2000 doesn’t have an ideology. The only thing we’re pushing is freedom in this new territory. The only way to freedom is not to have an agenda. Protest is not a creative act, really.”
The memes that R.U. Sirius chooses for his magazine, though, are politically volatile issues: sex, drugs, revolutionary science, technology, philosophy, and rock and roll. Just putting these ideas into one publication is a declaration of an information war. Sirius claims that one fan of theirs, a technical consultant for the CIA and the NSA, always sees the magazine on the desks of agents and investigators. “He told us `they all love you guys. They read you to try to figure out what’s going on.’ Why that’s pretty pathetic. I told him we’re just making it up.”
In spite of his lampoonish attitude, Sirius admits that his magazine reflects and promotes social change, even though it has no particular causes. “We’re not here to offer solutions to how to make the trains run on time. We’re coming from a place of relative social irresponsibility, actually. But we’re also offering vision and expansion to those who want it. We don’t have to answer political questions. We just have to say `here we are.”‘
And with that we arrive at the Mondo house. Sirius has a little trouble getting out of the car. “I’m kicking brain drugs right now,” he apologizes. “I was experiencing some back pain so I’m staying away from them, for now.” Yet, he manages to round off his exit from the vehicle with a little flourish of his cape. He moves like a magician–a slightly awkward magician–as if each action is not only the action but a presentation of that action, too. No meaning. Just showmanship.
As he walks the short footpath to house, he comes upon journalist Walter Kirn, who is urinating off the front porch into the bushes below.
“We have a bathroom, Walter.” Sirius may be the only person in Cyberia who can deliver this line without sarcasm.
Walter apologizes quickly. “This was actually part of an experiment,” he says, zipping up, and thinking twice about offering his hand to shake. He proceeds to explain that he’s been waiting to get in for almost an hour. He thought he saw movement inside, but no one answered the bell. Then he began to wait. And wait. Then he remembered something odd: “That whenever I take a piss, something unusual happens. It acts as a strange attractor in chaos math. When I introduce the seemingly random, odd action into the situation, the entire dynamical system changes. I don’t really believe it, but it seems to work.”
Sirius stares at Kirn for a moment. This is not the same journalist who arrived in Berkeley last week. He’s been converted.
“So you peed us here, I guess.”
Walter laughs at how ludicrous it all sounds. “It was worth a try.”
“Apparently so,” concludes Sirius, opening the door to the house with that strange hobbitlike grace of his.
Why no one heard Kirn’s ringing and knocking will remain a mystery. About a dozen Mondoids sit chatting in the large, vaulted-ceiling living room. The cast includes Eric Gullichsen (the VR designer responsible for Sense8–the first low-cost system), two performance artists, one of Tim Leary’s assistants (Tim left earlier in the evening to rest for a lecture tomorrow), one member of an all-girl band called DeCuckoo, plus Sarah Drew, Jas Morgan, a few other members of the editorial staff, and a few people who’d like to be.
Queen Mu concocts coffee in the kitchen (hopefully strong enough to oust the most sedentary of couch potatoes from their cushions), as a guy who no one really knows sits at the table carefully reading the ingredients on the cans of Durk and Sandy mind foods that are strewn about. Back in the living room, the never-ending visionary exchange-cum-editorial meeting prattles on, inspiring, boring–abstract enough to confuse anyone whose brain chemistry profile doesn’t match the rest of the room’s at the moment, yet concrete enough to find its way onto the pages of the next issue, which still has a couple of openings. The VR designer might get his next project idea at the suggestion of a writer who’d like to cover the as-yet nonexistent “what if … ?” technology. Or a performance artist might create a new piece based on an adaptation of the VR designer’s hypothetical interactive video proposal. This is at once fun, spaced, intense, psychedelic, and, perhaps most of all, business.
“It’s interesting to see what happens to the body on psychedelics,” someone is saying. “The perceptions of it. Some of it can be quite alien-looking. Some of it’s very fluffy and soft and wonderful. Sort of gives you some hints of what the physical evolution of the body is going to be like.”
“And the senses. Especially hearing and sound,” adds Sarah, looking deep into the eyes of one of her admirers. She’s this Factory’s Edie Sedgewick except with a shrewd mind and a caring soul. “Think if, instead of developing TV, we had taken sound reproduction into art. It would have created a different society.” No one picks up on the idea, but Sarah has nothing to worry about. A huge spread on her music is already slated for the next issue.
Sirius sits down next to Sarah, and her admirers back off a little. Kirn watches the couple interact, silently gauging their level of intimacy. Perhaps Sirius is only a cyber Warhol, after all. Sarah might be his art project more than his lover. Meanwhile, others wait for Sirius to direct the conversation. Is he in the mood to hear ideas? How was Toon Town? Did he think of the theme for the next issue?
Journalist-turned-starmaker R.U. Sirius is the head “head” at Mondo, and he serves as the arbiter of memes to his growing clan. It is Sirius who finally decides if a meme is worth printing, and his ability to stay removed from “the movement” gives him the humorist’s-eye view of a world in which he does not fully participate, yet absolutely epitomizes. Having made it through the 1960s with his mind intact, Sirius shows amazing tolerance for the eager beavers and fist wavers who come through the Mondo house every day. In some ways the truest cyberian of all, “R.U. Sirius” asks just that question to everyone and everything that presents itself to him. His smirkishly psychedelic “wink wink” tone makes him impervious to calamity. His “no agenda” policy infuriates some, but it coats the memes in his glossy magazine with an unthreatening candy shell. Hell, some of the strongest acid in the sixties came on Mickey Mouse blotter.
Sirius sits in a rocker and smiles in silence awhile. He knows these people are his willing subjects–not as peasants to king, but as audio samples to a house musician. As Sirius said earlier that day, “I like to accumulate weird people around me. I’m sort of a cut-and-paste artist.” He waits for someone to provide a few bites.
“We were talking about the end of time,” one of the performance artists finally says. “About who will make it and who won’t.”
“Through the great attractor at the end of time, she means,” continues another. “Into the next dimension.”
“Only paying Mondo 2000 subscribers will make it into hyperspace,” Sirius snickers, “and, of course, underpaid contributors.”
Everyone laughs. The mock implication is that they will be rewarded in the next dimension for their hard work and dedication to Mondo now–especially writers who don’t ask for too much money. Sirius puts on a more genuinely serious tone, maybe for the benefit of Kirn, who still jots occasional notes into his reporter’s notebook. This is media talking about metamedia to other media.
“I’m not sure how this is all going to come to pass, really.” Sirius says slowly, so that Kirn’s pen can keep up with his him. “Whether all of humanity will pop through as a huge group, or as just a small part, is hard to speculate. I don’t think it’ll be rich, dried-up Republican white men who come through it in the end. It’s more likely to be people who can cope with personal technologies, and who do it in their garages. You have to have your own DNA lab in your basement.”
“I’ve got this theory about New Age people and television.” Jas sits up in his chair, gearing up for a pitch. The relaxed setting in no way minimizes the personal and professional stakes. To them, this is an editorial meeting.
“New Age people are very much like the Mondo or the psychedelic people are–they just go outdoors and camping because they are scared of technology. That’s because growing up in the sixties, parents would take TV time away as a punishment. Plus, TV became an electronic babysitter, and took on an authoritarian role. And I think a certain amount of TV had to be watched at the time in order to get the full mutation necessary to become one of us. They didn’t get enough, so they became New Age people with mild phobias towards technology.”
There’s a pause. Most eyes in the room turn to Sirius for his judgment on the theory, which could range anywhere from a sigh to an editorial assignment. Would the idea become a new philosophical virus?
“Hmmph. Could be …” He smiles. Nothing more.
Jas goes downstairs, covering the fact that he feels defeated. Someone lights a bowl. Queen Mu serves more coffee. The guy in the kitchen has passed out. Someone pops in a videocassette. Walter, wondering now what he liked about Sarah, checks his watch. Somehow, it’s hard to imagine this gathering as our century’s equivalent of the troubadours. (Queen Mu later informed me that the magazine actually conducted its business in a much more conventional and businesslike fashion than I was exposed to in my limited time with RU Sirius’s crowd.)
But maybe this is the real Cyberia. It’s not tackling complex computer problems, absorbing new psychedelic substances, or living through designer shamanic journeys. It’s not learning the terminology of media viruses, chaos math, or house music. It’s figuring out how two people can sell smart drugs in the same town without driving each other crazy. It’s learning how to match the intentions of Silicon Valley’s most prosperous corporations with the values of the psychedelics users who’ve made them that way. It’s turning a nightclub into the modern equivalent of a Mayan temple without getting busted by the police. It’s checking your bank statement to see if your ATM has been cracked, and figuring out how to punish the kid who did it without turning him into a hardened criminal. It’s not getting too annoyed by the agendas of people who say they have none, or the inane, empty platitudes of those who say they do. It’s learning to package the truth about our culture into media-friendly, bite-size pieces, and then finding an editor willing to put them in print because they strike him as amusing.
Coping in Cyberia means using our currently limited human language, bodies, emotions, and social realities to usher in something that’s supposed to be free of those limitations. Things like virtual reality, Smart Bars, hypertext, the WELL, role-playing games, DMT, Ecstasy, house, fractals, sampling, anti-Muzak, technoshamanism, ecoterrorism, morphogenesis, video cyborgs, Toon Town, and Mondo 2000 are what slowly pull our society–even our world–past the event horizon of the great attractor at the end of time. But just like these, the next earth-shattering meme to hit the newsstands or computer nets may be the result of a failed relationship, a drug bust, an abortion on acid, or even a piss over the side of the porch.
Cyberia is frightening to everyone. Not just to technophobes, rich businessmen, midwestern farmers and suburban housewives, but, most of all, to the boys and girls hoping to ride the crest of the informational wave.
Surf’s up.
September 9th, 2005
Muppet Personality Test
Check it out - I was surprised that I turned out to have the personality of my all time favorite muppet, Animal - the wild-eye drummer of the Electric Mayhem Band. Fitting I suppose. Although it must be the inner me - the muppet I wish I was keeps popping up at the most inconvenient times. Like during the most important meetings of my career that usually turned out to be the last meetings of that particular phase of that particular career. Who Knows. I used to want to grow up to be Animal. Now I want to grow down so that being Animal would be cool.
September 8th, 2005
Results from The Advertising Slogan Generator for the words “gus”, “redneck” and “electric redneck”:
Gotta Lotta Gus.
There’s no Wrong Way to Eat a Gus.
Break Me Off a Piece of That Gus.
A Day Without Gus is Like a Day Without Sunshine.
Cleans Your Floor Without Gus.
Do You Eat The Gus Last?
Once You Pop, You Can’t Stop Gus.
Leaves Your Gus Minty not Mediciney.
It’s Slightly Rippled with a Flat Gus.
Only Gus Has The Answer.
Would You Give Someone Your Last Redneck?
Full Of Eastern Redneck.
The Loudest Noise Comes From The Electric Redneck.
With A Name Like Redneck, It Has To Be Good.
Do You Eat The Redneck Last?
Come to Life. Come to Redneck.
Built Redneck Tough.
My Doctor Says ‘Redneck’.
Watch Out, There’s a Redneck About.
That’ll be the Redneck.
There’s Always Room For Redneck.
It’s the Bright One, it’s the Right One, that’s Redneck.
Poppin’ Fresh Electric Redneck.
Make Room for the Electric Redneck.
You Can’t Top an Electric Redneck.
Wouldn’t You Like To Be An Electric Redneck Too?
September 8th, 2005
CHAPTER 17
The New Colonialism
As we slouch farther toward the chaos attractor at the end of time, we find most of our networks, electronic or otherwise, working against their original aims or being diverted toward different ends. Subnetworks and metanetworks grow like mold over the original medium. Be it a symptom of social decay, cyberian genesis, or both, the growth of new colonialism around and within our old systems and structures brings a peculiar sort of darkness-before-dawnishness to the close of this millennium.
Compare our subculture of cyberians to Hogan’s Heroes carrying out rebellious acts under the noses of guards and through underground tunnels in the prison camp. Perhaps the most telling sign of our times is that the United States has a greater percentage of its population in jail than does any other country, and is breeding a criminal subculture further and further removed from accepted social scheme.
It was in prison that legendary phone phreaque Cap’n Crunch (who got his name for using a two-note whistle he found in a box of Cap’n Crunch cereal to make free long-distance phone calls) was forced to join the ranks of the criminal subculture. His real name is John Draper, and I find him at Toon Town operating with a computer-video interface.
After several meteoric climbs to the top of the programming profession, Draper is in the low phase of an endless rags-to-riches-to-rags curve that has defined the past twenty or so years of his life. It seems as though every time he develops a brilliant new program, an investigation links one of his friends, or friends of his friends, to something illegal, and then Draper’s equipment–along with his livelihood–gets confiscated, delaying his progress and costing him his contract. The large, gray-haired, bespectacled cyber veteran suggests that we duck into the brain-machine room to speak about his prison experience.
“In order for me to survive in jail, I had to make myself valuable enough so they wouldn’t harass me or molest me. So I had to tell everybody how to make calls, how to get in to the system, and what to do when they got in there. We’d have little classes. Out of pure survival I was forced to tell all and, believe me, I did.”
Draper believes that thousands of telephone and computer crimes resulted from his prison classes. When his technologies got in the hands of inmates serving time for embezzlement or fraud, they in turn developed some of the most advanced industrial hacking done today.
Draper’s experiences mirror the ways in which cyberian counterculture movements form in society at large. For intellectual, emotional, or even physical survival, clusters of people–not always linked by geography–form posses characterized by the specific networks holding them together. This, then, initiates a bottom-up iteration of cyberian ideals.
One startling example is the growing community of “Mole People,” who inhabit the forgotten tunnels of New York’s subway system. The New York City Transit Authority estimates that about five thousand people live on the first level, but that accounts for only one-third of the tunnel system. Other officials estimate that closer to twenty-five thousand people live in the entire system, which goes much farther down than police or transit workers dare trek, and consists of hundreds of miles of abandoned tunnels built in the 1890s. The ash-colored denizens of the subways elect their own mayors, furnish their underground apartments, find electricity, and in some cases install running water. Sounding more like an urban myth than a real population, mole people claim that their children, born in the tunnels, have never seen the light of day. Others speak of patrols, organized by mole leaders to prevent their detection by making sure that outsiders who stray into their campsites and villages never stray out again. Whether or not this is an exaggeration, we do know that numerous television news crews who have attempted to reach the lower tunnels were pelted with rocks and forced to retreat.
“It’s for security,” explains J.C., who was asked by the mayor of his Mole community to explain their philosophy of life to Jenny Toth, a New York journalist who befriended the Mole People in 1990. “Society lives up in a dome and locks all its doors so it’s safe from the outside. We’re locked out down here. They ignore us. They’ve forgotten what it is to survive. They value money, we value survival. We take care of each other.” Alienation, disorientation, and, most of all, necessity, form new bonds of community cooperation not experienced above ground.
A man who lives hundreds of feet under Grand Central Station explains: “You go down there, play with some wires, and you got light. And before you know it, there are twelve to fifteen people down there with you. They become like neighborhoods; you’re friends with everyone. You know the girls at the end and the family in the middle. When someone gets sick, we put our money together to get medicine. Most people team up. You can just about make it that way.”
This bottom-up networking is analogous to the formation of the Global Electronic Village, which also depends on bonds of mutual interest and like-minded politics. Each system is made up of people whose needs are not met or are even thwarted by established channels and each system exploits an existing network, using it for a purpose that was not intended. These kinds of communities make up an increasingly important component in the overall dynamical system of society. Programmer Marc de Groot compares this social landscape with the conclusions of systems math:
“The classic example of the feedback loop is the thermostat, which controls itself. I think we’re becoming aware of the fact that the most common type of causality is feedback, and not linear or top-down. The effect goes back and effects the cause, and the cause effects the effect. We have a society where power becomes decentralized, we get feedback loops, where change can come from below. People in power will try to eliminate those threats.”
The fears about cyberian evolution may stem from a partial awareness of these new channels of feedback and iteration. Those who believe they are currently in power attempt to squash the iterators, but find that their efforts are ineffectual. Like mutating bacteria or even cockroaches, feedback loops will foster adaptive changes faster than new antibiotics or bug sprays can be developed to combat them. Meanwhile, the formerly powerless who now see themselves as vitally influencing the course of history through feedback and iteration become obsessed with their causes and addicted to their techniques. But however obsessed or addicted they get, and however fearfully or violently society reacts, feedback and iteration slowly and inevitably turn the wheel of revolution, anyway.
Negative Feedback Iteration
Feedback loops are mathematics’ way of phrasing revolution and are as natural a part of existence as plankton, volcanoes, or thyroid glands. The negative feedback loops to a mechanistic, consumption-based culture are irate labor, ecoterrorists, and consciousness-expansion advocates, who conduct their iterations through cheap communications, printing, and video production.
Take Chris Carlsson, for example, editor of Processed World, a magazine that he says is “about the underside of the information age and the misery of daily life in a perverse society based on the buying and selling of human time.” Carlsson looks more like a college professor than an office worker; he’s a brilliant, ex-sixties radical who dropped out of the rat race to make his living as an office temp data processor in San Francisco.
On a lazy Sunday morning, Carlsson explains the intricacies of his historical-philosophical perspective as he changes the screen in his pipe and the grounds in his espresso pot. He believes that we are currently living in a “socially constructed perversion,” an unnatural reality that will be forced to change. According to Carlsson, our society is addicted to consumption, and this addiction leads us to do things and support systems that benefit only the dollar, not the individual. The systems themselves are constructed, like Muzak, to squash the notion of personal power.
“It’s hard to imagine how else it could be. The only questions you are asked in this society are, `What do you want to buy?’ and, `What are you going to do for money?’ You don’t get to say, `What do I want out of life and how can I contribute to the totality?’ There’s no mechanism at all in our society that promotes some sort of role for the individual.”
The “processed world” is a place where the bottom line is all that matters. Workers are paid as little as possible to produce goods that break as quickly as possible, or serve no function whatsoever other than to turn a buck. For this final phase in the era of credit and GNP expansion, there can never be enough stuff–if there were, the corporations would go out of business. The motivation is to sell; the standard of living, the environment, cultural growth, and meaning to life do not enter into the equation.
Chemical companies who want to sell chemicals, for example, thrive on weak crops and cattle; they hope to create a chemically dependent agriculture. “Thus, the first application of gene-splicing technology will be bovine growth hormone,” Carlsson says. “Not that we need more milk in this country; we have a surplus!” But the growth hormone will increase a cow’s output of milk. Farmer Jones will need to keep up with Farmer Smith, so he, too, will buy the hormone. Unfortunately, the hormone also weakens the cows’ knees, which requires that the farmers purchase more antibiotics as well as other drugs, bringing more dollars to the chemical companies. Another example: It is to the chemical company’s advantage to lobby against sterile fruit flies as a way of combating the medfly crisis in California. By “persuading” the government to allow the use of pesticides, chemical companies weaken the plants they are “saving,” and thus create further dependence on fertilizers and medications–more money, less effectiveness, greater pollution.
Carlsson does not blame the “people in charge” for our predicament. “The chairman of the board doesn’t feel like he has any power. He’s just as trapped in. Nothing matters to the stockholders but how the balance sheet looks.” Further, as the work environment increasingly dehumanizes, the system loses precious feedback channels with which it can correct itself. The dollar oversimplifies the complexities of a working society (and its needs–as we’ll see later in this chapter–have simplified the global ecology to disastrous levels). As the workplace gets more automated, workers become merely a part of the spreadsheet: their input and output are monitored, regulated, and controlled by computer. As jobs are replaced by machines (which do the work more efficiently), workers are demoted rather than promoted. Any special skills they developed over time now become obsolete.
The way out, according to Carlsson, is subversion and sabotage.
“When you sell your time, you are giving up your right to decide what’s worth doing. The goal of the working class should be to abolish what they do! Not being against technology, but being against the way it’s being used. Human beings can find subversive uses for things like computers and photocopy machines. They were not made to enhance our ability to communicate, and yet they do. They provide everybody with a chance to speak through the printed medium. The work experience tells the worker that he has no say, and that what he is doing is a complete waste of time. But this profound emptiness and discontent is not evident on TV. Everything in society erodes your self-esteem.”
Processed World magazine hopes to enhance the worker’s self-esteem by appealing to his intellect and giving him tips on how to subvert the workplace. It’s a homespun publication that articulates the experience of office workers so that they may realize they’re not going crazy and their situations are not unique. It serves also as a forum for workers to share their observations on consumer society, abuses at work and techniques for fighting back. Slogans like “sabotage … it’s as simple as pulling a plug” and joke ads for “cobalt-magnet data-zappers” for erasing office hard disks accompany the articles and testimonials written by reader/workers about ways in which to disable the workplace and thus disrupt the evil practices of big companies.
The computer is the primary instrument of sabotage in the workplace. The techniques that industrial hackers use against competitive companies are now being used by workers against their own companies. Usually–as throughout Cyberia–the routes to the greatest destruction have already been established unwittingly by the company bosses in the hope of better monitoring and controlling their employees.
On a tour of the data entry department at a major insurance firm, a computer serviceman and office saboteur explains the way things can get reversed. “Our office managers monitor the workers through a special intercom feature in the worker’s telephone,” he whispers as we stroll through the tract-deskscape. “I know this because I installed the phone system, and I taught the office managers how to use it, and I know that they do use it, because I monitor them!” We arrive at the desk of another worker, who plays video games on his computer. When he hits the escape key, a dummy spreadsheet covers the screen.
“Show him how the phone works,” my escort requests.
The worker punches some keys on his phone and hands me the receiver. Someone is dictating a memo about how to order paper.
“That’s the floor manager’s office,” the worker says, smiling proudly as he takes back the receiver and carefully hangs it up.
My guide boasts about the achievement. “You can repair a Rolm (a subsidiary of IBM) phone system through a modem to act like a bugging device–useful for bosses to spy on their workers. But if you modify the software–which is easy enough to do through the modem by remote control without ever entering the boss’s office–you can take advantage of the same feature in reverse!”
“He did it right from my desk with my computer!” adds the worker, thankfully.
As we walk, most of the workers smile knowingly at my guide. They all are in this together. In the lingo of office sabotage, he confides proudly, “We’ve got this place pretty well locked up.”
Sabotage, like computer hacking, can be seen as both a natural iteration and a destructive urge. True, it makes people feel more powerful and sends a warning signal–in the form of negative feedback–to the system as a whole. But it’s also an opportunity for people to vent their frustration in general. A child who feels powerless and unpopular suddenly gains strength and status with a computer modem. An anonymous worker who cannot see any purpose to his life gets an ego boost when his well-planned prank disables an entire company.
Whether the motives are cyberian idealism or masturbatory ego gratification, these actions still serve as iterative feedback. We cannot dismiss these efforts as neurotic impulse or childish power fantasy just because their perpetrators cannot justify themselves with cyberian rhetoric. Even the most obsessive or pathological urges of saboteurs, when viewed in a cyberian context, appear to be the natural reactions of an iterative system against the conditions threatening its existence.
The most pressing of these conditions, of course, are the ones currently destroying the biosphere. As James Lovelock observed, Gaia defends herself through iterative feedback loops like plankton, algae, trees, and insects, which help maintain a balanced earth environment and conditions suitable for biological life. One such iterative loop may be the radical environmental group Earth First! These self-proclaimed “ecoterrorists,” like their founder, the burly Arizonan Dave Foreman, have developed an extraordinarily virulent sociopolitical virus called “ecotage” or “ecodefense.”
Ecotage is a terrorist approach to the defense of the environment. Rather than conduct protests, stage blockades, or influence legislation through lobbying, ecoterrorists perform neat, quick, surgical maneuvers that thwart the aims of those who would violate the environment. These actions, called “monkeywrenching,” take the form of burying spikes in trees so that they may not be cut down; disabling vehicles; pulling down signs or electric wires; destroying heavy machinery or aircraft; spiking roads or woods to make them impassable; triggering animal traps; and, most important, getting away with it. Their acts are never random, but carefully planned to make the greatest impact with the least effort and risk. Cutting two cables on a helicopter rotor the evening before an insecticide spray, for example, does more damage than stealing the distributor caps out of forty jeeps in a company’s parking lot. A few low-cost, well-planned ecotage attacks can make an entire deforestation project unprofitable and lead to its cancellation.
As Foreman explains in his Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching–a kind of Anarchist’s Cookbook with a purpose–monkeywrenching is powerful because it is nonviolent (no forms of life are targeted, only machines), not organized (impossible to be infiltrated), individual, specifically targeted, timely, dispersed throughout the country, diverse, fun, essentially nonpolitical, simple, deliberate, and ethical. Of course the ethics are arguable. Businesses have a “legal” right to destroy the environment (especially if they’ve paid big bills lobbying or bribing for that right). The monkeywrenchers feel that the current political system is merely a gear in the destruction machine, and that the only tactic left is direct action.
Bob and Kali (yes, she’s a TOPY member) are ecoterrorists from the Northwest. They have limited their activities (or at least the ones they’re willing to talk about) to “billboard trashing and revision.” Their hope is to preserve national parks and reverse the propaganda campaigns of would-be environmental violators. Kali, who works as a waitress in an interstate highway rest stop, is an odd mix of American sweetheart blonde and ankle-braceleted Deadhead–on her way from the counter to the tables she can be heard humming “Sugar Magnolia” through her Colgate smile. Her unthreatening demeanor allows her to listen in on and even provoke truckers’ and construction workers’ conversations about ongoing projects. Her boyfriend, Bob, then gives this information to more serious monkeywrenchers in their area over his school’s computer network.
Bob is an art-studio assistant at the state university farther up the highway. He was motivated to take action against billboarding on his long drives down to the diner to pick Kali up from work each evening. “There’s more and more billboards every week. There was a law passed to limit the number of billboards, but every time we pass a good law like that, the opposite thing happens in reality.” Taking his pseudonym Bob from the “savior” of the Church of the Subgenius, a satirical cyberian cult, the young man has a tongue-in-cheek attitude toward his monkeywrenching and delights in the efficiency of his visual wit.
“One two-dollar can of spray paint can reverse a hundred-thousand dollar media campaign. You use their own words against them, expose their lies with humor.” Using his own version of a device diagramed in Foreman’s Field Guide, Bob puts a can of spray paint on top of a long metal rod with a string and trigger in the handle. From the ground, he can alter or add to a billboard many feet above his reach. Following Foreman’s advice, he keeps the tool dismantled and hidden in a locked compartment of his truck, and varies the locations and times of his “hits” so that he won’t get caught. “The book says answer the billboards. That’s what we do. It’s like they leave space for our comments.” Among Bob’s favorites are painting tombstones on the horizons of Marlboro Country and changing campaign slogans from “elect” to eRect.”
Both Bob and Kali support the activities of more aggressive monkeywrenchers, but fear keeps them from going on those missions. “Not everyone’s gotta risk their lives,” Kali explains. “They’ve gotten chased by guys with bats.”
“But what they’re doing is essential,” Bob adds. “It’s a completely natural response. When the body gets sick, it makes more white blood cells. These guys are like that. We’re like that, too, to an extent.”
From a cyberian perspective, ecoterrorists are natural generators of negative feedback in the great Gaian organism. Even Brendan O’Regan, the reserved and mild-mannered vice president for research at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, acknowledges the place of ecotage as a valuable meme against the violation of the planet:
“Even if you disagree with the tactic, they’re pointing out that industry is generating a kind of anarchy toward the environment. Ecoterrorists generate an anarchy back. There is an extreme that is driving it. Ecotage is sabotage on behalf of the environment. It’s done rationalizing that due process of law and ethical concern is not being followed by the owners of the system, so `fuck them.’ And a lot of this stuff will be happening in concert with and through technologies like the fax, copiers, the computer network. It’s chaos against chaos.”
The systems set in place by the “establishment,” as long as we’re using blanket terminology, created a new series of feedback loops and iterators to replace or at least make us as aware of the natural ones destroyed by deforestation and environmental tyranny. Large organizations like Greenpeace depend on computer hackers and satellite experts both to set up their own communications networks and to intercept law enforcement communications about planned actions. Illegal television broadcasting vans, which have already been used in Germany, are currently under construction in the Bay Area; they will be capable of substituting scheduled programming with radical propaganda, or even superimposing text over regular transmissions.
Ecoterrorists are never antitechnology. They see high tech as a tool for faster and more effective feedback and iteration. For these and other reasons, the developers of the Gaia hypothesis do not predict doom for our planet–especially from the development of inventions that appear unnatural. They realize the place of technology in the bigger picture, and even its value in regulating the biosphere. As James Lovelock, originator of the Gaia hypothesis, assures us:
“In the end we may achieve a sensible and economic technology and be more in harmony with the rest of Gaia. There can be no voluntary resignation from technology. We are so inextricably part of the technosphere that giving it up is as unrealistic as jumping off a ship in mid-Atlantic to swim the rest of the journey in glorious independence.”
Howard Rheingold, a social theorist, editor of the Whole Earth Review and author of computer culture books including Virtual Reality, also admits: “It might be correct that technology was the wrong choice a long time ago and that it led to a really fucked up situation. But I don’t see a way of getting out of this–without most of the people on Earth dying–without learning how to manage technology.”
The danger here, of course, is in overestimating our potential to see our situation clearly and to implement technology toward the ends necessary. An oversimplification of the issues is as dangerous to our survival and, even more, our liberation, as is the reduction and simplification of our biosphere through the elimination of the millions of species upon which Gaia depends for feedback and iteration.
September 8th, 2005
Dateline: Wednesday, September 7 2005
9000 block of Wayne Street, Aubrey area -
A man complained to sheriff’s deputies Sunday morning that, sometime the night before, someone smeared a peanut butter and jelly sandwich all over his car.
Denton County Crime Stoppers will pay a reward of up to $1,000 for information leading to an arrest in these or other crimes. Callers can remain anonymous. Call 1-800-388-TIPS (8477).
September 8th, 2005
PART 5
Warfare in Cyberia: Ways and Memes
CHAPTER 16
Cracking the Ice
Like a prison escape in which the inmates crawl through the ventilation ducts toward freedom, rebels in Cyberia use the established pathways and networks of our postmodern society in unconventional ways and often toward subversive goals. Just as the American rail system created a society of hobos who understood the train schedule better than the conductors did, the hardwiring of our world through information and media networks has bred hackers capable of moving about the datasphere almost at will. The nets that were designed to hold people captive to the outworn modalities of a consumer society are made from the same fibers cyberians are now using in their attempt to climb out of what they see as a bottomless pit of economic strife, ecological disaster, intellectual bankruptcy, and moral oblivion.
Warfare in Cyberia is conducted on an entirely new battleground; it is a struggle not over territory or boundaries but over the very definitions of these terms. It’s like a conflict between cartographers, who understand the ocean as a grid of longitude and latitude lines, and surfers, who understand it as a dance of chaotic waves. The resistance to renaissance comes out of the refusal to cope with or even believe in the possibility of a world free of precyberian materialism and its systems of logic, linearity, and duality. But, as cyberians argue, these systems could not have come into existence without dangerous patriarchal domination and the subversion of thousands of years of nondualistic spirituality and feminine, earth-based lifestyles.
Pieced together from the thoughts and works of philosophers like Terence McKenna and Ralph Abraham, the ancient history of renaissance and antirenaissance from the cyberian perspective goes something like this: People lived in tribes, hunting, gathering, following animal-herd migrations for ready food supplies, enjoying free sex, and worshipping the elements. As they followed the herds, these nomads also ate the psychedelic mushrooms that grew on the animals’ dung, and this kept any ego or dominator tendencies in check. The moment when people settled down in agricultural communities was the moment when everything went wrong. Instead of enjoying the earth’s natural bounty, people worked the soil for food–an act considered by extremists to represent the rape of Gaia and the taming of nature. Psychedelics fell out of the daily diet because people weren’t wandering around anymore. They had time to sit around and invent things to make life easier, like the wheel, and so came the notions of periodicity and time.
Time was a particular problem, because if anything was certain to these people, it was the fact that after a certain amount of time, everybody dies. The only way to live on after death is through offspring–but ancient men did not know who their offspring were. Only women knew for sure which children were their own. In previous, psychedelics-influenced tribes, the idea of one’s own personal children mattered less, because everyone identified with the tribe. Now, with developed egos, men became uncomfortable with free love; thus patriarchal domination was born. Men began to possess women so that they would know which children were their own. The ideas of “property,” “yours,” “mine,” and a host of other dualities were created. In an attempt to deny the inevitability of death, a society of possessors was born, which developed into a race of conquerors and finally evolved into our own nation of consumers.
Others blame the invention of time for the past six thousand years of materialist thought. Fearing the unknown (and, most of all, death), ancient man created time as a way to gauge and control his unpredictable reality. Time provided a framework in which unpredictable events could appear less threatening within an overall “order” of things. Of course the measured increments were not the time itself (any more than the ticks of a watch say anything about the space between them when the real seconds go by), but they provided a kind of schedule by which man could move through life and decay toward death in an orderly fashion. Whenever man came upon something he did not understand, he put over it a grid, with which he could cope. The ocean and its seemingly random sets of waves is defined by a grid of lines, as are the heavens, the cities, and the rest of reality. The ultimate lines are the ones made into boxes to categorize and control human behavior. They are called laws, which religions and eventually governments emerged to write and enforce.
According to cyberian logic, the grids of reality are creations. They are not necessarily real. The Troubadours believed this. People burned at the stake as witches in the fourteenth century died for this. Scientists with revolutionary ideas must commit to this. Anyone who has taken a psychedelic drug experiences this. Fantasy gamers play with this. Hackers who crack the “ice” of well-protected computer networks prove this. Anyone who has adopted the cyberian vision lives this.
The refusal to recognize the lines drawn by “dominator society” is a worse threat to that society than is the act of consciously stepping over them. The exploitation of these lines and boxes for fun is like playing hopscotch on the tablets of the Ten Commandments. The appropriation of the strings of society’s would-be puppeteers in order to tie their fingers and liberate the marionettes is a declaration of war.
Such a war is now being waged, and on many levels at once. The cyberian vision is a heretical negation of the rules by which Western society has chosen to organize itself. Those who depend on this organization for power vehemently protect the status quo by enforcing the laws. This is not a traditional battle between conservative and liberal ideologies, which are debates over where to put the lines and how thick to draw them. Today’s renaissance has led to a war between those who see lines as real boundaries, and those who see them as monkey bars. They can be climbed on.
Cyberian warriors are dangerous to the “line people” because they can move in mysterious ways. Like ninjas, they can creep up walls and disappear out of sight because they don’t have to follow the rules. Cyberian activities are invisible and render the time and money spent on prison bars and locks worthless. The inmates disappear through the vents.
As Marshall McLuhan and even George Orwell predicted, the forces in “power” have developed many networks with which they hope to control, manipulate, or at least capitalize on the behaviors and desires of the population. Television and the associated media have bred a generation of conditioned consumers eager to purchase whatever products are advertised. Further, to protect the sovereignty of capitalist nations and to promote the flow of cash, the defense and banking industries have erected communications networks that hardwire the globe together. Through satellites, computers, and telecommunications, a new infrastructure–the pathways of the datasphere–has superimposed itself over the existing grids like a metagrid, enforcing underlying materialism, cause and effect, duality and control.
But cyberians may yet prove that this hardwiring has been done a little too well. Rather than create an easy-to-monitor world, the end of the industrial era left us with an almost infinite series of electronic passages. The passages proved the perfect playground for the dendrites of expanding young consciousnesses, and the perfect back doors to the power centers of the modern world. A modem, a PC, and the intent to destabilize might prove a more serious threat to the established order than any military invasion. Nowhere is the fear of Cyberia more evident than in the legislation of computer laws and the investigation and prosecution of hackers, crackers, and data-ocean pirates.
Forging Electronic Frontiers
There are as many points of view about hacker ethics, responsibility, and prosecution as there are players. Just how close to digital anarchy we move depends as much on the way we perceive law and order in the datasphere as it does on what’s actually going on. While many young people with modems and personal computers are innocently exploring networks as they would the secret passages in an interactive fantasy game, others are maliciously destroying every system they can get into. Still other computer users are breaking in to networks with purpose: to gain free telephone connections, to copy information and code, or to uncover corporate and governmental scandals. No single attitude toward computer hacking and cracking will suffice.
Unfortunately, the legal and law-enforcement communities understand very little about computers and their users. Fear and ignorance prevail in computer crime prosecution, which is why kids who “steal” a dollar’s worth of data from the electronic world suffer harsher prosecution than do kids who steal bicycles or even cars from the physical world. Raids have been disastrous: Bumbling agents confiscate equipment from nonsuspects, destroy legally obtained and original data, and even, on one occasion, held at gunpoint a suspected hacker’s uninvolved young sister. After a series of investigations and botched, destructive arrests and raids (which proved more about law enforcement’s inability to manage computer use, abuse, and crime than it did about the way hackers work, play, and think), two interested parties–Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus, and John Barlow, Grateful Dead lyricist and computer-culture journalist–founded the Electronic Frontiers Foundation.
The EFF hopes to serve as a bridge of logic between computer users and law enforcement so that cyberspace might be colonized in a more orderly, less antagonistic fashion. In Barlow’s words, the seemingly brutal tactics of arresting officers and investigators “isn’t so much a planned and concerted effort to subvert the Constitution as the natural process that takes place whenever there are people who are afraid and ignorant, and when there are issues that are ambiguous regarding constitutional rights.”
The EFF has served as a legal aid group defending hackers whom they believe are being unjustly prosecuted and promoting laws they feel better regulate cyberspace. But while the EFF attempts to bring law and order to the new frontier, many hackers still feel that Barlow and Kapor are on “the other side” and unnecessarily burdening virgin cyberspace with the failed legal systems of previous eras.
Barlow admits that words and laws can never adequately define something as undefinable as Cyberia: “I’m trying to build a working scale model of a fog bank out of bricks. I’m using a building material that is utterly unsuited to the representation of the thing I’m trying to describe.”
And while even the most enlightened articulators of Cyberia find themselves tongue-tied when speaking about the new frontier, other, less-informed individuals think they have the final word. The media’s need to explain the hacker scene to the general public has oversimplified these issues and taken us even farther from understanding them. Finally, young hackers and crackers feed their developing egos with overdramatized reports on their daring, and any original cyberian urge to explore cyberspace is quickly overshadowed by their notoriety as outlaws.
Phiber Optik, for example, a twenty-year-old hacker from New York, plea-bargained against charges that he and his friends stole access to “900″ telephone services. When he was arrested, his television, books, telephone, and even his Walkman confiscated along with his computer gear. While he sees the media as chiefly responsible for the current misconceptions about the role of hackers in cyberspace, he appears to take delight in the media attention that his exploits have brought him.
“People tend to think that the government has a lot to fear from a rebellious hacker lashing out and destroying something, but we think we have a lot more to fear from the government because it’s within their power to take away everything we own and throw us in jail. I think if people realize we aren’t a dissident element at all, they would see that the government is the bad one.”
Phiber claims that the reason why hackers like himself break into systems is to explore them, but that the media, controlled by big business, presents them as dangerous. “The term they love to use is `threat to society.’ All they see are the laws. All they see is a blip on the computer screen, and they figure the person broke the law. They don’t know who or how old he is. They get a warrant and arrest him. It’s a very inhuman thing.”
But this is the very argument that most law enforcement people use against hackers like Phiber Optik: that the kids don’t get a real sense of the damage they might be inflicting because their victims are not real people–just blips on a screen.
Gail Thackery served as an assistant attorney general for Arizona and is now attorney for Maricopa County. She has worked on computer crime for two decades with dozens of police agencies around the country. She was one of the prosecuting attorneys in the Sun Devil cases, so to many hackers she is considered “the enemy,” but her views on the legislation of computer laws and the prosecution of offenders are, perhaps surprisingly, based on the same utopian objective of a completely open system.
“I see a ruthless streak in some kids,” says Thackery, using the same argument as Phiber. “Unlike a street robbery, if you do a computer theft, your victim is unseen. It’s a fiction. It’s an easy transition from Atari role-modeling games to computer games to going out in the network and doing it in real life.”
The first hacker with whom she came in contact was a university student who in 1973 “took over” a class. Intended for social workers who were afraid of computers, the class was designed to acquaint them with cyberspace. “What happened,” explains Thackery, “was this kid had planted a Trojan horse program. When the students logged on for their final exam, out came, instead of the exam, a six-foot-long typewriter-art nude woman. And these poor technophobic social workers were pounding keys. They went cuckoo. Their graduation was delayed, and in some cases it delayed their certification, raises, and new titles.”
Thackery sees young hackers as too emotionally immature to cope with a world at their fingertips. They are intellectually savvy enough to create brilliant arguments about their innocent motivations, but in private they tell a different story. “I always look at their downloads from bulletin boards. They give legal advice, or chat and talk about getting busted, or even recite statutes. Kids gang up saying, `Here’s a new system. Let’s trash this sucker! Let’s have a contest and see who can trash it first!’ They display real callous, deliberate, criminal kinds of talk.”
Gail’s approach to law enforcement is not to imprison these young people but to deprogram them. She feels they have become addicted to their computers and use them to vent their frustrations in an obsessive, masturbatory way. Just as a drug user can become addicted to the substances that provide him access to a world in which he feels happier and more powerful, a young computer user, who may spend his days as a powerless geek in school, suddenly gains a new, powerful identity in cyberspace. Like participants in role-playing games, who might shoplift or play edge games under the protective veils of their characters, hackers find new, seemingly invulnerable virtual personas.
“After we took one kid’s computer away,” Gail says, speaking more like a social worker than a prosecuting attorney, “his parents said the change is like night and day. He’s doing better in school, he’s got more friends, he’s even gone out for the ball team. It’s like all of a sudden this repressed human arises from the ashes of the hacker.”
The hacker argument, of course, is that another brilliant young cyberian may have been reconditioned into boring passivity. Thackery argues that it’s a victory for the renaissance. “I have a philosophical, idealistic view of where computers started to head, and where the vandals actually kicked us off the rails. We wanted everybody to have a Dick Tracy wristradio, and at this point I know so many people, victims who have had their relationship to technology ruined. All you have to do is have your ATM hacked by a thief and you start deciding technology’s not worth it.”
So, in the final analysis, Gail Thackery is as cyberian as the most truly radical of the hackers. These are the ones who hack not for a specific purpose or out of resentment but for the joy of surfing an open datastream. The padlocking of the electronic canals is the result of society’s inability to cope with freedom. Corporate and governmental leaders fear the potential change or instability in the balance of power, while macho, pubescent hackers act out the worst that their ego-imprisoned personalities can muster. In both analyses, the utopian promise of Cyberia is usurped by a lust for domination and a deeply felt resentment.
Several months after speaking with Thackery, I get a phone call late at night. She is crying; she’s furious and needs someone to listen.
“Phiber’s been busted again! Dammit!” She goes on to explain that the Secret Service in New York, along with the FBI and the Justice Department, have just arrested Phiber and several of his friends, including Outlaw and Renegade Hacker–the famed MOD (Masters of Deception) group. She takes it as a personal defeat:
“I always think when we catch these kids, we’ve been given a chance to show them a better way to spend their lives,” her voice cracks in despair, “to finish school, get real jobs, stay out of trouble because it’s a big bad world out there. Now Phiber’s gonna go to jail. A kid’s going to jail! I thought we made a dent but we blew it! I saw it coming.”
What Gail had observed was undue media attention and praise for a boy who deserved better–he deserved scorn and derision. According to Gail, the positive reinforcement bestowed on him by reporters, computer-company owners, and sixties’ heroes since his first arrest steered him toward more crime and antisocial behavior.
“Phiber was the only hacker to go on Geraldo. Where’s Geraldo now? Nowhere! The kid’s an embarrassment to him now!” Gail is fuming–”flaming,” as they say on the WELL. Looking at it from a cyberian vantagepoint, Phiber became a victim of the fact that observers always affect the object they are observing. Media observation–from the likes of Geraldo or even me–threw Phiber farther off course than he already was. His problems were iterated and amplified by the media attention.
“What really irks me,” adds Gail, “is guys like Kapor [Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus] and Jobbs [founder of Apple] misleading these kids by not scolding them for hacking. They shouldn’t pat them on the shoulder! Kapor has no idea what’s really going on out there today. When he was hacking, things were very different. It was a few pieces of code or a university prank. They’re scared to tell these kids the truth because of their liberal guilt.”
She calls them hypocrites: “These guys certainly protect their own software. The money that’s funding the EFF is the same money that’s paying for Lotus’s attorneys, and they protect their proprietary rights, believe me! Guys like Kapor and Jobbs are fighting an old sixties’ battle, and getting kids put in jail with their misleading touchy-feely rhetoric. The kids shouldn’t be made to fight these battles for them. It’s the kids who are on the front line!”
Gail explains that the young hackers blindly follow the wisdom of the original computer hackers–but that this is a logic no longer appropriate on today’s violent computer frontier. Organized crime and Colombian drug cartels now hire young hackers to provide them with secure, untraceable communications and intelligence.
“Now these kids are being used by drug dealers! They are being prostituted, but it’s the kids who go to jail! Where’s the EFF now?”
Cyberia is not real yet, but the problems facing it are. On one hand, fledgling cyberians are still rooted in the political activism and cultural extremism of the 1960s and 70s, and eager to please the people they consider their forefathers–Tim Leary, Steven Jobbs, Mitch Kapor, William Burroughs–by wholeheartedly embracing their lifestyles and priorities. Kids who attempt to emulate William Burroughs will probably become addicted to drugs, and kids who take Steven Jobbs’s words at face value may end up prosecuted for computer crime. On the other hand, the technologies and pathways that young, brilliant cyberians forge are irresistible both to themselves and their would-be exploiters. Ego invades hyperspace.
Maybe the detractors are right. Maybe the cyberian technologies are not intrinsically liberating. While they do allow for cultural change through principles such as feedback and iteration, it appears that they can almost as quickly be subverted by those who are unready or unwilling to accept the liberation they could offer. But others present convincing arguments that the operating principles of Cyberia eventually will win out and create a more just Global Village.
September 7th, 2005
LOS ANGELES - Bob Denver, whose portrayal of goofy castaway Gilligan on the 1960s TV show “Gilligan’s Island†made him an iconic figure to generations of TV viewers, has died. He was 70.
He died Friday at Wake Forest University Baptist Hospital in North Carolina of complications from treatment he was receiving for cancer, his agent, Mike Eisenstadt, told The Associated Press on Tuesday.
His wife, Dreama, and children Patrick, Megan, Emily and Colin were with Denver, who also had undergone quadruple heart bypass surgery earlier this year.
“He was my everything and I will love him forever,†Dreama Denver said in a statement.
Denver’s signature role was Gilligan, but when he took the role in 1964 he was already widely known to TV audiences for another iconic character, Maynard G. Krebs, the bearded beatnik friend of Dwayne Hickman’s Dobie in the “The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis,†which aired on CBS from 1959 to 1963.
Gilligan was industrious but inept
Gilligan on the other hand was industrious but inept. And his character was as lovable as he was inept. Viewers embraced the skinny kid in the Buster Brown haircut and white sailor hat. So did the Minnow’s skipper, Jonas Grumby, who was played by Alan Hale Jr., and who always referred to his first mate affectionately as “little buddy.â€
“As silly as it seems to all of us, it has made a difference in a lot of children’s lives,†Dawn Wells, who played castaway Mary Ann Summers, once said. “Gilligan is a buffoon that makes mistakes and I cannot tell you how many kids come up and say, ‘But you loved him anyway.â€â€™
TV critics were less kind, dismissing the show as inane. But after it was canceled by CBS in 1967, it found new audiences over and over in syndicated reruns and reunion films, including 1981’s “The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan’s Island.†(It also led to the recent TBS reality series “The Real Gilligan’s Island.â€)
Remembering that three-hour tour
One of the most recent of those films was 2001’s “Surviving Gilligan’s Island: The Incredibly True Story of the Longest Three Hour Tour in History,†in which other actors portrayed the original seven-member cast while three of the four surviving original members, including Denver, narrated and reminisced.
“Gilligan’s Island†writer-creator Sherwood Schwartz insisted that the show had social meaning along with the laughs: “I knew that by assembling seven different people and forcing them to live together, the show would have great philosophical implications.â€
Denver went on to star in other TV series, including “The Good Guys†and “Dusty’s Trail,†as well as to make numerous appearances in films and TV shows.
But he never escaped the role of Gilligan, so much so that in one of his top 10 lists — “the top 10 things that will make you stand up and cheer†— “Late Show†host David Letterman once simply shouted out Denver’s name to raucous applause.
“It was the mid-’70s when I realized it wasn’t going off the air,†Denver told The Associated Press in 2001, noting then that he enjoyed checking eBay each day to keep up on the prices “Gilligan’s Island†memorabilia were fetching.
“I certainly didn’t set out to have a series rerun forever, but it’s not a bad experience at all,†he added.
© 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
September 6th, 2005
CHAPTER 15
Playing Roles
Ron Post, aka Nick Walker, is a gamemaster and aikido instructor from suburban New Jersey. In his world, fantasy and reality are in constant flux. Having fully accepted ontological relativism as a principle of existence, Ron and his posse of “gamers” live the way they play, and play as a way of life. It’s not that life is just a game, but that gaming is as good a model as any for developing the skills necessary to journey successfully through the experience of reality. It is a constant reminder that the rules are not fixed and that those who recognize this fact have the best time. Ron, his “adopted” brother Russel (they named themselves after the comic-book characters Ron and Russel Post), and about a dozen other twenty-something-year-olds gather each week at Ron’s house to play fantasy role-playing games. Like the psychedelic trips of the most dedicated shamanic warriors, these games are not mere entertainment. They are advanced training exercises for cyberian warriors.
Fantasy role playing games, unlike traditional board games, are unstructured and nonlinear. There is no clear path to follow. Instead, the game works like an acting exercise, where the players improvise the story as they go along. There is no way to “win” because the only object is to create, with the other players, the best story possible. Still, players must keep their characters alive, and having fun often means getting into trouble and then trying to get out again.
Ron’s game is based in GURPS, the Generic Universal Role Playing System, by Steve Jackson; it is a basic set of numerical and dice-roll rules governing the play of fantasy games. In addition, Jackson has provided “modules,” which are specific guidelines for gaming in different worlds. These modules specify realistic rules for play in worlds dominated by magic, combat, high-tech, even cyberpunk–a module that depicts the future of computer hacking so convincingly that the U.S. Secret Service seized it from Jackson’s office believing it was a dangerous, subversive document.
I meet Ron and Russel at Ron’s house, which is next to the train overpass in South New Brunswick. It’s the kind of day where everyone blames the sweltering heat on the greenhouse effect–too many weather records are being broken for too many days straight. The gamers sit on the front steps of Ron’s house with their shirts off, except for the two girls. The group defies the stereotypically nerdy image of role players–this is an attractive bunch; they don’t need gaming just to have a group of friends. Ron smiles and shakes my hand. His build is slight but well defined, which I imagine is due to hours of aikido practice. His hard-edged, pointy face and almost sinister voice counterbalance his quirky friendliness. He laughs at the cookies and wine I’ve brought as an offering of sorts, recognizing the gesture as one of unnecessary respect. He hands off the gifts to one of the other gamers, and as several begin to devour the food (these are not wealthy kids), Ron takes me upstairs to his room.
On his drafting table are the map and documents for Amarantis, the game Ron spent about a year designing for his group to play. It’s a world with a story as complex as any novel or trilogy–but one that will be experienced by only about a dozen kids. Amarantis is a continent that floats interdimensionally–that is, the land mass at its eastern coast changes over time. It could be one civilization one year and a completely different one the next. The western coast of the continent is called the “edge.” It’s a sharp drop into no one knows what–not even Ron, the creator of this world. He’ll decide what’s there if anyone ventures out over it. The “tech level” of this world is relatively low–crossbows are about as advanced as the weaponry gets, but there is magic. The power and accuracy of magic on Amarantis fluctuate with what Ron calls the “weather,” which refers not to atmospheric conditions but to the magical climate. The world is of particular interest to the IDC (the InterDimensional Council, which regulates such things), whose members recognize it as a nexus point for interdimensional mischief. Amarantis also has metaphorical influence over the rest of the fictional universe and even on other fantasy game worlds. What happens here–in a fractal way–is rippled out through the rest of that universe’s time and space. If the IDC can maintain decorum here, they can maintain it throughout the cosmos.
Ron wants me to play along today, so we must invent a character. I am to enter Amarantis as an IDC cadet, who has escaped the academy via its interdimensional transport system. But first we must create my character’s profile. My strengths and weaknesses are determined by a point system out of the GURPS manual. Each character has the same number of total points, but they are distributed differently. The more points a character has dedicated to agility, for example, the more tasks he can perform which require this asset.
During play, rolls of the dice are matched against skills levels to determine whether a character wins a fight, picks a lock, or learns to fly. If a character has spent too many points on wit and not enough on brute strength, he better not get cornered by a monster. GURPS has come up with numerical values for almost every skill imaginable, from quarterstaff combat to spaceship repair. Players may also acquire disabilities–like a missing arm or an uncontrollable lust for sex–which gives them points to use elsewhere. As in Neuromancer, characters must behave according to their profiles. Ron rewards players who, while maintaining their weaknesses, still manage to play skillfully.
For all the mathematics of character creation, the playing of the game itself is quite relaxed and chaotic. When Ron and I emerge from his bedroom we find today’s players sitting in the living room, shirts still off, ready for action. Ron sets up a table for himself in the corner with his map, a notebook of information, and a box of index cards for every character in Amarantis.
What’s going on here, essentially, is the creation of a fantasy story, where game rules and character points dictate the progression of the plot. A player thinks up an idea and is allowed to run with it as far as he can go until a conflict arises. Each character has an agenda of a sort, but these agendas do not get satisfied to the point where the game can end. For example, an agenda might be to extend the power of a large corporation, to destabilize the government of a city, or, as in my character’s case, to spread goodwill throughout the universe.
Ron declares my arrival: “Suddenly, in a blaze of light, a large metal obelisk crashes through the floor of the stage. Smoke and sparks fly everywhere. The obelisk opens to reveal …” And there I am. After I excuse away my arrival as a space-surfing accident–which no one believes–Russel, who plays a corporate businessman, invites everyone over to the Bacchic temple, a religious organization and megacorporation, to join the revelry already in progress. When we go there, Russel proceeds to seduce the young dancer (whose show I interrupted) with the promise of career advancement. As he takes her to his bedroom, I wander around the castlelike church. I hope to steal Russel’s prize possession: a flying dragon.
Rolls of the dice decide my fate. The other players, especially Russel, watch on in horror, powerless: his character is in bed with the dancer and can’t hear or see me even though the real Russel can. Other players worry for me–they know things about Russel’s immense powers that I don’t. But my character has a weakness for taking risks, and, disappointed by the lack of enthusiasm for my message of peace and harmony, I feel my only choice is to head straight for the edge and thus either certain doom or certain awakening. I find the dragon in an open courtyard. If I can get it to fly I’ll have an easy getaway, but the creature is unbridled. I use my skill of resourcefulness–”scrounging,” as it’s called in the game–to find a rope to fashion into a bridle. I roll the three dice–two 2’s and a 1. The other players moan. I’m a lucky roller, and the dice indicate that I easily find the rope. But the hard part is flying the creature. My dexterity is the skill that Ron pits against the dice. He calls this task a “D minus 8″–very hard. I need to roll a 10 or lower to succeed. I roll a 9. Amazing. Players cheer as gamemaster Ron describes the wiburn taking off into the night. I use the stars to navigate west, toward the edge. Russel stares at me from across the room and chills go up my spine. He reaches for the GURPS Magic Module to find a spell to get his dragon back … and to destroy me. He plans on using corporate/church money to hire a powerful professional wizard.
“Is the Wizard’s Hall open this late?” he asks Ron.
I look at Ron, who smiles knowingly at me. He had advised me to take “magic-protection” as a strength, and I reluctantly had done so. Thanks to Ron’s insistence in adding this feature to my character, none of Russel’s spells will work on me. I’m on my way to the edge.
FRP’s (fantasy role-playing games) are surprisingly engrossing. They share the hypertext, any-door-can-open feeling of the computer net. And, like on a computer bulletin board, FRP’s do not require that participants play in the same room or even the same city. Play is not based in linear time and space. A character’s decision might be mailed in, phoned in, enacted live, or decided ahead of time. Also, there is no “object” to the game. There is no finish line, no grand finale, no winner or loser. The only object would be, through the illusion of conflict, for players to create the most fascinating story they can, and keep it going for as long as possible. As with cyberian music and fiction, role-playing games are based on the texture and quality of the playing experience. They are the ultimate designer realities, and, like VR, the shamanic visionquest, or a hacking run, the adventurer moves from point to point in a path as nonlinear as consciousness itself. The priorities of FRPs reflect the liberation of gamers from the mechanistic boundaries imposed on them by a society obsessed with taking sides, winning, finishing, and evaluating.
Edge Games
These kids are not society’s unwitting dropouts. Indeed, they are extremely bright people. Ron and Russel met at a school for gifted yet underachieving high-schoolers in the Princeton area. They were smarter than their teachers, and knew it, which made them pretty uncontrollable and unprogrammable. Their brilliance was both their weakness and their strength. Because the subjects in school bored them, they turned to fantasy games that gave their minds the intellectual experience for which they thirsted. Of course, their elders never understood.
“Parental reaction is negative towards anything that teaches kids to think in original or creative ways,” Russel reflects. “Playing the games is an exercise in looking at different realities–not being stuck in a single reality. It gives you courage to see how you’re following many rules blindly in real reality.”
Russel explains his childhood to me as we share a shoplifted cigarette beneath the train overpass. He has learned that the rules of this world are not fixed, and both he and Ron live according to the principles of uncertainty and change. Like the heroes in a cyberpunk novel, they are social hackers who live between the lines of the system and challenge anything that seems fixed. When Russel is hungry and has no money, he steals food from the supermarket … but he doesn’t believe he’ll get caught. Geniuses take precautions that regular shoplifters don’t, I’m told, and survival to them becomes yet another “edge game.”
What is the edge? “The edge is the imaginary or imposed limit beyond which you’re not supposed to go, says Russel. Where you’ll get yourself really hurt. Pushing or testing the boundaries. Usually we find out the boundaries aren’t really there. It’s matter of putting yourself through the test of your own fear.”
Ron and Russel’s comfortable suburban upbringing offered them few opportunities to test their tolerance for fear. The boys were forced to create their own edge in the form of behavioral games, so that they could experience darker, scarier realities. These edge games ranged from stealing things from school and playing elaborate hoaxes on teachers to assuming new identities and living in these invented roles for weeks at a time. Once, after taking LSD, Ron, Russel, and their friend Alan went to the mall to play an edge game they called “space pirates.” Ron and Russel played interdimensional travelers, and Alan, who was temporarily estranged from them for social reasons, played a CIA-like spy trying to catch them. By the end of the acid trip and the game, Alan was crying hysterically in his mother’s kitchen, and the Post brothers had to decide “whether we were going to help Alan get himself back together from this and rebuild things, or let him crumble into the kitchen floor and become permanently alienated.”
Unlike the western border of the continent of Amarantis, to Russel and Ron the edge is no fantasy. Even Sarah Drew’s abortion on acid could be called an edge game. The consequences of playing too close can be extremely real and painful. Ron spends as much time as possible on the edge, but he takes the risks seriously. “If you fuck up on the edge, you die. Edge games involve real risk. Physical or even legal risk. Try this: Take a subway or a city street, walk around, and make eye contact with everyone you meet, and stare them down. See how far you can take it. You’ll come up to someone who won’t look away.”
Part of the training is to incorporate these lessons into daily life. All of life is seen as a fantasy role-playing game in which the stakes are physically real but the lessons go beyond physical reality. Unlike the characters of a cyberpunk book, human beings are not limited to their original programming. Instead, born gamers, humans have the ability to adopt new skills, attitudes, and agendas. They just need to be aware of the rules of designer reality in order to do so. Fantasy role-playing and playing edge games in real life are ways of developing a flexible character profile that can adapt to many kinds of situations. As Ron explains: “The object in role-playing games is playing with characters whose traits you might want to bring into your own life. You can pick up their most useful traits, and discard their unuseful ones from yourself.” One consciously chooses his own character traits in order to become a designer being.
Ron slowly slips into the Zen-master tone he probably uses with his students at the dojo. As the gamemaster, too, he serves as a psychologist and spiritual teacher, rewarding and punishing players’ behaviors, creating situations that challenge their particular weaknesses, and counseling them on life strategies. Like a guided visualization or the ultimate group therapy, a gaming session is psychodramatic. Moreover, adopting this as a life strategy leads gamers to very cyberian conclusions about human existence.
“I regard any behavior we indulge in as a game,” Ron says, waxing Jungian. “The soul is beyond not only three-dimensional space but beyond the illusion of linear time. Any method we use to move through three- or four-dimensional space is a game. It doesn’t matter how seriously we take it, or how serious its consequences are.”
Ron’s wife of just two weeks looks over at him, a little concerned. He qualifies his flippant take on designer reality: “To play with something is not necessarily to trivialize it. Anything you do in your life is a role-playing game. The soul does not know language–any personality or language we use for thinking is essentially taking on a role.”
To Ron, basically everything on the explicate order is a game–arbitrarily arranged and decided. Ron and Russel have adopted the cyberian literary paradigm into real life. Fantasy role-playing served as a bridge between the stories of cyberpunk and the reality of lives in Cyberia. They reject duality wholesale, seeing reality instead as a free-flowing set of interpretations.
Again, though, like surfers, they do not see themselves as working against anything. They do not want to destroy the system of games and role-playing that defines the human experience. They want only to become more fully conscious of the system itself.
Ron admits that they may have an occasional brush with the law, but, “we’re not rebels. There’s nothing to rebel against. The world is a playground. You just make up what to play today.”
These people don’t just trip, translate, and download. They live with a cyberian awareness full-time. Unlike earlier thinkers, who enjoyed philosophizing that life is a series of equations (mathematician Alfred North Whitehead’s observation that “understanding is the a-perception of patterns as such”), or Terence McKenna, who can experience “visual language” while on DMT, Ron guides his moment-to-moment existence by these principles.
“I’m aware that time is an illusion and that everything happens at once.” Ron puts his arm around his young wife, who tries not to take her husband too seriously. “I’ve got to perceive by making things into a pattern or a language. But I can choose which pattern I’m going to observe.”
Role-playing and edge games are yet another way to download the datastream accessed through shamanic journeys and DMT trips. But instead of moving into a completely unfiltered perception of this space and then integrating it piecemeal into normal consciousness, the gamer acknowledges the impossibility of experiencing reality without an interpretive grid, and chooses instead to gain full control over creation of those templates. Once all templates or characters become interchangeable, the gamer can “infer” reality, because he has the ability to see it from any point of view he chooses.
“The whole idea of gaming is to play different patterns and see which ones you like. I like playing the game where I live in a benevolent universe, where everything that happens to me is a lesson to help enlighten me further. I find that a productive game. But there are other games. Paranoia is a really good edge game. Or one can play predator: I live in a benevolent universe and I’m the other team.”
That’s probably why society has begun to react against designer beings: They don’t play by the rules. Cyberian art, literature, game-playing, and even club life are tolerated when they can be interpreted as passing entertainment or fringe behavior. Once the ethos of these fictional worlds trickles down into popular culture and human behavior, the threat of the cyberian imagination becomes real. And society, so far, is unwilling to cope with a reality that can be designed.
September 6th, 2005
CHAPTER 14
Hypertextual Forays
The writers of Cyberia underwent a similar evolution. The literary culture of Cyberia began as a dark, negative worldview but later developed into a multimedia celebration of timelessness and designer reality. Today, the literature of Cyberia–like its music–has become personified by cyberians themselves, who adopt into their own lives the ethos of a fictional designer reality.
The Interzone
“Beat” hero William Burroughs didn’t start the cyberpunk movement in literature, but he foresaw it, most notably in his novel Naked Lunch (1959). Although written long before video games or the personal computer existed, Burroughs’s works utilize a precybernetic hallucinatory dimension called the Interzone, where machines mutate into creatures, and people can be controlled telepathically by “senders” who communicate messages via psychedelics introduced into the victims’ bloodstreams.
Burroughs’s description of the psychic interface prophesizes a virtual reality nightmare: Senders gain “control of physical movements, mental processes, emotional responses, and apparent sensory impressions by means of bioelectrical signals injected into the nervous system of the subject. … The biocontrol apparatus [is] the prototype of one-way telepathic control.” Once indoctrinated, the drug user becomes an unwilling agent for one of the Interzone’s two main rivaling powers. The battle is fought entirely in the hallucinatory dimension, and involves “jacking in” (as William Gibson will later call it) through intelligent mutated typewriters.
Burroughs’s famed “prismatic” style of writing–almost a literary equivalent of Brian Eno’s Ambient Music–reads more like jazz than the narrative works of his contemporaries. Each word or turn of phrase can lead the reader down an entirely new avenue of thought or plot, imitating the experience of an interdimensional hypertext adventure. But as the pioneer of nonmimetic hallucinatory and even pornographic literature, Burroughs suffered condemnation from the courts and, worse, occasional addiction to the chemicals that offered him access to the far reaches of his consciousness. Unlike the cyberian authors of today, Burroughs was not free simply to romp in the uncharted regions of hyperspace, but instead–like early psychedelic explorers–was forced to evaluate his experiences against the accepted, “sane” reality of the very noncyberian world in which he lived. The morphogenetic field, as it were, was not yet fully formed.
This made Burroughs feel alone and mentally ill. In a letter to Allen Ginsburg, he wrote that he hoped the writing of Naked Lunch would somehow “cure” him of his homosexuality. As David Cronenberg, who later made a film adaptation of the book, comments, “even at that time … even these guys, the hippest of the hip, were still capable of thinking of themselves as sick guys who could be cured by some act of art or will or drugs.”
Burroughs’s early pre-Cyberia, as a result, became as dark, paranoid, and pessimistic as the author himself. It was three decades before cyberian literature could shake off this tone. In the current climate, Burroughs has been able to adopt a more full-blown cyber aesthetic that, while still cynically expressed, calls for the liberation of humanity from the constraints of the body through radical technologically enhanced mutation:
“Evolution did not come to a reverent halt with homo sapiens. An evolutionary step that involves biologic alterations is irreversible. We now must take such a step if we are to survive at all. And it had better be good. … We have the technology to recreate a flawed artifact, and to produce improved and variegated models of the body designed for space conditions. I have predicted that the transition from time into space will involve biologic alteration. Such alterations are already manifest.”
It wasn’t until the 1990s (and close to his own nineties) that Burroughs gained access to other forms of media, which more readily accepted his bizarre cyberian aesthetic. Filmmaker Gus Van Sant (Drugstore Cowboy; My Own Private Idaho) collaborated with Burroughs on a video version of the satiric poem “Thanksgiving Prayer,” which later appeared in freeze-frame form in Mondo 2000. But long before Burroughs had himself successfully crossed over into other media, his aesthetic and his worldview had found their way there.
Jacking in to the Matrix
Cyberpunk proper was born out of a pessimistic view similar to that of William Burroughs. The people, stories, and milieu of William Gibson’s books are generally credited with spawning an entirely new aesthetic in the science fiction novel, and cross-pollinating with films like Bladerunner, Max Headroom, and Batman. Taking its cue from comic books, skateboard magazines, and video games more than from the lineage of great sci-fi writers like Asimov and Bradbury, cyberpunk literature is a gritty portrait of a future world not too unlike our own, with computer hackers called “cowboys,” black market genetic surgeons, underground terrorist-punkers called Moderns who wear chameleonlike camouflage suits, contraband software, drugs, and body parts, and personality imprints of dead hackers called “constructs” who jet as disembodied consciousness through the huge computer net called “the matrix.” The invention of the matrix, even as a literary construct, marks the birth of cyberpunk fiction. Here, the matrix describes itself to Case, Gibson’s reluctant cowboy hero:
“The matrix has its roots in primitive arcade games,” said the voice-over, “in the early graphics programs and military experimentation with cranial jacks.” On the Sony, a two-dimensional space war faded behind a forest of mathematically generated ferns, demonstrating the spacial possibilities of logarithmic spirals; cold blue military footage burned through, lab animals wired into test systems, helmets feeding into fire control circuits of tanks and war planes. “Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts. … A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights … receding …”
The matrix is a fictional extension of our own worldwide computer net, represented graphically to the user, much like VR or a video game, and experienced via dermatrodes, which send impulses through the skin directly into the brain. After years away from cyberspace, Case is given the precious opportunity to hack through the matrix once again. Gibson’s description voiced the ultimate hacker fantasy for the first time:
He closed his eyes.
Found the ridged face of the power stud.
And in the bloodlit dark behind his eyes, silver phosphenes boiling in from the edge of space, hypnagogic images jerking past like film compiled from random frames. Symbols, figures, faces, a blurred, fragmented mandala of visual information.
Please, he prayed, now–
A gray disk, the color of Chiba sky.
Now–
Disk beginning to rotate, faster, becoming a sphere of paler gray. Expanding–
And flowed, flowered for him, fluid neon origami trick, the unfolding of his distanceless home, his country, transparent 3D chessboard extending to infinity. Inner eye opening to the stepped scarlet pyramid of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority burning beyond the green cubes of Mitsubishi Bank of America, and high and very far away he saw the spiral arms of military systems, forever beyond his reach.
And somewhere he was laughing, in a white-painted loft, distant fingers caressing the deck, tears of release streaking his face.”
The invention of cyberspace as a real place is the most heralded of the cyberpunk genre’s contributions to fiction and the arts. William Gibson and his colleague/collaborator Bruce Sterling paint vivid portraits of a seamy urban squalor contrasted by an ultra-high-tech web of electronic sinews, traveled by mercenary hackers, digital cowboys, artificial intelligences, and disembodied minds.
These authors acknowledge the discrepancy between the promise of technological miracles, such as imprinting consciousness onto a silicon chip, and their application in a real world still obsessed with power, money, and sex. Their backs are the literary equivalent of industrial music, exploring a world where machines and technology have filled every available corner, and regular people are forced to figure out a way to turn these technologies against the creators and manipulators of society.
Contributing to the pessimistic quality of these works is another idea shared with the industrial movement–that human beings are basically programmable. “I saw his profile,” one character remarks about another. “He’s a kind of compulsive Judas. Can’t get off sexually unless he knows he’s betraying the object of his desire. That’s what the file says.” And we know that means he can’t act otherwise. Characters must behave absolutely true to their programming, having no choice but to follow the instructions of their emotional templates. Even Molly, the closest thing to a love-interest in Neuromancer, leaves her boyfriend with a written, self-defeating apology: “ITS THE WAY IM WIRED I GUESS.”
Like Burroughs’s reluctant hero in Naked Lunch, Case’s addictive personality is exploited by higher powers, and he must pay for the joy of jacking in by becoming an agent for a dark, interdimensional corporation. Also like Burroughs’s prismatic style, the feeling of these books is more textural than structural. Like fantasy role-playing, computer games, or Nintendo adventures, these books are to be appreciated for the ride. Take the opening of Gibson and Sterling’s novel, The Difference Engine:
Composite image, optically encoded by escort-craft of the trans-Channel airship Lord Brunel: aerial view of suburban Cherbourg, October 14, 1905.
A villa, a garden, a balcony.
Erase the balcony’s wrought-iron curves, exposing a bath-chair and its occupant. Reflected sunset glints from the nickel-plate of the chair’s wheel-spokes.
The occupant, owner of the villa, rests her arthritic hands upon fabric woven by a Jacquard loom.
These hands consist of tendons, tissue, jointed bone. Through quiet processes of time and information, threads within the human cells have woven themselves into a woman.
Her name is Sybil Gerard.
Like the characters in Fantastic Voyage, we move through a multitiered fractal reality, enjoying the lens of a camera, the dexterity of a computer design program, the precision of a microscope, the information access of an historical database, the intimacy of a shared consciousness, and, finally, the distance and objectivity of a narrative voice that can identify this entity by its name. The way in which we move through the text says as much if not more about the cyberpunk worldview than does its particular post-sci-fi aesthetic. Writers like Gibson and Sterling hate to be called “cyberpunk” because they know their writing is not just an atmosphere or flavor. While this branch of fiction may have launched the cyberpunk milieu, it also embodies some of the principles of the current renaissance in its thematic implications.
Even the above passage from The Difference Engine demonstrates a sense of holographic reality, where identity is defined by the consensual hallucination of a being’s component parts. Similarly, like a DMT trip, a shamanic journey, or a hypertext computer program, reality in these books unfolds in a nonlinear fashion. A minor point may explode into the primary adventure at hand, or a character may appear, drop a clue or warning, and then vanish. Furthermore, these stories boldly contrast the old with the new, and the biological with the technical, reminding us that society does not progress in a smooth, curvilinear fashion.
Sterling’s Schismatrix, for example, pits the technical against the organic in a world war between Mechanists, who have mastered surgical manipulation of the human body through advanced implant technology, and Shapers, who accomplish similar biological manipulation through conscious control over their own DNA coding. This is the same metaphorical struggle that systems mathematician Ralph Abraham has explored throughout human history, between the organic spiritual forces–which he calls Chaos, Gaia, and Eros–and the more mechanistic forces embodied by technology, patriarchal domination, and monotheism. In fact, Sterling’s own worldview is based on a nonlinear systems mathematics model.
“Society is a complex system,” he writes for an article in Whol
