Collected Essays (84 page)

But in the end, for many of us, drugs are a trap. Can computers supplant psychedelics? It’s worth a try. With cool graphics and Virtual Reality we can pursue the dream of the pure non-physical software high. When I first got my computer I still knew very little about programming. The only software that I had was a free Mandelbrot set program someone had given me, and my idea of “hacking” was to reach around to the back of the monitor and randomly change the little switches I found there, but this wasn’t exactly a great feat of hacking I could impress my family and friends with. “Look, when I turn this little switch the picture gets different!” No, to do neat things with my machine I needed to understand how its insides worked so I could make up my own switches. Just as you can’t write a story without having something to write about, you can’t program without having something to program about. But I knew right away what I wanted to program: cellular automata (CA for short), which are parallel computations that turn your screen into self-generating computer graphics movies. In a two-dimensional CA, every pixel on your computer screen is “alive,” in that each pixel looks at the colors of its neighboring pixels and adjusts its own color accordingly. This is analogous to the way in which each spot on the surface of a swimming pool is “alive” and sensitive to the neighboring spots. When you throw a piece of redwood bark into a swimming pool, the ripples spread out in perfect uniformity and mathematico-physical precision. How do they know where to go? Because each spot on the water’s surface is updating itself in parallel a zillion times a second. The world is a huge parallel computation that has been running for billions of years. The folks putting on this all-encompassing show we live in—they’ve really got the budget! Even within the small budget of a PC’s memory and clock-rate, CAs are a rich environment for letting the computer do weird things. By blending together a succession of CA rules you can, for instance, do something like this: start with a blank rectangle, fill it in with concentric ellipses, break some of the ellipses into globs, arrange the globs into a moving face, grow a detailed skin texture, turn the skin’s pores into small beetles that crawl around and chew the picture up, send connecting lines between nearby beetles, bend the lines into paisley shaped loops, and fill the loops with growing fetuses.

I really got into the heart of California computer culture when I started going to the annual Hacker’s Conference held here. The first time, I was invited on the strength of my science fiction, but by then I was already trying to be a hacker, so I brought my machine to the conference to show off what I’d achieved with my cellular automata. It was the most fun I’d ever had. Everyone there seemed happy. They were happy because they could actually DO something. We stayed up all night partying, bullshitting, and hunching over each other’s machines. It all began to seem so SIGNIFICANT. The human brain gets along by grouping things into patterns and assigning meanings to them. If you have a nice fast chaotically changing computer graphics program you have lots of things to try and make patterns out of. And, unlike with watching clouds or fire, with a computer you also have the meta-level to play with; meaning that you can stop the process, go in and look at the rules generating it, tweak the rules if you like, then start it up again. And then there’s the meta-meta-level, the discourse about what this image in connection with this program MEANS—like do fire and clouds really work this way? Are the thought-patterns in our brains like computer-generated fire and clouds? While my new friends and I were gloating over each others graphics, other hackers were doing entirely different kinds of crazy stuff. Someone had linked his computer to the public telephone and was talking to Russia using the blank spaces between successive TV screen images going across the satellites. That little bar between frames that you see if your TV loses its vertical hold—that was this guy’s Panama canal to everywhere. And the things in the real world these guys had done! “I wrote the software for the first Versateller machines,” someone might say, or, “I wrote this arcade game your kids play,” or “my program is used in the carburetor of your car.” What really impressed me was that people could play around on machines in their homes and end up affecting the events in the big industrial world. Before hackers it seemed like you needed a factory and an accountant and a bunch of workers before you could actually make something. But in the information economy, you can package it up and ship it out right from your home. Not that all the hackers were only into information. Hacking is an elastic concept—some guys showed up at the conference without paying, and proudly told me that he’d “hacked the Hackers Conference”—hacking in the sense of finding your way through some hindering thicket. Another told me he was going to hack Death by having his head frozen. Someone else had robot cars that could sense light, little radio-controlled type trucks with no radio-control but instead with a chip that the guy himself had made. The cars liked the edges of shadows, they liked to find a place where they could keep wavering in and out of the light. In this midst of all this fun, I felt a real sense of being engaged in a Great Work, in something like the same way that the workers on the Notre Dame cathedral might have felt.

I often think of Silicon Valley (and other hacking centers) as being like the Ile de France in the Middle Ages, a spot where artisans and craftspeople from all over come together to work on the Great Work. It’s certainly not a cathedral that we’re building here—so what is it? At first I thought the Great Work was Artificial Life. The idea behind Artificial Life (called A-Life for short) is that what living systems are really doing is to move information around. When living systems reproduce themselves, they are replicating their information. When a living system heads towards some food, it is using information about its environment to improve its situation. A computer virus is alive in a lowdown kind of way: it attaches itself to programs and gets those programs to make copies of it. A higher kind of Artificial Life might be an electronic ant colony with graphical critters that dart around on the screen and evolve to get better at bumping into the pixels that count as food. Much higher than that might be a program which is able to repair and even improve itself. Higher steps might be programs which not only talk like a person, but which are even able to effectively drive a robot body around in the physical world. And somewhere down the science fictional road might be robots that build robot factories that make new robots. A race of “artificially alive” machines spawned by us—the torch of life passed from carbon on to silicon.

It’s an inspiring vision, but is Artificial Life really the Great Work which hackers are working towards? Isn’t the more important goal to make things better for the humans on Earth now instead of for some race of future robots? This line of thought views the Great Work as the achievement of some kind of material paradise on Earth, with comfort and abundance and perfect understanding for all mankind. The watchword here is Global Network, rather than Artificial Life. Great high-bandwidth communication links with people talking to each other in Virtual Reality, instantaneous electronic polling, ten thousand different TV channels, and all good stuff like that. Keeping something this complicated working would take exceptionally good computer programs, of course, and the best kind of program is going to be one that’s artificially alive, so in the end the two Great Work images may really merge into one utopian vision.

Utopias have a way of blinding you to the real present, though, so let’s draw back from that. Let me tell you about what I saw some REAL machines do. Fellow freestyle SF writer Marc Laidlaw took me and the family to a Survival Research Labs show held under a freeway in San Francisco. It was terrific, a mad swirl of politics and collaged machinery, with a giant flame-thrower that seemed continually about to explode, a pile of burning pianos, a giant metal arm poking at the pianos, and so on. After the show, my son and I found a heap of what seemed to be unexploded dynamite—clayey substance packed into an officially printed wrapper saying “FRONT LINE DEMOLITION PURPOSES ONLY”, and with a long fuse. My son and I love fireworks. We tried lighting one, but it didn’t go off. We were spending the night at the Laidlaws’ apartment in Haight-Ashbury. Sylvia kept saying that it was too dangerous for us to keep the dynamite, that it was unstable and might go off. After some thought I agreed. So how were we to throw it away? Laidlaw didn’t exactly want it in his kitchen trashcan, so he and I went outside to ditch the dynamite. The sidewalks of Haight-Ashbury are crawling with homeless stoners every hour of the night and day, and we didn’t want them to get hold of the dynamite, so we couldn’t just leave it on the curb. The public trashcans were out of the question, as some Haighties practically LIVE in the trashcans—you throw something in a trashcan and there’s a guy inside the can to catch it. Finally we found a church with a metal grating over the entrance. We pushed the dynamite through there out of reach. A few days later I saw an article in the
San Francisco Chronicle
about a rash of “fake dynamite” being found all over the city. It had all been a mind game that was part of the Survival Research Labs show. The show had kept going on for several days, as it were, and the Establishment’s Spectacle had been (ever so slightly) taken over and co-opted by Marc Pauline.

The reality is that there is no unifying Great Work, there are just a lot of people here in the pit together, slamming and hacking. Our Great Work is to stay in the pit, to control our own destinies, and to hack what we can of the world. There are no nations in the pit, no us against them, and the Japanese are not our enemies. Recently Sylvia and I went to Japan where I was to appear on a Cyberspace panel along with hacker Jaron Lanier and some others. Queen Mu of
Mondo 2000
was there as well, as chance would have it. After our talks we were invited to the Gold Disco where a Mr. Takemura was putting on his monthly show. His show is a series of collaged videos he makes, also lighting effects, smoke clouds and scent clouds, and fast acid-house disco. The video-show is a mélange consisting of (1) the chaotic pattern you get by pointing a TV camera at a monitor in a feedback loop, the key thing being, as Santa Cruz chaos mathematicians discovered, to have the camera upside down, (2) gay porno films of men kissing and dicks with studs and rings, (3) dolphins and politicians in black and white d) screens from the new
Sim Earth
computer game, (4) SIGGRAPH style computer graphics. Standing with Mr. Takemura and Jaron by the disco control panel, and the Japanese kids dancing like crazy, vogueing, some of them in bathing suits, a geisha off there somewhere, the video projected on seventeen different screens,
Sim Earth
going by, Mr. DataGlove right next to me—I get this really heavy flash that the New Edge really IS happening, it matters to these people here, it is going to happen, and we’re all hanging out at the surfin’ edge. Right then Mr. T. takes my arm and leads me off to a corner of the room, past the guy in the bathing suit, past the beautiful Japanese girl in the high shorts, and there on a PC monitor is…my own program
CA Lab
! The “Rug” rule, boiling away, bopping right to the beat as the casual viewer might think, my program running live here in the coolest disco in Tokyo. Hallelujah, my information had made it this far on its own. I’d GOTTEN OVER, as the brothers say.

And that thought sets off the flash that none of us hackers or writers or rappers or samplers or mappers or singers or users of the tech is in it solely for the Great Work—no, us users be here for our own good. We work for the Great Work because the work is fun. The hours are easy and the pay is good. And the product we make is viable. It travels and it gets over. And if you help make a piece of it, then that piece is part of you. You’re part of the thang.

Now what exactly IS this Great Work which is taking place on the New Edge? We are not given to truly know WHAT IT IS. The Great Work is like a Mandelbrot Set of which we are the pixels, or even the steps of the computation. The Great Work is like a living body in which you and I are like a cell, or even like a specific chemical process, like an enzyme which copies ten thousand rungs of DNA. The Great Work is so big that nobody alive can even put a name on it. In a few hundred years they can look back and say what it was, but here inside it, nobody can see. It has something to do with people getting more and more mixed up with machines, it has to do with do-it-yourself, it has to do with sampling and collaging, it has to do with the end of the old style of politics. A wave of revolution is sweeping all of Planet Earth. Incredibleness: the Soviet Union is no more. How many more years can it be until the revolution comes back here to the United States, back to where it started? To reduce it to a bumper sticker: “IF THE RUSSIANS CAN GET RID OF THE COMMUNISTS, THE AMERICANS CAN GET RID OF THE REPUBLICANS!” Pass it on. Surely the ever-escalating rape of the environment, the crazy wastage of the “drug war,” the warmongering, the elitist selfishness, surely this will someday come to an end—blown away perhaps by the onslaught of total New Edge information? Maybe soon.

Let’s follow the Great Work and see.

Note on “The Mondo Edge”

Written 1992.

Appeared in Rudy Rucker, R. U. Sirius, and Queen Mu, eds.,
The Mondo 2000 User’s Guide to the New Edge,
HarperCollins, 1992
.

I met R. U. Sirius and Queen Mu quite soon after I moved to California in 1986, and I wrote a number of small pieces for their magazine
Mondo 2000
over the next few years.
Mondo
developed quite a reputation for being weird and hip, so I was happy to be involved. Queen Mu was, to put it mildly, not a standard-issue publishing exec, and by the early nineties,
Mondo
was on the verge of collapse. They had the idea of making one final big score by publishing an anthology of the best bits from the past issues of
Mondo
. But they were having trouble getting this project together. “We need a mathematical logician for this,” proposed R. U. “We need Rudy!”