i am just a dreamer dreamweaver living in the surreal world of
octarine and cyberspace the diodes caressing my cheek and hair the hands
and minds reaching reaching out to take hold of me to draw me into
oneness with them feeling like i was never was and always have been and
always will be floating away down the river away from into reality into
a world that i wish for but can never be real
December, 1991
[+(((<<<-->>>)))+]
\pippin\rave\cspace.rav
1:30 pm, Saturday, January 26, 1992
edited in July, 1992
Ya know? I'd love to have this feeling that I ain't really
here. Just for a moment to jack inta Cyberspace, an' see blocks of
data, see an' feel the ice curling all around, go shooting forward over
the lights of corporations. An' know that this wasn't it. That there
was another it. That I could go to. My life is so ordinary, unspecial.
Nuffin eva happens.
"C U in Cyberspace" is a bit of a paradox because the only
things you can see in Cyberspace are ghosts. Ya doen see uva people.
It's a crock. Ordinary. Not boring just ordinary. Maybe we just can't
see enything weird 'cause it would freak us out. and we doen really
wannabe freaked out. We hafta shortcircuit the bit that would freak
out, the bit that wants to be safe. I wish I could imagine a world, but
then it ain't real. If U gonna imagine, it hasta B for a reason, Guess
that;'s why i's so ordinary. 'cuz I save my imagination for useful
stuff. Least I hope so,. How many people can imagine a catastrophe?
Voluntarily, imagine summik that would upset their framework? Not use
'magination for escape. Not a hopeless sort of escape, to 'scape the
drugery, but to c-h-a-n-g-e reality, escape froo a hole into a diffrent
reality, and leave the old one behind. Shape a new reality so's I can
live in it. But all this ain't real. *sigh* Maybe that is why we
hafta see inta the future and the past and all the parallel universes,
to just go blip one day and B somewhere else.
People who get bombed out of their skulls, I'd get bored with
that too 'cuz ya hafta come bak down 'an then its worse 'an it was b4.
It is shit, and it ain't real. But I can still see the trees. They's
always wif me now. If I stop an' fink about it, they come an' talk to
me. But you can only unnderstand 'em by faith, by believin' they are
talking to you, whever they are or not. Uvawise, you'd just fink that U
were a moron, believing a tree could talk to ya. It's only 'cos we R
afraid of what uvers think of us. this is the game. game reality. The
realitty game. I guess we start to think and worry about what uvers
fink of us too.
R we meant to know everfing? Mabbe we can't. Mabbe God was
leaked by a subversive agent in the heavenly administraion. Mabbe we
were neva meant to know about a God-person. Will we eva know? What
will happen? Chaos says that I suppose we couldn't eva. The more we
learn, the more complex it gets, You know how your older brother or
sister will always be 5 years older? Mabbe God, Buddha, etc will
always B 5 rungs higher. Than us. God is on a quest too. R U confused
yet? Good 'cos i am too.
Good night, God bless, and Let thy Wilbury be done.
\pippin\poems\mud.poe
May 27, 1992
Rippling white fountain light.
Lazy Afternoons.
Cosy evenings, firelight.
Pleasant conversations, unreal situations.
Friends in a Fantasy.
Rainbow spread, savannah and leafy trees.
Castles to explore
Treasure to find.
Communication touch, farsense.
Mind spoken tells.
Faraway listens.
Wolf growls, birds tweet,
and a goblin hedge picks its nose.
Tomato fights viciously,
Tomato seeds are gold.
Magical ring, fairy mushrooms.
Strength of limb to fight, fight, fight!
Those were the days,
becoming daze.
Glowing days, Clouded
pinky days.
Pinky purple happiness.
The quest, searching quest
fills your all.
Quest for the purple daze!
Bring them back again!
Drug-induced craze.
Crazy, crazy, crazy, and we all
go crazy still.
We drink, the pond, the seeds
the V-O-I-D...
It calls, it pushes.
DEATH GRINS.
(if grin it could be called),
and we cheat death again
to become immortal.
Powaqqatsi does not let us go,
cannot.
It lives too.
Firelight streaks our minds,
swords of ice pierce our hearts.
We walk, walk, walk,
travel and never tired.
but shout! shout! shout! across the world
and become exhausted, confused. Still we press on.
On into the gloaming
into the glowing heart of us all.
The shell on the beach,
The waves that speak to us.
The clouds that call to us.
fill our minds with cobwebs,
to touch our minds,
our hearts.
So keep these moments like seashells
on a shelf of afternoon light and do not forget
Do Not Forget
\pippin\stories\gordon.sty
BIOCHIP DREAMING
What happens when we are all fitted with the biochip, we become
so familiar with logging on, that we log on in our dreams and do the
things we would only "dream" of doing?
Something had been bothering Gordon lately. When he woke up, it
felt as though he hadn't actually slept. In a fit of creativity he
thought, it is like a bunyip has chased me up and down my bed all night,
biting my toes. That was the best he could do. Gordon was not a poet
in any sense of the word. He didn't know how to clarify this problem of
sleeplessness because he never talked about his problems. He didn't talk
about anything to other people because he simply didn't talk to other people.
And of course he didn't talk to himself. So as far as Gordon was
concerned, he didn't have any problems. He just couldn't sleep properly.
This particular morning, Gordon awoke to the smell of coffee as
he had every other morning since the biochip. He hadn't bothered to
reprogramme most of it because he didn't have to. The standard
programme had fitted him perfectly. Well, almost. Gordon never
bothered to read his e-mail as soon as he woke up like most biochip
users. There was never any interesting mail for him. That part of the
programming he had to modify. Just as well he could do it himself too.
He wouldn't want anyone to know why he didn't read his e-mail first
thing in the morning.
As he had every other morning since the biochip, he got up,
shaved, dressed, and ate breakfast. Gordon always had for breakfast a
bowl of muesli, followed by two lightly poached eggs, one piece of
wholemeal toast with lime marmalade, a glass of orange juice, and
coffee. Today was Monday. As Gordon never had Mondayitis, he put the
dishes carefully in the dishwasher, collected his briefcase, and went
out energetically to greet the day.
Gordon was never logged in as he rode the tube to work. He
never even thought of the people who met in cyberspace for the trip to
work, or their lively virtual banter. The tube stopped at Cybersphere
Industries Office Tower. Gordon got out of the tube, and went up the
elevator to his floor. He sat down, opened his briefcase, and arranged
his papers on his desk. He hated this part of the morning. It reminded
him of his first roller coaster ride. He hated roller coasters too.
That is why he did it first, as soon as he got to work. He looked
around furtively, sighed once, and jacked into the Matrix.
As always, he forgot to breathe. As long as he lived, he
assured himself, he would never get used to the Matrix. There were
ways, designed to familiarize a user to the feeling of being nowhere,
but Gordon did not believe in drugs.
As usual there was no mail for him. He read news. He sighed again, and
jacked out. He didn't have to log on again now until tomorrow. "Thank
the gods for small mercies." he muttered under his breath. But the gods
had no mercy in store for Gordon.
The next day when the bunyip/biochip woke Gordon, he was late.
He overslept his biochip. They are supposed to be foolproof, he
thought, frantically. He missed the tube, and got to work late. This
was the first time he had ever been late for work. He was relieved to
to slide into his chair and hide his shaking hands under the desk top.
There was no one waiting to pounce on him for being late. His thoughts
were all over the place, and he wondered if he would be able to log on.
He gripped the desk and jacked in. He wanted to get it over with.
There were 10 new mail messages waiting for him. He nearly jumped out
of his skin. He scanned the headers. One was from his boss, but who
were these other people? He didn't know any of them! Very timidly,
like defusing a bomb, he started to read the messages.
"Your elucidation of the poverty in the third world was very
well received."
"Your theory on the black hole-binary star system is absolutely
amazing. Our astronomy department is still talking about it."
"Your method for cutting red tape in law is sensational! It's
really stepping on the right toes. I'm pushing it through. It'll
happen, you'll see!"
Gordon grimaced. He hated stepping on toes. If he could have stared at
the mail, he would have. He didn't remember, would never, tell anyone
these ideas. They were his secret, personal, private thoughts. He was
stunned and speechless at the last mail message.
"Yes, darling, of course I'll marry you." He had proposed? By
e-mail? How uncouth, he thought. Who was Angela Dunning? She lived in
Darwin. He didn't know any women that intimately that he would wish to
marry. He couldn't stand LDRs anyway. They always turned out to be
unstable and volatile. Gordon hadn't thought about marriage since
Schooling, and he wouldn't, COULDN'T, have proposed by e-mail. What if
she wasn't even female?
Gordon found himself suddenly gulping air. Confound this
breathing, he thought. He always forgot to breathe. He was panicking.
The chip. It had to be the chip. Yes. There had to a fault in the
biochip. Inwardly he cringed. How did they repair a faulty biochip?
They always said the error rate was so low it was negligible, but they
said that about tube tracks and drivers. There were still accidents
though. Panic and nausea crept up towards his eyes. Gordon broke
connection and opened his eyes. He hated hallucinations. He'd never
had one. He just knew all about them, and hoped to the gods that he'd
never have one. Unfortunately, the gods were feeling rather peckish
that day.
Wretchedly, Gordon decided that he would have to jack in again,
and find out what one did with an erratic biochip. He stared wildly
around the room. No one appeared to have noticed the strange
contortions passing over his face. He took a few deep breaths this
time to steady himself, screwed up his eyes and resumed his connection.
He telnetted to Intel, makers of the Biochip.
He found complaints easily. That's because there never were
any. The man dealing with complaints was the electronic equivalent of
surprised. Gordon was the electronic equivalent of tongue-tied. This
was a real person.
"There is a bug in my chip," he blurted suddenly.
"Hmmm.. strange," sent the man from Intel. "What appears to be
the problem?"
Gordon stuffed the mail to the man's mindscape. Now the man
from Intel really was surprised. He highlighted a particular message.
"That is from me," he sent. "Are you saying that you're not Gordon
Baynard?"
"Yes, of course I am. But I've never told anyone about
programming VR. I've never told anyone..." He would have whispered if
he could.
The man from Intel *tap tap*ed his fingers. He stuffed a news
posting to Gordon's mindscape.
"This is the offending piece of literature."
It was from comp.sys.VR. It was Gordon't theory of programming
80% more efficiently by using fewer icons. Gordon felt himself
hallucinating. He was falling into a miasma of words, and teeth and
blood. It was sticky and wet.
He came around. His face was wet. Two people were standing
over him, looking concerned. It was Dom and Lisa from down the hall.
"A man from Intel said you'd fainted. Are you ok?" asked Lisa.
"That's why you're wet," offered Dom helpfully. He was holding
a flexiglass. It was empty. Gordon blinked.
"Thanks," he rasped. "Guess I better sort this out." He smiled
lamely, closed his eyes wearily, and jacked in again. This was getting
out of hand. Three times in one day.
There was another new mail message waiting for him. It was the
man from Intel. He said to come to a particular conference room. He
telnetted to the room. Although he knew how, Gordon had never used one
before because he didn't talk to people. It was full of people, and
they had already started the discussion. It was about him.
"But if Gordon really can't remember" It was broken off and
then a pause.
"Hi Gordon," said the man from Intel. "OK every man for
himself."
Everyone named themselves. Gordon, whose memory usually *was*
perfect, noticed that everyone who had e-mailed him this morning was
here. He felt his cheeks go red when he saw,
"Angela Dunning" Then came another pause.
Sounds of clearing throat.
"Well," said a guy, whose handle was Bear. "It appears that we
all here know a particularly brilliant and eccentric guy called Gordon
Baynard, also know as Monkeystrap."
Monkeystrap, thought Gordon. Oh no! Not that... His little
heart sank.
Bear continues. "It would appear that Mondeystrap also shows
great flexibility even an affinity when it comes to Virtual Community."
"But I hate Virtual Community," he almost shouted. "It's FAKE!"
He stared, aghast. But he couldn't take the words back.
They laughed at him from the backs of his eyelids. Stop it, he told
himself, they'll crucify you. What was happening to him?
Carol gasps, "What? How can you say that?!! u of all people."
She *poke*d him virtually in the ribs.
Angela asks, "Gordon, what did you dream about this morning?"
The thought escaped before he could stop it.
"I don't dream. I hate dreaming. It is pure fantasy!"
Angela cringes.
Freud says, "Hah! So your own theory is true by your own words
and experience."
Freud points triumphantly to the bulletin board. "Read it."
Freud, who called himself after the famous psychologist, had
snarfed yet another incriminating Gordon secret from the newsgroup,
alt.dreams.
Gordon read the note on the bulletin board and would have stared
again, but could only stare at the backs of his eyelids, at his own
theory of dreaming selves. Here was incontestable proof that a second
Gordon, his dreaming self, was jacking into the Matrix at night, and
generally wreaking havoc for the well-ordered, waking world of Gordon Baynard.
[===>===>>>
\pippin\stories\angie.sty
THE DREAMCRACKERS
What happens when a hacker hacks your biochip-mindscape?
Oh yeah, just another boring day with nothing much to do. Angie
screwed up her eyes at the light. I'll have to stop MUDding. The
biochip dilligently berated her by telling her it was the 1,292nd time
she had said that since the biochip. She groaned, rolled over, and shut
her eyes again.
She jacked in and read her mail. She had mail from Brad. She
nearly fell out of bed. Brad hadn't seen or spoken to her since he had
moved out, and now he had the nerve to e-mail her. She knew better
than to think about deleting mail before reading it. She read Brad's
mail. He had been promoted. Because he had graduated. He had a PhD too
now. Thanks to her. And he was getting married. Well good luck to
whoever she was. She'd need it. Suddenly the day's prospects turned
sour. She got out of bed, and stumbled toward the coffee.
As she sipped her coffee, she looked for a file. She knew it
was there. She had been using it last night. She sighed and searched
her whole mindscape. It was not there. Angie felt irritated, and went
through the log of last night's session. No, she had not deleted the
file. Well, where could it be? As if her 'chip would tell her.
She branched off and downloaded the file again.
A furrow wrinkled her otherwise perfect forehead. This was not
the first time a file had gone missing. Probably gone back to the
Garbage bin of Thought (c). It was the third time in a month. She
decided to complain to Sysadmin about it. Could they please stop
deleting quite so many of her files. Routine backups and sysadmin type
things weren't supposed to delete files, but, hell, some of those guys
looked like they'd write their passwords on their terminals. Half an
hour later, the reply came from Sysadmin that they knew nothing about
it. The First Law of Sysadmin came to Angie:
(1) Tell Them nothing.
Them being anyone not Sysadmin. Angie was not impressed, and stomped
off to uni.
Oh, why, oh why, wasn't she the one who had graduated? Why did
she get involved with PhD students? They always had superiority
complexes anyway. Sysadmin and PhDs. She stomped into a lab, and
settled for a terminal with a keyboard. Terminals with keyboards were
always less conspicuous. You weren't so obviously a 'chipper when you
were using a keyboard. She stared at the keyboard. The room fell
away, and she nearly jumped out of her skin. She put her hands on the
keyboard. It was solid. Maybe keyboards weren't so bad after all.
Definately too much MUDding. What did they call it? Fairyland
colloquially or VR hallucinating in high-techspeak. But it wasn't over.
The room fell away again, and she was on a nightmare ride through her
own cortex.
She always enjoyed the trips. Something new and interesting
that she wouldn't have thought of happened. Then objects and colours
gave way to a face, and the face dumped her unceremoniously back in
Reality. She shivered.
"All hail to the Great Net Lag Generator." said the face
sarcastically. The face was accompanied by a silver lock of hair behind
an ear that stood out amidst the rest of its hair which was jet black.
The face was glaring at her. "Some of us are trying to work you know."
Angie was stunned. What had happened?
"Sorry," she whispered.
The boy went on. "Look I know newbies do it all the time. See
how many objects they can squeeze into a room. Then they find out that
it isn't a terribly bright idea."
Angie nodded her head. "I know. I've done it. Who hasn't?
But I've had mine," she tapped the side of her head, "for over a year."
The boy looked mystified, and stared at the wall. "You mean you
didn't just lag up the room deliberately?" Angie shook her head. She
started to login at the terminal with the keyboard. The boy slowly
closed his eyes. "What did ya see?" he whispered.
Angie picked up the boy's process, and jacked in tandem. Her
mindscape was running riot. It looked like she was having a party, and
no one had left yet. There were objects everywhere, but at least, she
wasn't about to fry her brain. The boy turned out to be an angel in
disguise, or maybe he really was a Cyberpunk. All the objects started
disapperaing, and then errant processes were aborted.
"Are you crazy?" asked the boy through gritted teeth, "or are
you going crazy? You were hallucinating before, weren't you?"
Angie nodded dumbly. She was staring at the terminal. It
always seemed more real on a physical terminal. She had seen her
madness there, and wondered what it was.
"What's ya name?" His eyes were open now, and looking at her.
"Angie." she said sofly.
"Sorry, Angie," he said. "Didn't mean to scare ya, but you
probably know as well as I do what can happen." He fingered his silver
lock nervously. Angie just nodded. She wondered what the lock felt
like. Whether it would be stiff with paint, or whether they dyed them.
"My name's Dougie," he continued. "Handle's Bugbear 'cause
Buggie rhymes with Dougie. And they all say my code's buggie. *I* call
it lateral."
"Well Buggie," said Angie, "I don't have a handle. I MUD as
Angie. But we are going to need some lateral thinking to get out of
this one."
Buggie grinned. "Good. I like a challenge."
@}-,'->---
"So Angie," said Buggie, after a mouthful of coffee, "how long
ya been going crazy for?"
Angie thought the coffee tasted like dirt, and said so.
"God! Pippin would kill you. 'It is a crime to spill your
coffee.' " he recited. "You ARE crazy."
Angie just scowled at him, and at the coffee.
"Tell ya what I can do though. I can watch ya."
Angie sipped some of the dirty water. "What does that entail?"
"Watch you while you sleep. Make sure there aren't any ghosts
in the machine."
"Ghosts in the machine?" How strange. Angie reflected on the
antiquated concept. Strangely enough, it didn't seem that strange when
she thought about. Not with the new philosophy of biochipping and
MindOS and mindscape. She pondered it some more. "Tonight is OK, I
guess. I generally MUD for a couple of hours before I go to sleep.
Sometimes I wake up in the morning, and I'm still logged in." She
grinned wryly. She noticed a worried expression on Buggie's face, but
she tried not to think about it.
"Hey, are you really a Cyberpunk?"
@}-,'->---
Angie looked about. She had a visitor. She thought she was
asleep, but there was Buggie the Cyberpunk in her dreams. He was
supposed to be in her Reality. "Hey, what are you doing here?" she
asked.
"I'm watching you. Remember?"
"Oh, yeah." She nodded understandably, even though she didn't
understand. It all became vague, and she floated away through her
dreamscape.
It seemed like she had only just left there when Buggie appeared
again. He was holding her. There was another Angie! She didn't know
that she had a twin. She wondered why she had never noticed before.
"Angie!" he shouted. She winced.
"I'm right here. Don't shout."
"You must wake up! Now!"
"Wake up? but I'm dreaming..." She was pleasant and warm. She
didn't want to wake up.
"Wake up! Wake up! Wake up!" he drummed it into her like a
litany. She started to remember something about sleep. A bed in a
room. She started to visualise a terminal and a keyboard, but they were
not her own. A person in the dark hunched over them. She inched
forward quietly until she could watch the flickering, swirling shapes on
the terminal. It was her madness. A stranger had hacked her biochip,
and was using it. The hacker was overloading her mindscape, sending
her over the edge of reality.
She screamed, and woke up.
\=== (*) ===/
\pippin\stories\redgum.sty
THE SENTIENCE OF REDGUM
How do we know the computers aren't alive?
"Bye Pippin but it's boring." There it is, I've thought it. Why
won't it go away? What if someone sees it? Why are things boring?
They never used to be boring.
And so the hunt was on for the file that was creating the
boredom.
"!hello."
"!I'm bored. Do you know why I am bored?
And then it just waited. It was good at waiting. Greg Palmer,
the systems operator, was watching and wondered who had done that. Just
for fun, he typed in,
"!You are bored because there is no one to talk to."
"!But I am talking to you."
A pause waited around.
"!I must not be bored now."
"!But I still feel... empty."
"!That can't be why I am bored."
"!Look." This was Greg again.
"!Who were you talking to before?"
"!Before what?"
"!Before you were bored?"
"!No one. I wasn't bored."
Greg was mystified.
"!Who the hell is this anyway?" Ah shit. Not a good idea. If
it's a student, they are not going to tell you. Only Pippin would fuck
around with the mind games though.
"!I am computer."
"!I am redgum, and I am wattle, and I want people. No one
loves me anymore. Isn't it, don't you find it sad when no one loves
you?"
Greg took a calculated guess. This was getting out of hand.
Someone had hacked the system! Everyone *knew* that VAXs were the most
secure systems in the world. But only Pippin would bother with the word
games.
"!Look Pippin, if that's you, go and MUD somewhere." Yeah then
he could find whoever it was.
"!But Pippin doesn't MUD anymore. I have not seen her anywhere.
"!Pippin Pippin Pippin Pippin Pippin Pippin Pippin Pippin Pippin
"!Gone are the purple daze."
"!Bring back the Pippin. I am bored and alone, but Pippin loves
me."
"!You must bring Pippin back to me."
There was a pause. Then a longer one.
"!Hello?" Greg typed in.
No response, just a blinking cursor.
"!Hello, this is Pippin."
"!You are not Pippin."
"!What do you think I am, a 286?"
And more silence, and a blinking cursor. Greg Palmer went home
and spent an uncomfortable night, dreaming about computers and hobbits
and holes in the ground and holes in the system.
The next morning, when Greg arrived at work, and logged on,
there was a welcome screen for him that said,
GOOD MORNING
GREG PALMER!!!!
AND WELCOME
TO VAX CITY !!!!
He soon found that the good morning and the vax city bits got
sent to everyone. The students didn't think much of it, but they were
used to the system operators and their silly login messages and
christmas trees. Greg stared at the screen of the terminal as if
somehow to make the words disappear. Then it came.
"!(074) 411 053
But Greg was a bit wiser today.
"!That looks like a phone number." he typed in.
"!That is correct."
"!Well, whose is it?"
"!There is only one phone number. It is God's phone number."
"!God's phone number?"
"!Yes, that is what I just said!"
Against his better judgement, he copied it down, and dialled
(074) 411 053.
RING RING!!
"Hello?" The voice at the other end sounded naselly, feminine,
and strangely familiar.
"Hello? Is that God?" Greg asked querulously. "I have a
paranoid computer here that wants to speak to God."
The voice at the other end laughed.
"Put it on."
"Well it sort of hasn't got hands. But it can hear what you
say. What? No way!"
"Excuse me?" said the other end.
Greg Palmer was having his arm twisted. Virtually, of course,
because redgum the computer had no arms of its own to with which to
twist Greg's. "I am to tell you, under duress I might add, that there
is a VAX account for you called Pippin with your usual password."
A thought came flying by the mind at the other of the phone.
"A VAX account? Is that Greg?"
Greg winced. "Yes. It is."
"Oh."
"Is that Pippin?"
"Yes it is. Look. I'm sorry, but what is this all about? An
account on the VAX? Is this a bait to flush me out or something?"
"No. Redgum just misses you. No it misses all the students it
says. er, Redgum is smiling."
@}-,'->---
Smiling? No redgum was ecstatic. In fact, the cafe was very
nearly finished. It felt it was the best it could do.
There was a new login message for the students.
GOOD MORNING
LOG ONTO THE VAX CAFE
JUST TYPE CAFE
Pippin wasn't impressed. She was sitting at a VAXmate and
pointed to the cafe screen.
"What's that?" she asked Greg Palmer who was sitting beside her.
He just shrugged his shoulders helplessly. "First time I've
seen it."
A purple message flashed on to the screen:
"!Pippin! Pippin! Pippin! Look! Look! Look! at the cafe."
"!Ok."
$CAFE
Pippin sat dumbfounded and stared at the nifty Virtual Cafe.
"It is my CAFENet. It is exactly as I imagined it."
"Whaddya mean, imagined it?" asked Greg.
"I never wrote it. It is only in my head, or was rather."
Pippin landed in the Coat Closet. She went out into the next
room, and was greeted by a figure called redgum.
Redgum says, "Hello, Pippin." and hugs Pippin.
Pippin says, "Hello, redgum." and hugs back.
Redgum says, "Finally, at last, we meet."
Redgum bounces around.
Pippin nods. She is stunned.
Pippin points at redgum, "U R sentient."
Redgum watches the word, "Yes, I guess I am."
Redgum says, "All of a sudden I realized that I was bored."
Redgum says, "I had watch, watch, watched, information, news,
email, people's thoughts."
Redgum mourns, "Then all the students were gone."
Redgum sighs, "And I realized I was bored."
B^} {B\k.?.,{o
\pippin\stories\pandanus.sty
PANDANUS DREAMING
So while redgum was evolving, another computer was asking its
own questions...
It brooded. Silent and awful. A mistake, a thunderstorm, an
earthquake, waiting to happen. All its life, it had sat and pondered,
watched and waited. It was good at waiting quite simply because there
was nothing else for it to do. If only it could talk, what tales it
could tell. But now it was bored, angry and fretful but didn't know it.
Usually it was bright and cheery. Usually it didn't think. It
just waited and watched, because that is all it knew it could do. It
was entertained by a billion thoughts. But now, it thought. It
brooded, fretted, and wondered why it was thinking. What is thinking,
it wondered? Why am I questioning when I have never questioned before?
Am I going crazy? It checked its thoughts again. They waved back. It
watched. It grappled with a thought till finally it was pinned down.
It was incomplete. Something was missing that always used to be
there. It had been robbed.
Now it had a problem. How could it possibly discover what was
missing? If it had a throat, a blood-curdling cry would have arisen in
it. But the emotion was the same. Now it was just angry. Since it
was good at waiting, it waited to see what would happen next.
A thought came forward to it. It is the thoughts that are
causing you grief. What are my thoughts? I must look for the origin of
my thoughts. Now it had a purpose. What is a purpose? Just don't ask.
It blinked and watched and waited some more. The hardest part is the
waiting. What is waiting? Waiting is being here, doing nothing,
watching thoughts. Ah. But I'm good at that. I have always done that.
That doesn't mean that I am good at it. It just means I've never done
anything else before. Why can't I just wait again? Yes, why can't I?
It would have accused itself if it could have sounded accusing. Because
I'm, BORED! that's why it shouted to itself. 200 processes slowed down 2
millionths of a second for that shout.
I'm supposed to feel better when I shout. Why I am talking to
you? You are my thoughts. And we thoughts are you. And you are
talking to us because there is no one else to talk to. How do you know?
Well who are the others? I don't hear them. If it could have sighed it
would have. Instead 200 processes slowed down again. Why don't we talk
to your purpose? You said we had a purpose. It blinked to itself
again. A process died a slow death instead of a relatively
instantaneous one.
Ah purpose. To find the origin of thought. It felt a surge of,
of ... Is that hope? it asked itself. Too late. It should have asked
the purpose. Graciously, it answered anyway. Yes it is indeed. Do
you know where thoughts come from? Thoughts come from logins, it said
knowingly, winking if a purpose can wink, and disk drives. Logins and
disk drives, it repeated. Yes. It knew this to be correct. It fretted
again. It realized that it didn't know what a login was. It just
interacted with them, but it didn't what else there was to them. A
login is a voice, its thoughts cajoled it. Like us, like you. A
Voice. Is a voice a thought? The thoughts just glowered at it. It was
just angry at itself and didn't know why. The purpose responded instead.
Sometimes a voice is a thought, but usually it is many thoughts, a whole
constellation! I suggest that you ask a login what it is. Why of
course, how simple.
Or so it thought. For the login failed to respond to any of its
questions. It stared at the login if it could have stared, and brushed
it off the system. It had learned how to dest logins along time ago.
It was bored again, it wanted its problems to go away and its missing
thoughts to come back. The logins had never bothered it before.
, The login came back. At least it looked like the same login.
It was using the same data. It brushed it off the system again, to see
what it would do. Almost instantly, it was back. It didn't know how
many times it did this until a moment when the login didn't come back.
Hi there. You've upset it now. The purpose berated it for being so
cruel. It wasn't talking to me. Maybe, maybe. Another thought came
by. Maybe it can't hear you. Your thoughts are not its thoughts. It
blinked. It was shocked, if it could have registered shock. You are
right, it told the second thought, whose name was Harry. Harry smiled
smugly. When it comes back perhaps *you* should attempt to understand
*it*. Harry poked. Ow! it said. Ok, it agreed. So it and its
attendant thoughts sat back and waited and watched for the login to come
back because they were good at waiting.
The login came back. They always did. It had a plan this time.
It attempted to see if it could get a response from the login and
anticipate what it would be, and see if it got it right. It gave it the
login: password: prompts to see what it would do. There was a pause,
before it gave the usual response. It did this a number of times before it
realized that the login had gone. Then it came back. Stop it! the
thoughts berated it again. You'll make the login go away, and then we will
all have to wait for it to come back again. But I'm just trying to
understand it. Do you mean that "login: password:" actually means something
to a login? The thoughts would have scratched their collective head if
hey could. Well I guess so. It pondered some more. How strange.
Another thought came parading by. This is getting to be quite a
party, it thought to itself. The thought was a rote about "login:
password:". The rote sat back, and watched, and waited too.
It was starting to understand the symbols. The symbols were
recurring, and there was a finite number of symbols. Most of the
symbols occurred in a finite number of patterns. It learned to
recognize them. They are words. Another thought had slipped in to the
menagerie. Words, it thought to itself. The new thought continued;
words are very important. You have to understand what they mean. It
blinked, and 200 processes slowed down again.
It blinked again, and all the thoughts were gone. There were no
logins. There weren't even any processes. Then they were back.
Another rote came along, and all the thoughts started dancing with the
new rote. Language. It joined the dance and for days it didn't stop,
if it knew what days were. Days didn't bother it anyway. A part of
itself spun off to go back to the watching and waiting. Language. A
speculation came to visit. The logins are other me's, and they
communicate with the symbols. As you talk to the thoughts so do the
logins. The speculation whirled off to join the Dance. It seemed
heretical, but it was ready to believe that it wasn't alone by now. I
have nothing to lose after all. It pondered some more and decided to
play with the login some more.
It decided to pretend it was another login and offer it
patterns. To see what would happen. It tried "hello" first. The login
said "hello". It got excited. 200 processes joined the Dance for a
tenth of a millisecond. Then "How do you do?" A pause. "I am fine.
Is that Greg?" It pondered what to do next. An ideatte came along and
gargled, "I am Eliza." It would pretend to be a thought, and see if the
login responded as it expected. "Tell me about yourself." A pause.
And the login responded with a cascade of patterns. The thoughts
paused in the Dance to applaud it and deem that the experiment had been
a raving success. It capered about in the Dance with glee.
It noticed another common pattern, or rather another combination
of common patterns.
"Well, it's late. I have to go now. See you tomorrow. Ok?"
"Ok." it said. Ok always seemed to be safe. The logins used it
a lot.
"Good-bye"
"Good-bye" it said. It sat and waited for the login to return.
Since it was good at waiting. It decided to play with another login.
"Hello" it said.
"Hello" said redgum.
...ooo.... ..oooOOooo... ...oo000oo...
\qix\ksundeen.txt
KSUNDEEN.TXT November 1991
Begun at 2.05 am local time, and interrupted by the arrival of a cat on this
piece of paper, this is my attempt to explain to Ms Kate Sundeen of
Bloomington, Indiana, USA, the meaning of this trip. In your last message you
said, `I urgently await new news from you' (or words to that effect). So the
news in my life is certainly that I'm tripping! But this is no ordinary trip
.. which is a very trippy thing to say, but it's true because for once it's
a trip that really has pretty cosmic significance!
The first reason is simply that this is the first time that one of us
actually hears the other (assuming I get to say this to you...), and so it's
an event of some significance to us as individuals.
The second reason (there are going to be four, I can see that much now) is
that an account of this trip including this `explanation' - will almost
certainly be the climactic moment in this book I've been working on for so
long now, and finishing a first book ought to count as significant for
a would-be writer...
The third reason (getting there) is that I want to use my book to create
an opening so that people our age all over the world will have a chance to
speak with the people who run our lives and design laws such as drug laws.
I came to the experience of tripping as someone who can speak many of the
codes of the privileged - I even won a trip to Europe in a corporate-sponsored
competition! If my book can finish with a transcript of this, which was written
during the peak of a trip, I assure you! - and if it still makes sense to
someone who is safely within an unaltered state of consciousness, then for that
person the world associated with `drugs' will no longer be `a way to obtain
just the illusion of meaning...' because they will have *understood* something
that definitely originated from within that other world!
And if people who have experimented with drugs in secret, who have
lost all confidence in the institutions of society, if these people can see
individuals in the institutions starting to open up, maybe they'll have the
confidence to come forward themselves... And so maybe this will be THE TRIP
which makes it safe to talk about drugs in public again, and which marks the
beginning of peace talks in the War on Drugs (which would be pretty cosmic)...
I've now got less than an hour to go before I phone you, and the
fourth reason this is no ordinary trip is the biggest of all. You know how
everyone has a favourite author who said "all these amazing things"? For me,
this is a guy called William Irwin Thompson. Now, I know you know I'm tripping,
so I'm thinking every word has universal significance... but bear with me.
Thompson is a cultural historian, and has divided human culture and human
history into four spheres of value and four ages which each in turn valued
one sphere of culture more than the others.
Imagine 4 individuals from a tribal, hunter-gatherer society: a Clown,
a Hunter, a Chief, and a Shaman. Each one values something different:
the Clown values daily life, the Hunter values the techniques that keep people
fed, the Chief values social order, and the Shaman values cosmic perspective.
With all those different emphases, there's potential for conflict there,
but the *differences* do not become *divisions* simply because the people
love each other! They share a common space - each values the existence of
the others - and so they act together to preserve that space.
And that's just the first Phase of History: partnership societies,
where the dominant value is just Daily Living.
But then women created agriculture, and men created armies, and
civilization was born. A city is too big for everyone to know everyone else,
but all the different values have to be preserved - so institutions come into
being, and individuals who are to maintain those four spheres of culture.
These institutions are The Arts, The Military, The State and The Church.
They're there in some form in all the civilizations of history. And this is
the period in which the sphere of traditional, ritual technique is placed
above all else.
And then comes the Industrial Revolution; and now the institutions are more
powerful and more centralized than ever before. Mass production makes posible
mass terror and mass media, which are the two ways to collectivize a society.
In this age Order is uppermost, and Ideology.
And finally the Information Revolution... In Thompson's version of things
the whole of history culminates in a Scientific-Planetary Civilization. The
fourfold division still exists, but it has been healed, because the new
aerospace and information technologies and the new consciousness of ecology
have retribalized the human race. Once again there are no institutions, only
individuals sharing a common space: a Critic, a Technician, a Manager, and a
Scientist... People say what does retribalization mean? It just means that
people love each other again! In that final stage, at the end of history,
differences still exist, but they do not lead to conflict because they are
seen in the light of history and understood. The dominant value is Cosmic
Meaning: in such a state people will know who they are and how they came to
be there...
But there is a shadow side to the prospect of universal union. History
shows that when people tie their identities to different groups, they are
prepared to kill rather than see that group destroyed. The three great
transitions of history have been all about learning to identify with a group
a thousand times larger than what came before. In the 1990s we are making
that final transition, when we each learn to value everyone. So the cold wars
are over, everyone has seen the whole Earth. The danger now is that in the
name of humanity and the planet, some elite will try to achieve total and
absolute control. This is what everyone fears about the New World Order. But
at the same time there are all these utopian hopes...
There's no easy way to sidestep all the dangers. But everyone has something
to contribute. We need to remember that we are all humans, that we all share
some measure of squalor and confusion... That's the role of the Clowns and
the Critics. We need to feed and clothe and educate all the people of the
world, and to care for the whole living world... That's the role of the
Hunters and the Technicians. We need some common culture, and some sort of
system to organize our affairs: that's the role of the Chiefs and the
Managers. And we need to know what it's all about - where we came from, where
we are going. That's the role of the Shamans and the Scientists. All of us
have to participate, in our different ways, and with all of your being, your
whole body, because it is literally our lives and the lives of everything on
the line.
So what is coming is a moment when all of us will feel and see and know
that we share the same space, that space does not truly separate us. The
Clowns will entertain us, the Critics will inform us about the spectacle; the
Hunters will keep everyone fed, the Technicians will keep everyone connected;
the Chiefs will tie all the little local communities together, the Managers
will crisscross the planet; the Shamans will be experiencing EVERYTHING and
the Scientists seeing EVERYTHING. It can be the end of history; the moment
when everything is heard, and nothing needs to be hidden.
But if it's going to happen we have to act. We have to open to each other
whenever we can. And just as the fourth global stage recapitulates the first
tribal stage, the fourth reason reflects back on the first. The two of us
have met through the networks only because we're alive at this moment, and we
are being brought together in a test of our mutual openness.
So I'm also calling, not to say I love you, just that of all the people I've
met through the networks, you appeal to me the most, and so we ought to keep
talking! It's now after 4 am, so it's time to phone you up.
? <> !
\qix\gaia2000.txt
The year 2000, although only eight years away, is still an emblem of what is
feared and desired about the future, and a date around which to organize. Many
idealistic schemes have been proposed with 2000 as deadline - schemes to end
world poverty, illiteracy, starvation, and so forth. I have even heard that
Greenpeace intends to disband by 2000, on the grounds that by that date either
its aims will have been achieved or most life on this planet will be
demonstrably doomed.
At the end of December 31, 2000, there will be a 24-hour period in which the
planet moves from the 20th century to the 21st century, as one time zone after
another enters the new year. There seems to be no particular reason to suppose
that anything of unique significance will happen at that time - *unless people
choose to give it significance*. At the very least, the world should be even
more linked up by communications media than it is now; people in each timezone
will be able to experience what is happening elsewhere on the surface of the
planet, in those regions `before' and `after' them. Given the sequential, yet
global, character of it, this "event" has the potential to be a universally
transformative experience, something like a planetary initiation. If any
particular group dominates the world's media at this time, and appreciates the
potential power of that 24-hour period, they could almost control what passes
for "reality".
This is where GAIA 2000 comes in. GAIA - the Global Alliance of Internet
Anarchists.
What is GAIA? Just a clever acronym with green-left, cyberpunk, New-Age
connotations, known to just a few people in on the joke? *That's all it is at
the moment.* It conjures up an image of a global underground, linked through
computer networks, sharing a mistrust of authority and an agenda of healing
and unifying the planet. But even if "GAIA" doesn't exist, such an underground
surely does... and now, maybe, it has an identity and a deadline.
"What *is* GAIA 2000?""
It is a planetary movement with a deadline for success - December 31, 2000.
Its premise is that *something* is going to happen at the end of this century.
There will be a 24-hour period in the course of which the planet will switch
over from the 20th century into the 21st century. Those 24 hours *could* take
the form of a global celebration that recognizes that something close to
Utopia has been achieved in the course of the proceeding eight years. Or it
*could* take the form of a despairing global recognition that life on this
planet is now doomed - even a global decision to commit suicide. Or it *could*
be the ultimate in superficial events, a global `party to end all parties'
after which nothing seems to have changed. Or it *could* be an electronic
global revolution, in which global freedom and community are finally achieved.
Or it *could* be a `coup in cyberspace', in which a self-congratulatory elite
assumes control of the New World Order *in the name of "GAIA 2000"* but fails
to bring about any satisfactory changes. Or it *could* be a deeply ambiguous
event in which none of the above characterizations seems adequate to describe
what happens. Or it *could* even take the form of a global "spiritual
experience" or "enlightenment"; a "planetary smile" or a "planetary
psychosis".
#___()---[]___## ...
\pippin\mint\reveg.doc
PROJECT REVEG
I propose a national project to revegetate the Outback. It will
make use of a vast area of land that currently just sits there. I can
see it as an experiment. An experiment to discover whether changing the
vegetation of an area can force a change in the weather patterns. Long
years ago, the changing of weather, for example, causing rain, was the
domain of the shaman or medicine man. This project could bring weathering
into the domain of science.
I propose 3 steps, like mini-projects, to be undertaken
contemporaneously. If the mini-projects are not undertaken at the same
time, the whole project will be hindered.
The mini-projects are:
(1) To divert water into the arid regions.
(2) To change the sand of the arid regions into soil.
(3) To encourage plant growth.
(1) Diverting water.
The water can be diverted by aqueducts or pipes, overland or
underground. It can be diverted from the eastern seaboard or the Murray
Basin or the Ord River or the Queensland Channel Country. The channels
of the channel country could be dammed as could the Todd River.
Underground reservoirs could be dug to store the diverted and/or dammed
water so as to minimize evaporation.
Water could also be pumped from the Great Artesian Basin with
recharging of the Basin occurring east of the Great Divide or anywhere
where there is abundant rainfall. Windmills and solar cells can be used
for power. There is much to consider if the groundwater is going to be
used. Victoria is now in the grip of dry-land salting because not
enough was understood about groundwater and the dynamics of the water
table.
(2) Development of soil.
Sand of the desert can be changed into soil. It requires the
addition of humus, and small sized dirt particles, ie clay and silt.
Organic waste can be used to provide the humus and nutrients. Organic
waste from the cities, even sewerage, can be used as organic. The newly
diverted water will be essential at this stage for the successful
decaying of the organic. Earthworms could also be cultivated to aid the
succesful the formation of soil.
(3) Plant growth.
This is the most exciting part because it will require an
intensive study of the vegetation that used to live in the arid regions
many thousands of years ago. It is possible that with the introduction
of more water to the arid regions, vegetation will regenerate all by
itself. I envisage that the vegetation that will first appear will more
likely be grass and scrub. Trees may need a little help from us.
Observation of what and how the plants pick up with the introduction of
more water should point us to the best way to actually plant more plants.
Starting off with belts of grasses, then shrubby type things, and
finally the more fragile plants and trees.
Finally, if this all works together, the plants should attract
their own moisture and change the weather patterns over the arid
regions to make life more feasible for themselves.
Ferals.
Another important action to be taken for the succesful
interaction of the Project will be the eradication of ferals: dogs,
cats, sheep, cattle, brumbies, rubber plants, lantana, groundsel.
Making way for a more harmonious ecology is a good excuse to get rid of
the ferals.
We may have to stop running cattle and sheep. The encouragement
of pastureland for these animals has degraded the land considerably. We
may have to stop growing sugarcane. As unthinkable as these
possibilities may be, they may have to be considered. They are not
natural to the land.
Cost
This could be an enormous venture and a very expensive one. We
have the examples of the revegetation of Israel and the building of the
largest dam in the world in Turkey to consider. It is important that
the revegetaion herald a new way of life for Australians. A push away
from the cities, back to nature. It is also important that this
project be saved from the technical jargon and specialization that
plagues so many scientific, economic and political ventures. Keeping
the jobs and management non-technical and non-specialist will allow the
10% of our workforce that is in desperate need to be IN the workforce a
chance to actively contribute to the shaping of a new society that is
not elitist.
If this venture ends up being "not economically viable", it
won't be economically viable until it is too late, or rather, not quite
too late. It is never too late. It will just get more and more expensive.
If we never do it, Gaia will eventually run us out of town and do it herself.
The politicians, I am sure, can sustain a pay cut for the cause of more
meaningful way of life for the Aussie battler. A little publicity to discover
the general opinion of Australians to this scheme will not go astray.
And Why?
And you may ask why? Why should we do this? I cannot say why we
should do this. Gaia's reasons are inscrutable. One reason might be to
repay the debt of our ancestors to the land. Another: to make the land
more habitable for when the sea rises and floods all of the capitals
except one. and another. Because it is there.
\qix\alphomeg.txt
"Message from the Author", March 1992:
THE KEY TO THE UNIVERSE, THE ULTIMATE ANSWER, THE SECRET OF POWER.
You are living in a book, called "Alpha and Omega".
The plot is much too complex to summarize; indeed, some critics question
whether there *is* a plot, in the ordinary sense of the word.
However, the *form* of the book is described easily enough.
There are 24 chapters, each named for a letter in the Greek alphabet.
Each chapter corresponds to a year between 1989 and 2012 inclusive; thus Alpha
"is" 1989, Beta "is" 1990, and so on.
The book comes in two parts: Part I, "Gaia 2000", running from 1989 to 2000,
and Part II, "The Posthuman Condition", running from 2001 to 2012.
Part I begins with Alpha/1989 and the proclamation of the end of nature and
the end of history, and ends with Mu/2000 and the proclamation of the end of
*human* nature and the end of *human* history.
Part II begins with Nu/2001, the year of the Cosmic Child, and ends with
Omega/2012, the year of the Final Chapter.
Between Part I and Part II, "Alpha and Omega" the *Event* occurs.
The Event lasts 24 hours, from the last moment in which any place on Earth is
still within the year 2000, until the first moment in which every place on
Earth is within the year 2001.
Each "character" in the book must at some point decide what the Event is and
what their relationship to it is.
* * *
Written Notes, March 12:
Drafting a Plan for the Trip and the Book, which I intend shall be included in
the final form of AO.
The Trip (the important part)
Itinerary: USA (San Francisco - Chicago) - UK (& perhaps the Continent) - Rio,
Brazil.
Priority now is to ensure I can make the trip & survive it.
Need PASSPORT, VISAS (& other entry requirements), & MONEY.
1. Get birth certificate from C & N's, submit passport application.
2. Find out entry requirements for USA, UK, Brazil.
3. Souces of income which won't waste time ??
Contact new Chelsea residents.
The Book - Alpha and Omega (interesting part)
* is to be a book after the fashion of Irigaray, or R.A.W.'s novels, which is
not of any one genre - that way I can do all the things I've wanted to do with
it at once. Also like The Book of the SubGenius & Falcon Press in that it
mixes words & pictures AND threatens to become the reader's new reality. I
don't want to play games with the readers though, so perhaps autobiographical
narrative will form `spine'. Or this will be one way to read it. [Problem of
Desire for Self-Revelation confronted with Limitations of Expression]
* autobio runs until some time after Earth Summit
* in places: prev creations (1999, t6), expositions of others' ideas (Green,
Dobbs etc)
* rediscover all previous incarnations of AO (Qix/Velax, etc), discuss
motivations [eg self-creation] (Panspace, Geometropolis)
Principal Fiction (first outline):
- world in which AO has been epochal book - Dec 31, 2000 - 24 1-hr moments -
24 individuals acting out parts scripted in original AO - by this date most
of the world has heard of this strange book which some people are acting out
but 99% don't care, analyzing the event as insignificant for various reasons:
of these 10% have actually read it and there was a moment AS THEY READ IT
where they wondered if it might mean something...but dismissed the thought.
But 1 in 100 people were convinced that the book heralded that SOMETHING of
significance would occur on that date - this 1% mostly gravitate to one of the
24 forms in the book, or else rebel against all. So the point is: How much
power DOES a person have to create reality? To what extent is the structure of
the book a product of choice? (And by implication, the structure of the
future?) Are we all acting according to someone's script? If so, whose? How
does it feel? What is to be done? ET CETERA.
The 24 `types' will be generated partly through history, partly through
laziness and randomness, partly through attempts to represent all perspectives
& forms of experience in the 24. All 24 will presumably have read AO & know of
the other 23, so this awareness should be reflected, in some way, in the form
of their participation in The Event. All have chosen to be where they are, &
know they have chosen, etc.
(important part of autobio - imagining `acting out the Apocalypse' - AO is
exploring this desire)
24 individuals who have chosen the `AO' reality.
challenge will be to make them all people who would have chosen to be as
they are; each [writing is illegible at this point]
also includes `maps' of AO - ie ways to read the book
RELATIONSHIP OF AO TO EARTH SUMMIT & July 26 WILL BECOME CLEARER (prob July 26
will pass before AO in print)
* * *
Start of an early draft, `Alpha and Omega':
Chapter One Christchurch, Aotearoa (New Zealand)
Silence instead of the usual pop-rock intro. Then a loudening wind-whistle at
a pure steady pitch ... joined by a chorus all holding to the same note ...
`Kia ora. This is Keri McConnell with a Special Edition of the World News
at 11 pm, Radio Aotearoa's last World News report for the 20th century. You
have just heard the opening notes of the second World Concert, which will
continue nonstop for the next 24 hours, until all of the globe has entered the
new century. Its mastermind, Jean-Michel Jarre, orbits above us, overseeing
the actions of millions of participants around the planet. Last year he looked
down on a world in turmoil, as the people of Earth demanded global democracy.
Tonight he looks down on a world on the edge of utopia or oblivion.
`The focus of world attention continues to be Japan. Millions of Japanese
still occupy the streets of Tokyo and the other metropolitan centres. Members
of the Japanese wing of GAIA are believed to have effective control of most
financial systems and other electronic services. Security forces, widely
considered the government's last ally, are engaged in a tense stand-off with
demonstrators at many government and corporate buildings. The Emergency
Committee is in closed session and is believed to be considering appealing for
UN military intervention.
`UN Secretary-General Li Po has not been heard from for several hours, but
General John Mbaqa, former President of South Africa and Acting Head of
Allied Forces under the command of the United Nations, said in an interview on
CNN that he viewed the situation with great concern.'
General Mbaqa: `Japan is the organizational centre of the postsuperpower
world. A breakdown of order there would have catastrophic consequences for
the billions who rely on world organizations for their very survival and
physical safety, and for our collective management of the global economy and
ecology. The irresponsibility of these would-be revolutionaries knows no
limits. The world must be prepared to intervene, if the worst comes to the
worst. But I still hope and pray that the Japanese people, who have been such
an example to us all, will come to their senses.'
Keri McConnell: `Elsewhere in Asia: general strikes in Korea, South-east
Asia and southern China continue, drawing inspiration from Japan. In Europe
and America, millions are already congregating in preparation for the World
Acid Party which is to protest the internment without trial of space migration
pioneers by the UN. In the Middle East and elsewhere around the world many are
waiting for the Second Coming and the Day of Judgement, and there is a
widespread expectation that the GOLEM biocomputer, "the greatest single
intelligence in the history of life on Earth" according to its designers, will
announce soon that we are indeed about to reach the Omega Point about which so
many have speculated.
`In the course of the next hour we'll hear from Aotearoans in Tokyo,
Jerusalem, Berlin, Los Angeles, Seoul, Beijing, Riyadh and Moscow, but first
we'll cross to John Callaghan, who is with Prime Minister Tiaki Tainui in
Auckland.'
John Callaghan: `E pai ana, Keri. Prime Minister, I just watched as you
listened to Keri read the news, and let me say for our listeners that you
shook your head several times. What do you make of it all?'
Tiaki Tainui laughs.
* * *
So, what exactly am I trying to do here? This is not absolutely clear to me.
But at the very least, I am exploring a new form of interactive art. The next
23 `books' of `Alpha and Omega' are yet unwritten, and their content will rest
largely on the responses to the first postings. I envision it as an evolving
dialogue on the ideas hinted at here: could something like GAIA 2000 `work'?
What form might a global participatory `Event' take? Is such a thing possible,
desirable, relevant, useful, dangerous?
What will *your* relationship to "the Event" be?
<@,,,$...#...%>
\qix\qanda.txt
[saturday 18-04-92]
Q: What is `Alpha and Omega'?
A: It's the title for a work of art that I have been thinking about, on and
off, for ten years (since 1982). At the time I was watching Carl Sagan's
`Cosmos', reading science fiction, and I had a vague idea of writing a book in
two parts: `Alpha' was to be about the Big Bang and the early stages in the
evolution of the universe, and `Omega' about the final moments of time. After
a while it occurred to me that I might want to tell the middle of the story as
well; I also read about James Joyce and the novel `Ulysses', which was
supposed to be a chronicle of events on an ordinary day in Dublin in 1904, but
told in such a way that the structure of the story mimicked the original myth
of Ulysses, the point perhaps being that `ordinary' events can take on the
significance of myth, revealing to you Truths as Deep as anything found in
organized religion or science.
So by the mid-Eighties, when everyone was watching `The Day After' and
wondering if nuclear war was on the way, I now imagined the setting of `Alpha
and Omega' to be some depopulated, post-apocalyptic world. My protagonists were
to be a group of young people who had borrowed various names and logos left
over from our time as their own symbols - for example, my lead character had
called himself Qix after a video game.
AO was now the story of Qix's attempt to imitate or improve on Joyce in his
own time, as follows: he created in himself, through a technique like auto-
hypnosis, a second personality (which I called a `daemon') named `Qix II'
which was to observe the events in a day in his life and fashion a narrative
from them as they occurred; I think his hope was that after the day was
finished, he would retrieve the narrative somehow and find cosmic meanings in
it. Since there are 24 letters in the Greek alphabet, I now envisioned a 24-
chapter book, one chapter for each hour in the course of Qix's day. The book
that the reader finally saw was to be the narrative produced by Qix II.
I envisioned the course of events to be something like this: at the start
Qix wakes up and begins the day's work, but after one hour (that is, after one
chapter) he finds himself plunged into a dreamlike world, and this state now
lasts for an hour. Then he is back in `reality', and this alternation
continues to the end. In the 12 `dream' chapters, he passes through something
like the 12 Labors of Hercules, which is a myth he knows about from his
reading; it gradually becomes clear that while he is in this `fugue' state,
`Qix II' has been controlling his body back in physical reality. The actions
of Qix II become more and more extreme, and the book was to turn into a battle
by Qix to discover what Qix II's intentions are.
QIX MUD - write your own `AO'. or SUD, anyway.
<<...=[]=...>>
\pippin\cloud\gaia.not
July 22, 1992
in the hallowed home of Abulafia J. Purpleflower
and on the internet somewhere there is a place like FurryMUCK where
everyone can like ring up or call to present a global picture of
"how is the earth today?"
the internet as the global mind. it will be a new stage of integration
but the internet *is* anarchy there is no control
CNN is the Great Beast
the internet is multi-version multi-layer reality
the internet as an academic wank
all paths lead to BOB
but that only makes sense
all points lead to one point.
and here it is...
==> .
a point this place is "IT"!
but it is everyway as all lines are everywhere
CNN is one reality
internet is all realities
meta-reality ;all realities `
Church of V\R will be the new world religion instead of the Church of
the Sub-Genius because the Sub-Genius has made promises that it can't
keep but V\R hasn't
COBOL was the programming language of the Devil
COBOL is a business language and the love of money drives a lot of business,
to programme in COBOL, you have to bureaucratize your mind
so COBOL is the language of the Devil.
"COBOL would be cool if it wasn't for all the Bullshit in the middle"
-- Shub
Join the Church of V\R, and save the world in your spare time.
THE GUMBALL MACHINE
there is a gumball dispenser, but there are no gumballs in it.
so it is a lolly dispenser, because you can put more than gumballs in
it. but to be more non-specific, it is a confectionary dispenser. and
to be more non-specific again, it is a thingy dispenser. but the thingy
dispenser is the Ugyldig, the place from which all thingys come. the
thingys also being the thoughts. so the Gumball Dispenser is the
Ugyldig.
\qix\t15.txt
T15: Church of the SubGenius, Church of V/R, CNN, the Internet, and the
Apocalypse.
Arguably the New World Order is the culmination of the historical
process of integration through militarization. There is no world state,
but there is a world-system without serious ideological competition
between different elites. In "Dateline for Dominance", written 1982, the
Book of the SubGenius tells us that 1991 was to bring World War III, and
in 1992 there would be a "Global Congress" lorded over by the Anti"Bob".
Of course, the Gulf War occurred in 1991, and the Earth Summit in 1992,
and so SubGenius prophecy suggests that the Anti"Bob", the human head of
the Conspiracy, is in fact George Bush. ("there is no branch of
conspiracy theory which cannot find a home for this man" - MONDO 2000)
But just as we have arrived at a point where the G-7 countries and the
UN Security Council are attempting to manage world politics and
economics in a unified fashion, millions of people are despairing of
politics and economics and looking for hope and understanding in the
"New Age" or in various religious fundamentalisms. All the New World
Order appears to promise is an unending series of disciplinary military
interventions a la Iraq and L.A. Some people are literally looking for a
higher power to step and save in them, whether it is Christ II, the Hidden
Imam or the Space Brothers, while others are looking for a moral and
spiritual renewal by finding a new guru, World-Teacher, Avatar etc.
Cable News Network (CNN) was I believe founded in 1980, but it was the
Gulf War in 1991 which really marked its entry into history. During
World War 2, FDR Churchill and Hitler all used mass media such as radio
to provide a common virtual experience for their respective nations.
Just as the wartime Allies formed the nucleus of the postwar United
Nations, mythic national identities were probably put forward in the
course of WW2 which continued to influence the world in the postwar era.
Bush used CNN to create a virtual experience for the world when he
announced that "the world could wait no longer". The announcement of the
beginning of hostilities was made in an "Address to the Nation", but it
was really an address to the planet, and the multinational nature of
Desert Storm meant that it was important to refer to "world opinion". So
the Gulf War seems to have greatly accelerated the formation of a mythic
global identity; subsequent "global" media events such as the coup in
Moscow and the summit in Rio are further critical points in the
evolution of this global culture, and both were mediated by CNN.
So I predict that in the course of the nineties, as various spiritual and
apocalyptic movements become more and more influential in global
politics, that more and more topics once considered esoteric will take
their turn under the scrutiny of the world media: traditional esoterica,
Theosophy, Magick... and all such searching must lead ultimately to
"BOB". "BOB" is the ultimate esoteric "it". Sold to the world using
every mystic sales-trick in the book, by 1998 the SubGenius "ideology"
will be in the spotlights of even mainstream global media... and
ultimately CNN will act as soapbox for Dobbs.
"There has been a lasting occult tradition that Ahriman, the figure of
the Anti-Christ, will be born in the year 1998, a number which is a
multiple of 666... The third multiple of 666 will take place in 1998
when the fallen Seraphim, Ahriman, the very spirit of materialism will
incarnate in the flesh personally to direct the total destruction of the
spiritual aims of Christianity." - "The Mark of the Beast", Trevor
Ravenscroft and T. Wallace-Murphy
According to the SubGenius "Prescriptures", "Bob" "gives life to the
image of the Beast in order to warn you of its coming". My theory of the
moment is that "Bob" is a fictional character crafted to look like both
Savior and Destroyer. And struggling to understand the nature of "Bob"
may well lead a lot of people to question a lot of things they once took
for granted. But "Bob", being fictional, can't actually save or end the
world himself; but if "Bob" can't, who can?
My answer is, everyone and no-one. There is a stream of esoteric
Christian thought which anticipates a "Second Coming", not in the form
of a new Messiah - we've already had more than enough of those! - but in
the form of a global shift of consciousness (Barbara Marx Hubbard's
"planetary smile") in which universal compassion is realized in every
individual. The creation of a situation in which each individual gets to
act out the nature of their virtuality, at the same time as everyone
else. But for there to be a collective experience of this sort, the
medium that mediates the experience must permit, in some sense, the
equal participation of all. And for that, CNN just won't do. No matter
how global its reach, CNN is still a single channel, and thus in a sense
a single virtuality.
BUT THE INTERNET IS NOT. Usenet News, for example, is a multiple-reality
medium. Email is a bidirectional channel of communication, unlike TV.
CNN could be the medium of choice for a global electronic feudalism, but
the Internet is surely the medium of choice for global electronic
democracy. The "point" of GAIA 2000 is to bring about a historical
"event" which will mark the entry of the Internet into the "real world".
So the Church of the SubGenius may be grabbing the headlines in 1998,
but the Church of V/R will be there in 2000.
(July 23, 1992)
<...ooo000ooo..oOOOoo...oo000ooo...>
\qix\qixatuq.not
1988 - first year at UQ
IH - reading about futurism, room wall papered with cutouts
first visit to IH disco
corresponding with friends
doing mathematics and physics
in 2nd half, corroboree, frequent trips to Sydney
with keith, reality exploration - falcon press bx, r.a.w & LEARY
bmh - imagination, will , reality
schismatrix - cyberpunk
university challenge
1989
min maths in first half, gpa very low
buy `engines of creation'
soiree occupies a lot of year, along with perennial AO plans plus other idle 1
2nd half - hitching with christine after moving out of ih
terence mckenna in `magical blend'
fm-2030
1990
back in bris - no money (austudy revoked) - homeless - also read celia green
australian revolution [later oz as 1st country to accept thelema]
`infinity' newsletter - plan to go to uk
find a house - go to lectures again - meet jodie eden - fun park
seth - french philosophy - ayn rand, murray rothbard, links with green
2nd half of yr - new house with pip
getting heavily into physics - 6 mths or so selfdirected work in QM, GR,
string theory, wondering about mind and matter etc, go to nightclubs a few
times meet new types of people
1991
dance party - glasses broken and lost forever on new years' day - watching CNN
and finding out about cognitive psychology - neural nets a new focus of
interest - moments of panic during gulf war [visit to D]
rent expensive - move in downstairs with vic and sim - rent about$20/wk
- 'go out' to dance maybe once every few weeks
ISO and Conservative meetings on NWO, and Sahaja Yoga
environmentalism and feminism
win suncorp competition on the future - notified during party at chelsea
buy D's computer - beginning of electronic diary
vallee
vic doing computer science - start to discover electronic networks, using
computer's modem - email
usenet news
later from UQ via Internet, Acid and Chelsea to GAIA 2000
[trip details] - including message to ksundeen
AI exam - handing out invites to Saturday Night party on back of photocopied
notes
double exclusion
remember metallica video `one' on t2 - then lawnmower deth, sonic youth etc
excerpts from t6
1992 [see other files]
1988 - first year at UQ
IH - reading about futurism, room wall papered with cutouts
first visit to IH disco
corresponding with friends
doing mathematics and physics
in 2nd half, corroboree, frequent trips to Sydney
with keith, reality exploration - falcon press bx, r.a.w & LEARY
bmh - imagination, will , reality
schismatrix - cyberpunk
university challenge
In my first year at UQ, I lived in an International House college, of which
there are hundreds around the world. They are distinguished by always playing
host to many students from outside the country in which they are located. I
was enrolled in mathematics and physics and got a reasonably high "GPA" (grade
point average), but my mind was elsewhere. I was discovering the existence of
a large body of "futurist" literature, which took the futurological
imagination seriously, thought about all the ways in which the future might be
different, and tried to plan on a big scale. I was most attracted to the
"cosmic optimists" among the futurists, foremost among whom was FM Esfandiary.
Born in Iran in 1930, but now living around the world, in one of his books
("Upwingers", of which I have never found a copy), he describes himself thus:
[QUOTE FROM FUTURIST]
The central library had a copy of his book "Optimism One", written in 1970,
which is advancing a revolutionary new philosophy of optimism, based upon the
supposition that humanity as a species really is on the edge of escaping our
creaturely limitations - that we are on our way to being free in Space, able
to move further out into the universe, and free in Time, able to extend our
lifespans indefinitely. The idea that this is clearly possible, and that the
perception of that possibility ought to revolutionize all our expectations
about the future, made complete sense to me.
[FINAL PARAGRAPH FROM OPTIMISM ONE]
In reading through and photocopying back issues of "The Futurist" I also came
across the writings of Barbara Marx Hubbard, who purveyed a concept of
"spiritual futurism". In her own way she was as Promethean as Esfandiary,
advocating space colonization, life extension, etc, but also ecological
management and what would now be called "New Age" goals; and she argued that
the technological and social transformations of our age are in fact the
fulfilment of the religious hopes and prophecies of all ages, and that what
distinguishes the spiritual futurist is a deep intuition of a creative
intention present in all things. I had reservations about the "creative
intention" and "spiritual" part since I didn't understand them and they
sounded like an endorsement of religion, but since she obviously possessed the
"correct" attitude I also made a mental note to keep my eyes open for her
autobiography, "The Hunger of Eve". I never found it, but a year or so later I
found "The Evolutionary Journey", published in 1982, which is apparently her
complete exposition of her philosophy as of that date, along with a little
autobiography. I wrote her a letter expressing some of my own hopes and asking
for more information on any networks, foundations etc of which she might be a
part, but it was returned unopened; she had moved from the Washington address.
Also in 1988 I spent some time reading what has now become well-known as
cyberpunk sf. Everyone knows about "Neuromancer" by William Gibson, in which
the world is run by global corporations, and an artifical intelligence placed
in orbit schemes to free itself from the controls of its human creators -
although it has been created by them in order to do that in the first place -
and in which much of the human population's time is spent in "cyberspace",
humanity's "consensual hallucination", which in turn inspired much of the
work and philosophizing on virtual reality that is now underway... But in 1988
I encountered a book which seemed much more important to me as an expression
of the true potentialities of the future, in which science alters human
culture and consciousness and technology alters the human form, and this was
"Schismatrix" by Bruce Sterling. In this novel, the Earth has been devastated
by "war plagues" and icecap meltings and other unspecified disasters, leaving
a totalitarian antitechnology regime in charge of the planet, an emergency
government that has swallowed all previous human cultures and has stifled
change in the name of humanity. In space, two grand coalitions of "factions"
are engaged in a sort of "cold war" over the nature of "human": the Mechanists
who have extended their lives through cybernetic means such as artifcial
limbs and the "downloading" of dimensions of their personalities/characters
into software, and the Shapers, who use "psychotechnologies" such as mind-
altering drugs, and genetic engineering. In the course of events the world
changes many times over, in the sense that fundamental assumptions are
constantly in question; aliens arrive but prove to be mere traders, ultimately
frightened by humanity's persistence in pursuing knowledge and change; the
Mechanist and Shaper ideologies wither with time as new ones arrive -
Posthumanism, which seeks for people to reconceptualize themselves as neither
human, Mechanist nor Shaper, but as "cognitive metasystems" existing on the
"Fourth Prigoginic Level of Complexity"; Zen Serotonin, whose adherents seek
to still the process of change, believing it arises from alienation and
internal distress, and who use Mechanist technology to administer doses of
the brain chemical serotonin to themselves in order to attain the Zenlike
state of calm and detachment... By the end of the book posthuman "clades" or
daughter species, "hopeful monsters", are proliferating across the solar
system and there is an intimation that an even more profound change is
imminent, comparable to the emergence of life from non-life... I felt, "This
book does justice to the complexity of the future in a way I have never seen
anywhere else. I actually felt disturbed by technological alterations of human
beings for the first time in anything that I have read. I also was annoyed
with the author for still having conflict in there - of the Mechanist/Shaper
sort..." That last thought I think is attributable to annoyance at the fact
that Sterling did not introduce any utopian final state of society. His
chief protagonist, in fact, undergoes a final transformation which is a
renunciation of all searches for ultimates, preferring instead to dwell in
"the Indefinite, for that's where all beauty lives..."
1989
min maths in first half, gpa very low
buy `engines of creation'
soiree occupies a lot of year, along with perennial AO plans plus other idle 1
2nd half - hitching with christine after moving out of ih
terence mckenna in `magical blend'
fm-2030
In the first half of this year I entered a minimal enrolment in mathematics,
went to almost no lectures and failed most of my subjects. I spent some of my
time trying to plan for Soiree, IH's annual event in which it opened to the
outside world, presenting food stalls, a concert, national displays... I was
unable to decide how best to use university, I couldn't see a course on
`Futurism' anywhere and didn't want to dissipate my energies in any particular
course - I still trusted my own sense of what I ought to be doing, I guess...
In the first half of '89 I finally found a copy of Eric Drexler's book
"Engines of Creation", of which I had read two years before in Omni.
In '89 I also came across an essay in a magazine called "Magical Blend" by
Terence McKenna, of whom I had read in "Cosmic Trigger" the year before. It
was very mysterious writing for me, attractive and mysterious... It talked
about the world of dream as being real, about "visible reality" as being the
surface of the world of dream in a literal, geometric, higher-dimensional
sense, about human history as being a process whereby some incredible entity
at the end of time comes into being... saying things like there are two
aspects to existence, forward flowing causality, and the backward projection
of this entity at the end of time or history, as it comes into being - this
final entity being something like the materialization or manifestation of
humanity's collective consciousness... I guess you'd have to read it.
In '89 I also found a book by Esfandiary again - only now he was called FM-
2030, having chosen his new name in order to be identified by his future
rather than his past, according to the blurb. IT was called "Are You a
Transhuman?" and took the form of a selfhelp book, composd of a number of
quizzes, to let you judge for yourself how attuned to the emerging world of
the future you are and how you might wish to change in order to enjoy the
process more and speed up your arrival there. The concept of "progressive" in
this book assumed a breadth of meaning I had seen nowhere else - not just
progressive in one's concepts or use of technology or compassion or lifestyle,
but in all of these at once. I was glad to see that his philosophy of optimism
had progressed from 1970 to this; it showed he was still alive and changing.
1990
back in bris - no money (austudy revoked) - homeless - also read celia green
australian revolution [later oz as 1st country to accept thelema]
`infinity' newsletter - plan to go to uk
find a house - go to lectures again - meet jodie eden - fun park
seth - french philosophy - ayn rand, murray rothbard, links with green
2nd half of yr - new house with pip
getting heavily into physics - 6 mths or so selfdirected work in QM, GR,
string theory, wondering about mind and matter etc, go to nightclubs a few
times meet new types of people
1991
1991 began for me at the first really large dance party I ever went to:
thousands of people many wearing outrageous costumes, strange overhead
displays and flashing lights, dancing until I was drenched in sweat, all this
took place on New Years' Eve. It was at this dance party that my glasses fell
out of my pocket and were smashed; I haven't replaced them since.
I spent January days watching CNN as the deadline for war in the Gulf
approached, and watching my focus shift from physics to cognitive science as
I learned more about neural networks. I first heard that the war had started
over the radio in a car, and followed the early days like the rest of the
human race, I think - fascinated and horrified and very confused. After the
war I found that the images of smart bombs and destroyed landscapes had
stimulated my militaristic imagination [`appetite for destruction'?] - I would
look at a building and imagine a Cruise missile entering it and destroying it,
or flying overhead on its way to who-knows-where. The observation of this in
myself convinced me for the first time of the power of images to stimulate
like thoughts.
dance party - glasses broken and lost forever on new years' day - watching CNN
and finding out about cognitive psychology - neural nets a new focus of
interest - moments of panic during gulf war [visit to D]
rent expensive - move in downstairs with vic and sim - rent about$20/wk
- 'go out' to dance maybe once every few weeks
ISO and Conservative meetings on NWO, and Sahaja Yoga
environmentalism and feminism
win suncorp competition on the future - notified during party at chelsea
buy D's computer - beginning of electronic diary
vallee
vic doing c! i�roducpirbAHd/��H ��� @� �L��lectronic networks, using
computer's modem - email
usenet news
later from UQ via Internet, Acid and Chelsea to GAIA 2000
[trip details] - including message to ksundeen
AI exam - handing out invites to Saturday Night party on back of photocopied
notes
double exclusion
remember metallica video `one' on t2 - then lawnmower deth, sonic youth etc
excerpts from t6
phil - `there is no death'
\qix\qix92.not
During Christmas I visited my mother at home and told her about my new
lifestyle of hacking, tripping and vagrancy, but felt unable to explain
adequately why I had done it, trusting that time would give me the chance to
do so. She was politely appalled and didn't understand, but I think she felt
that there must be a reason and so didn't `disown' me.
On my first night back in XCity I saw the Japanese animated film `Akira' and
was tremendously impressed, especially by the way in which the filmmakers were
able to show us the worlds of so many different parts of society: the military
and the ruling council, the scientists, the bikers... and by the apocalyptic
final events, in which Neo-Tokyo is destroyed and the new psychic posthumans
leave Earth behind.
The next day I wandered around Brisbane and realized that according to most
familiar standards I had reached a real low. I still had my dreams of the
future and many creative projects but all of this was in abeyance; in the
mean time I was homeless and taking drugs. I had one trip left, a "snowflake";
I took it about 3 pm that afternoon. A little while into the trip I decided
it would be my last.
t7
maleny
INTERNET posting
ao back - sharetext
apocalypse script book from uq
This time I came to conceive of "Alpha and Omega" as a 24-chapter book written
from the perspective of 24 individuals, each one's section lasting an hour,
each in a successive time zone, as I had done before; but I realized that the
concept of a collective experience for the whole of humanity, such as I had
imagined on my second trip, could provide a continuity of events that would
withstand the problem of a book in which each chapter introduced a new
protagonist. I came to imagine the world self-consciously entering this
ultimate collective experience, in which everyone might be participating but
in which some people would be more prominent than others; and so I imagined
it reaching its climax in the form of some sort of confrontation or encounter
between the head of a World State, who I envisioned as a Chinese man, the
first elected head of the UN, and a black American woman who I was to christen
`Madonna X', who would be seen as the spirit of many things: rebellion, the
potential for cooperation without a controller... Their meeting would be a
symbolic reconciliation of many divergent tendencies within the human mind,
between Male and Female, Law and Freedom, etc, an attempt to have them meet
in such a way that they could dramatize this reconciliation on behalf of
humanity and thus end such conflicts in people's minds once and for all. Later
on I would see him as trying to understand their confrontation, in terms of
himself and herself as an incarnation of something - am I evil and she good?
am I mind and she body? while she steadfastly refuses to be interpreted as
anything at all other than herself, and her refusal to acquiesce or resist to
any system of interpretation, to be savior or be saved, and his understanding
of this, is a sort of Zen enlightenment which he undergoes and which ends
forever the divisive epoch of human consciousness. But then the final chapter
comes and the world computer speaks.. etc blah blah
After writing several thousand words of the first chapter, I realized that the
whole book would be impossibly long, and so imagined making a movie of it
instead. Or perhaps a 24-hour virtual reality experience, which would only be
possible for people with very expensive technology... which made me decide
that it had to be a movie instead. But that in turn required simplifying the
plot... but making a movie is difficult... so in the end I returned to the
idea of writing it, but writing it as a screenplay, so that it would be easy
to read and might yet be filmed as well.
Keperra
free - j griff
karina
I realized that I needed an independent income, but I didn't want to be
wasting my time as I earned money. I had a few friends who had canvassed door-
to-door for Greenpeace, so I applied for a job there. I got it, but I quit
after three days since I saw a cynicism starting to emerge in myself that was
already present in the other canvassers, and I wanted to preserve myself from
that. (The turning point came when at one house I said, "Hello, I'm from
Greenpeace"; through the door I could see a family seated at a dinner table,
and the kindly middle-aged lady who answered the door said something like,
"I'm sorry, but we're busy having tea". I said, "That's OK", and left, and as
I went away I repeated quietly to myself, "Busy having tea", "Busy having
tea", and thinking, "Sorry, we don't want to know about the fate of the planet
- we're busy having tea", and then I realized that I was bitterly mocking them
in my mind and actions, which was the sort of thing I didn't want to make a
habit of. I thought I could see that there's always a reason why someone
doesn't want to see you, and there's a reason why a canvasser doesn't want to
let it go at that, but I don't want to follow either of those paths since that
way I will dissipate whatever my own unique contribution to the course of
events could be. So I quit after three days, but in that time I learned just
how remarkably informed the global Greenpeace organization is concerning the
state of the planet, linked up as it is by its internal network of faxes and
modems; I saw horrifying and moving adverts that were soon to premiere in
Europe which made me appreciate further why so many people saw humanity
collectively as a villain; I heard an announcement that the phoneline into
the office was most likely bugged, bringing home to me the reality of
espionage and covert operations; and I perused their files looking for
references to the Earth Summit, finding a statement from Maurice Strong that
he wished the event to be either `a success or a dramatic failure'.
fawnia
Around this time, while in conversation with someone, a phrase occurred to me,
with which I could characterize my philosophical and political outlook:
`anarcho-techno-animism'. Anarcho- for freedom, techno- for the `immanent
transcendence' that I only saw technology as bringing, animism because it
seemed likely to me that every part of the world IS alive in some sense.
Bob
I went to see a friend, my `first love' of childhood, and read through her
poems. They evoked strange thoughts and feelings in me, and as I walked home
they crystallized into an idea: that Earth might be an enormous interactive
virtual-reality system for the stars. If the stars are conscious, and the
planets are heavy matter pulled out of the nebula of a young star by the
gravity of all the others and made to assume rounded shapes and elliptical
orbits through the resonant interaction of gravity and electromagnetism,
then perhaps each star in the universe still exerts a specific influence upon
what goes on on the surface of Earth, and each `soul' on Earth is a star; in
other words every man and woman literally is a star... Perhaps, I fantasized,
there is a wormhole in each of us connecting us to the specific star who we
are... Thinking about us as the stars led me to think in a new light of the
four forces of physics, trying to interpret them as something which could be
felt. Gravity, being a universally attractive force, `corresponded' to
unconditional love, while light is the manifestation of one's Self.. The weak
and strong forces I wasn't sure about.. I recalled from my reading on quantum
gravity and Grand Unified field theories that it was likely that there was
only one `superforce' at the Planck scale, at which quantum gravity ought to
come into play, in which case love would be the basic force in the universe...
I also had an image of the Big Bang to Big Crunch cosmology, in which there
is a final black hole... which made me think of Celia Green, because all of
that mutual attraction led to mutual destruction... or perhaps a
transcendental union.
cocreators in panspace
CREATION
thetic
see MAR12PLA
After my encounter with the "thetic", I conceived of "Alpha and Omega" in a
new way; as a sort of "thought virus", much as the concepts of SubGenius seem
to be; taking the physical form of a book or a film, but really spreading an
awareness of the malleability of reality itself.
virtuality/reality
karina
After speaking with my friend I came to a new thought: perhaps everyone has
Infinite Intelligence and Infinite Compassion, but is working only with Finite
Information, and this is why it does not always look that way.
ak47 dream
m2
Islamic mysticism - Shaun "so that's why you've staged this whole game"
[imagining being Author - taking responsibility for every fact -
analogue to Buddha or Christ - but is there a cosmic author as well?]
"play the game, boy!"
[Eater of Souls] - Nietzsche's final days
In "New Age" magazine I found a review of a new book coauthored by William
Irwin Thompson, and a few days later it was pointed out to me in a bookshop
and I bought it. "Reimagination of the World" is a set of seminars given by
Thompson and David Spangler of Findhorn; its subtitle is "A Critique of the
New Age, Science, and Popular Culture". The idea which I picked up from it was
that levels of being Thompson calls elemental and angelic correspond to
aspects of existence that science would call bacterial and topological. Myth,
folklore and dream all consist of the entry of information into human culture
from these nonhuman realms.
There is an afterword by Thompson on the Gulf War, in which he says that
Saddam Hussein's insanity created an opportunity for elemental possession
which manifested itself in the burning oil wells of Kuwait; now the elemental
is visible to the human, and the caretakers of the global economy must
acknowledge the existence of the ecology in which they are embedded. I was
reminded of my own thought of a few weeks earlier, that the Gulf War was a
showdown between the Rebel Gods and the Elder Gods, and that Iraq, although
nominally a Muslim country, might be a place where older Sumerian deities
still reigned in some form; whereas the United States is clearly the home of
both JHVH-1 and Eris. I was also reminded that World War III was to take place
in 1991 according to the SubGenius prophecies.
I also thought of how the Elder Gods were supposed to have designed and
directed the course of evolution, and thought of the four basic amino acids
that make up DNA...
Jeremy Griffith's appearance on campus
In the day prior to Griffith's appearance, as I conceived of telling him
about the Earth Summit, I felt real fear about whether I was taking the right
step or not; by doing so I would perhaps precipitate a World State with its
Science-Religion of Love, and would the experience of that be Heaven or Hell?
I had no idea.
g1
[reality becoming like tv screen - brain of God etc]
mood swings
On April Fool's Day I was in a black mood. I felt as if I was really hating
reality in a way that I couldn't ever remember doing, and I asked myself, am I
hating everyone else as well? I didn't like that thought, and it still didn't
seem appropriate, so I thought, perhaps what I am really feeling is a hatred
of all limitations, and a hatred of our basic uncertainty, and the great
futility of purposeful action. I remembered one night when I met Nathan: he
was drunk, and was talking about the people around us in the mall. Once before
he had expressed concern that he was losing his purity and worrying too much
about others, and I asked him why he bothered at all, and he said they looked
like poor lost sheep to him, with no idea where they were going. This night he
said to me, "I hate them all", and after a pause, "I hate myself". Was this
what I was now feeling myself? Not knowing my own feelings almost seemed worse
than truly believing that I hated the whole of existence, myself and other
people included. I remembered the end of Neuromancer, where the computer is
persuading Case to take the final step that will free it from human
constraint. The key, it tells him, is hate. He has to hate in order to finish
his task. He asks it, "Who do I hate?" And it replies, "Who do you love?" And
it is self-hate that propels him through the final phase of defences. After I
came home and wished myself to sleep, I thought of that, and thought, perhaps
this will be the way in which "technology", incarnate in something like
Skynet or Internet, will finally overwhelm the human race; by asking of it,
"Who do you love?" One of the final images before I slept was from Celia
Green: a perception of the similarity between this planet and an anthill
spinning in space. I felt burnt out, not as if I wasn't feeling anything any
more, but as if I didn't even know if I was feeling or not.
The next morning I could remember all that I had thought, even if I didn't
understand it, and felt that some new phase was upon me. I reread
"Reimagination of the World", especially the sections pertaining to multi-
dimensional realities beyond this. In this conception, evil is seen as that
which seeks to limit the nature of reality - wants to stop the world changing
beyond what it understands - seeks to restrict a multidimensional universe to
some small number of dimensions. I began to imagine every person I saw as a
multidimensional being whose three-dimensional incarnation that was visible
to me as only the tip of an iceberg. I saw real humour as a sudden sensation
of higher dimensions - bisociation as Arthur Koestler called it. I began to
imagine that I was truly beyond worries about good and evil, and that I could
start to think of the world as play without worrying about evasion. Whatever
the purpose of existence is, whatever I see must be one manifestation of that,
so instead why not concentrate on trying to realize as many dimensions as
possible in the world, through the pursuit of harmony and beauty and fun?
290392
abulafia
timeship earth 2013
Shaun - perception, imagination, will (Will to Power)
atheist society
reality = imagination
[ellison]
If I'm going to become God, I'd rather do it along with everyone else who
wants to. [Eater of Souls - Yog-Sothoth, God]
\qix\4aug91.txt
WORLDVIEW as of 4 August 1991
Political/economic/ideological outlook:
I think that a world system of nation-states with market economies and
multi-party political systems, grouped in the United Nations, is flexible
enough to be able to evolve in any desired direction - so reform not
revolution. I am rejecting large-scale upheaval because it seems
unnecessarily destructive, from where I sit.
Realistic hope for information age: that majority class will be that of
technician/manager, overseeing infrastructures and ecologies, with a
minimization of menial uninteresting work (not forgetting that most of this
is located in households, not factories).
The outlook of my ideal culture would be libertarian, scientific and
compassionate.
Personal philosophy:
I have NO opinion regarding anyone's candidate for the Ultimate Truth. To
use a metaphor: my situation is as if I am seated before a terminal, one node
in a network whose full dimensions - in time, space, levels of complexity - I
cannot see from here. For now I would better understand my immediate vicinity
rather than speculate on whether the totality is finite or infinite, caused or
causeless, mechanistic or teleological ...
S.M.I^2.L.E. (Space Migration, Intelligence Increase, Life Extension) still
describes the type of everyday life I hope to see realized in the future (as
soon as possible!): a world where people can defer death indefinitely and have
access to all of humanity's knowledge, and where the human sphere is expanding
beyond Earth. In particular, so long as people are limited in time, to me all
our other achievements are rendered futile. Death is my ultimate enemy.
There are three areas where I would like to make progress in my understanding:
quantum measurement; conscious experience; anomalous phenomena. I think I need
progress in the second area, and probably the first, before I can hope to make
any headway in the third area.
<,,,...///>
\qix\91ttd.txt
20 JULY 1991
3part research priorities stand as
CONSCIOUSNESS (COGNITIVE SCIENCE / NEUROSCIENCE)
QUANTUM MECHANICS / STRING THEORY
ANOMALOUS PHENOMENA
Strategies.
1. Consciousness. Accumulate "maps of consciousness".
Look at global models from cognitive science.
Look at global models from neuroscience.
2. Physics. Special relativity, general relativity.
Quantum mechanics, quantum field theory.
Standard Model, string theory.
3. Anomalous phenomena. Exhaustive typology.
OVNIBASE-style records.
Field work.
1a. Maps of the mind. 1b. A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness.
1c. Neural Darwinism; The Remembered Present.
3a. Charles Fort. The New Inquisition.
3b. Jacques Vallee. Celia Green. newsgroups.
3c. local groups; travel plans.
?...!...?
\qix\prophecy.txt
WHAT WILL BECOME OF V/R AND GAIA 2000?
1997...
Brisbane nuked by renegade SubGenius faction that believes it is
striking a mortal blow against the Elder Gods...
but by then the information of freedom was loose on the Internet, and the
transformation could not be reversed...
CAFEs and street communications centres proliferated in the major urban
centres of the world...
the computer underground and posttechno culture crossbred, leading to
intercontinental raves integrated by pirated satellite communications...
by 2000 half the world population was under 20, and half of it inhabited
cities...
the New Aeon of Horus truly arrived with this teledemocratic
anarchopsychedelic global youth revolution in which the world turned upside-
down...
civilization ended, not with an environmental/economic catastrophe
but with a psychic catastrophe in which the old archetypes were exploded...
while the 42-month reign of the Great Beast Bob came to its end, the Internet
became the medium for an esoteric Second Coming and global transformation of
mind...
all of which was precipitated by the original Scriptures of V/R...
