A New Californian’s Guide to the Mondo 2000 Guide
This material appeared as the introduction to the Mondo 2000 User’s Guide, which I edited in 1992.
When my family and I moved to California in 1986, one of the first things I did was to visit the City Lights bookstore on Columbus Avenue in San Francisco’s North Beach, right across Jack Kerouac Alley from the funky old beatnik bar/cafe called Vesuvio’s. Whenever I go into City Lights, I get so excited seeing all the cool books and magazines that I can barely even breathe. One particular magazine that caught my eye on this visit was a huge pink thing with a Ben-Day dot picture that seemed to be a cross between Tim Leary and Art Linkletter. Art Linkletter was the host of a 50’s candid-camera TV show called PEOPLE ARE FUNNY, and he authored the book KIDS SAY THE DARNDEST THINGS. Linkletter’s daughter had a mental illness which was compounded by the use of LSD, and she ended up committing suicide by jumping out a window, so Art Linkletter became a prominent spokesperson against psychedelia. So now here’s these California weirdos putting out this big pink magazine — — which is called HIGH FRONTIERS — — and they have Linkletter’s face merged with Leary’s, and out of the mouth is coming a shaky speech-balloon saying, “Kids do the darndest drugs!” And if that weren’t enough, walking across the top of the picture is a drooling three-eared Mickey Mouse holding out the logo of the Central Intelligence Agency. The magazine HIGH FRONTIERS became REALITY HACKERS, which became the magazine MONDO 2000, and now I’m co-editing the MONDO 2000 USER’S GUIDE TO THE NEW EDGE. Software packages always come with a book that says USER’S GUIDE on it, even though in the rest of culture, a “user” is usually using drugs. Are people who buy software the same as the people who buy drugs? People are funny
At first California was hard to get used to. My family and I were coming from a small town in central Virginia, you understand, a place called Lynchburg, the home of that notorious God-pig, Jerry Falwell, always on TV, preaching fear and asking for money. The main thing you notice first about California is how much you have to drive. At first I’d see all these little shopping centers along the highways and I’d be thinking, “Oh, I better come back here sometime and check out those nice stores.” It took me awhile to realize that the little shopping centers, the strip malls, were all the same, and that there was no point in going into one except for an instantaneous purchase. In this great American urban mega-suburb, shopping is a parallel, distributed process. Shopping for ordinary things, that is. For special things you need special, non-mall sources like the addresses in the MARKET section at the back of this USER’S GUIDE.
California drivers aren’t usually rude — — if there is a necessity to merge, people will pause and wave each other on — — but they are pushy. If you don’t take advantage of a hole in traffic, someone else will squirm around you to get at the hole. Once, in Santa Cruz, when I paused flounderingly in an intersection in our big old Chevy station-wagon, two separate drivers called me an asshole. I was blocking a hole and I was driving an American station-wagon with Virginia plates, therefore I was an asshole. I notice a fair amount of standoffishness and impatience among Californians. It’s like Californians know that there is the possibility of getting REALLY GOOD STUFF out here, and when they have to settle for something inadequate — — like seeing a whale-wagon in the middle of an intersection — — they get very miffed. When I first got here, I was so happy to see restaurants that weren’t Red Lobsters and Pizza Huts that I was bewildered by all the “Very Best Restaurants” guides I kept seeing in the paper. “Hell,” I’d say, “I don’t need the VERY BEST. I’m perfectly happy with something that’s REASONABLY ADEQUATE.” But of course now, after six years here, I don’t feel that way anymore. I’m a Californian, and I want the very best all the time! My guiding philosophy in making the selections for this USER’S GUIDE has been simply that: get the very best things I could find in all the issues of the magazine HIGH FRONTIERS/REALITY HACKERS/MONDO 2000.
Some of the first Californians I befriended were fellow science-fiction writers. There’s few enough SF writers that we’re always glad to see each other. The one thing that my new SF friends were most interested in telling me about was Marc Pauline of SRL (Survival Research Labs) and the cool things he did with machines. They knew, of course, that I like machines a lot — — my novel SOFTWARE is about the first intelligent robots, and WETWARE is about the robots using bio-engineering processes to build people like machines. Cyberpunk fiction is really ABOUT the fusion of humans and machines. That’s why cyberpunk is a popular literature for this point in time — — this is a historical time when computers are TAKING OVER many human functions and when humans are TAKING IN much more machine-processed information. There is a massive human/computer symbiosis developing faster than we can even think about it realistically. Instead of thinking realistically, we can think science-fictionally, and that’s how we end up writing cyberpunk near-future science-fiction. Cyberpunk is really about the present.
You would think science-fiction conventions would be very hip and forward-looking, but often they are dominated by a fannish, lowest-common-denominator, Star Trekkie, joiner kind of a mentality. At times there’s even a nostalgic, BACKWARDS-LOOKING streak to science-fiction gatherings, with ancient writers saying reactionary things like, “The future isn’t what it used to be.” When the idea of cyberpunk SF first developed, it was very unpopular at SF cons. Along with some of my fellow cyberpunk writers, I was practically booed off the stage for talking about cyberpunk at an SF Con in Austin a few years back. In California, I finally went to a good and intelligent science-fiction conference. It was called Sercon (which is SF fan jargon for “serious and constructive”), and was held at the huge old Claremont resort hotel in Berkeley soon after I moved here. All my new SF SF friends were there, and the British SF writer Ian Watson was there, too, and I spent a lot of time hanging out with him and with Faustin Bray and Brian Wallace of Sound Photosynthesis. Faustin and Brian were videotaping everything everybody said, which made us feel smart and important. In the morning the grounds of the Claremont were full of beautiful flower beds and big pastel sculptures, with a warm damp breeze off the bay. Ian Watson and I had lobster ravioli for lunch. This, I felt, was California as I’d dreamed it would be.
Faustin brought me into contact with the editor and the owner of MONDO 2000, R.U.Sirius and Queen Mu. R.U. is a pale-skinned puffy-faced individual with very long hair and a goony gap-toothed smile. Mu is fey and spacey, thin, attractive in a toothy Camelot-Kennedy way, also with long hair. They invited me to come and give a “Reality Hackers” speech/reading in a space called Shared Visions on San Pablo Avenue in Oakland down below Berkeley. Before the reading, they gave me and my wife Sylvia a good meal at the “Mondo house” — — the huge rambling redwood Califorina-craftsman deco pile in the Berkeley hills where MONDO 2000 is produced. I was nervous about the talk, for which I was billed as a cyberpunk — — in my past experience, the public’s reaction to cyberpunk had been quite negative. I kept my shades and leather jacket on and read a chapter of my novel WETWARE in which some people have sex, and one of them turns out to be a robot meat-puppet with a steel rat living in his skull. The audience was about 70 strong, and R.U. and Mu had charged them $10 apiece. And they totally got into what I was talking about. I’d expected them to be snobby arty/literary East coast types, but they weren’t like that at all. They were reality hackers, nuts, flakes, entrepreneurs, trippers, con-men, students, artists, mad engineers — — Californians with the native belief that (a) There is a Better Way, and (b) I Can Do It Myself.
To put it in a clear gelatin capsule for you, I’d say that (a) and (b) are the two beliefs that underly every single entry in the MONDO 2000 USER’S GUIDE. The way that Big Business or The Pig does things is obviously not the best way; it’s intrusive, kludgy, unkind, and not at all what you really want. I mean, look at what they show on TV! Look what the government does with your taxes! How can we make things better? The old political approach is to try and “work within the system,” and spend years trying to work your way up to a position of influence so you can finally set things right, only by then you no longer even want to. But now, thanks to high-tech and the breakdown of society, you’re free to turn your back on the way “they” do it, whatever it might be, and do it yourself. You can make your own literature, your own music, your own television, your own life, and — — most important of all — — your own reality. There is no reason to believe in or even care about the stale self-serving lies being put out by the media day after dreary day. The world is full of information, and some of it is information YOU NEED TO KNOW, so why waste time on the Spectacle of the politicians and the media?
At my Reality Hackers talk, I finally relaxed enough to take off my mirrorshades and put on my regular glasses, and we all sat in a circle and people did show-and-tell. Someone had a mind machine with earphones playing pulsed sound to match the flickering rhythms in two rings of tiny red lightbulbs mounted in goggles that went over your eyes. As soon as I put them on I saw closeups of the Mandelbrot set, just like the ones I’d been seeing on my new computer. The Mandelbrot set is a mathematical pattern discovered by Benoit Mandelbrot of IBM, the same guy who coined the word “fractals.” Fractal shapes have the property that each small part resembles the whole thing. Trees are a kind of fractal, in that the branch of a tree tends to look like a shrunken version of the whole tree, and the sub-branches look like the tree as well, on down through about seven levels. The Mandelbrot set is shaped like big fat warty buttocks with a knobby disk stuck on one side, and with a bumpy stinger sticking out of the disk. If you zoom in on the edges of the Mandelbrot set you find little copies of the butt, warts, disk, and stinger, some of the copies wound around into gnarly spirals, all swathed in diaphanous veils and gauzes of the loveliest imaginable colors. The really HEAVY thing is that the whole endlessly various pattern is based on nothing but repeatedly evaluating a single quadratic equation. A potentially infinite information structure can emerge from one simple equation, if the equation it iteratively coupled to a repetitive computation. And THAT could very well be how the world is made, you dig, a simple rule plus lots and lots of computation. The world’s “rule” is the Secret of Life and the world’s “computer” is matter — — pursuing the analogy another step, the “system software” for the world’s “computer” is physics.
My new California physics friend is Nick Herbert. Nick is lean, button-nosed and over fifty, with Ben Franklin spectacles and a fringe of white hair around his bony pate. He holds to the belief that maybe there really IS some laboratory way to build a time-machine or a matter-transmitter or a telepathy-inducer. For all this, Nick is neither a charlatan nor is he a self-deluded nut, meaning that Nick does not LIE about being already able to build these physical devices (as a venture-capitalist-wooing charlatan would), nor does he THINK that he knows how to build them on the basis of some badly flawed or even nonsensical “symbolic proof” But Nick isn’t a nut, he’s more like a gymnast who decides to spend the rest of his life walking on his hands, just to see how it is to have the world permanently upside-down. I already knew Nick before moving here by his having written me some letters arguing about synchronicity and time-travel. When I got out here, he got me invited for a free weekend at Esalen in Big Sur. I’d read about Esalen for years of course, and was really tripped to go there. Nick’s scam was that it was a workshop having to do with fringe concepts in Mind and Physics. Esalen has workshops on all kinds of things, and if you’re a presenter it’s free and if you’re a participant it might cost a couple of hundred dollars. While the Mondo/Reality Hackers scene felt really happening, the Esalen scene did not. A lot of the other guests from the other workshops seemed very pushy, cold and uptight. They were like unkind Swiss and German tourists into their own personal health, man, I mean like readers of SELF magazine. Going to Esalen felt like going to visit Thomas Jefferson’s house Monticello in Virginia. There used to be something there. The scenery is beautiful. But now its run for tourists by Park Rangers. At least that’s how it struck me that one time, but in all fairness to Esalen remember that I was then still undergoing the economic and cultural “bends” at moving from hideous Lynchburg to lovely CA. The wealth of Californians annoyed me a lot at first. And the indifference. The hard glossy surfaces of people’s character armor. I soon realized that if I was going to make any money at all, I was going to have to retool and become high-tech. I began practicing looking at things — — like the rocks and surf off Big Sur, for instance — — and trying to believe that THIS TOO was a computer calculation. This was the big mental transformation I was needing to make — — to think of everything as a computer — — and talking about things like enlightenment or the theory of relativity struck me as a waste of time, dead-horse topics left over from past.
One of the great scientific centers for the study of the mathematical theory of chaos is the University of California at Santa Cruz. Soon after moving here, I had my first opportunity to give a talk to Ralph Abraham’s chaos seminar at UC Santa Cruz. Ralph is a ruminative man with a dark beard. He speaks softly, but is somehow rather intimidating. You never feel like interrupting him. He showed me a file-drawer full of computer circuit boards and said that he wanted to use computer processes to generate musical output. After my talk we went to a great Chinese restaurant in Santa Cruz on Rt. 1 just north of Bay Rd. that leads up to the UC campus. The place is called the Oh Mei. The day’s special was called “Ants on a Tree,” though that’s not really what it was, I think it was a zucchini with transparent rice-flour noodles. The talk had been publicly announced, so as well as Ralph, me, and his students, a couple of random strangers showed up as well. The next time I saw Ralph he was mostly interested in talking about cosmic historical trends, primordial Chaos, the Mother Goddess, way-out things like that. California culture is like an organico-chemical bath with thousands of distinct kinds of macromolecules with open bonding sites. No matter what kind of triple-cis-alpha-desoxy thought probe you might be waving around, you know you’ll find minds with receptor sites you can bond to.
Speaking of chemicals, after one of my talks somewhere else, a random stranger who nobody knew walked outside with me and pulled out a paper packet of white powder. “This is a new drug, Rudy. It’s like Ecstasy or MDMA. Some people I know made it. They’d be very interested to hear how it affects you.” “Wow, thanks.” I saved the powder, and was finally unwise and idle enough to eat it one night a month or two later. It made me grind my teeth a lot, and then I got into a phone-calling jag, getting in touch with various weird oldtime computer-programming and hacker types whom I hadn’t had the nerve to talk to before. Merged on the phone I had the feeling of being jacked into some huge synchronistic Net. But then the full force of the drug hit me, and I sat in the living-room feeling crazed and frightened. The next day I was so depressed that I wanted to die — — this chemically induced clinical depression being the usual aftereffect of psychedelics on me, and the reason why I very rarely take them. I enjoy READING about people taking psychedelics, and I like to THINK ABOUT the effects they have, but I don’t really like to TAKE them, nor would I wholeheartedly recommend them to others. To me the political point of being pro-psychedelic is that this means being AGAINST consensus reality, which I very strongly am. Psychedelics are a kind of objective correlative for being weird and different.
But drugs are “out” these days, or at least that’s what the media would like us to believe. Can computers supplant psychedelics? As one of my fellow teachers at San Jose said to me, “Computers are to the Nineties what LSD was to the Sixties.” With cool graphics and virtual reality we can pursue the dream of the pure non-physical software high. When I first got my computer I still knew very little about programming. The only software that I had was a free Mandelbrot set program someone had given me, and my idea of “hacking” was to reach around to the back of the monitor and randomly change the little switches I found there. One of them toggled the monitor between digital and analog mode, and when I set it the “wrong” way, it would make the Mandelbrot image look like a bunch of gray and white lines in the top of the screen with new little white pixels moving around. I liked to imagine that it was a picture of penguins on the Antarctic ice, but this wasn’t exactly a great feat of hacking I could impress my family and friends with. “Look, when I turn this little switch the picture gets different!” No, to do neat things with my machine I needed to understand how its insides worked so I could make up my own switches. Just as you can’t write a story without having something to write about, you can’t program without having something to program about. But I knew right away what I wanted to program: cellular automata (CA for short), which are parallel computations that turn your screen into self-generating computer graphics movies. In a two-dimensional CA, every pixel on your computer screen is “alive,” in that each pixel looks at the colors of its neighboring pixels and adjusts its own color accordingly. This is analogous to the way in which each spot on the surface of a swimming pool is “alive” and sensitive to the neighboring spots. When you throw a piece of redwood bark into a swimming pool, the ripples spread out in perfect uniformity and mathematico-physical precision. How do they know where to go? Because each spot on the water’s surface is updating itself in parallel a zillion times a second. The world is a huge parallel computation that has been running for billions of years. The folks putting on this all-encompassing show we live in — — they’ve really got the budget! Even within the small budget of a PC’s memory and clock-rate, CAs are a rich environment for letting the computer do weird things. By blending together a succession of CA rules you can, for instance, do something like this: start with a blank rectangle, fill it in with concentric ellipses, break some of the ellipses into globs, arrange the globs into a moving face, grow a detailed skin texture, turn the skin’s pores into small beetles that crawl around and chew the picture up, send connecting lines between nearby beetles, bend the lines into paisley shaped loops, and fill the loops with growing fetuses.
I really got into the heart of California computer culture when I started going to the annual Hacker’s Conference held here. The first time, I was invited on the strength of my science-fiction, but by then I was already trying to be a hacker, so I brought my machine to the conference to show off what I’d achieved with my cellular automata. It was the most fun I’d ever had. Everyone there seemed happy. They were happy because they could actually DO something. We stayed up all night partying, bullshitting, and hunching over each other’s machines. It all began to seem so SIGNIFICANT. The human brain gets along by grouping things into patterns and assigning meanings to them. If you have a nice fast chaotically changing computer graphics program you have lots of things to try and make patterns out of. And, unlike with watching clouds or fire, with a computer you also have the meta-level to play with; meaning that you can stop the process, go in and look at the rules generating it, tweak the rules if you like, then start it up again. And then there’s the meta-meta-level, the discourse about what this image in connection with this program MEANS — — like do fire and clouds really work this way? Are the thought-patterns in our brains like computer-generated fire and clouds? While my new friends and I were gloating over each other’s graphics, other hackers were doing entirely different kinds of crazy stuff. Someone had linked his computer to the public telephone and was talking to Russia using the blank spaces between successive TV screen images going across the satellites. That little bar between frames that you see if your TV loses its vertical hold — — that was this guy’s Panama canal to everywhere. And the things in the real world these guys had done! “I wrote the software for the first Versateller machines,” someone might say, or, “I wrote this arcade game your kids play,” or “my program is used in the carburetor of your car.” What really impressed me was that people could play around on machines in their homes and end up affecting the events in the big Industrial world. Before hackers it seemed like you needed a factory and an accountant and a bunch of workers before you could actually make something. But in the information economy, you can package it up and ship it out right from your home. Not that all the hackers were only into information. Hacking is an elastic concept — — some guys showed up at the conference without paying, and proudly told me that he’d “hacked the Hackers Conference” — — hacking in the sense of finding your way through some hindering thicket. Another told me he was going to hack Death by having his head frozen. He had a zit on his nose, and I had to wonder about freezing the zit, too. Another guy took me out to the parking lot and showed me an electronic lock that he’d designed for his Corvette. There’s a three-position toggle switch by the door, and to unlock the car, you jiggle the switch sixteen times up or down from center. The whole glove compartment was full of chips to make the system work. Someone else had robot cars that seek light, little radio-controlled type trucks with no radio-control but instead with a chip that the guy himself had made. The cars liked the edges of shadows, they liked to find a place where they could keep wavering in and out of the light. Another guy had programmed his own flashing electronic jewelry. Someone else had a bottle liquid nitrogen to show off a superconductor he had. When we got tired of seeing the superconductor levitating magnets, he poured a lot of liquid nitrogen into the swimming pool. The liquid nitrogen froze itself little boats of water-ice that it sat on, boiling. A lot of play, but beyond that, there was a real sense of being engaged in THE GREAT WORK, much the same sense as workers on the Notre Dame cathedral might have felt.
I often think of Silicon Valley (and other hacking centers) as being like the Isle De France in the Middle Ages, a spot where artisans and craftspeople from all over come together to work on the Great Work. It’s certainly not a cathedral that we’re building here — — so what is it? At first I thought the Great Work was artificial life. The idea behind artificial life (called alife for short) is that what living systems are really doing is to move information around. When living systems reproduce themselves, they are replicating their information. When a living system heads towards some food, it is using information about its environment to improve its situation. A computer virus is alive in a lowdown kind of way: it attaches itself to programs and gets those programs to make copies of it. A higher kind of artificial life might be an electronic ant colony with graphical critters that dart around on the screen and evolve to get better at bumping into the pixels that count as food. Much higher than that might be a program which is able to repair and even improve itself. Higher steps might be programs which not only talk like a person, but which are even able to effectively drive a robot body around in the physical world. And somewhere down the science-fictional road might be robots that build robot factories that make new robots. A race of “artificially alive” machines spawned by us — — the torch of life passed from carbon on to silicon.
It’s an inspiring vision, but is artificial life really the Great Work which hackers are working towards? Isn’t the more important goal to make things better for the humans on Earth now instead of for some race of future robots? This line of thought views the Great Work as the achievement of some kind of material paradise on Earth, with comfort and abundance and perfect understanding for all mankind. The watchword here is Global Network, rather than Artificial Life. Great high-bandwidth communication links with people talking to each other in Virtual Reality, instantaneous electronic polling, ten thousand different TV channels, and all good stuff like that. Keeping something this complicated working would take exceptionally good computer programs, of course, and the best kind of program is going to be one that’s artificially alive, so in the end the two Great Work images may really merge into one utopian vision.
Utopias have a way of blinding you to the real present, though, so let’s draw back from that. Let me tell you about what I saw some REAL machines do. Fellow freestyle SF writer Marc Laidlaw took me and the family to a Survival Research Labs show held under a freeway in San Francisco. It was terrific, a mad swirl of politics and collaged machinery, with a giant flame-thrower that seemed continually about to explode, a pile of burning pianos, a giant metal arm poking at the pianos, and so on. After the show, my son and I found a heap of what seemed to be unexploded dynamite — — clayey substance packed into an officially printed wrapper saying “FRONT LINE DEMOLITION PURPOSES ONLY”, and with a long fuse. My son and I love fireworks. We tried lighting one, but it didn’t go off. We were spending the night at the Laidlaws’ apartment in Haight-Ashbury. Sylvia kept saying that it was too dangerous for us to keep the dynamite, that it was unstable and might go off. After some thought I agreed. So how were we to throw it away? Laidlaw didn’t exactly want it in his kitchen trashcan, so he and I went outside to ditch the dynamite. The sidewalks of Haight-Ashbury are crawling with homeless stoners every hour of the night and day, and we didn’t want them to get hold of the dynamite, so we couldn’t just leave it on the curb. The public trashcans were out of the question, as some Haighties practically LIVE in the trashcans — — you throw something in a trashcan and there’s a guy inside the can to catch it. Finally we found a church with a metal grating over the entrance. We pushed the dynamite through there out of reach. A few days later I saw an article in the San Francisco Chronicle about a rash of “fake dynamite” being found all over the city. It had all been a mind game that was part of the Survival Research Labs show. The show had kept going on for several days, as it were, and the Establishment’s Spectacle had been (ever so slightly) taken over and co-opted by Marc Pauline.
The reality is that there is no unifying Great Work, there are just a lot of people here in the pit together, slamming and hacking. Our Great Work is to stay in the pit, to control our own destinies, and to hack what we can of the world. There are no nations in the pit, no us against them, and the Japanese are not our enemies. Recently Sylvia and I went to Japan where I was to appear on a Cyberspace panel along with hacker Jaron Lanier and some others. Queen Mu of MONDO was there as well, as chance would have it. The building where our panel was had some really great graphics supercomputers. One of them had a simulation of a flag which was made of a grid of points connected by imaginary springs, and with two of the points attached to a flag pole. You could crank up the wind, or change the wind’s direction, and see the flag start to ripple and flap. I kept thinking of the Zen story about three monks looking at a flag flapping in the wind. A:”What is moving?” B:”The flag is moving.” C:”No, the wind is moving.” A:”Ah no, the mind is moving.” You could rotate the flag too, and as a last touch you could cut one or both of the flag’s tethers to the pole and see it blow away, a crumpling wind-carried shape. After our talks we were invited to the Gold Disco where a Mr. Takemura was putting on his monthly show. His show is a series of collaged videos he makes, also lighting effects, smoke clouds and scent clouds, and fast acid-house disco. The video-show is a mélange consisting of a) the chaotic pattern you get by pointing a TV camera at a monitor in a feedback loop, the key thing being, as Santa Cruz chaos mathematicians discovered, to have the camera upside down, b) gay porno films of men kissing and dicks with studs and rings, c) dolphins and politicians in black and white d) screens from the new Sim Earth computer game, e) SIGGRAPH style computer graphics. Standing with Mr. Takemura and Jaron by the disco control panel, and the Japanese kids dancing like crazy, vogueing, some of them in bathing suits, a geisha off there somewhere, the video projected on seventeen different screens, Sim Earth going by, Mr. DataGlove right next to me — — I get this really heavy flash that the New Edge really IS happening, it matters to these people here, it is going to happen, and we’re all hanging out at the surfin’ edge. Right then Mr. T. takes my arm and leads me off to a corner of the room, past the guy in the bathing suit, past the beautiful Japanese girl in the high shorts, and there on a PC monitor is . . . my own program CA Lab! The “Rug” rule, boiling away, bopping right to the beat as the casual viewer might think, my program running live here in the coolest disco in Tokyo. Hallelujah, my information had made it this far on its own. I’d GOTTEN OVER, as the brothers say.
And that thought sets off the flash that none of us hackers or writers or rappers or samplers or mappers or singers or users of the tech is in it solely for the Great Work — — no, us users be here for our own good. We work for the Great Work because the work is fun. The hours are easy and the pay is good. And the product we make is viable. It travels and it gets over. And if you help make a piece of it, then that piece is part of you. You’re part of the thang.
Now what exactly IS this Great Work which is taking place on the New Edge? We are not given to truly know WHAT IT IS. The Great Work is like a Mandelbrot Set of which we are the pixels, or even the steps of the computation. The Great Work is like a living body in which you and I are like a cell, or even like a specific chemical process, like an enzyme which copies ten thousand rungs of DNA. The Great Work is so big that nobody alive can even put a name on it. In a few hundred years they can look back and say what it was, but here inside it, nobody can see. It has something to do with people getting more and more mixed up with machines, it has to do with do-it-yourself, it has to do with sampling and collaging, it has to do with the end of the old style of politics. A wave of revolution is sweeping all of Planet Earth. Incredibleness: the Soviet Union is no more. How many more years can it be until the revolution comes back here to the United States, back to where it started? To reduce it to a bumper sticker: “IF THE RUSSIANS CAN GET RID OF THE COMMUNISTS, THE AMERICANS CAN GET RID OF THE REPUBLICANS!” Pass it on. Surely the ever-escalating rape of the environment, the crazy wastage of the “drug war”, the warmongering, the elitist selfishness, surely this will someday come to an end — — blown away perhaps by the onslaught of total New Edge information? Maybe soon.
Let’s follow the Great Work and see.
— — Rudy Rucker, Silicon Valley, January 29, 1992
