2002 lines
107 KiB
Plaintext
2002 lines
107 KiB
Plaintext
\pippin\poems\diode.poe
|
||
\pippin\rave\cspace.rav
|
||
\pippin\poems\mud.poe
|
||
\pippin\stories\gordon.sty
|
||
\pippin\stories\angie.sty
|
||
\pippin\stories\redgum.sty
|
||
\pippin\stories\pandanus.sty
|
||
\qix\ksundeen.txt
|
||
\qix\gaia2000.txt
|
||
\pippin\mint\reveg.doc
|
||
\qix\alphomeg.txt
|
||
\qix\qanda.txt
|
||
\pippin\cloud\gaia.not
|
||
\qix\t15.txt
|
||
\qix\qixatuq.not
|
||
\qix\qix92.not
|
||
\qix\4aug91.txt
|
||
\qix\91ttd.txt
|
||
|
||
\pippin\poems\diode.poe
|
||
|
||
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/<2F><>H <1C><04><> @<40> <08>L<EFBFBD><4C>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.
|
||
|
||
2a. Riemannian geometry. 2b. QFT textbooks.
|
||
2c. conference proceedings, current journals.
|
||
|
||
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...
|
||
|
||
[july 25 '92]
|
||
|
||
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\
|
||
|
||
|