The Circle is Open but Unbroken
The three main sections of this work are Holos, Mythos, and Ontos. These three elements encapsulate a world-view that has been built into the structure of this work. The formulas is:
HOLOS, what we perceive,What we experience shapes what we beleive which shapes what we are which shapes what we beleive which shapes what we experience.
creates MYTHOS, what we believe,
creates ONTOS, what we are, which in turn,
creates MYTHOS, which in turn,
creates HOLOS.
Holos speaks to the things that are manifestly visible now, and places them within a discourse known as perceptual cybernetics, a framework which provides an unusual degree of illumination upon a series of processes which appear, on the surface, to be unconnected.
Mythos is about the demons in the dark; evil people in the outside world and the evil that is within us. Let me make myself clear - I do not consider evil either "ethical" or "unethical", but, like most things, it is better when it is clearly identified.
When a goul looks into a mirror, no god looks out; but what does god see when he gazes upon his reflection? Ontos, the divine being, is the starting point for an exploration of the human interface.
I will slip between modes of discourse in this exploration; "literary" and "scientific" rhetoric will be used, side-by-side, in a diachronic method, which I owe to William Irwin Thomson. That this method is of singluar importance in our time will be clearly explicated in the text; our imaginations are the content of our will.
The ideas presented in this work phenomenologically describe the world around us and the changes that work is passing through. The world, we are discovering, is information, and we are manipulators of that information flow. That is what life does; it manipulates all of the information it has access to in order to improve the environment for itself. Sometimes these improvements are sound; other times they are disasters. Nature makes serious mistakes all the time. And the glorious falibility of nature makes it clear that everything is true, everything is false, and we are absolutely, entirely free. That is the thesis of this work.
If we do not take steps to maintain the freedom of our natural condition, we will inevitably become attracted into some other way of being, which will sacrifice our natural freedoms for the uniformity of the dwell state. Human beings thrive on interface; the boundaries between are the important zones. Our technos is rapidly (within 24 months) coming to a point where it can create a true Beast; One Who Must Be Obeyed. The mind-sucking machines are here.
Since the birth of time man has had mind-suckers, viruses (or drugs or religions) that ate the soul, leaving the phantom of consciousness; the CIA only brought them to a new level with their LSD and drama experiments in the 1950's. Soon the mind-sucker will mate with the coaxial cable wired into our living rooms. What happens then is up to us: It doesn't have to be Hell on Earth. It could be Heaven.
Holos is adapted from a lecture I gave at the San Francisco Exploratorium on the Autumnal Equinox of 1994. Entitled "Opening the Third Ear: Humanity at the VERGE of Communion".
Mythos was adapted primarily from "Final Amputation: Pathogenic Ontology In Cyberspace", delivered at the Third International Conference on Cyberspace, on 14 May 1994, at the University of Texas at Austin, entitled, "Final Amputation: Pathogenic Ontology in Cyberspace."
Ontos was delivered as a lecture at Interval Research in Palo Alto, California, in January 1995.
All of the observations and predicitions made in this work are but the shades of Things to Come. Like Scrooge, we save ourselves by our actions today; to speak of cybernetics is to speak of self-regulation.
NOTE: This document is in progress; it is a series of fragments, some of which you've seen before, arranged where they seem appopriate. After a serious bout of solve et coagulae, it'll be the final text.
These formations are aspects of my personality, but also, in a broader sense, of my time. History is a process, and the processes of our time are the expression of a metasystem. The nature of these formations have aspects both internal to me and external to the universe.
During the brief period of time I actively attended classes at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, from Fall 1980 through Winter of 1982, I was fortunately enough to come in contact with several sets of ideas which were in embryonic form at that time. Today each of them have blossomed into an entire field of research, but in 1981, no more than a handful of people were working on any one of them.
"It steam-engines when it comes steam-engine time."- Charles Fort
"The cathode ray tube is the retina of the mind's eye." - Brian O'Blivion
Certainly, Morton Heilig and his "Sensorama" was an important step, and Ivan Sutherland produced the first computer-generated synthetic environment, but what about Lascaux? Painting, the high-technology of thirty millennia ago, created an enviornment which must have seemed virtual to the initiates who made the journey into the belly of the earth to see it. We know from ancient cultures that the perceived boundary between totem and presence is tenuous, that representation carries reality, so these caves really did contain a legion of animals, sacred goddesses, and dead/ressurected hunters.
Later, drama emerged as the pre-eminent form of synthetic experience - inseperable at first from ritual (where it originated), and later developing into a form of its own. The "willing suspension of disbelief" was as true for the audiences of Euripides as for Shakespear or Beckett. These are participatory creations, where the boundary between the performer and audience can become very thin, and, in the machinery of mind, provides the vehicle for experience.
The novel, from Tale of the Genji, to Finnegan's Wake provides another example; one of the supreme pleasures of reading, after all, is that it can take you away, and deposit you into another world. All of the "storytelling" media have this capability to evoke the perception of another world, not explicitly grounded in reality, but rather, placed in the imagination.
A century and a half ago man extended and superseded his organism through the use of the electric technology of the telegraph. In an instant the velocity of human communication and the ability to coordinate human activity reached its uppermost physical limit, the speed of light. This phenomenon has been described by Marshall McLuhan, in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, as an extension, or outering, of the human nervous system.
After three thousand years of explosion, by means of fragmentary and mechanical technologies, the Western world is imploding. During the mechanical ages we had extended our bodies in space. Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned. Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extensions of man - the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society, much as we have already extended our senses and nerves by various media.
And what is being communicated?
Our imagination.
PHI - The physical universe, the set of items outside of the self. In the example of the automobile given previously, PHI represents the machinery itself, and the interface it presents to the human. It can be more than just the control interface; an automobile indicates its performance by sound and feel, rather than by pure instrumentation. In more philosophical terms, PHI is the "other", the exterior, and can contain within itself the potential for independent action.
Fx ("Fecks") - The human biology, the raw organs of perception; the eyes, ears, nose, skin, and myriad other "senses" (sensors?) which provide humans the basic data by which they can create a view of the world. It is the affective interface as well, the means by which humans modify their world. In the sense that they eye watches road and traffic, the feet depress petals, and the hands steer the wheel, Fx is the interface between human beings and the other.
PSI - Psychology, the mental state, the human world view, or mind. In the framework of Cognitive Psychology, PSI contains "experience", and all perception is mediated by it. Our assessment of traffic, choice of routes taken, and concern about punctuality are events which occur within PSI.
Fx serves as the mediator between PHI and PSI. All human action expresses itself as PSI acting through Fx, and PHI expresses itself to human thought through Fx. Yet Fx can act of itself. Reflexes, such as the involuntary shutting of the eyes in response to a bright light, show that Fx, rather than just the slavish servant of PSI, has priorities of its own.
Each of these components presents an "interface" to its companion component. PHI and PSI both have interfaces to Fx, while Fx presents interfaces to PHI and PSI. In scientific terms, the PHI/Fx interface is studied in the discipline of neurophysiology, the Fx/PSI interface in Physiological Psychology, and PHI/PSI in psychophysics. These interfaces are the most interesting feature of this framework, with respect to holosthetic media. If, as Aldous Huxley, William James, and the cognitive psychologists have suggested, consciousness is largely a reducing function[16], an extraction from the universe of a restricted set of "events" which allow us to create a world view, a large part of this filtering occurs at these interfaces. The ear accommodates itself to a continuous sound. The eye adjusts to a constant pattern or movement.
Learning is disambiguation, the process of training a set of inputs to a set of responses. This is not the unary relationship of behaviorism, but a complex of messages, both sent and received, which together create a new perceptual attractor.
"Fairness? Decency? You expect fairness and decency on a planet of sleeping people?"- G. I. Gurdjieff
I walk to center stage, shopping bag in hand...It's October 1997, and I've just come back from "The Good Guys", where I just burnt up about $2000.00 on my AMEX. But look at what I've got...
I reach into the bag, and pull out a MiniCD player...
First, for just $500.00, I've got myself the third- generation Sony multimedia "playstation". True color, real-time video texture mapping, and all that stuff. Keeps on getting smaller, doesn't it?
Pull out the safety glasses...
This was the expensive item - a Sega HMD. Let me tell you something about its design: it was a collaboration between several companies you might be familiar with: Redmond Productions Incorporated, or RPI, as they're more familiarly known, contributed the design of the head-mount and multi-megapixel displays, Ono-Sendai contributed a high-accuracy orientation detector, Sega handled the manufacturing and distribution. Quite pricey, over a thousand dollars, but worth every penny....
One more thing I should mention - this head- mount is quite intelligent. Turns out that part of the design was contributed by a company in Palo Alto called Biocontrol. The rim of this head- mount is lined with myoelectric and electroencephalic sensors. This head-mount can read the muscle movements in my face and eyes, and even read my brain waves - to some degree. It knows where my foveal centers are, and my Sony knows to render those in high resolution. Quite slick, and, for the price, worth every penny.
Pull out the CD entitled "Thelemic Sex Magick"...
Of course, I'm going to need some software - and this fits the bill nicely. Comes in one of four basic flavors - male/female, female/male, male/male and female/female. With a full suite of configurations for various dominance and submissive options, body type preferences, and a variety of stimulation parameters. This cost me another eighty bucks.
And finally, what I've really been waiting for....
Pull out the dildo, look at it, saying...
There is an oft-quoted limerick, generally attributed to John Von Neumann, a father of modern computing, which goes like this:
There was a young man named Greene,
Who invented a fucking machine.
Concave or convex,
It fit either sex,
And was exceedingly easy to clean.Actually, these are getting rather old hat. After the first dildonic device appeared two years ago, there was quite a frenzy for them, in certain circles. I never tried one, because one of my friends told me the software sucked, (well, perhaps that's the wrong word to use) and that I should wait until the second generation of products came down the pike. That's typical - never buy the first revision of anything.
I pop the disc into the player, pop the head- mount on, and idly play with the dildo...
I want to talk about this disc some more - it's got some very special software on it, and it's been selling like hotcakes - in fact, it may be driving sales of the Sony, rather than the other way around. Sort of like 1-2-3 and the old IBM PC...
This disc is the product of a joint American/Indian development agreement - you know the story; some marketing types in Santa Clara, a horde of cheap PhDs. in Calcutta cutting code for $25,000 a year and loving it. And this disc is designed specifically to work with this head-mount. This software cares about my foveal centers and brain waves...
About two years ago, two doctoral candidates at Loma Linda University Research Center were performing research on the physiological analogs to certain states of "heightened" consciousness. To do this they got some experts, perhaps one should say "adepts", in these various capabilities. Yogis, Shamans and the like paraded through the lab, got wired and recorded while they performed their shtick, and, after all of the data was collected, these researchers used a supercomputer for feature extraction from the recorded data. Their results were very interesting, and pointed to the existence of a well defined electroencephalic "signature" for most of these states. Hardly surprising, but, for the first time, these signatures were identified. They published this work early in 1996, in Nature, and so it fell into the hands of some Silicon Valley marketing types.
Clinical researchers began to explore applications of this recovered knowledge, now "respectable" because it had been put into a scientific framework. But these marketing types said, "Hey! Maybe we can use this for something...something fun!"
Among the more interesting "adepts" who participated in the scientific study were a pair of experts in the intricacies of Tantric Yoga. Tantric Yoga comes in two forms; "white", and, for lack of a better terminology, "sexual". White Tantric Yoga involves prolonged meditations and motions which are used to raise the "kundalini" energy in an individual. This body of knowledge contains extremely useful techniques for stress management, relaxation, and so forth.
The other form of Tantric Yoga has a strong sexual component. This was the type practiced by the adepts who visited Loma Linda, and, during the study, they maintained a state of high sexual excitation for twenty hours. They could have gone longer (and had before), but they'd filled up the researchers' disk storage. All of it. So the article in Nature dutifully reported the signature associated with this state of consciousness. That was the one which interested the marketing types in Santa Clara. They passed it along to their Ph.D. sweatshop in Calcutta, with a little Post-It note attached, saying, "Can we do this?"
All of this ended up in the hands of the senior programmer, who began a detailed analysis of the problem. With alpha versions of the new Sega head-mount, he began a detailed investigation of the phenomena associated with this brainwave signature, and the phenomena which could create it. He had no shortage of volunteers to use for his tests. It took fifteen months of twelve hour days, but, in the end he'd developed an algorithm, based primarily in a software neural network, which would induce this brainwave state in about 73% of his test subjects. He felt that was good enough. The marketing types bitched, but finally let up, after the product was received very favorably in beta testing. It was released at the end of September in 1997, and had only been on the market about two weeks when I bought it.
Of course, I didn't know any of this when I bought the software - I'd just heard about it on the net.
So, let's get the software started -
Pop CD into player, pop head-mount on, play with dildo some more...
Here we go -
I am one of the 73% that this algorithm works for. Essentially, there's some real-time processing of my brainwaves going on, which is being fed into the neural net, which then weights its outputs to the software. In so doing, it gradually trains the inputs to the head-mount in such a way that I start producing the brainwave signature associated with the ecstatic state. This is a very creative example of a feedback loop.
One of the more interesting aspects of sexual Tantric Yoga is that it avoids the normal bounding condition of human sexuality, that is, orgasm, by holding it off, and channeling the sexual energies differently. It is possible, then, to enter a very high level of sexual excitation, and remain there for as long as desired.
My first question: Will I ever want to turn this machine off? My brain wants pleasure, wants to avoid pain. We've known this since Freud and Maslow and Skinner. At this point, the absence of pleasure might be construed as pain. My brain is changing, electrically, chemically, physically, as I interact with this device; different neural pathways are being setup, others are being torn down. Since this is a "natural" phenomenon, its unlikely that I will acclimate to it; it's not a drug, but rather, a change in my entire neurophysiology.
My next question: Have I become addicted to the software? If I do manage to turn it off, which at this point is uncertain, how long will I be able to go before I need to return to that blissful state of being? Will I be able to function, unaugmented, on my "normal" plane of existence? Or have I become an "elad", that is, an electrical addict, as described by Michael Chricton in "The Terminal Man"?
Now, how hard would it be to do this? this? I've outlined an example, and, admittedly, it relies on a few things we don't yet understand completely, but none of this is magick, just well applied science. If not 1997, when? Sooner?
These are the kind of questions we're confronting - they're neither moral nor ethical considerations. We're creating powerful mind-altering substances. Tantric Yoga and other esoteric disciplines are taught slowly, imparted together with a body of knowledge which is primarily cautionary. Thus, when these states are achieved through unaugmented means, the individual can mediate the experience positively, without becoming bound do it. But we will shortly be able to short-circuit this process, provide the essence of the experience to people neither trained nor ready to receive it.
My final question: What are we doing?
That's all I have to say, and all I have to ask.
During the exploration of the PHI/Fx interface, researchers also carry on an exploration of the Fx/PSI interface. The greater the "fidelity" which can be achieved through the holosthetic optimization of the PHI/Fx interface, the more plastic PSI becomes vis--vis PHI. The eventuality of this process is that PHI will be able to completely (or almost completely) determine PSI. This is the true man/machine symbiosis, the end result a true cyborg, human united to machine. This process has its reverse component; work continues toward the expression of mind, or PSI, within the machine. Speech recognition, with its unfathomable ambiguities, outlines the difficulties inherent in such a task, but, as a more complete picture of Fx is created, the process will accelerate, and may, at some future point, succeed. This would represent a fully bilateral symbiosis, where machine steers mind as mind steers machine. A dance.
These speculations, even in a dim outline, trace out the most important details in the newly developing relationship between humans and their technologies. Perhaps the most relevant detail to this analysis is the component of speed. The electric age gave instantaneous speed to the entire spectrum of human interaction; now it moves forward into the entire spectrum of human relation to the machine.
Much has been said on the potentials of holosthetic media in education. It is widely believed that virtual reality represents an incredible tool for investigation and study, for learning and experimentation. If that is so, it is primarily due to the fact that information presented will be "tuned", presented in a holosthetic form (via PHI/Fx/PSI) which is uniquely well suited for human absorption. Holosthetic media hold out the possibility for greatly accelerated learning, almost, as described by Rheingold, "mind amplifiers". This potential for speed-up represents one aspect of such an amplifier.[26]
Like every technology, this speed-up will have to pair with a self-amputation. However, rather than a "sensory" amputation, this holosthetic effect will lead to an amputation within the organic function of the "self". Integral to the human process of consciousness is the "reducing function", which operates at both the purely organic level and at the level of mind. For example, certain individuals suffering from forms of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorders have "racing thoughts", that is, an organic condition which results in the inability to effectively discriminate between and retain trains of thought. In this case the organic reducing function is impaired. In order to speed information transfer from machine to mind, from PHI to PSI, this reducing function will need to be eliminated or circumvented. This, however, can only be done at great peril to our own sanity.
A thought experiment illustrates this point. Suppose the existence of a high-fidelity holosthetic device, capable of creating and maintaining a world self-consistent in both biological and mythical or ontological aspects. This device has been designed to uniquely match the capabilities of a test subject who is placed into the device, or rather, immersed within the holosthesia generated by it. At the beginning of the experiment, the test subject has a known PSI, or mental state. The experiment begins with a full-fledged assault upon the test subject's senses, using every trick of holosthesia to express PHI, with the highest possible fidelity, and the greatest speed, through Fx, to PSI. The machinery creates a world, a world which the test subject inhabits. Furthermore, the machine has been programmed to create the state anti-PSI in the test subject, i.e. to present information pathogenic to the world view of the test subject. Under normal circumstances, this information would be discarded by PSI. In this case, these mechanisms have been effectively disabled. The test subject would then enter a state of holosthetic psychosis, unable to create or maintain a consistent world view. The damage inflicted in such a condition could well be permanent.
"Is it a virus, a drug, or a religion?"
"What's the difference?"- Neal Stephenson
The all too obvious convergence between holosthetic technologies and the geometric, rhyzomic growth of digital networks of communication implies that soon we will indeed be able to pipe a "consciousness" into the household, whose effects will be bounded primarily by the fidelity of the technology found within the household, rather than any constraints present within the network.
While this brings an unprecedented scope to the range of human telecommunication, and human communication in general, it does not come without consequent costs and dangers. The price we pay for allowing a technology into our lives is allowing ourselves to be shaped to the demands of the technology itself. Technologies have been called value-neutral; this is perhaps imprecise. The actual construction of a technology embodies a mythology, or ontology, literally a definition of the place of the "self" within the technology. The telephone, for example, places the self into an aural, auditory, dimensionless space, where everything, all data, converge upon a single point; the eardrum. It is impossible to develop a sense of distance while using a telephone, except perhaps distance from the handset. Everything else is immediately present. Even the device itself, as Heidigger and Rondel have shown, has an imperative. To answer the telephone is to acquiesce, in advance, to any request made through it.
As human consciousness is placed into cyberspace, real issues of safety begin to emerge. Just as we do not allow lunatics to wander across highways, we will not allow the citizens of cyberspace to commit holosthetic suicide or murder. Telepathology, the expression of sociopathology from a distance, is one such danger. Telepathology is most effective when the greatest amount is known about the subject(s) of the attack. Secure transactions guarantee that it is at least difficult to gather this information.
Much has been said on the subject of the rights of privacy, and about the government's provisional right to invade privacy to protect the rights of other citizens. These same arguments are now made to prevent the widespread implementation and adoption of crypographically secure transactions. The argument against this is simple; any cryptography which can be broken by the government can be broken, perhaps even easily, by someone else. Either we will have privacy or we will not; it is that simple. If we do suspend the right of privacy, it must be complete, universal; the government can not hide secrets from us any more that we can hide secrets from it. However, private mind and private life are perhaps so important to ourselves as human beings, that we will opt for complete privacy, a privilege which comes paired with an awesome responsibility - the policing of ourselves in cyberspace.
In order to police ourselves, only one mechanism is necessary; transaction authentication. Once we can securely identify the agent(s) involved in a transaction, we can develop models of "trust" which can reliably be depended upon, much as in physical reality. No mechanism for secure transaction or authentication is theoretically bullet-proof, so it is advisable that a continuous, competitive evolution in cryptographic systems begins, with the stated goals of preserving liberty and freedom in cyberspace. These are noble, national, perhaps even global goals, and the author would suggest that perhaps these are the defense industries of the twenty-first century.
Finally, a subtle paradigm shift is required in the design of our networks. Historically, this technology has approached two extremes; bilateral conversation and broadcasting. If these were thought of as the ends of a dial, the range in the middle could be thought of as many-to-many or multicast communications. Rather more than a party line, a multicast provides a "space" within the network bandwidth for the expression of shared events and other information. In such a system, every node is coequal to every other; the keys to reaching one or one hundred million other people are equally available. This represents an inversion of the concepts implicit in both the telephone and television, for both of them collapse into a hybrid medium which is like neither of them.
This event is preventable; we could engineer our networks to conform to the old styles of bilateral conversation and broadcast. There are a number of reasons why this eventuality should be avoided. The first reason is primarily creative; it is enormously beneficial for us to be able to work collaboratively, be that on the development of an artistic work, a government by and for the people, or a corporation. People will be able to "reach us", exposing us to their own personal arts and wonders, in unprecedented numbers. If we neglect to design our networks for multicasting, this will be impossible.
The second reason is precautionary, having to do with the potential abuses of the powers within the human sensorium to persuade or brainwash. If the adages about the corruptions of absolute power are even moderately true, we need to protect our selves from omnipresent influences in cyberspace. Except in the cases of most extreme emergency, broadcasting should be prohibited across the network. Open-loop communication, without the stability of feedback, potentially presents a highly pathogenic influence on the human consciousness within cyberspace. Only the most serious issues of public safety merit such an intrusion into an essentially personal space. An organization such as the Emergency Broadcast System will be a necessary fixture in cyberspace, and should be the only body technically able to broadcast throughout the network.
If these technologies are incorporated into the infrastructure of the network, the way line voltage and frequency are delivered by the power utilities, in a standardized and ubiquitous manner, we will be able to develop the mechanism to ensure privacy and private mind are not violated by the entry into cyberspace. Without these safeguards, the full range of human pathology, from suicide to terrorism will find room enough to express itself in our private mind, irrespective of any choice we may make to take it in or filter it out.
The sacred is that which ontologically founds the world. - Mircea Eliade
If you take away all the cues, all you have left is expectation. If interface conforms to expectation, an entire world will be created to frame it, and an enourmous set of expectations will crystalize around very small pieces of that world.
Mythology is the essential component of the design of a synthetic environment. There is no room for any other component of "reality"; nothing to hang it on.
The power of a medium which is positively reinforcing but pathogenic is clearly the most dangerous ghost we could conjour. This is the lesson of 1984's Inner Party.
The limits of this medium are more than just proto-fascist; such an intimiate relationship with the sensorium portents a qualitative change in our relationship to it. Cyberspace must be shaped, must be wrought into existence through the intervention of will - we must be sure that our will is our own.
Here the primary question is of the relationship between sexuality and pathology, and how, mythologically, each expresses itself in the other. The long-term existence of an S/M subculture and the recent appearance of the technarchaic "Modern Primitives" are the visible evidences of such a relationship. However, our earliest civilizations show a common consciousness of the connection between sexuality and pathology. Pathology may be the essence of sexual reproduction. Thomson writes:
From Oedipus to Freud, love and death have always been
paired archetypes. Hence, one flavor of the human sexual drive is to
"push the envelope" within the field of sexual experience, up to (or
beyond) the limits of pathology. This will present a very compelling
temptation to creators and users of holosthetic media. Without being
prudish, the author wishes to suggest that the first accidental
sufferers of holosthetic psychosis will encounter it during
experiments in dildonics. Caution is especially required in the
exploration of dildonic holosthesia, because biology would, of its own,
tend away from it.
- Aleister Crowley
Only Bobby, of all the people in this room, is not here as data. And Bobby
is not the wasted thing before her, strapped down in alloy and nylon, its
chin filmed with dried vomit, nor the eager, familiar face gazing out at her
from a monitor...
Now she steps across rolling dunes of soiled pink satin, under a tooled
steel sky, free at last from the room and its data.
Brigitte walks beside her, and there is no pressure, no hollow of night, no
hive sound. There are no candles. Continuity is there too, represented by
a strolling scribble of silver tinsel that reminds her, somehow, of Hilton
Swift on the beach at Malibu.
"Feeling better?" Brigitte asks.
"Much better, thank you."
"I thought so."
"Why is Continuity here?"
"Because he is your cousin, built from Mass biochips. Because he is young.
We walk with you to your wedding."
"But who are you, Brigitte? What are you really?"
"I am the message your father was told to write. I am the
veves he drew in your head." Brigitte leans close. "Be
kind to Continuity. He fears that in his clumsiness he has earned your
displeasure."
The tinsel scribble scoots off before them, across the satin dunes, to
announce the bride's arrival.
A magical mythology already exists, and has for thousands of years. In its
current formulation its most concise expression is given in the phrase:
We need to develop interfaces which conform to this law.
But the end of the twentieth century is not merely a recapitulation of the
human past; we have planted our flag upon a new continent of collective
imagination, which has been named for us; Cyberspace. A place where
we can communicate through infinitely mutable forms, in an inconceivable galaxy
of sensation, this place awes and terrifies us; whatever we want in Cyberspace,
we will find.
Cyberspace is the Shadow Land of human technos; at the end of our striving
we will find the perfect, still mirror in which we see only ourselves. This
can be either good or ill; when a monkey looks into a mirror, no god looks
out. But perhaps we would do well to acknowledge the divine within
ourselves within Cyberspace; perhaps this will help us to understand the
emanations which compose our reflection.
The only thing that can be brought into cyberspace is the self.
Everything else must be manufactured there; but out perception, our living
being is the one item we add to the virtual world.
We're about to "pop" into a new state of being, a homeostatis whose defining
feature will be a new human relationship to information, a cybernetic
integration of being and body and becoming that sounds more like fiction
than the brutal reality of life, but then that transition defines exactly what
is changing. We are watching a paradigm shift, and we're far enough along
the process that certain elements are now quite clearly visible. We can
begin to make out the dim outlines of a world that will be as different from
ours as ours was from the early Romance era. But most of us will live to
see the full flower of this era; in this time it takes not hundreds
but just single years for gigantic changes to sweep the world.
And so we wait for the pop, the boom, and the crash. We put our fingers in
our ears, or cover our heads and scream, and put our heads in the sand. But
all the time, our actions, in the moment, determine where we are heading;
that is the lesson of the blip of Western Civilization.
Gandhi was right, it would be a nice idea.
Ontos
Abrahadabra
"It is my Will to inform the World of certain facts within my knowledge.
I therefore take "magical weapons", pen, ink, and paper; I write "incantations"
- these sentences - in the "magical language" i.e., that which is understood
by the people I wish to instruct; I call forth "spirits", such as printers,
publishers, booksellers, and so forth, and constrain them to convey my message
to these people. The composition and distribution of this book is thus an act
of magick by which I cause Changes to take place in conformity with my Will."
Innana and Timmuz
Angela Mitchell comprehends this room and its inhabitants through shifting
databases that represent viewpoints, though of whom or what, she is in most
cases in doubt. There is a considerable degreee of overlap, of
contradiction...
Seven: Holos
San Francisco - 1994
World-song
Trans-Space
Eight: Mythos
Yule - 1994
Will and Interface
The only conclusion that can be drawn from the eventual endpoints of our
technos is that sometime in our future, and probably quite soon, we will be
able to do what ever we want, or at least create a convincing simulation
of that state. How we behave in such an environment, how we interface to it
is a issue of primacy; the medium we speak, our passage through it,
determines and shapes what we ask of it. We need an interface which can do
whatever we can ask of it. We need an interface which can protect us from
the viscissitudes of the mind-raiders, and this means we must use mythology
as our sword and shield. We need a new world view to accompany this
mythology.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.
It is often considered that this statement is a commandment, but it is
simply a description of observed behavior, rather like saying, "if you
release an apple from your hand it falls to the ground."
Nanotechnology and Virutal Reality meets Thelema
Nine: Ontos
Samhain - 1994
Holos: Self in Cyberspace
In the brief span of pre-millenial time now left us, there is a growing
understanding and respect for archaic modes of being, and an unconscious
acknowledgement that our ancient rites tell us more
about our selves than our gods. Unlike the rationalist, who would ignore
the dark side of imagination, or the spiritualist, who accepts only the
imaginary as real, we could find a middle path; one in which an ego is not
the center of the entire universe, but an island of mutability in the
midst of our lives and selves, one that will one day die, leaving their
gentle touch upon our spirits.
Mythos: Drawing the Line
Ontos: Being Divine
Holos. Mythos. Ontos.
Postscript: Teleos
Earth - 2012
Technologies, by themselves, are value-neutral. Human use of technology
never is. This bitch won't fly unless we get out and push it, and
it won't crash into the ground unless we point it at it. We determine the
end points of our own work. If we want connection over rape, communion over
dominion, play over order, we must all choose them now, and at every step on
the way there.
Acknowledgements
This work has passed through many hands to reach its present state;
the hands who have
been involved from the start are the ones most deserving of thanks. They
include; Greg Jacobson, who freed me from the shackles of the West when he
introduced me to Deleuze; Tony Parisi, a faithful frater in every measured
dimension; Peter Kennard, who will see a lot of himself in this work; and
Owen Rowley, for Herculean patience.
Yuletide 1994/95