Escape Velocity (5 page)

To some sixties futurologists, the machine and the garden were not irreconcilable. Writing in the December 1968 Playboy, the science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke imagines an "uninhibited, hedonistic society" of cradle-to-grave leisure, made possible by "ultraintelligent" machines. Much

of the planet will revert to wilderness, he predicts, and people will spend youthful idylls in this paradise regained "so that they never suffer from that estrangement from nature that is one of the curses of our civilization."^^ Anticipating the techno-eschatology of the nineties, he concludes, "In one sense . . . History will have come to an end. ... It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God-but to create him. And then our work will be done. It will be time to play."^^ Yoking the counterculture's Rousseauistic dream of idling away the hours in Elysian Fields to the promise of artificial intelligence, he resolves the atheistic empiricism of modern science with the paternalistic God of Genesis in a clockwork caretaker.

In "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace," the hippie poet Richard Brautigan echoes Clarke's sentiments, auguring a "cybernetic meadow / where mammals and computers / live together in mutually / programming harmony":

/ like to think

(it has to be!) of a cybernetic ecology where we arejree of our labors and joined back to nature, returned to our mammal brothers and sisters, and all watched over by machines of loving grace .^^

Analyses of sixties counterculture that characterize it as intractably antitechnological neglect the cyberdelic motifs that counterpointed its back-to-the-land primitivism: the perception of psychedelics as liberatory technologies and of electronic media as mind-expanding psychedelics; the embrace of the public access computer terminal as an instrument of empowerment ("guerrilla warfare for people against bureaucracies"); SF visions of an earthly Elysium made possible by machines of loving grace.

Nonetheless, the reduction of the countercultural attitude toward technology to a retrograde neo-Luddism persists because it serves the needs of conservatives, the Left, and libertarian cyber-hippies alike. Time and again, we are reminded that the difference between the cyberdelic counter-

culture and its sixties prototype is, as Elmer-Dewitt observes, that the cyber-hippies "have found ways to Uve with technology, to make it theirs."

In an early Mondo 2000 editorial, Queen Mu and R. U. Sirius (the magazine's publisher/"Domineditrix" and then editor in chief, respectively) breathlessly promise to report on "the latest in human/technological interactive mutational forms as they happen."^'' Significantly, they place the Zeitgeist of the nineties in opposition to sixties counterculture, locating cyberculture squarely on the "culture" side of the nature-versus-culture polarity:

Back in the '60s, Carly Simon's brother wrote a book called What to Do Until the Apocalypse Comes. It was about going back to the land, growing tubers and soybeans, reading by oil lamps. Finite possibilities and small is beautiful. It was boringP^

In the next breath, however, the authors celebrate the decade's bacchanalian side, which they imply lives on in the thrill-a-minute Nintendo futurism ("High-jacking technology for personal empowerment, fun and games") to which Mondo is dedicated:

[T]he pagan innocence and idealism that was the '60s remains and continues to exert its fascination on today's kids. Look at old footage of Woodstock and you wonder: Where have all those wide-eyed, ecstatic, orgasm-slurping kids gone? They're all across the land, dormant like deeply buried perennials. But their mutated nucleotides have given us a whole new generation of sharpies, mutants and superbrights.^'

Mu and Sirius's Nietzschean "superbrights" are synonymous with RushkofPs cyberians, personified by the cyberpunk surfers in "Probability Pipeline," an SF story by Rudy Rucker and Marc Laidlaw. Rucker and Laidlaw's characters "are riding the wave of chaos purely for pleasure," writes Rushkoff.

To them, the truth of Cyberia is a sea of waves-chaotic, maybe, but a playground more than anything else. The surfer's conclusions about chaos are absolutely cyberian: sport, pleasure, and

adventure are the only logical responses to a fractal universe ... a world free of physical constraints, boring predictability, and linear events.^^

The rhetoric of Rushkoff and the Mondo editorialists reveals how selected intellectual threads have been teased out of sixties counterculture and woven into the cyber-hippie worldview, while others have been dismissed as irrelevant to the nineties. The profound disjuncture between political radicalism (the antiwar movement, the civil rights struggle, black power, the New Left, feminism) and psychedelic bohemianism created a fault line in sixties youth culture. Gitlin sums up the "freak"-politico dichotomy, circa 1967:

There were tensions galore between the radical idea of political strategy-wdth discipline, organization, commitment to results out there at a distance-and the countercultural idea of living life to the fullest, right here, for oneself, or for the part of the universe embodied in oneself, or for the community of the enlightened who were capable of loving one another-and the rest of the world be damned (which it was already). Radicalism's tradition had one of its greatest voices in Marx, whose oeuvre is a series of glosses on the theme: change the world! The main battalions of the counterculture-Leary, the Pranksters, the Oracle [a hippie newspaper]-were descended from Emerson, Thoreau, Rimbaud: change consciousness, change life!"

This dichotomy is resolved, in the cyber-hippie subculture, by jettisoning "the radical idea of political strategy" and updating "the counter-cultural idea of living life to the fullest, right here, for oneself." In cyberdelia, the victory of the countercultural tradition over political radicalism is all but complete. As Gitlin notes, countercultural phrasemakers such as Leary were "antipolitical purists" for whom politics was "game-playing, a bad trip, a bringdown, a bummer. Indeed, all social institutions were games. . . . The antidote to destructive games was-more playful games."^"* In like fashion, movement politics or organized activism of virtually any sort are passe among the cyber-hippies, for whom being boring is the cardinal sin and "high-jacking technology for personal empowerment, fun and games" the

be-all and end-all of human existence. After all, "sport, pleasure, and adventure are the only logical responses to a fractal universe."

The Yippies Take Tomorrowland: Mondo 2000's Brave New Age^s

Mondo 2000 will introduce you to your tomorrow—and show you how to buy it today!

—publisher's catalogue blurbJor Mondo 2000: A User's Guide to the New Edge^^

The Future is Fun! The Future is Fair! You may already have won! You may already be there!

—the Firesign Theatre^^

Coming to grips with Mondo 2000 is like wrestling the shape-shifting liquid metal android in Terminator 2. By turns illuminating and infuriating, the magazine is an in-crowd status symbol, a career vehicle for would-be Warhols, a beacon of Utopian hope, and a source of dystopian anxiety. Epitomizing the contradictions of the cyber-hippie phenomenon, Mondo ("M2k" to its fans) has one foot in the Aquarian age and the other in a Brave New World. It is pessimistic about political solutions but Panglossian about technological ones; hardened by cyberpunk cynicism but softened by New Age credulity; eager to jettison the body but determined to retain its humanity; obsessed with upgrading brainpower (through smart drugs, mind machines, neural implants, and nanotechnological tinkering) but impatient for the fleshly pleasures of the "Dionysian revival" prophesied by Mondo's publisher. Queen Mu.

Mondo's contradictions manifest themselves in the jarring incongruity of its contents. Issue number five is typical: The soft-core pictorial "Bacchic Pleasures," a cyber-Dionysian fantasy acted out by nude models with hunks of circuit board lashed uncomfortably to their privates, makes a strange bedfellow for John Perry Barlow's "Virtual Nintendo," a sobering reflection on the use of electronic media in the Gulf War to "give war a new lease on death-by keeping it at a distance and transposing another, denatured, reality between the electorate and barbecued bodies."^^

Mondo's brief history has been fraught with internal tensions between the magazine's hippie/New Age hneage and its hbertarian/cyber-punk stance; between its Beavis and Butt-Head anti-intellectuahsm and the starstruck attentions it lavishes on academic celebrities; between the swooning, fin de siecle romanticism that flowers in Queen Mu's prose ("Cancer of the penis must be the ultimate in karmic diseases-just too exquisitely perfect for an incarnation of Orpheus. Jim [Morrison] must have pondered the sweet irony.") and the smirking, isn't-it-ironic Gen X cynicism exemplified by Andrew Hultkrans's column, The Slacker Factor ("This is our 15 minutes of fame. Sell out while you still have the chance.").^^

But Mondo turns its contradictions into rebel cool, running up the Jolly Roger of political incorrectness, "social irresponsibility" (Sirius's catch-phrase), adolescent fun, and shameless sellout. It is no coincidence that Sirius, the magazine's former editor and current "Icon-at-Large," frequently sports a photo button of Andy Warhol. In Mondo, Warhol's philosophy of brazen self-promotion reaches its zenith: Queen Mu interviews herself under a pseudonym, Sirius's girlfriend is adoringly profiled, Sirius's rock band is interviewed at length, a book is reviewed by its author, a pair of smart-drink manufacturers who advertise extensively in the magazine are the subject of frequent, fawning inter views. "^^

Sirius (aka Ken GofFman), a fortysomething former yippie who likes to toss ofFcalculatedly contrarian zingers, is unruffled by such charges. "Be mercilessly politically incorrect," he exhorts, in Mondo's fourth issue. "Be commercially successful by being pleasingly offensive. Subvert through media, not because you think you can ^change the system' but because successfully tickling America's self-loathing funnyboiie is an amusing form of foreplay."^^ This is D. H. Lawrence's "revolution for fun," staged by reality hackers who want to upset the apple cart not for lofty principles, but to see which way the apples will roll. In his poem "A Sane Revolution," Lawrence wrote Mondo's position paper:

If you make a revolution, make itjorjun, don't do it in ghastly seriousness, don't do it in deadly earnest, do itjorjun.'^^

On the BBS (bulletin board system) the WELL, Sirius responds to the cultural critic Vivian Sobchack's charge that "fancy footwork" is required to resolve the tension betw^een Mondo's self-styled "New Edge" futurism and its New Age romanticism, between its sixties social consciousness and its "privileged, selfish, consumer-oriented, and technologically dependent libertarianism."^^ Emphasizing the magazine's use of irony to let the air out of its own hype, Sirius counters that Sobchack takes Mondo's "clearly double-edged, deliberately provocative, and at the same time honest 'embrace' of high-tech consumerism all too literally.'"*'*

On the other hand, he implies, Mondo futurism and sixties-style social consciousness may not be as antithetical as they seem. Sirius refers Sobchack to the manifestos of the Diggers, a Haight-Ashbury-based anarchist collective that harmonized the counterculture's Arcadian longings with the technetronic age. According to Sirius, the Diggers preached the Arthur C. Clarkeian gospel of "a post-scarcity culture where work was obsolete, 'all of [us] watched over by machines of loving grace.' '"'^

In a Washington Post interview, Sirius recalled, "We wanted to believe in this cybernetic vision, that the machines would do it for us. And I maintained that vision, somewhere in the back of my head."^^ A fateful acid trip in 1980, days after John Lennon's death, somehow assured him of "the all-rightness of everything"-a revelation that spurred him to leave the sixties behind and catch up with the emerging computer culture around him.^^ Delving into Scientific American, he soon concluded that the Diggers' anarchist Utopia of universal leisure and infinite abundance lay within reach; the revolution, if it happened, would be brought about not by political radicals but by the high-tech breakthroughs of capitalist visionaries. But why settle for a cybernetic Eden when the promise of prosthetic godhood lay somewhere over the rainbow? Inspired by Timothy Leary's premonitions in the seventies of "space migration" to ofF-world colonies, Sirius incorporated a high-tech take on the human potential movement into his vision of robotopia.

In 1984, Sirius's heady blend of gadget pornography, guerrilla humor, human potential pep talk, New Age transcendentalism, and libertarian anarcho-capitalism took shape in the typewritten, newsprint version of what would later become Mondo 2000. Subtitled A Space Age Newspaper of Psychedelics, Science, Human Potential, Irreverence and Modern Art, it was

christened High Frontiers, a name borrowed from the book that inspired the L-5 Society. The society was founded in 1975 in response to the Princeton physicist Gerard O'Neill's call, in his book The High Frontier, for the establishment of an orbital colony equidistant between the Earth and the Moon at a gravitationally stable point known as Lagrange Point 5. According to the SF writer Norman Spinrad, the L-5 colony held forth the promise of "an escape from the ecological pollution, resource depletion, poverty, collectivism, and unseemly, unplanned natural chaos of. . . Earth.'"^^ High Frontiers crossed the L-5 colony with Fun City in a theme park Utopia characterized, in Sirius's words, by "abundance and leisure, self-fulfillment, play, adventure, limitless space, limitless time, [and] limitless pleasure.'"*^ Sirius's vision recalls a symbolic coup staged by several hundred yippies in 1970 when antiwar demonstrators infiltrated Disneyland, planting a Viet-cong flag on Frontierland's Mount Wilderness before Orange County riot cops threw them out. Now, the techno-yippies had taken Tomorrowland!

High Frontiers begat Reality Hackers, which begat Mondo 2000, an increasingly slick, sumptuously illustrated glossy now in its thirteenth issue. Over the years, Mondo's design-a product of the desktop publishing revolution made possible by Macintosh computers, digital scanners, and software such as QuarkXPress and Adobe Photoshop-has accelerated into a postliter-ate blur: jumbled fonts that buzz against fluorescent backgrounds, digitally enhanced photos that flow under, over, and around article copy. Mondo's art direction, like that of its competitors Wired and Axcess, accepts on faith the cybercultural truism that information overload is the operating mode of computer mavens accustomed to surfing the Internet or bouncing around in hypertext programs. The prototypical Mondo reader is one of the "Third Wave people" imagined by Alvin Toffler in The Third Wave,