Escape Velocity Read online

  “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” the opening line of Joan Didion’s White Album, is one of Escape Velocity’s keystone assumptions. This book is less about technology than it is about the stories we tell ourselves about technology, and the ideologies hidden in those stories-the politics of myth. The cyber-hippies, technopagans, and New Age advocates of “consciousness technologies” in chapter 1 (“Turn On, Boot Up, Jack In: Cyberdelia”) invest the new machine with a soul, relocating the Sacred in cyberspace. As well, they join the cultural struggle for ownership of the sixties: Rebooting the transcendentalism of the counterculture in nineties cyberculture, they purge it of its Luddism and consecrate it to technology’s promise. On a related note, the cyber-rockers and cyberpunk writers in chapter 2 (“Metal Machine Music: Cyberpunk Meets the Black Leather Synth-Rockers”) scuffle over the legitimacy of their mutual claims to the torn mantle of adolescent rebellion. In so doing, they highlight the essentially cyberpunk nature of rock music, a form of low-tech insurrection made possible by human-machine interface. The rogue technologists and cyber-body artists mentioned earlier mount techno-spectacles in which amok robots and humans menaced by heavy machinery dramatize popular anxieties over the growing autonomy of intelligent machines, especially “smart” weapons, and the seeming obsolescence of humanity. In chapter 5 (“RoboCopulation: Sex Times Technology Equals the Future”), on-line swingers who engage in text sex and hackers who fantasize about anatomically accurate robo-bimbos cast a revealing light on the gender politics of computer culture, and on our national obsession with the mechanizing of sex and the sexualizing of machines. Lastly, there are the postmodern exponents, in chapter 6, of what David Cronenberg calls “uncontrollable flesh”: a self-made “morph” whose body, through avant-garde surgery, is her medium; a male-to-female transsexual who fancies herself the “techno-woman of the ’90s”; bodybuilders who Nautilize themselves into machine-age icons; plastic surgeons who dream of human wings; prophets of posthuman evolution. These and others in cyberculture spin millennial fables about the transitional state and uncertain fate of the body, late in the twentieth century.

  The subcultures explored in Escape Velocity act as prisms, refracting the central themes that shaft through cyberculture, among them the intersection, both literal and metaphorical, of biology and technology, and the growing irrelevance of the body as sensory experience is gradually supplanted by digital simulation. Each, in its own way, makes sense-or nonsense-of the dialectic that pits New Age technophiles, epitomized by the Wired editor Kevin Kelly, who believes that technology is “absolutely, 100 percent, positive,” against doomsaying technophobes such as John Zerzan, the anarchist theorist who contends that technology is “right at the heart of what is so chronically wrong with society.”26 Each subculture plots a course between escapism and engagement, between techno-transcendentalism and politics on the ground, in everyday cyberculture.

  Most important, fringe computer culture relocates our cultural conversation about technology from the there and then to the here and now, wiring it into the power relations and social currents of our historical moment. It keeps us mindful of Donna Haraway’s admonition that any “transcendentalist” ideology that promises “a way out of history, a way of . . . denying mortality” contains the seeds of a self-fulfilling apocalypse. What we need, more than ever, she argues, is a

  deep, inescapable sense of the fragility of the lives that we’re leading-that we really do die, that we really do wound each other, that the Earth really is finite, that there aren’t any other planets out there that we know of that we can live on, that escape velocity is a deadly fantasy.27

  The rhetoric of escape velocity crosses cyberpunk science fiction with the Pentecostal belief in an apocalyptic Rapture, in which history ends and the faithful are gathered up into the heavens. Visions of a cyber-Rapture are a fatal seduction, distracting us from the devastation of nature, the unraveling of the social fabric, and the widening chasm between the technocratic elite and the minimum-wage masses. The weight of social, political, and ecological issues brings the posthuman liftoff from biology, gravity, and the twentieth century crashing down to Earth.

  As we hurtle toward the millennium, poised between technological Rapture and social rupture, between Tomorrowland and Blade Runner, we would do well to remember that-for the foreseeable future, at least-we are here to stay, in these bodies, on this planet. The misguided hope that we will be born again as “bionic angels,” to quote Mondo 2000, is a deadly misreading of the myth of Icarus. It pins our future to wings of wax and feathers.

  1 / TURN ON,

  BOOT UP, JACK IN

  Cyberdelia

  Ravers. Photo: SKID

  Flashback to the Future: The Counterculture, 2.0

  “The ’90s are just the ’60s upside down,” says the comedian Philip Proctor.1

  LSD is in vogue again. The “classic rock” of the sixties rules FM radio. Jimi Hendrix has been trance-channeled by the retrorocker Lenny Kravitz, whose flowered shirts and squalling wah-wah guitar pay devoted homage to Hendrix’s style and sound. Oliver Stone has refought the Vietnam war (Platoon), resurrected Jim Morrison (The Doors), and obsessed on the blurred phantoms of the Zapruder film and the hermetic meanings of the Warren Report (JFK). On August 13, 1994, hordes of Generation Xers and an attendant army of hucksters and roving reporters descended on Saugerties, New York, for Woodstock ’94, a hyped-to-death attempt to regain paradise at $135 a head.

  As with all revisionist fads, the sixties redux is largely a fashion statement, skinning the look of the decade and leaving its stormy politics and troubling contradictions behind. A bell-bottomed naif gambols across a 1993 Macy’s ad: “DON’T WORRY, BE HIPPIE,” counsels the caption.2 A Details pictorial from the same year reconciles boomers and Gen Xers in images of longhaired, love-beaded models in fringed vests and paisley-printed jeans: “Counterculture style returns to where it once began. . . . [T]hese hippie-inspired clothes bridge the gap between grunge and glamour.”3 Time travel is a snap and decades can be mixed and matched when history is reduced to a series of frozen poses and kitschy clichés. The politics of style supplant the politics of the generation gap.

  But the superficial faddishness of bell-bottoms and baby-doll dresses belies a deeper cultural tug-of-war over the meaning of the sixties. This pitched battle was a subplot of the 1992 presidential campaign. In his campaign ads, Bill Clinton positioned himself as a grown-up exemplar of John F. Kennedy’s idealistic “new generation of Americans.” Flushed with his Gulf War exorcism of the ghost of Vietnam, George Bush turned Clinton’s sixties exploits–dodging the draft, protesting the war, smoking (but not inhaling) dope-into campaign issues. “[T]he GOP has found a new all-purpose enemy: the ’60s,” observed the Newsweek writer Howard Fine-man. “The critique is that in a mad, ‘permissive’ decade the nation threw away its will, its discipline, its faith in the family and the military, in moral absolutes and rightful authority.”4

  The return of the sixties, and the culture war raging around the memory of that turbulent decade, is at the heart of the cyberdelic wing of fringe computer culture. Not surprisingly, many of cyberdelia’s media icons are familiar faces from the sixties: No magazine cover story on the phenomenon is complete without the septuagenarian Timothy Leary, admonishing readers to “turn on, boot up, jack in” and proclaiming that the “PC is the LSD of the 1990s,” or Stewart Brand, the former Merry Prankster and creator of the back-to-the-land hippie bible, the Whole Earth Catalogue (whose prescient motto was “ACCESS TO TOOLS”). Other prominent cyberdelic spokespeople, such as the Mondo 2000 founders Queen Mu and R. U. Sirius; Howard Rheingold, the author of books on virtual reality and on-line communities; John Perry Barlow, an advocate of computer users’ rights; and the virtual reality innovators Brenda Laurel and Jaron Lanier, are steeped in the Northern California counterculture of the sixties.

  Rooted in Northern California and rallied around the Berkeley-based quarterly Mondo 2000, the cyberdelic phenomeno
n encompasses a cluster of subcultures, among them Deadhead computer hackers, “ravers” (habitués of all-night electronic dance parties known as “raves”), techno-pagans, and New Age technophiles.

  Cyberdelia reconciles the transcendentalist impulses of sixties counterculture with the infomania of the nineties. As well, it nods in passing to the seventies, from which it borrows the millenarian mysticism of the New Age and the apolitical self-absorption of the human potential movement. As the cyberpunk novelist Bruce Sterling points out,

  Today, for a surprising number of people all over America, the supposed dividing line between bohemian and technician simply no longer exists. People of this sort may have a set of windchimes and a dog with a knotted kerchief ‘round its neck, but they’re also quite likely to own a multimegabyte Macintosh running MIDI synthesizer software and trippy fractal simulations. These days, even Timothy Leary himself, prophet of LSD, does virtual-reality computer-graphics demos in his lecture tours.5

  In his cyber-hippie travelogue, Cyberia: Life in the Trenches of Hyper-space, Douglas Rushkoff uses the “trippy fractal simulations” Sterling mentions-intricate, involuted abstractions generated by computers using complex mathematical formulae-as a root metaphor.6 To Rushkoff, the fractal is emblematic of the cyberdelic subcultures he collectively calls Cyberia (a coinage borrowed from the Autodesk company’s Cyberia Project, a virtual reality initiative). It serves as a cyber-hippie yin-yang symbol, signifying the union of the “two cultures”–the scientific and the nonscientific-into which society has been split by the scientific advances of the twentieth century, to use the scientist and essayist C. P. Snow’s famous phrase.

  In cyberdelia, the values, attitudes, and street styles of the Haight-Ashbury/Berkeley counterculture intersect with the technological innovations and esoteric traditions of Silicon Valley. The cartoon opposites of disheveled, dope-smoking “head” and buttoned-down engineering student, so irreconcilable in the sixties, come together in Sterling’s hippie techno-phile and Rushkoff’s cyberians. Increasingly, the media image of the Gen Xers who predominate in high-tech subcultures is that of the cyber-hippie or, in England, the “zippie” (“Zen-inspired pagan professional”). Toby Young, the associate editor of England’s Evolution magazine, defines zippies as “a combination of sixties flower children and nineties techno-people.”

  Like his or her sixties predecessor, the archetypal cyber-hippie featured in Sunday supplement articles is largely a media fiction, synthesized from scattered sightings. He or she sports jewelry fashioned from computer parts by San Francisco’s Famous Melissa and dresses in “cyberdelic softwear” from the San Francisco designer Ameba-op-arty T-shirts printed with squirming sperm, leggings adorned with scuttling spiders, belled jester caps popular at raves. He or she meditates on cyberdelic mandalas like the New Electric Acid Experience video advertised in Inner Technologies, a mail-order catalogue of “tools for the expansion of consciousness.” “Recreate the Summer of Love with this ’90s version of a ’60s light show,” the blurb entreats.

  There’s something for everyone here: soft swatches of moving color, hypnotic, pulsating mandalas, psychedelicized fractals, surreal film imagery, computer animation, and advanced film graphics. A guaranteed mind-warping experience!7

  In addition, cyber-hippies sometimes seek switched-on bliss through Mindlabs, InnerQuests, Alphapacers, Synchro-Energizers, and other “mind machines”—headphone-and-goggle devices that flash stroboscopic pulses at the user’s closed eyes, accompanied by synchronized sound patterns and, in some cases, low-level electrical stimulation of the brain. Advocates claim the devices induce trancelike states characterized by deep relaxation, vivid daydreams, and greater receptivity toward autohypnotic suggestions for behavior changes.

  Alternately, a cyber-hippie might choose to boost his or her brain power with “smart drugs”—Piracetam, Vasopressin, and other central nervous system stimulants and so-called “cognitive enhancers” that allegedly increase the production of chemicals associated with memory or speed up the rate of information exchange in the brain’s synaptic structure.8

  What distinguishes the cyberdelic culture of the nineties from psychedelic culture, more than anything else, is its ecstatic embrace of technology. In his 1993 Time cover story on the phenomenon, Philip Elmer-Dewitt asserts that cyberdelia “is driven by young people trying to come up with a movement they can call their own. As [Howard Rheingold] puts it, They’re tired of all these old geezers talking about how great the ’60s were.’. . . For all their flaws, they have found ways to live with technology, to make it theirs–something the back-to-the-land hippies never accomplished.”9 Similarly, in his introduction to Mirrorshades, the 1986 cyberpunk omnibus that brought the SF subgenre into the mainstream, Bruce Sterling argued that cyberpunk signaled “a new alliance . . . an integration of technology and the ’80s counterculture.”10 Sixties counterculture, by comparison, was “rural, romanticized, anti-science, anti-tech.”11

  To the extent that they define themselves in opposition to the Woodstock Nation, high-tech subcultures–whether cyberdelic or cyberpunk–insist on this reductive reading of sixties counterculture. Even so, there is more than a grain of truth in the widespread dismissal of sixties counterculture as “a return to nature that ended in disaster,” to quote Camille Paglia.12 Hippiedom inherited the Blakean vision of a return to Eden and the Emersonian notion of a transcendent union with Nature by way of Beat poets such as Gary Snyder, who counseled a tribal, back-to-the-land movement, and Allen Ginsberg, whose “Howl” demonized America as an industrial Moloch “whose mind is pure machinery.” Such intellectual currents led, for some, to the antitechnological utopianism expressed in the rural commune. “It was inevitable that hippie values would lead true believers back to nature,” the popologists Jane and Michael Stern write in Sixties People. “Although virtually all of them were Caucasian, hippies relished their romantic self-image as nouveau red men, living in harmony with the universe, fighting against the white man’s perverted society of pollution, war, and greed.”13

  Nonetheless, sixties counterculture simultaneously bore the impress of Zbigniew Brzezinski’s technetronic age. As Sterling notes, “[N]o counterculture Earth Mother gave us lysergic acid–it came from a Sandoz lab.”14 A popular button turned the E. I. Du Pont slogan, “BETTER THINGS FOR BETTER LIVING THROUGH CHEMISTRY,” into a sly catchphrase for acidheads. At the same time, as Theodore Roszak points out in The Making of a Counter Culture, the Learyite article of faith that the key to cosmic consciousness and sweeping societal change could be found in a chemical concoction sprang from a uniquely American faith in technology. In that sense, he argues, the Du Pont slogan on the hippie button

  [wasn’t] being used satirically. The wearers [meant] it the way Du Pont means it. The gadget-happy American has always been a figure of fun because of his facile assumption that there exists a technological solution to every human problem. It only took the great psychedelic crusade to perfect the absurdity of proclaiming that personal salvation and the social revolution can be packed into a capsule.15

  The archetypal hippie experience was not dancing naked in a field of daisies, but tripping at an acid rock concert. The psychedelic sound-and-light show was as much a technological as a Dionysian rite, from the feedback-drenched electric soundtrack to the signature visual effects (created with film, slides, strobes, and overhead projectors) to the LSD that switched on the whole experience.

  The emergent computer culture of the sixties overlapped, even then, with the counterculture. “Students were signing up in droves to take courses in computer studies,” report the authors of The ’60s Reader, “though having a home computer was beyond the wildest imaginings of most of them.”16 Prophetically, one of Ken Kesey’s ragtag hippie troupe the Merry Pranksters was a not so distant relative of Sterling’s bohemian techie–a computer programmer named Paul Foster whose life “seemed to alternate between good straight computer programming,” when he wore the standard-issue suit and tie, and wild
er times with the Pranksters, during which he sported a homemade psychedelic jacket festooned with “ribbons and slogan buttons and reflectors and Crackerjack favors.”17

  Similarly, the electrical engineer and hardware hacker Lee Felsen-stein “balanced the seemingly incompatible existences of a political activist and a socially reclusive engineer,” writes Steven Levy in Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution.18 Swept up in the political radicalism of the Berkeley-based free speech movement but obsessed with electronics at a time when technology was regarded with deep suspicion by radicals, Felsenstein strove to reconcile his divided loyalties. He and another activist hacker, Efrem Lipkin, went on to create the Bay Area electronic bulletin board Community Memory in 1973. Dedicated to the proposition that alternative networking was inherently empowering, Computer Memory was free to any and all through two public access terminals. “By opening a hands-on computer facility to let people reach each other, a living metaphor would be created,” writes Levy, “a testament to the way computer technology could be used as guerrilla warfare for people against bureaucracies.”19

  Felsenstein and Lipkin weren’t the only members of the counterculture to champion personal computing as an engine of social change. Bob Albrecht, a longhaired, wild-eyed zealot with a background in computing, founded a newspaper and a computer center, both called the Peoples’ Computer Company. The technovisionary Ted Nelson self-published a “counterculture computer book” titled Computer Lib, an impassioned manifesto for an imagined movement whose battle cry would be “COMPUTER POWER TO THE PEOPLE!” Intriguingly, Roszak recently countered Newt Gingrich’s use of the term “countercultural” to demonize boomer Democrats with the charge that Gingrich is