I’ll preface this with a little caveat. Google’s search results often vary from domain to domain (i.e. from google.com to google.co.uk), and also from time to time. The following I found hitting the #1 spot on google.co.uk, today.

• microsoft office swastika
• strap-on transexual freud devil
• visionary ecstatic smut elvis
• chinese tryptamine spam
• throbbing apocalypse cum fuck

Actually, I’m pipped to the post on that last one by a vast page of Throbbing Gristle reviews, but I think even a #2 spot for that phrase deserves acclaim.

For what it’s worth, I’ll tag Joel Biroco, Mark Pilkington, Natasha Young… and I’ll stop there. I always run out of people to tag—maybe that’s a good thing.

P.S. Just checking the above links before posting, I found that in the time between first searching and writing this, in the “strap-on transexual freud devil” search result my dreamflesh.com #1 hit had been replaced by a PDF of the same content that’s been uploaded to scribd.com. Mine hasn’t even been nudged to #2—it’s just gone. I’ve flicked through the next few pages of results and couldn’t find the dreamflesh.com page before I became queasy. (Really, some of the other things alongside in the results for the above are for the extremely jaded only.)

From indefatigable comedian and activist Mark Thomas, an impassioned rant against “neo-liberal capitalism” given at the Put People First G20 rally in Hyde Park, London, 28/3/09:

And a more in-depth, though equally passionate call for the decentralization of currency from media theorist Douglas Rushkoff, given at the Web 2.0 Expo, San Francisco, 2/4/09:

Reading this post about the future of publishing, I found a number of interesting, depressing or exciting perceptions flying around like sparks from the clash between it and my current reading of Peter Ackroyd’s excellent Blake biography.

Seizing the means

Of course, the exciting part of it is the web’s promise to cut out the middle men: large publishers and distributors. The author of the post, Aaron Wall, a search engine optimization expert, calls for artists to become publishers (and for publishers to become artists). I’m way ahead of him on that one, editing and publishing my own stuff since before the web. Granted, it’s never been a commercial proposition, but the principle holds: optimism for the future has to include artists and writers seizing the means of production, and technology facilitating their expressions rather than commerce hampering them.

William Blake was way ahead, too, printing (with his tireless wife Catherine) many of his creations, famously pioneering a new print process known as relief etching. He used this technique to print his “illuminated books”, words and images combined on one metal plate.

Blake’s control over the technical means of his creativity was more than just a convenience. He understood the spiritual roots of McLuhan’s “medium is the message” centuries before media studies.

But first the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul is to be expunged; this I shall do, by printing in the infernal method, by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid.
If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.

Here, in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, he rallies the process of relief etching, where acids burn away unprotected parts of the copper printing plate, to stand as a metaphor for the lifting of the veils from our degraded sensual perceptions. But this is almost beyond the realm of metaphor, as his means of conveying his idea is itself symbolic of the idea.

What kind of world does our new media—untouchable, frictionless, both pervasive and ephemeral, empowering and bewildering—convey? Do we want to live there?

Information snacks

The post embeds a brief interview with Cory Doctorow on how to blog effectively, and his advice boils down to: write like a wire service writer. Write like your audience could put your words down after a few seconds, because they probably will. At least, the people that “count” will:

Most people with significant social and/or economic influence have (an equivalent of) attention deficit disorder, caused by an interruption-driven life cluttered with too much content and too little time. People may want to consume relevant bits [...] Little chunks of information that change how we perceive the world around us.

I’m more interested than most in nurturing our besieged attention spans; part of my reason for reviving my relationship with print publishing is to encourage more breaks with the flooding rush of information flow, more oxbow lakes of reflective reading, or at least some meanders.

But wasn’t Blake one of the masters of “little chunks of information that change how we perceive the world around us”? So much so that I’ve no need to throw any at you—most people reading this will have at least a few almost clichéd pithy quotes from his poetry and writing to hand. Scanning a compilation of Blake quotes, it’s astonishing how many they are, how brief they are, and how potent their kick of perceptual reconfiguring is.

Many great thinkers are (or can be) aphoristic thinkers: Nietzsche, Einstein, Lao Tsu, Voltaire, Wittgenstein… Need one mention Jesus? Or Woody Allen?

The closely sustained argument of Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death left him in a place where the revelatory infernal corrosives started breaking his language down into exaggerated, non-linear aphorisms, a kind of erudite prose poetry. He quotes McLuhan quoting Francis Bacon:

Aphorisms, representing a knowledge broken, do invite men to inquire farther; whereas Methods, carrying the show of a total, do secure men, as if they were at farthest.

Brown goes on to proclaim:

Systematic form attempts to evade the necessity of death in the life of the mind as of the body; it has immortal longings in it, and so it remains dead. [...] The rigor is rigor mortis; systems are wooden crosses, Procrustean beds on which the living mind is pinned. Aphorism is the form of death and resurrection: “the form of eternity”.

All of which is a far cry from the kind of disposable blandness that usually results from “best practices” in blog writing! Still, might Blake have found some affinity with the web, with its eagerness for snappy one-liners and aptitude for textual and visual combinations?

What’s missing here is, firstly, the state of the reader, and secondly, the value of thorough reading, even (or especially) of aphoristic writers. Aphorisms, as a kind of pocket poetry of ideas, can compact very sophisticated insights into tiny seeds of expression. For that insight to properly unfold, however, the ground must be receptive—as Jesus taught in his Parable of the Sower. “He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.” (Luke 8:8) Which of us, hurried into a permanently anxious low-level emergency state, frazzled with caffeine, eager to click the next link or check our inboxes, has ears to hear much at all?

It’s true that the greatness of someone like Nietzsche is that he wasn’t a system-builder. And yet, there are subtly (or not-so-subtly) dangerous misinterpretations lying in wait to prey on anyone who hasn’t surveyed the full scope of his thought. James Hillman’s work is similar. There are core ideas and tendencies, but the experimental nature of this thought leaves an particular arc that unfolds through his career. Apprehending it all doesn’t leave you with a totalized “system”, but it naturally creates a much fuller understanding of his work. My good friend Jim assures me that Gregory Bateson’s eclectic oeuvre is similarly rewarded by a comprehensive reading. Connections between apparently disparate ideas reveal themselves; and one starts seeing that the connections are the point of his worldview.

But who has the time to read all of Nietzsche, Hillman or Bateson? The dark Satanic offices demand their vast share of your life, and our hyperconnected society lets their demands press ever harder.

Art, commerce, democracy

Ackroyd, early on in Blake, contrasts the London prophet with the Romantic poets he’s normally loosely lumped with. He makes much of the fact that, despite “the dark Satanic mills”, Blake didn’t share the Romantics’ aversion to commerce, making his way (just) throughout his life as an engraver.

It’s true that Blake’s life as an artisan, a tradesman, coloured him in ways that differentiate him from, say, Wordsworth and Coleridge. But what colour?

When he returned to London in 1804, after three generally unsuccessful years near the Sussex coast, Blake “was again enlightened with the light I enjoyed in my youth, and which has for exactly twenty years been closed from me as by a door and by window-shutters.” (Quoted in Ackroyd, p. 271) Ackroyd comments:

He is very specific about the period of darkness he has had to undergo, with a duration of twenty years up to this year of 1804. 1784 was the year in which his father died and in which he set up the print-selling business with James Parker in Broad Street. It was the beginning, then, of his life as a tradesman, conducted perhaps in emulation of his dead father.

He saw these two decades, wherein his youthful creativity was constantly restricted by commercial concerns, as time spent “as a slave bound in a mill among beasts and devils”.

In the interview with Aaron Wall where I found his post on publishing, Wall is asked what he thinks the net will look like 100 or 200 years from now.

I think the distinction between the web and the real world will be hard to draw, or perhaps non-existent. Communication technologies will keep evolving and information will available readily in whatever format you like, but with well blended ads. It will become nearly impossible to see the difference between ads and content.

This tendency towards intensifying the blend between commerce and art, advertising and communication, is it creating a hybrid culture that transcends both, some utopian marriage? Or is it the bars of the Black Iron Prison becoming invisible, seamless?

Wall states the obvious dynamic of commercial survival:

If I target an idea to a market and people tell me it is garbage then so much for that idea. If early feedback looks promising then it is time to dig deeper, do more research, read more, and write more. Invest where your interests align with the interest of others.

The web promises a broad democratization of the supply-demand axis in publishing. But—oodles of pointless and shit websites notwithstanding—I thought the point of cutting out the middlemen was to enable more diversity?* Of course Wall’s goal is to help people be more commercially successful, so I can’t criticize his good advice. It’s just indicative of the growing control that “the consumer” has over their media world. And while I generally champion this control, I can’t help but see its shadow: the death of revelation.

Audiences can’t be ignored. But they should never be obeyed (just as publishers or artists should never be obeyed by their audiences). The artist’s responsibility (which, as Wall noted, is destined to overlap with that of the publisher) is to a certain extent, as David Cronenberg noted, to be irresponsible. Not wilfully or gratuitously; but to challenge, to provoke, to proffer unpalatable truths. To surprise, to lift the veils. If everyone gets exactly what they want, much of value to life will remain unseen, held at bay.

The web may yet be a tool of conviviality, a means to negotiate between the oppressions of both fascism and democracy. Things don’t look too promising. But I am—I hope—still open to surprises and revelations.

I’ll just end by noting one of the final questions in the interview with Aaron Wall:

How much offline reading do you do?

Much less than I would like…

* I realize that for the most part, the move from top-down to bottom-up dictation of media content is a move towards more diversity. I don’t oppose this. The “diversity” I’m talking about (as becomes clear) is diversions from what people immediately want, in a surface, ego, “gimme this” kind of way.

An Interview with Jason Louv

by Gyrus

Gyrus: What was your awareness as a teenager of youth cultures, their cycles and histories?

Jason: I was extremely self-aware on this topic to the point that my determination to not identify with any social group probably prevented me from truly fitting in with any. I was a goth at the ages of 13-15 like most people who end up in my, er, “line of inquiry,” but at the time I was the only goth in my school and it felt like assembling an arcane tradition out of cast-down fragments from previous generations—Joy Division albums; black trench-coats, hair dye and nail polish; William Burroughs books; the tail end of Mondo 2000; drinking weird green booze in the back of math class—the usual suspects. It was tacky, but a proud and individual kind of tacky, and fully surpassed by the horror of the onslaught of Marilyn Manson, who made goth into a major trend. By 15 I was a bitter old man of the goth world at my school, waving my fist at the new kids popping up everywhere who had (gasp) never heard of Arthur Rimbaud but did really like when Marilyn Manson carved evil Satan stuff in his chest. So of course I had to hide in the anonymity of white t-shirts and jeans rather than be associated with these upstarts who had ruined my fun. Which may have been for the best since it’s really hot in Southern California all the time and the trench-coats were a bit much. By the time I was ready to graduate, Columbine happened and the whole thing was put into a very very unfortunate context. By that point I was all into chaos magic and determined to become completely invisible from the social order while doing my utmost to erase my own tenuously-constructed and barely-born identity. Which didn’t stop me from being frisked by the authorities, but still…

Gyrus: We talked about Columbine a bit when we met last year, specifically in relation to cycles of youth culture. Pete Carroll wrote about sunspot cycles a bit, and I published a piece by Iain Spence in Towards 2012 where he maps 22-year solar cycles onto youth movements. The idea is of an evolution in the Transactional Analysis grid, from friendly weakness (Hippy), to hostile weakness (Punk), to friendly strength (Rave), to a (then, in ’97) projected hostile strength current (he terms it “Storm”). [Readers might want to check out Iain's site, where he's updated and evolved his theories.] There was no coherent “movement” of this nature, but certainly a lot of aspects in youth culture—albeit scattered and refracted through commercialism and millennial confusion. Columbine certainly expressed it, horrifically. You were the same age as Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold—how did the incident affect you at the time, and how did it feed into your cultural and magical awareness at the turn of the millennium?

Jason: I was pretty aware of that hypothesis at the time and was trying to play my life into it. I had it pegged for 1999 which was what Grant Morrison was talking about at the time. Peter Carroll called it for 2001, but I think 1999/2000 was when it seemed to be the most noticeable.

I think almost all that energy got sucked into the Internet because the kids at the time who would have been most affected by it were in many cases working out their identity crises in online forums instead of in a more physical realm, so there was no unified “look” or music or anything like that. I think the anti-WTO movement focusing around the Battle in Seattle was the most visible manifestation though. Columbine happened around the same time and that was another one. Actually, somebody on Barbelith at one point had the theory that the 1999 energy went into radical fundamentalism, which was certainly interesting if maybe disturbingly accurate. I hope that Generation Hex is a document of that “surge” hitting and some of the people who were affected by it, at least in the realm of magick. It took us all a few years to really process it.

Around the time that Columbine occurred it seemed like there was another big school shooting every week in the US. Columbine was just the biggest and most dramatic. I don’t really know where to lay the blame for all that other than to say that in the moment it seemed obvious to me that the whole institution of American public schooling was outdated and pretty good at producing uneducated, sociopathic (sometimes psychopathic) consumers and not much else, and it couldn’t handle a generation of kids raised in an ultramodern media sphere, and that this was the result—though I’m not sure if Columbine was representative of much more than a couple of absolute idiots being absolute idiots. It was, however, one (comparatively early) incident in a LONG string of “terror” events that have been used by both ends of the political spectrum to completely lock down the country, so in that it really did represent a swinging point away from the tail-end of Clinton-era optimism and towards Bush’s Death Race 2000. It only took the dot-com crash and the election steal to transition from “friendly strength” to “hostile strength” but I didn’t see that acted out too much in youth culture per se. Maybe we have to entertain the idea that “youth culture” may be an artifact of the late Twentieth Century, an outdated marketing strategy from a less fragmented time.

On a personal level, when Columbine happened I was automatically seen as “the enemy” by my school’s administration because I wore black a lot and was moody. At one point I got dragged into the office and forced to change my clothing because I was wearing a Taxi Driver t-shirt; some of my friends who wore trench-coats every day (peaceful nerd types) got pelted with rocks by other students (in speeding SUVs) on multiple occasions and were all strip-searched by the administration at one point, and were just constantly harassed by students and administration alike. We had one teacher who started wearing a black leather jacket every day out of solidarity which was very nice but in general every sensitive goth type in the school was now expected to kill everybody. The entire thing had the effect of polarizing me completely even from the “rebel” stance of the nonconformist student and leading me to feel truly unwanted and completely disassociated from my life. At this point I was heavily into chaos magic and trying to get an “outside” perspective on everything anyway. It helped fuel that stage of initiatory crisis in a way, through complete disassociation.

Gyrus: Obviously detachment and an “outsider” perspective is an essential part of the initiatory process, but it seems clear that many people in our society have problems with getting attached to this—both because of how unattractive the idea of “rejoining” society currently is, and how rebel stances have been codified and rigidified by consumer culture. But part of contemporary magic that is evident in Generation Hex (and on discussions on Key23.net) is the desire to connect with communities, to earth the abstractions and postures of post-modern occultism back into social awareness and activism. How has that tendency touched you, and what are your observations of it unfolding around you?

Jason: Yes, I think ultimately it’s impossible to be an outsider, and I think there really is a tendency right now to want to reconnect magic with communities, which I think is a manifestation of what Frater Achad first identified as the Aeon of Ma’at in the 1940s.

In the US that’s very prevalent with Burning Man. I’ve never been to Burning Man so I can’t say too much about it, but I’m less interested in a once-a-year dress-up and more interested in actually putting these things to use in the unglamorous daily grind of mundane life, and using them to slowly but surely improve our lives and the lives of the people we’re close to. In New York there’s a lot of that centered around Alex Grey’s Chapel of Sacred Mirrors, which is great. I think that’s a great model for a community center, and something that all cities would benefit from immensely.

The internet’s also been great for bringing people together but to be honest I’m sick of the internet, and the problem, especially with discussions about magic, is that it can be hard to separate out the people who have actually practiced magic in any kind of deep or meaningful way, and those who just like to talk about ideas. Both are great but for those who are just getting started and are looking for actually useful and meaningful information it can be a real mess. But I suppose that’s how it’s always been with magic, anybody looking to get some proper information has always had to sift through small landfills’ worth of charlatanry. Internet discussion forums and even books like Generation Hex are just puffery really when compared to the experience of sitting down or going out in the world and actually doing magic, so the most I can hope for in the current occult “climate,” even my own little corner of it, is that hopefully people will take away enough of a sense that there are other people out there doing this stuff and that helps it become OK for them to actually take that first step and do some experiments without having to feel like they’re completely alone or crazy.

Gyrus: The standard view of tribal societies sees the shamanic vocation as the province of the very few; yet there are examples, like the San in southern Africa, where practitioners are numerous, up to half the population, and healing ceremonies are highly communal. How do you see modern occultism relating to communities in the near future? And how do you see the role of the contemporary magician in relation to the tribal shaman? Healing in service of the community is perhaps the prime function of the shaman, but both healing and community seem to minor elements in the western occult traditions.

Jason: That’s very interesting about the San, I hadn’t heard that before. Certainly I have huge amounts of fun and have often felt at my most human when doing magic with large groups of people who are all experienced magicians in their own right, so I hope those types of experiences can be more accessible for people. Of course finding out where the party is, or organizing your own, is definitely its own initiation.

As far as the community view, I certainly wanted to prompt that with the book. Healing is something that’s a bit more overlooked though. There can be a lot of emphasis on healing in the occult but it’s often of the practitioner him or herself; i.e. healing the division from spirit or healing the damage one is assumed to have incurred from a “materialist” socialization. On the other hand, once you look beyond the occult ghetto, homeopathic medicine and forms of healing based on magical thinking are now big business in the West, which is another facet of what I was expressing in the introduction to Generation Hex, that magical thinking is now everywhere.

Stephen Grasso is somebody who talks a lot about the role of the magician as being the person in the community who sorts out people’s problems that can’t be sorted in other ways. That’s close to the experience of shamanism I had in Nepal—shamanism is a form of healing that people seek out when they don’t have access to Western medicine. Of course in the West forms of healing based on magical thinking are the ones you go to when Western medicine isn’t enough.

Robert Anton Wilson said that out of any hundred people, one will be the shaman or trickster figure. That’s the widest angle to view the phenomenon from, a lot wider than looking at who’s read the right books or who’s got the right tattoos or whatever, or who calls themselves a magician. In a lot of ways standing up and calling yourself a magician or shaman seems to automatically disqualify you from being such, so I guess I’ve invalidated myself and everybody else in Generation Hex in a way!

Gyrus: What’s the plan with the idea of “Ultraculture” and the associated website?

Jason: Well it was originally going to be a kind of cross between an occult order and a social networking system along the lines of Indymedia or even MySpace, but after weighing it for over a year I think that the potential pitfalls of directly networking people together and taking on that responsibility outweigh the potential benefits.

As I’ve just left Disinformation, I’m going to be putting a lot of time into retooling the Ultraculture site into something useful. At this point I want it to be kind of an open artistic collective which people are welcome to participate in, and I hope to use it as a kind of goad for activating people and prompting further magical renaissance.

There are some Ultraculture-related projects that are going to be upcoming in the next few months which should give people a taste of what’s going to happen.

Gyrus: What other things are you working on, and how are your recent (or not so recent) experiences of magic informing them and the Ultraculture ideas?

Jason: Right now most of my focus is going into Tantra, incorporating what I’m learning there with my previous learning. When I was developing Generation Hex I was fully into Crowley and that kind of mad, racing sense of urgency that goes along with his writing. My focus has been all Western Esoteric Tradition so it’s good to have some change. I tend to kind of hover on the balance of doing lots of ritual magic and just going out and seeing life as a magical process. Right now I’m back in the laboratory refining my ideas and my approach to magic, trying to break up some of my assumptions and get further into the core.

I have had some fairly bizarre experiences in connection with the Ultraculture eidolon, though, which suggest that it’s already operating as a slipstream within the morphogenetic field. I suspect the complete crassness of the idea is a kind of smokescreen for something much more involved and intelligent. Developing rituals to contact it might be of use to anybody with interest in the concept, but I suspect it may be much bigger than I or anybody else previously suspected…

One that struck me particularly was my off-the-cuff use very recently of the phrase "open source philosophy". Obviously, posting every day means you think about posting, and writing, a little more than usual, and I’d been homing in on something to describe what I like writing here, and that something turned out to be "open source philosophy". It’s obviously not strictly open source—my ideas here aren’t really presented in a way that’s that closely analagous to the nature of open source software. Like much of my writing, I’m maybe more concerned with the spirit than with the letter here. Including my wrong turns, not being too concerned about revealing various peccadilloes, disclosing (some of) my personal investments and biases… All this hopefully adds up to a flow of thinking that’s a little more accessible than traditional, professional philosophy, where the arguments have been built into daunting edifices through years of mental labour, and much of the gaffer tape and idiosyncratic, less than stable underpinnings in the foundations are hidden behind confidence and rhetorical polish.

Well, shit, that might describe me to some people! There are infinite lessons in relativity… But really, it’s an ideal, not a fully formed reality, and I’ve other concerns that pull in other directions—like sounding cool and convincing everyone that I’m right. It’s also another attempt to define my slippery self—as with my shift in section labelling here from "articles" to "essays"—and a get-out clause.

In any case, a couple of days later I’m checking out Douglas Rushkoff’s site and I see he’s got an interesting-looking recent book out, Nothing Sacred: The Truth About Judaism. And a web project to accompany it: Open Source Judaism.

It’s an inevitability, this conjunction of libertarian concepts of software development and these long-standing human institutions of mind and spirit. It’s just odd, and nice, how first-use and first-encounter like to huddle together in time.

The technical structure of the internet, as we all know, is the prime factor in this wave of enthusiasm for "open source", for transparent collaboration, for harnessing collective intelligence. When I first got my head around building web sites in the late nineties, I was deep into some rather intensive, poetically-inclined etymological research. It’s still all in notebooks and ancient Microsoft Works files somewhere (I think), an enthusiastic amateur rumble through Indo-European languages for associations between words related to the Pole Star, centrality, naval navigation, and cheese-making (don’t ask—yet). At the time I enthused about building an openly collaborative website, dumping it all in there, and getting others with similar strange habits to add their research to the mix.

The idea came up once with Julian Cope, hanging in the Stones restaurant next to Avebury Henge, and he warned me against it. He had a load of etymological speculation—etymosophy he called it—in his then upcoming tome, The Modern Antiquarian, and some of our research had overlapped. I recall his reasoning being that there’s a dissipative effect in just splurging your research on the web mid-stream. I guess it depends on where you want to go with it. There’s also some sound advice on personal creativity there—allowing something to gestate for its proper time before it comes to term.

But there are new ways of generating novelty and connections emerging, not without their pitfalls and ambiguities, but certainly worth exploring. There’s been some interesting buzz recently about the free, radically open online encyclopedia, Wikipedia. A journo in Syracuse, New York, published something a few weeks ago where a librarian was quoted emphasising the lack of trustworthiness of this web resource where anyone can edit nearly anything. Communications boffin Alex Halavais set about testing the responsiveness of the Wikipedia non-system, by seeding a bunch of intentional errors. All thirteen were spotted and corrected by the amorphous collective editing process within a couple of hours. (Though please read this strong caveat before "testing" Wikipedia yourself.)

Madness is rare in individuals—but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule.

Friedrich Nietzsche

This has become such a truism to me that it is rather difficult to take on board this kind of "collective intelligence". (Nietzsche would probably have been horrified at such inflexibility of conception. Or he might have just erupted with misanthropic bile, hitting the table and shouting, "Bollocks! They’re all stupid bastards out there!") But orgs like The Co-Intelligence Institute (via WorldChanging) seem to be the tip of an iceberg that’s been steadily accumulating weight as computer networking has reshaped society and ecological research has revealed and delineated the power of sheer numbers: millions of heads are better than one.

So what about open source religion? It may be an oxymoron whose time has come. If we go back to the likely origins of religion (and much else besides), shamanism, I think even then real "open source" is impractical. The way I see it, even before the Microsofts of the human spirit, the priestly horders of divinity, came along with their coded texts and zealously guarded secrets, powers and privileges, the shaman as the "technician of the sacred", however non-elitist the social structures she was embedded in, had to keep some stuff to herself. I think part of the deal with shamanic healing is the persona of the shaman, the mask of power and knowledge.

Not that this mask or persona implies any lack of real power or knowledge—far from it. These things seem to me to be very sophisticated tools, interfaces between the shaman’s actual power and the social group, that are part of her power to effect healing and transformation. People need to believe they can be healthy again, and this slippery, almost ungraspable shift in mental constructs often needs a bit of trickery to accomplish.

An exquisite seduction carried out not only in the cause of mutual satisfaction but also as a conscious act in a deliberately beautiful life—may be the ultimate Poetic Terrorism. The Poetic Terrorist behaves like a confidence-trickster whose aim is not money but CHANGE.

Hakim Bey, ‘Poetic Terrorism‘

Of course Bey isn’t talking about shamanism (or is he?), but the sentiment is the same. The vitality of archaic trickster figures, and their degeneration into our Devil, "the father of lies", speaks volumes about our loss of sensitivity to the ambivalence of both lies and honesty.

So, a shaman, in a professional, socially benevolent capacity, needs to keep some cards close to their chest. But—in case you hadn’t noticed—we don’t live in a tribal society anymore. Previously secret indigenous traditions revealing their wisdom and techniques, due to a perception that our world’s up shit creek and needs any paddles that can be thrown at it, seems to be an increasingly common occurrence (despite the fear and mistrust in indigenous societies that we have dragged into shit creek with us, without a boat, let alone a paddle). The ways of the world ebb and flow, but I don’t think this flow of esoterica into the open is needing to ebb just yet—our problem is almost certainly that it hasn’t flowed enough.

The gates need to be opened, the seals broken. Let’s put our cards on the table.

An Interview with Douglas Rushkoff

by David Kendall

David: How did you get into this?

Douglas: I was a theatre major in college. I went to Princeton, which is a very traditional kind of school, and the theatre people, the music people and the weird people in general hang out together. We were the sort of psychedelic crowd. I moved out west and a lot of the people, the most involved in alternative culture, were also deeply involved in computer software, computer programming, doing high level stuff up in Silicon Valley and I really wanted to find out if all these computer people were like that. I’d remembered computer kids in school, as you know, pocket protector wearing nerds.

David: We have the same image here. You must have picked the most interesting and the most literate specimens of their kind. [The same with] Role players, over here they’re dorks obsessed with power. You don’t get kids saying, "I’m into another hyperspatial reality," interconnecting with another world.

Douglas: You don’t think so? Dungeons and Dragons?

David: Oh yes, they don’t mind a bit of rape and pillage but that’s basically feudal economics.

Douglas: Right, but they don’t have to understand what they’re doing to be doing it. They’re involved in a non-linear reality. They’re involved in roleplaying, without knowing, "Oh, we’re experimenting with other fields of reality."

David: Mmm, I sort of expect that from McKenna and Leary. I read Food of the Gods and enjoyed it. After reading your book I was a bit more sceptical. How did you find him?

Douglas: I think he’s a brilliant guy but he’s got a kind of fundamentalism that bothers me. What he talks about is that there’s a bottleneck effect at the end of time, and that humanity’s going to take this leap into hyperspace. First, I think it’s going to happen but it’s going to be much more subtle than that. It’s not like zoom, we’re out of the physical reality, and two, the problem is, he says that if you have the DMT or psychedelic experience you’ll make it, if you haven’t had that experience you won’t. That’s kind of fucked up. Because that’s exclusionary. To me what the psychedelic experience says to me is that All is One, either we all make it or none of us make it.

David: Yeah, like in Cyberia, a technophobe’s nightmare. If you’re not on the Net, without a computer you can’t get a job, effectively you’re not literate. I’m not sure if it will become like that, any new medium finds its niche. Literacy was an exception, it took over completely, I don’t know about computers. You could become dependent on the Net for all information, all support.

Douglas: But if what you’re saying is true, and the Net becomes the overculture, then the counterculture will go onland. Right now the counterculture’s online and mainstream culture’s in space. And what will happen is the counterculture will be people doing real things.

David: Reading Cyberia, I thought there was a bit of a time lag. Britain seems to be more Pagan than Techno.

Douglas: Well House comes to San Francisco and we incorporate the Pagan thing into technology, it comes here and you guys incorporate technology into the Pagan thing.

David: Yet the way you put it over in Cyberia, it seems much more passive than say Chaos Magick in Britain, which exercises more will than that needed to turn on a computer or drop an acid tab. Plug into the Net and surf Chaos, click your way around the world, and you’ve got "freedom of information," that’s just crap. That’s just an excuse to lay back and enjoy what’s been given to them by sixties radicals.

Douglas: Fine. Even Genesis P-Orridge talks about the ‘bliss’ response. You know, to get the kid into the club you don’t have to let him know he’s coming to a Pagan thing, that he’s coming to unlearn his Christian ethic, question his parents, the Queen and the Pope. The music’s cool, the girls are pretty, everybody’s wearing black make-up or whatever. They come in and they have the bliss response, after they’ve had that I think a different set of desires emerge. I think it’s OK for a first stage. You drop acid for the first time you’re thinking…

David: …mystical thoughts.

Douglas: Yeah, you’re thinking Wow!, but then after the fourth or fifth hour when you’re starting to come down some people get a desperation, how am I going to bring the reality of the state, how am I going to bring all this one consciousness into reality. In the United States that did get downloaded as the environmental movement, the Women’s Movement, the Civil Rights Movement.

David: But it wasn’t just acid that did that though.

Douglas: Not just acid, no.

David: By itself what is in Cyberia is not going to produce a revolution [of thought]. I really think it’s another cog inside a wheel that’s turning slowly. [...]

[We shift onto Mayan time.]

Douglas: He [McKenna] sees 2012 as the end of Mayan time, then we go out of history into chaos. We’re in this small intermittent period of control in this vast period of chaos and we’ll go back to it. I think when there’s a fundamental shift in the way people perceive what’s around them, it creates the environment where the sort of changes we’re talking about can happen. It is passive in that sense, feminine whatever. All these people are doing is tilling the soil. They’re not activists in that sense. They’re creating a state of readiness. I mean Rupert Murdoch and the corporate control machine, consumer whatever, they’re the ones who put the wires out there. They’re the ones that created television, telephones, all of that. They had no idea that people were going to start talking out through these things. So you can even look at consumerism, or even the patriarchy, feudalism, all those horrible things. You can look at all of these as the build-up to the release from all that stuff.

David: Mmm. It’s also an escape route for thousands of would-be students who would like to be would-be rebels, by latching onto this they feel they’re rebelling without actually having to go on the streets. A lot of this seems to be to do with image, it’s very important to have the right image—whether that’s all part of a big scheme and in the end our individual worries will be proved groundless, this new reality will appear and we’ll have been shitting ourselves all the way through it and yet it comes about whether we want it or not. I hope it does.

Douglas: In America it’s tricky, because the media reality, the simulacra, and the physical reality are intertwined. People have a hard time telling the difference between the two, people believe that if I buy products from a company that supports a ‘sustainable’ land thing, then I’m supporting the environment. That may not be true but on the other hand I had a journalist talking about just this, people fixing the rainforests and how the rainforests were the lungs of the planet, how they were being destroyed, how we should be down there standing in front of bulldozers and if you’re on the Internet you’re not doing that. Meanwhile, she’s sitting there chainsmoking cigarettes, and I said to her, "If you want to take a fractal approach on the whole thing, I would say, you stop smoking, and the rainforests’ lungs will take care of themselves." Who’s right? I don’t know.

David: Is that enough?

Douglas: From my point of view, from the Cyberian point of view, if the world is a self-similar, fractal kind of thing, then her smoking a cigarette is bulldozers chopping down rainforests. It’s one and the same. Not just in a visible tangible this-cause-leads-to-that-effect. We live in a world where, if our intellectuals are smoking cigarettes, then they are powerless to stop the destruction of the rainforests.

David: Fair enough, but to move to cyberpunk and the computer culture, do you not think there’s a tendency to see the whole world as a binary organism? Using the computer metaphor is OK but it seems people are getting confused between the map and the territory. It’s like Newton’s ‘clockwork universe’, a way of looking at the world, but it’s not the ‘real’ world.

Douglas: I think this is in Cyberia. You know the argument between a surfer and a cartographer, the cartographer would say where are you, above or below a certain degree of latitude, the surfer would say, "I don’t know, I’m on the wave." I would say the surfer is right but he’s using a different map, the chaos map.

David: But a map isn’t the same as the actual environment itself. The computer is just one in a progression of hopefully more accurate maps of the world.

Douglas: Maybe, but there’s what the computer maps and there’s what the computer does. I think what’s valuable about the computer is that it allows people to have a very non-linear experience, allows what feels like a very ancient/psychedelic/pagan experience through technology and in a very safe way. When you log on you really travel.

David: Yeah, but surely nothing in paganism is completely safe.

Douglas: But is it safe? It’s safe to you as a biological organism, but it’s not safe to culture as a discreet control operation. I mean they’re making raves illegal, what’s this called?

David: Criminal Justice Bill.

Douglas: And the right to silence has gone.

David: So do we surf this cultural wave or get out and protest?

Douglas: Is going out on the Internet sitting back, or is it extending out in a way that’s extremely dangerous for those who would control the information we get?

David: For the Cyberian image, they have to believe they’re dangerous to maintain that. There aren’t that many people in England on the Net. Some people can barely afford the phone, so on a purely economic level it seems only a small minority will get it. The Net has to have everybody linked up to be effective.

Douglas: The thing about the Net is that, unlike people who got television sets, they didn’t think, "I want everybody to have a TV so they can all watch this programme," when they get online, they really do want to reach out to other places, so in a way, the way that Rupert Murdoch or whoever is providing this service is going to provide a better and better service. You can talk to people in Somalia, you can talk to people all over the country. If it’s where the money’s to be made, and I don’t know what you’d call me, a libertarian anarchist or something, if it’s where the money is to be made then the Rupert Murdochs of this world have to be there.

David: So it’s going to get cheaper and cheaper and everybody can get linked up.

Douglas: In the States they’re giving away computers.

David: The Net is a displaced power to some extent but you have very little control over it.

Douglas: You don’t want control. You want access.

David: Yes, but your access is limited by factors you can’t control, the phone companies whatever, until you have control over the entire system, when it’s free to use and free of censorship, then you have something approaching a free network. At the moment you’ve got a Net with very few people on it. There’s no guarantee of an intelligent conversation just because you can phone America.

Douglas: I see the Net as very, very new right now. It’s certainly a cheaper way for me to have a conversation with you than on the telephone.

David: Yeah, but I’d just write to you.

Douglas: You could but it’s slow.

David: Yes, but writing gives you more time. My phone conversations are relatively boring, you don’t have the time to create something really interesting like you do in a letter.

Douglas: I’ve heard literally hundreds of arguments against the Net, parents saying, "My kids can go online and get pictures of naked women, get molested by someone virtually or something."

David: That’s true of any technological advance. The first thing that gets printed is pornography.

Douglas: There’s a lot of possible very bad trips that can be had, but there’s also tremendous potential with this stuff. It’s actually pretty cheap, and what I think our responsibility is to envision the way in which this can work to society/civilisation’s favour and then enact it. [...] I think it comes down to two questions: is human nature changing, and if so, is it changing for the better, or is human nature essentially good but worth moving forward? If it’s not, then no amount of cybernetic movement is going to change that. [...] Cyberia is aimed at Middle America and whatever Middle England is. People who have never gone online, who think that kids going to raves are crazy, would never touch a psychedelic in their lives, and think that the Internet is for weird nerds to talk to each other about Star Trek. My purpose is to say; it’s not. This is a vibrant community of people with some very interesting bright aspirations for the future. While they may sound off the wall and overly optimistic, I spent a couple of years with them, and I like them. There’s something worthy that they’re trying to communicate to us. If nothing else they do have a inkling of a new way to organise reality, to organize the way we look at things that might be better than what we’re using.

David: Maybe it’s because I come from up North, I always felt some sympathy for the Luddites. I don’t really like machines that much.

Douglas: That’s good. You see, I think there is a natural evolutionary force against change and there should be, if human beings changed too quickly they wouldn’t recognise themselves.

David: Well the Luddites lost. If they’d won, change would still have come but technology might have been subservient to people needs, rather than the other way around. Will we need the equivalent of the Luddites now, or will the change come gradually, allow people to acclimatise themselves? [...] Being able to confirm or discount a newspaper article about Somalia, say, by contacting someone on the Net out there, is a nice idea, but it doesn’t remove any of the power bases, it simply spreads them out a bit.

Douglas: As I see it, the reason we have powerbases, controllers, people in charge, is because we as a people ask for it, we want it. As a civilisation we are a civilisation of children, who like parent figures to set boundaries for us because we’re scared to make decisions and choices on our own.

David: Is that conditioning or would you say that it’s inherent?

Douglas: It’s both. It’s inherent and we have people condition us because that’s the way we want to grow up. I like to think we are on the brink of our societal adolescence.

David: That’s not too good a prospect.

Douglas: It’s rough, there’s a lot of raging hormones. There’s a time when a kid listens to his parents, he doesn’t like girls he thinks they’re gross, has his own stuff, my this, my that. Finally because he wants to contact another person he breaks down some of his barriers, he reaches out, and I think that’s what happening on a cultural level, people are going, "Well, I’d rather reach out to other people than just take it from up there."

David: But in reaching out down a phoneline or whatever, it gives people confidence, they can be someone else, but in the end they’re going to have to meet them, have social contact.

Douglas: Yeah, this is play, this remedial help for a society that has lost the ability to communicate with itself.

David: I find that easier to believe; that it’s therapy we all need rather than The Answer.

Douglas: It’s not the answer. It’s a stage. As any good pagan knows, this is something we could be doing anyway. We don’t need a fucking computer to contact the entire Gaian mind, all we need are the right drugs, the right ritual or the right state of mind. But I think we have to convince ourselves of that, through a kind of play period.

David: So in a way the computer is a toy, a learning toy like giving a kid a toy to help them read.

Douglas: And that’s why it’s alright now that only the first world has them, because as far as I’m concerned it’s only us that need to learn this. I don’t know if people in Somalia need to learn the same lessons as we do.

David: Only problem is, it’s people in Taiwan or wherever that are making the damn things. The Internet is going to be supported by more exploitation of other worlds, it needs the cheap labour.

Douglas: Every silver lining has an awfully big cloud. [...] It’s a slow process.

David: What sort of reception are you getting in America?

Douglas: Fear but different fears, not fear of Somalia not getting computers. Not fear of there not being enough intention. I get fear that kids are going to get addicted to teledildonic sexuality online, they’re not going to listen to their teachers anymore, they’re not going to listen to their parents anymore, that rather than watching public television getting their stories that way, they’re going to talk to some weird radical person and find out about world events through people who’ve no right telling them how they are.

David: Sounds reasonable.

Douglas: Yeah. These are the parents’ fears for themselves.

David: I can see the Net as a good tool to bring people together but there needs to be something else. Travel used to be considered a good thing, you travel the world and you become this wonderful mature person. Now it’s lovely and cheap to travel, people whizz around Europe, station to station, they come back and they’ve learnt nothing; to learn a culture you have to experience it, that’s why I think the Net is too easy, just click your way around the world, no face to face contact. I’m not sure that matures you.

Douglas: I’m not either but it is training. Some person living in a remote region who doesn’t have anyone to share his opinions with, who can’t find anyone to agree with him, he’s reading Noam Chomsky or something. If he gets online he’ll be able to find a community of people who can say, "If you like Chomsky, read this." If a person begins to get positive feedback to their point of view, for what seems like radical wayout ideas in the country they’re living in, then I think they’re more willing to go to the pub or caf� and say, "Well you know, this is the way it is."

We live in bedroom communities in America. We’re so desocialised. So many people have opinions but they’re too scared to speak out against conformity. It has to be the first step to something else. It’s not an end all.

My first reaction to the internet was physical. I accessed Usenet to see what sort of newsgroups were around. Scrolling down the list, I was simply staggered. This was just one list, and there were so many discussion groups, and so many threads within each one. Two things happened: I started extrapolating from the small sub-section of the net I’d peeked into, boggling at the capacity for information exchange the whole thing appeared to afford; also, I kept remembering a quote at the end of a Throbbing Gristle interview in Re/Search, which inspired me at the start of my zine-making days: "Information exchange is the only way to ever get real change…" I hadn’t even got to the end of the list of newsgroups when my physical reaction to this vista of potential became unbearably intense… I was so excited I had to go outside and shout "FUCK!" a few times.

Well, that TG quote was from 1982. At that time, the ‘zine scene’ was only just emerging from the 70s’ mailart networks, the internet was mostly unheard of, and the arrival of VCRs had provoked a moral panic about screen sex and violence. Even now, the censorship of visual information is perhaps only beaten by that of political information. Us responsible over-18s still can’t see the more intimate details of lovemaking, like hard-ons and labia, onscreen. Well actually, we can—if we dig a bit deeper than the local multiplex or Blockbusters!

The same applies to political information. We get lied to daily about even the most basic of political situations through the mass media (and they lie even when they’re telling the truth). But anyone with the barest scrap of curiosity can get a better low-down through more underground media, whether it’s via the internet, Red Pepper, SchNEWS, Undercurrents videos, whatever. There are things that far too few people know about, no doubt; but there’s much more than enough information around to intellectually arm anyone who genuinely wants to get out there and do something about our corrupt cultures. Lack of access to information is not the major problem. Apathy is.

So is ‘information exchange’ still the Holy Grail of social change? Can it be such a thing in a society where information overload now seems to reign supreme? Bombarded with tragedies and trivia from around the globe, we grow numb to our immediate surroundings. Persuaded that we should be like this or like that—by everyone from advertisers to health experts, New Age moralists to totally sound eco-activist groups—our faith in our own nature is eroded. Faced with seemingly limitless possibilities for ‘inner change’ or ‘personal growth’—magick, yoga, therapies, dancing, crystals, NLP, psychedelics, neo-quasi-pseudo-shamanism—we can easily succumb to ‘option anxiety’. Imagine a rabbit, transfixed by oncoming headlights because it can’t decide which of the two escape routes to take. Now imagine that it’s not a rabbit, it’s you. There aren’t just two ways out, but hundreds. And it’s not a car approaching, it’s a black hole, on the other side of which there may be… a spouse, two kids, mortgage and a tiresome job? Schizophrenia? Death? Boredom? I feel like I’m just starting to learn that knowing how to apply a small amount of information is shitloads more powerful than being the most informed squashed rabbit around.

Actually, saying that I’ve just started to learn is a bit misleading. Nearly four years ago I wrote: "The concept of consuming information should be replaced by that of seeking out and using information." Such a simple thing to do, no? But how many of us use—in a tangible, creative way—as much information as we consume? How many of us express as much information as we consume? I don’t think all information has to be immediately ‘functional’—that would be as boring as information overload is paralyzing. But as far as the way I allow information to change my life goes, I’ve reached some fruitfully creative peaks, and I’ve also sunk to some very burnt-out troughs. The learning process (or mine, at least) is wave-like and cyclic, not linear and progressive.

Lingering traces of linearity are my main bone of contention with the apocalyptic ideas of people like Robert Anton Wilson and Terence McKenna. Don’t misunderstand; people like this have inspired me to do some wonderful things. Their models of how human culture is evolving still influence me. And I know that they’re probably well aware of the criticisms I’m about to bring up—they just don’t seem to talk about them much. Only human.

RAW, mainly in Prometheus Rising, has demonstrated that the rate of human acquisition of knowledge is increasing exponentially. That is, it’s not just going up; it’s going up faster and faster and faster… So if it was mapped on a graph, it wouldn’t be a straight diagonal line going from bottom left to top right; it’d be a curve, rising slowly from the bottom at first, then getting steeper and steeper, until eventually it’s just going vertically.

What happens when human knowledge ‘goes vertical’? Time-travel? Space colonization? Entry into a hyperdimension? Massive good vibes? No one really knows, but Terence McKenna’s tagged a date and time to that vertical line—6.00am, December 21st, 2012. Moreover, because of the acceleration of the universe’s unfolding, he thinks that half of the total evolution of our 72-plus-billion-year old universe will occur in the last 0.3 seconds before 6.00am on this date. If we take the rise of life or the discovery of atomic energy as examples of key ‘barriers’ that universal evolution passes through, McKenna’s calculations tell us that thirteen such barriers will be passed in the last 0.0075 seconds!! (see The Invisible Landscape) This theory is staggering, unimaginable, and inspiring in a way that’s intense but very hard to grasp (until you smoke DMT I suppose). It’s also amazingly human-centred, ‘West-centred’, and probably very ‘male’ too.

The idea of a point at the end of history, or the universe—McKenna’s "concrescence of novelty"—is the flip-side of everything exploding out from a singularity at the beginning. The Omega Point and the Big Bang are like bookends of unification at either end of the flow of time. They can also be seen as Vast Ejaculations (now there’s an album title). Douglas Rushkoff first pointed out to me the masculine sexuality underlying linear apocalyptic ideas. As I wrote that last paragraph, I noticed the sexual innuendo in the idea of human knowledge ‘going vertical’ (fnarr, fnarr). The Big Bang isn’t really that far from Egyptian creation myths where gods bring forth various things by beating off. And the Omega Point is an ever-accelerating rush towards a crescendo of connectedness and barrier-dissolution—a Cosmic Climax.

This all sounds great, but I also wonder: where’s the female orgasm? What about continuous waves of full-body, non-linear ecstasy, with no focal point and no singular ‘explosion’? Such experiences are the focus of much sexual mysticism, for men and women. There’s no Point to it, but it ain’t ‘pointless’! Does it have no place in eschatology? Would the concepts of the Omega Point, the Apocalypse, Judgement Day, Timewave Zero, etc. even exist if this experience was more common than the furtive "sneeze in the genitals", as Alan Watts has called the average male orgasm? Well, there’s only one way to find out!

Undigested information is mounting up inside most of us: facts without meanings, meanings detached from emotions, emotions we don’t take time to understand. Are we yearning for a quick and catastrophic explosion to relieve the tension—the tension of information overload, the tension of tightly measured time, the tension of too much history? Dare we step back for a moment amidst this frantic rush towards the Climax, and question the assumptions behind linear masculine eschatology—even as we approach the deadline? As Mogg Morgan says in his article ‘The Erotic Landscape (revisited)‘:

If you feel yourself approaching the point of ‘no return’, maybe ask your partner to pause, and make any adjustments necessary to prevent ejaculation or climax . . . . As the urge for ejaculation or release subsides, you may feel the warm sexual glow spreading throughout your whole pelvic region, opening out other energy centres sometimes called chakras . . . A strange thing happens: you become like an erotic landscape, a sea of sensation. Try to regard the time you have spent in this ‘build up’ to ejaculation as part of the orgasm. Viewed this way, perhaps you can see that an orgasm, for both men and women, is actually a lot more intense than those few moments of ejaculation or climax.

by Gyrus

Welcome to the third, perhaps central part of the Towards 2012 project. Central because its themes are at the heart of what we’re looking at (and taking part in) here—ourselves as a species. How we are different from, and similar to, other life forms. What it means to be human. How we relate to the processes of evolution, and why we may be a crucial part of it.

The theme ‘Culture & Language’ is probably a bit too broad and unwieldy to tackle properly in one issue; but then again we’re not concerned with being ‘authoritative’ or ‘complete’. Excitedly throwing out models, ideas, memes, inspiration and catalytic information is what this project is about. Although the pre-set theme was a bit amorphous, the visions that emerged through the first two parts, together with a healthy dose of organic order emerging spontaneously from editorial chaos, led to a very densely inter-related collection of writings. There’s quite a few conflicting voices here—good!—but there’s also a powerful, if hard to define, uniting drive behind the various contributions. Something to do with a refusal to let intelligence be separate from intuition and passion, with a defiant lack of respect for orthodox thinking. And an ever-sharpening focus on that most basic fact of our existence that has been shunned, ignored and repressed for thousands of years, the body.

There are quite a few pieces here that have appeared in various forms before, in other publications and other media—it’s hoped that this recycling will prove worthwhile. Some works will reach people they never would have otherwise, either because of the obscurity of their original appearances, or because they wouldn’t normally be noticed or considered by someone who’s picked this publication up on the strength of another article. We aim to cross-fertilize.

Aside from all this, hopefully this tome is greater than the sum of its parts. Editorial policy here walks in an undefined zone between Unifying Vision and rabid eclecticism—probably a lot to do with our hazy publishing status, which hangs somewhere between the ‘book’ and ‘magazine’ categories. Also, to amplify the common threads and odd juxtapositions, we’ve gone for a slightly re-vamped layout. The quotes, web sites, organisations and publications you’ll find listed down the sides of the pages are often placed to complement the main text—windows out into related fields, conceptual support from unexpected sources, playful connections… And sometimes they’re just there. Some of the quotes from the same person follow on in sequence, some don’t.

A heavy influence on this part, and a big concern for many of the writers here, is the internet. The first time I logged on, my mind simply flipped with the immensity of it all. Not just the information I directly accessed, but all the other information implied by what I came across, the probably infinite possibilities for information exchange that the internet opens up. I had to go outside and walk around for a bit, shouting "FUCK!" in astonishment. One of the first thoughts that occurred to me was that the only way I could get a handle on this new tool was by focussing clearly on what I wanted to get out of it. Since then, I’ve come to enjoy the occasional free-form wander around the web, without goals or aims (rambles which are definitely most fun with friends—the monitor becomes the steering wheel of conversation, not the obliterator of human contact I’d expected).

Nevertheless, I think that my first experience, and the conclusion I drew from it, is totally relevant to this part of the project. There’s a huge amount of information in here, and countless pointers to more and more zines, books, web sites etc. The challenge posed by this, and the information overload in our society as a whole, is that you must become very clear about what you want—your desires—to constructively survive the onslaught. This doesn’t mean becoming rigid and inflexible, rejecting anything that doesn’t slot into your preconceived idea of what you want. It means gently, constantly re-assessing your wants and needs according to what you encounter and experience, and learning to use all the tools you have before you to achieve your desires.

Above all, what you have in your hands is, like language (and culture?) itself, a tool. And because we’re interested in future possibilities, there’s a lot of speculation here pointing towards the next step in communicative tools. A step beyond verbal language, beyond the processes both you and I are engaged in now. What you hold is one of those fingers pointing at the moon—remember to see the moon once you know where it’s at. Don’t get transfixed and charmed by the sight of that trembling, excited finger. Check out for yourself why it’s excited…

But in designing web pages, my tolerance for the (relatively few) shortcomings of the Internet Explorer browser has been running thin of late. IE 5 is still widely used, and has some very annoying faults in its application of web standards. You get used to working around it. IE 6—which, by all accounts, is here for a while as the dominant browser—is more subtly annoying to the designer. But it’s been pissing me off enough lately for me to do a bit of non-MS browser advocacy here.

As a web user, I switched to Mozilla Firebird last year, and haven’t looked back (except back when Firebird’s Java was a bit shaky). Well, just recently Mozilla released a new version (0.8) of this great browser, and changed its name to Firefox. Crucial to this new release is an installer for Windows, so most people will find it easier to get running. I’m here, mostly as a frustrated designer, to ask you to give it a try (it’s available for Windows 98, ME, 2000 & XP, Mac OS X, and Linux).

A couple of caveats:

• That 0.8 version number means it’s not yet considered shiny enough to be an official "full release". There are various bugs in it, but they’re pretty minor. I’ve been using it as my main browser since 0.6, and have had no more problems than I had with IE 6.
• Er… that’s it, actually.

Now for the goodies:

• By far and away Firefox’s big one-up over IE (apart from making designers happy :-) is tabbed browsing. Makes flipping back and forth between different pages much more manageable, and generally becomes indispensible once you’ve got used to it (a bit like top-notch smack).
• Pop-up blocking comes as standard.
• "Find As You Type" simply rocks. No need to bring up a "Find" dialogue box: just hit /, and start typing. Firefox crunches through the page as you type, finding stuff that matches what you’ve typed so far. Then keeping F3‘ing to find more instances.
• Firefox is designed as a "bare-bones" browser—without the news and email stuff that makes the full Mozilla suite a little cumbersome. However, there’s a host of extensions that you can easily install to add more powerful functionality as you desire. My current essentials are:
  • Googlebar – Like Google’s toolbar for IE. A little rougher at the edges, but much more powerful.
  • Tabbrowser Extensions – About as much configurability as you’ll need for tabbed browsing.
  • Web Developer – Hugely useful bits for web design geeks.
• It’s not evil! ;-)

Ironic postscript: In uploading this post, I discovered what seems to be a minor Firefox problem with JavaScript that prevented me from activating it! What’s more, when I went to check the post in IE6—my target audience—I re-discovered a bug I’ve never managed to solve that prevents right-aligned images here from displaying in IE 6. So that cute Firefox button doesn’t show up where it’s most needed.