So of course I have a background rosy feeling about the guy. But, while I found his recent books Life Inc. and Program or Be Programmed to be well-written, sound advice, none of it comes close to this closing keynote talk he gave at a social media conference. He says:

I got really tired of listening to brand managers talk about their “Twitter strategies,” and by the time my closing keynote came around, it felt like I had watched the corporatization the net recapitulated over the course of the afternoon.

Please watch this if you’ve not come across Douglas’ recent ideas.

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.

a review by Gyrus

• Published: City Lights Books, 1997
• ISBN: 0872863328

I bought this book on the strength of the title—mentioned in Wired News’ coverage of a conference Ullman was speaking at—and general praise from readers at Amazon. The title’s style is ultimately, I think, misleading—for me it evoked a thoroughly engrossing survey of human-machine relations, perhaps journalistic, definitely non-personal. However, ‘non-personal’ is far from the book’s reality. Sure, it’s partly about the non-personal world you sink into when hooked on the abstracted rush of software coding. But in the end it’s a brave and successful attempt to reveal this world’s inevitable link back to the messy, human world of personal relationships.

A radical feminist and communist in the early 70′s, Ullman moved swiftly into the burgeoning world of computer programming later that decade. We join her, 20 years down the line, as she plies her trade—now advanced to ‘software engineer’—as an independent contractor in San Francisco’s booming tech-obsessed Bay Area. She vividly (and hilariously) describes that odd realm where people lose all sense of time, not due to dreamy mind-expansion, but because of hyper-focused mind-contraction. No daylight, humming machines, frantic colleagues who reach the pits of despair when their code crashes, the body’s energy thrown around by caffeine and sleep deprivation, unnaturally compressed into one’s cerebrum, eyes and fingers.

Her account of this world quickly mingles with her personal life, something one reader at Amazon found disconcerting:

Working as a technical writer within the technology industry, I related to a great deal of the story. That being said, a great deal of the story had nothing to do with what I thought the theme was to be. The book is marketed as a liberal arts major’s mis-adventures in techno-land. I was not interested in the author’s personal, sexual life. I wasn’t offended by it, just bored.

Boring it’s not, if you’re interested in both techno-land and the human heart. I quote the above reader to make it clear to anyone thinking of buying a copy that in the end you do need an interest in the human heart as well to fully get behind this unique tale. I mentioned the obsessive programmer’s world’s "inevitable link back" to the personal world because however much this link is ignored, missed, blanked out, neglected or not believed in, it persists. I’m worried by the extent to which this bond, which can’t be erased or deleted or archived, is neglected by the people who are moulding the culture of tomorrow. Which is why I find Ullman’s account, for all the perversity of the human-machine tangles it describes, courageous and encouraging in its honesty.

"In the end, this is a book about Ellen Ullman, not about technoculture." So says yet another disillusioned Amazon customer. Are they disillusioned just because they felt the book was marketed in a deceptive way? I thought the title implied an in-depth critique of technoculture—but was pleasantly surprised that it was in-depth in a different way, delving into someone’s actual experience of this culture’s massively complex innards. And yet there are still people out there blind enough to dimiss the book because of this, serving only to highlight Ullman’s still-timely cautionary tale.

a review by Gyrus

• Published: Hodder & Stoughton, 1996
• ISBN: 0340672021

This book’s cover—culturally dated Mandelbrot art and ‘holographic’ lettering—should, with the exception of J.G. Ballard’s high-praise quote, be totally ignored. Though he keeps his prose snappy and accessible, Dery’s work here shines with a lot more intelligence than implied by the cover’s mid-nineties rave-flyer design.

First impressions aside, it must be said that this work has aged very well. Apart from some scattered internet references that betray the book’s age (5 years—a long time in technoculture, even longer on the web), Dery’s cultural survey focuses on writers, books, performance artists, films, thinkers and trends that are still hugely relevant. A large part of this, though, is due to the analysis he interweaves with his reports and descriptions. His perceptions are sharp and admirably balanced, teasing out what seem to me to be most of the interesting and vital arguments about evolution (genetic and memetic), consciousness and identity that our perpetual collisions and marriages with technology engender.

While the author makes no claim to offer a coherent political critique of cyberculture, it’s refreshing to read a popular work on technology where social conscience isn’t paid mere lip-service or just ignored. While the upbeat optimism of the Mondo 2000 crew is given room to jump up and down exuberantly, it’s fully countered by a recognition of its privileged, white, moneyed background. And the startling, undoubtedly pioneering technological body-art of Stelarc doesn’t astound Dery into forgetting his critical faculties. He’s fully prepared to give space for arguments that the Australian posthumanist’s fantasies of space-faring, context-free, lone robotic entities are pathological—"extreme, narcissistic fantasies of complete isolation."

Dery’s introduction, where he first brings in some of the issues he deals with, is relatively easy-going and simplistic. His subsequent gleeful plunge into the discussion of concrete subjects such as the roots of tech-culture in 60′s America, cybercultural music, and machine performance art, demonstrates how at home he is writing about material culture, and led me to believe he was less at ease navigating the tricky abstract spaces of cultural theory and wider philosophical issues. Not true. The book builds, weaving in more and more intellectually stimulating concepts and debates, up to the final discussion of the fate of our status as embodied beings in a culture finding more and more ways to disengage from the biological matrix. Touching on many of my favourite reference points in this arena—J.G. Ballard, David Cronenberg, Videodrome, William Burroughs—Dery’s summary shines one perspective on another, again and again, illuminating some of the most fascinating intersections in modern culture.

At once exciting and cautionary, this pretty close to being the essential introduction to our current cultural interactions with technology.

An Interview with Terence McKenna

by Gyrus & John Eden

Gyrus: Firstly, have you seen Independence Day, and what did you make of it?

Terence: I didn’t see it, because I saw enough of it in shorts to realize it’s The Day The Earth Stood Still with worse actors and more money.

Gyrus: Fair enough. Now, do you see a contradiction in the desire to leave the planet and the desire to save it? Is it merely a case of delaying global catastrophe so that we’re here long enough to leave?

Terence: I don’t really see a contradiction. We probably saved the Earth the first time in 6000 BC, when we decided to move into cities. That gave the Earth enormous breathing room—up until the present moment, in fact. At what cost to ourselves is hard to assess. Certainly, we’ve become different creatures than we would have been otherwise. Probably the Earth and the human segment of the biosphere must be parted, not only to save the Earth, but in a sense to save ourselves. Our thing is to unfold the imagination, and that’s all very well when the best trick you can do is a Gothic cathedral. But we’re capable of things far, far beyond that, and if we were to try to unfold these dreams on the surface of the planet, we would probably wreck it and toxify ourselves. On the other hand, outer space is almost like mental space. Where we’re headed, whether we leave the planet behind or not, is into the imagination. And either it will be a three-dimensional space colonizing, a kind of Buck Rogers deal; or the more contempo-vision I think is of a nanotech immigration into some kind of virtual or cybernetically maintained space.

The whole question revolves around the body. What is it? Where are you going to put it? What role should it have? Is the body the defining quintessence of humanness, or is it the ball and chain that holds us from forever realizing what humanness is? That’s an ideological cat-fight that I’d like to sit in the front row and watch, but I don’t think I want to get down on the mat. It’ll sort itself out.

Gyrus: I was interested in this because the in plot of Independence Day, the aliens were basically seen as going from planet to planet, using all the resources, going to another planet, and so on… This seemed to be some sort of projection of ourselves—if we leave the planet, still with this potential for destroying resources, that’s what we would be.

Terence: All projections of aliens are statements about the human condition. And I think you’re quite right. I mean, this horrific vision of alien triage and waste-making is precisely how we would conduct ourselves if we were to ever make it out there. The point being that it may be possible that you can’t organize a global society for starflight without stripping out some of its more savage and brutal tendencies. For example, how long has it been? Thirty years since the landing on the moon? And our humanness has made it impossible to go beyond that. It was essentially a stunt, staged for political and ideological purposes. It wasn’t an evolutionary thrust, unstoppable and leading to starflight. It was a political stunt. Now, there may come a time when we can pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and spread out into the galaxy, but I think we have to do a lot of dirty laundry here before that’s possible to contemplate.

A friend of mine, somebody worth quoting—Howard Rheingold, who’s a hot VR guy… I was with him once on a psychedelic trip, and in the middle of it, he stood up and said, "My God! I’ve understood what virtual reality is for!" (laughter) And I said, "What is it for, Howard? You invented the term ‘teledildonics’, I thought you’d already figured out what it was for." He said, "No, no, virtual reality will keep us from ever leaving the planet." So he saw it as a cheap shot, a second prize. No, you can’t conquer the galaxy, but here’s a simulacrum of Madonna that you can screw forever. Real colonization of the galaxy is quite a technological leap from anything that we’re capable of now. Clearly, virtual reality, indistinguishable from reality as we know it, will arrive long before anyone sets foot on Zeta Reticuli Prime. That’s way out in the future, if possible at all.

Gyrus: In your writings, you’ve really aligned yourself with Huxley rather than Leary in the psychedelic propaganda argument. I was interested in why you worked with such an overground band like The Shamen. I know you appeared with them at the Birmingham NEC. How does that stand with your statements…

Terence: …I think when I worked with The Shamen, they weren’t so above ground. Time is a curious thing. We did all that stuff… four years ago? Something like that. So they were respectably underground at that point. Nothing ruins you for the underground like success. So when Boss Drum went double platinum, they were obviously ‘establishment’.

Gyrus: So you were on the cross-over…

Terence: That’s right. I worked with bands like Spiral Tribe and Zuvuya truly, authentically impossible to project into the commercial domain type bands. I’m much more comfortable with that. I’ve talked to Colin about this, and he agrees. It would have been wonderful to hit it big at 23. At 35 it becomes a pain in the ass, and you just have to manage the money and the image.

John: Are you still interested in working with popular cultural
things like music?

Terence: I’m interested, but I have no interest in giving advice to the young. I don’t want to become a grandfather figure. I would like to follow. I’d like to be accepted as the oldest and longest-toothed in the pack. But I have no illusions that my generation has great wisdom to impart. We impart a strong example; but that isn’t to say that those that went through it understand the kind of example they’ve become.

My hope is that the present youth culture will be a bit more resistant to co-option than the youth culture of the sixties, because those people just turned into the unbearable yuppies of the seventies and the eighties. The thing that keeps the youth culture vital in the UK is that there’s no social escape into respectability. A very small percentage may go on to nice houses in Hampstead, but the English social system has condemned most people to marginal positions vis-à-vis the official culture…

Gyrus: And they’ve made it worse with the Criminal Justice Act, they’ve just marginalized people and politicized loads of people like ravers… who may have just been into going out. And then when government say, "You’re not having free parties in the countryside", they think… "Let’s get ourselves together."

Terence: Well I think good art arises from a certain state of discomfiture. If you were to be totally embraced, what would be the point?

Gyrus: You’ve mentioned a few times the production of dimethyltryptamine in the human brain, and all the statements I’ve found in which you mentioned it have been up to ten years ago. I was wondering have there been any new developments in this, new research, especially in relation to dream activity?

Terence: Well the only research that’s been done since ten years ago is work done by Rick Strassman at the University of New Mexico. And it was very interesting. It certainly showed that DMT can be safely used. Although the fate of that research is very interesting. He was, he is, a Mahayana Buddhist, and at some point the Lamas came to him and asked him to stop that research, because they said it was "messing with peoples’ deaths." And, without a lot of debate, he folded. I respect Rick, but I would have asked, "Based on what published papers and in what journal of religious studies can we find this data?" (laughter) I think the most terrifying thing about DMT is it’s utter harmlessness. So there is no rational argument against it. And yet here it is, so much more powerful than any other psychedelic that it barely is in the same category.

Gyrus: You’ve made statements condemning the view that mathematical equations can bring us closer to a view of reality because they don’t come into our immediate experience of life. How does Timewave Zero fit into that? With it you’re trying to describe our felt experience of time, and yet it itself is a mathematical equation.

Terence: My gripe with mathematics is not that it’s remote from human experience, but that it uses a language that’s excruciatingly remote. You’ve referred to it as mathematical equations. What you see when you use Timewave Zero is not mathematical equations, but an easily understood picture like a stock market graph. The great revolution in mathematics, that’s going to make every one of us a mathematician, involves the fact that you no longer need numbers to do it. It all can be seen with computers. So I could cover this wall with equations and you wouldn’t know what I was talking about. But I can show you a ten second video clip of a certain object rotating in space—and you’ve got it. And that’s the same thing as all those equations. So what’s happening is mathematics is being taken out of the hands of an elite priesthood who speak a special secret language, and being put into the common language of visual appearances, by people like Ralph Abraham, and so forth and so on. This is very exciting stuff. So it isn’t mathematics per se that my argument is with, but the style of doing mathematics that was imposed upon it by the limitations of technology, pre-computer.

Gyrus: Most of the questions I came up with going through your work were all about paradox. There are so many paradoxes in your work. But it seemed to me that the biggest one was the actual practice of Timewave Zero, which is about setting a date for the end of time—at least in one of its interpretations. But you’ve stated that you see the run-up to 2012 as a time of ever increasing paradox. What are your thoughts on this?

Terence: Well, who was it? Oscar Wilde, or somebody said, "Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds." Reality is inherently paradoxical. And the beginning of intellectual maturity is to be able to simultaneously hold two contradictory ideas in your mind at the same time. People ask me if I believe in the 2012 prediction. I don’t believe in anything. My anti-ideological stance makes it very important to believe nothing. I regard Timewave Zero as a fascinating model of a previously unmodelled system—which is human history. The fact that it seems to deliver interesting data… for instance, I predicted a very deep plunge into novelty this past summer. Just as it was at its deepest, the Martian meteorite chock full of fossils arrived—along with a lot of email demanding to know where was the miracle I had predicted. (laughter)

I like the word models. What we’re trying to do is build models. By saying the word ‘models’, we make it very clear that this is not ‘Truth’, and that there will be a better model, and we’ll swap the old for the new. So at the moment Timewave Zero is simply a better model of history than the idea that there is no model at all, which is what’s taught in the Academy. The definition of history, if you study history in the Academy, is: it’s a trendlessly fluctuating process. If true, it’s the only trendlessly fluctuating process ever to be observed in this universe. So obviously it’s not true, it’s just that we lack a model. So people say… like, Toynbee’s model was that ‘God is waiting’, somebody else had a ‘Great Man’ model, Marx believed it was all driven by class struggle, and Freud that it was all libido. Well, these are just opinions. Those aren’t theories, those are opinions. A theory has an ability to make predictions, and refine itself, so that’s what I offer with Timewave Zero.

It arises out of my relationship to the psychedelic experience. Because I believe that when we finally understand what a psychedelic trip is, we’ll realize that during the experience consciousness unfolds into a higher dimension. Not metaphorically, but literally a higher dimension. And that that’s how the shaman can tell where the game has gone, that’s how the shaman predicts the weather, that’s how the shaman knows more than the people he serves—because they’re all caught in a lower-dimensional slice of reality, and he’s looking down from a place that becomes accessible to him when cultural boundaries are dissolved. This is a key concept in my thinking: dissolution, and maintenance, of cultural boundaries. This is what psychedelics do. Whether you love ‘em or hate ‘em, what they do is dissolve boundaries. And this is of course closer to the way reality is. The boundary-riven reality is always the creation of a local language—English, French, Witoto—they create synthetic boundaries at the convenience of local syntax. What the psychedelic state shows you is that beyond that localism which is historically finite is the wisdom of the body, and the wisdom of the body is higher-dimensional.

And I mean these things very precisely. I’m not at war with the New Age, it’s the only category they have to put me in, but I really believe the New Age is a flight from authentic experience. That’s why the New Age is so uncomfortable with the psychedelic experience—they would rather have you drinking wheatgrass juice and staring at your navel. You could almost say of the New Age that they will accept anything as long as they can be assured of its lack of effectiveness. (laughter) That’s an assurance you don’t get with psychedelics. Even the critics of psychedelics grudgingly admit, "It works." But… you don’t work hard enough, or it doesn’t last long enough, or some other gripe. No gripe with its effectiveness.

Gyrus: You’ve said quite often that the world is made of language, and this seems to have caused quite a bit of confusion, myself included. Could you clarify what you mean by the word ‘world’ and what you mean by the word ‘language’ in that context?

Terence: Well, for example (the example I always use), the child lying in a crib with an open window—a pre-verbal or nearly pre-verbal child—and a hummingbird flies through the room. It’s a psychedelic miracle, it’s absolutely stunning. The boundaries of that experience are completely undefined. But then the mother or the nanny walks into the room and says, "Oh! It’s a bird, baby. Bird." The miracle immediately collapses down into a hard little tile, and by the time a person is six years old, reality has been entirely replaced by a mosaic of defined and very non-numinous meaning. And so people are then imprisoned in this language. And they will remain so imprisoned until the yawning grave, unless they are put in touch with the transhistorical wisdom of the body. And that means psychedelics. By the way, this idea that reality is made of language is actually the standard position in structural linguistics. This is not a radical position, this is dull-as-dog-shit orthodoxy for those people.

Gyrus: I was talking with a magician the other week and he was in complete agreement. You said once that the true secret of magick is that the world is made of words, and if you know what words the world is made of, you can do with it as you wish, and yeah, he was…

Terence: Yes, and energy follows attention. So, what we care about is what we take to be real. And there are all kinds of realities around us that we don’t even see. And then when these realities intrude into our vision, we become very upset. And often the urge is to suppress, because it presents itself as somehow threatening. This is why, in my opinion, psychedelics, though they do very little social harm, and don’t promote criminal syndicalism, we don’t have people overdosing in doorways, and so forth and so on; nevertheless, they are at the top of the agenda for suppression. Because, whether you’re a fascist state, and industrial democracy, a monarchy or whatever, the one thing you’re not interested in is having people question first premises. And psychedelics will force you back to do that. All social systems are to some degree con-games, because they’re always inconvenient for individuals, and they’re always extremely convenient for institutions. Psychedelics are hideously unfriendly to all forms of institutional thinking, and tremendously supportive of what I call the felt presence of immediate experience. That’s what ideology, and propaganda, and government, social programming, they all make war on the felt presence of immediate experience, and try to get you to deny the obvious wisdom of the body—and replace it with Christianity, Islam, the work ethic, whatever they’re pedalling at the moment.

John: Is that one of the reasons you backed off from an academic approach to all this?

Terence: Oh, I could never fit myself into an organization like that. I live in Hawaii, I’m virtually a hermit, I organize my own speaking, I say what I want. My fortunes ebb and flow with forces mysterious even to me. I can’t imagine committing myself to any kind of institutional structure. It’s tremendously disempowering. I mean, there’s nothing more contradictory than a radical in an organization. That’s why—let’s whisper it low—the ICA is an entire contradiction. The very idea of institutionalizing the avant-garde means that you don’t understand what the avant-garde is.

Gyrus: I’m interested your theories about the Stropharia cubensis mushroom evolving extra-terrestrially. Is this entirely due to information imparted in the trance that it induces? I was curious because there’s so many other species of mushroom, and other plants, that access these same dimensions, why is Stropharia cubensis this ‘special case’?

Terence: Well, it’s a complicated argument. There are a number of things you could say about Stropharia cubensis. First of all, an organism that wastes energy is slated for extinction. Thousands of mushrooms exist on this planet that don’t make psilocybin. Stropharia cubensis channels approximately fifteen percent of its metabolic energy into making psilocybin. Why, if mushroom existence doesn’t require that for any important purpose? It begins to look to me as though the mushroom may be a kind of technological artefact.

The other thing to notice is that, and this is true of all fungi, they’re what is known as primary decomposers. They exist only on dead matter. That’s the only karmaless place in the food chain. Vegetarianism compared to that is an orgy of mass slaughter. I guess I have a slight Buddhist bias here. But it seems to me that we’ve only known about DNA since about 1950, and we’re already talking about completely redesigning ourselves based on reprogramming the human genome. So it may be that this is a stage that any intelligent being, species, organism, anywhere in the universe passes through, a phase where it takes control of its own design process. And Stropharia cubensis looks to me like it’s been designed for immortality, information storage, low-speed space flight, an ability to adapt to an incredible variety of environments. So I’m willing to at least entertain the possibility, based on the fact that it talks to you and fills you with alien information, that it may in fact be an artefact of extra-terrestrial origin.

This is how real aliens would do it. They don’t arrive in the middle of the night with an interest in your asshole like the stories we’re given, that’s preposterous. Still less do they have an interest in the electrical grid, or the Gross National Product, or any of that. The problem with an extraterrestrial is to know when you’re looking at one. I once visited the world’s largest radio telescope in Araceibo, Puerto Rico, and they search for extra-terrestrial life with this thing. It’s so large a telescope it’s basically a dish suspended in round valley. And underneath the dish there’s pasture land, and white cattle, and Stropharia cubensis… It’s like this amazing image of this instrument studying the centre of NGC-3622, and yet a hundred feet from the main control booth is probably what they’re looking for. (laughter)

Gyrus: This is probably a peripheral question, but a lot of your descriptive, poetic language that you’ve used to describe the psychedelic experience has very industrial connotations. There’s been a lot of digital metaphors about the DMT trance, but you use… "machine elves", and "the green vegetable engine of nature"…

Terence: …That’s a steal from Dylan Thomas…

Gyrus: …Right—so that’s where it comes from?

Terence: "The greeny engine that drives the flower." Yeah. So what about that?

Gyrus: It’s interesting that this very thing that you seem to be railing against a lot of the time… well, not railing against, but putting a lot of environmental destruction down to the industrial revolution—and these adjectives are seeping into your description of this state…

Terence: Well, I don’t think the problem is with machines per se, I think it’s that we’re in a very early and primitive stage with machines. Nanotechnology holds out the possibility of building as nature builds, atom by atom. I think that the machines that we possess today are to the machines of the future what the chipped flint of the palaeolithic is to our machines. The key concept is prosthesis—in other words, the extension of human understanding and feeling by mechanical means. That’s tremendously exciting to me. I mean, given the human body, that’s hardware enough to integrate into a group of seventy hunting-gathering nomads. But a city like London—you need the tube system, you need the black cabs, you need radio and all of it, and these things are all prosthesis. And if we’re really talking about going to the next level, a global collectivity, a global telepathic state of mind, this can only be done at this stage by prosthesis. At some point, perhaps, one could reprogram human beings to be able to talk to each other on the other side of the planet. On the other hand, we see no animals who do that. There simply may be some things that lie beyond the capacity of mere unassisted flesh to achieve. But assisted flesh, flesh in marriage to prosthesis, can do anything. I think the whole curious fascination with piercing, and the mechanization of human body parts, and so forth and so on, that informs art at the moment is actually art performing the function it’s always performed—of anticipating where we’re headed.

Gyrus: As far as that concept of prosthesis goes, you’ve talked about machines and cultural artefacts as an extension of humanity, and you condemn laboratory-manufactured psychedelics to a large extent. Why would they not fall into the…

Terence: Well, I don’t condemn them out of some kind of purist "Plants are good, chemicals are bad"… No, I condemn them for very practical reasons. First of all, a white powder drug. You have no idea what it is. You can be fairly sure it was manufactured in an atmosphere of criminal syndicalism where the major goal was to make money. That’s not a very reassuring statement of drug purity and chemical attention to detail. And the other thing is, the vegetable psychedelics, we have our human data—five thousand years of mushroom use in Mexico, and so forth and so on. With a new drug, since it’s illegal to do research on it, we have no human data. And sometimes it takes a generation or two to see what the consequences of exposure to a compound are. So I don’t have an absolutist position against laboratory drugs, it’s simply that if we’re trying to get to a certain place—which is the dissolution of the ego, and the entry into psychedelic space—at this stage, the vegetable psychedelics are just simply more effective, better track record… they work.

Gyrus: So your argument is bound by the context of human society now?

Terence: Sure. If someone can produce a drug that meets all these requirements… And DMT occurs in nature, but when actually smoked, it’s usually coming out of a laboratory.

Gyrus: You’ve said that you don’t consider yourself a shaman just because shamans cure and you don’t cure anyone. Also you write a lot about the re-emergence of the shamanic institution. What do you think of its re-emergence in the modern world—how can it’s integrity be preserved, if at all, and how must it evolve?

Terence: The music. And the trance-dance drug-taking situation is the establishment of a ritual space outside the conventions of ordinary society, that is the new shamanism. And that’s again what makes it so suspect in the eyes of the establishment. They sense that this is something they can’t get a handle on and control, or that it takes them some time to get a handle on—they have to figure out how to co-opt each generation in a new way. My generation was co-opted in a very crude way, with money. Your generation… The Establishment’s not interested in that, they’d rather keep the money for themselves. I’m hoping that the new trance-dance culture has enough integrity to resist being folded into commercialism and ordinary mass cultural entertainment. But we shall see.

Gyrus: Could you outline the influence of Teilhard de Chardin on your work?

Terence: Yes. Essentially, he’s me without drugs or immediacy. (laughter) My rap would be much more palatable if I said it was all gonna happen fifty thousand years in the future, a million years in the future… The only difference between me and a lot of apocalyptarian thinkers is that I see this curve of increasing novelty and approach toward the transcendental as happening at a much faster rate. But I base my estimate of its acceleration by looking at how fast it’s accelerated in the past. I don’t see how anyone can speak in rational terms of a thousand years in the future, or five hundred years in the future. The twentieth century is ten times weirder than the nineteenth, and the twenty-first will be a thousand times weirder than the twentieth. Well then how can anyone extrapolate any institution or idea or style that far into the future?

It’s perfectly clear that we sought transcendence from the very first moment of consciousness. It takes about fifty thousand years to go from the "Gee, wouldn’t it be nice?" to the "My God, it now stands at the door…," and it now stands at the door. We’ve been planning and plotting this since the Pyramids and Stonehenge—it’s all been about this, apparently, moving ourselves, positioning ourselves for an evolutionary leap off the planet. Nature is not interested in sustainability. Ninety-five percent of all life that ever existed on this planet is now extinct.

John: I’ve got one last question. You said that you don’t see yourself as a shaman, and I guess you don’t see yourself as a guru either—so what do you see yourself as?

Terence: A troublemaker. A messenger, and somewhat of a troublemaker. Gurus… the mushroom said to me once, it said, "For one human being to seek enlightenment from another is like one grain of sand on a beach to seek enlightenment from another." The point being, the holiest, highest person you’ve ever met, Dalai Lama, Shree Bhagwan, you pick your guy, is no different from you. It’s an illusion that anybody is smarter than you are. People love to give away their power, and follow Christ, or Hitler, or Shree Bhagwan… They don’t understand that no one is smarter than you, no one understands the situation better than you, and no one is in a position to act for you more clearly than you are yourself. But people endlessly give away this opportunity, and subvert their identity to ideology. It’s the most perverse thing about human beings.

Gyrus: Where do you think this comes from?

Terence: Well, I had a professor once who said if you think of human beings as angels, it’s a shit of a scene. If you think of people as apes—it’s the most astonishing accomplishment you’ve ever laid eyes on. (laughter) And this is where we are, with one foot in a carnivorous, cannibalistic ape, and the other reaching out for deity.

You talk about a coincidentia oppositorum, a union of opposites, a living contradiction—human beings are that. Every one of us individually and then the entire enterprise as a collectivity. We’re in the process of changing—from an animal, into a god. It takes thirty thousand years. That’s a very uncomfortable moment. But in the life of a species, it’s the blink of an eye. We just happen to, because we live seventy years, it takes what? Five hundred generations to stumble through that zone of uncertainty that we call human history. Now, I think we’re close to the jackpot. I can feel the heat of the thing. And a lot of people fear it, because they cling to the old order. But there’s no room for clinging at this point. I mean, hang on, do not attempt to stand up, do not attempt to leave the carriage, we’re going over the top! (laughter) Scream if you must, but stay seated please!

So, it was interesting to read how mobiles are mutating social ettiquette among teenagers (via Boing Boing). I hate it when friends leave their mobiles on while we’re having a drink and catching up or something, unless they’re expecting an urgent call. Reading this article, by cultural anthropologist Mizuko Ito, I at once felt enlightened as to the unseen new social norms that this sort of behaviour is creating among groups of teenagers, and simultaneously suspicious and… well, old.

The older generation is often baffled by the sight of teens gathered at a fast-food restaurant, gazing at their mobile phones rather than their friends. The assumption is that the virtual connection is detracting from the experience of the face-to-face encounter. What non-users often don’t realize is that mobile phones have become devices for augmenting the experience and properties of physically co-located encounters rather than simply detracting from them. Teens use mobile phones to bring in the presence of other friends who were not able to make it to the physical gathering, or of accessing information that is relevant to that particular time and place. The boundaries of a particular physical gathering, or flesh meet, are becoming extended through the use of mobile technologies, before, during, and after the actual encounter.

The full account of how this transpires is fascinating. But, perhaps with my Luddite side buoyed by a recent Hakim Bey interview, I just saw worrying holes running through the whole thing.

Referring to the ‘dissipation’ of meetings, where contact builds up via mobiles as a prelude to physical presence, and fades away afterwards instead of being cut off when goodbyes are exchanged, the author notes:

The dead time in transit on the way home is now occupied by the fading embers of conversation and contact.

"Dead time"? Is time alone now seen in this way? I sense a kind of blind over-compensation, in a culture where true personal communication has atrophied hideously (and I’m not stood on a soap box haranguing you here, I’m swimming in the same shit…). Suddenly communication per se is sought out compulsively. Communication and contact become, like most things under capitalism, quantitative rather than qualitative. Jeez, I’ll be talking about spending "quality time" with people soon… But then, why not? Quality’s good, no? Doesn’t matter if clichés have devalued a phrase to our ears, it still matters to the heart.

Urban space has become highly personalized, no longer a site of anonymity. Young people are in social contact even when alone, coordinating a meeting with a friend, sharing information about a shopping conquest, a celebrity sighting, a photo of their entrée, or just killing time in a texting chat as they ride the train home. Even as the urban environment is being homogenized by the latest franchise influx, mobile phones become devices for customizing and personalizing even the most generic of urban places.

"Young people are in social contact even when alone…" A cynic might say, "They’re also alone even when in social contact." A cynic (OK, it’s me) might also note how casually everything is associated with shopping, consumption, and imagistic spectacle. Maybe there’s a genuinely liberatory process at work here, as capitalism’s mantra of "consumer choice" ends up transforming the whole shebang from within. Or maybe the cages are just getting bigger, the chains longer—and more "personalized". Your very own chain, etched with your name, decorated by you. Is there a point where this transforms the chain into something else? Or does this very question disguise the fact that a chain is a chain is a chain?

And the time the hypothetical texter in the above passage spends on the train back home isn’t quite dead yet. It’s writhing in a quite unsightly way, and has to be "killed".

The final nail in the coffin here (for the article in question, not The Kids—I hope) is probably the location of the article: it’s in an online magazine, Receiver, brought to you by… Vodafone. Apparently it’s "a neutral space where pioneer thinkers challenge you to discuss exciting and future-oriented aspects of communications technologies." (my emphasis) In the issue the above article is taken from, they take "a close look at what impact mobile communication has on our environment." Of course, "there’s much more to talk about than electronic smog"—that wouldn’t sell many phones, would it?

If they’re so interested in the environment, I thought, how about coltan? Google returned zero results for me. Not one. A search for tantalum (the material that coltan is refined into for use in mobiles and other devices) fared slightly better: one result. There’s a brief mention in one paragraph of an article otherwise dedicated to exploring "emerging relations in urban space and culture". There’s a brief nod to "environmental damage in places such as Central Africa", then it’s back to RFID‘s and Gilles Deleuze.

Still, those being slaughtered over territorial disputes around coltan mines needn’t feel neglected. A search for Congo on the site brings back three entries! One is from Johannesburg-based author David Shapshak, who contends that "cellular communications are ideal for uplifting Africa".

Throughout Africa there are examples of major telecommunications successes, including new undersea cables, advances in regulation and a blossoming of entrepreneurial spirit that has seen cellular networks built in politically oppressive countries like Zimbabwe and war-torn ones like the Democratic Republic of Congo.

See? They benefit from the mobile deal, too—why should they complain about a bit of killing each other here and there, y’know, and maybe a smattering of devastation in their environment? Besides, as the other Receiver contributor noble enough to bring these far-flung regions to our attention, the traveller and "environmental consultant" Nicholas Middleton notes:

A satellite phone, radio or cellphone is an essential element of all modern-day expeditions, a key tool that no self-respecting intrepid traveller would be without. During the past two years I’ve been lucky enough to travel to a wide range of the world’s more obscure corners, making television documentaries about the people who live there and the physical geography that helps to make these places extreme. During that time, I’ve spoken to loved ones from the arid heart of the Atacama Desert in Chile, and from the banks of Central Africa’s Congo river.

No comment.

Postscript: As if to confirm my concerns, I just flicked on the BBC news and caught an item about the catastrophic rise in teenage depression in the UK. I can’t find the story on their website, but the basic picture was clear. I recall one interviewee saying that suicide had become the third biggest cause of death among 15-24 year olds. Incidents of serious depression among teens at one clinic had doubled in the past decade, with an estimated 1 in 8 teenagers suffering from the classic symptoms of anxiety attacks and lack of energy and hope. "Keeping up with peers" was cited as a contributing stress factor.

So, when we look at fascinating new social interactions among teenagers, using smart techie language to give the whole picture a sheen of exciting novelty, we should ask: Are we seeing teens evolving valuable new social structures? Or are they just doing their level best to keep pace with the frenetic self-defeatism of our accelerating, unsustainable, denial-riven culture—with many folding in on themselves in despair as the contradictions explode?

Anyways, via web software hero Nick Bradbury, I just came across an interesting post-Sun interview with Joy. It might seem arbitrary to some for an interview to veer between critiquing computer networking and operating software, and assessing the dangers to our species’ future. Well, Joy’s the person to read first if you’ve not made the frightening conceptual leap to the point where these two issues start overlapping—he probably knows more than anyone about the former, and seems to know more than most about the latter. He’s got a book out soon, probably worth checking out: The Future Doesn’t Need Us.

Also via Nick’s blog, a related deep-tech piece from AI pioneer Ray Kurzweil.

Leftfield music journo Simon Reynolds recently mapped his fellow music-obsessive bloggers to proggy bands and artists. My old occultural mucker John Eden got (respectfully, it seems) paired off with Hawkwind. Cue loads of "re-assessing Hawkwind" bits and pieces (for those into Hawkwind—I’m pretty agnostic on them), some of it spawning an interesting little re-conceptualisation of the 60′s.

Which brings me in a roundabout kind of way to my object of interest here: someone else who bothers to mention that trans-Freudian brain-bending scholar Norman O. Brown. I got into this guy via the same route that brought this mention into Reynolds’ blog: Theodore Roszak’s sober, fascinating analysis of the 60′s, Making of a Counter Culture. Yes, Brown’s Life Against Death was a huge influence on Jim Morrison, probably more than he admitted and most people are willing to acknowledge. I was thinking about this recently, getting into Brain Donor‘s Too Freud To Rock ‘N’ Roll, Too Jung To Die. Sure, Sigmund himself was probably a stuffy bookworm, coke habit notwithstanding. But the shit he unearthed—what we usually refer to with the word "Freud"—came from psychological seams that fuel rock ‘n’ roll. Talk about angst… And the song so commonly hailed as the rock song that it’s probably terribly uncool to big it up these days, ‘The End’—it don’t get more Freudian than that. The only thing that comes to mind as getting close is from Copey himself: the blinding Jehovahkill.

Rock thrives on Oedipal fury, and Norman O. Brown gave Freud’s work the sharp, radical spin it needed to influence rock stars themselves. Check out Brown’s ‘sequel’, too, the more scholarly and more poetic Love’s Body (1966). His third book in this series, Apocalypse And/Or Metamorphosis (1992) doesn’t even live up to its title; if you want more, rather grab his great little classical trickster treatise, Hermes The Thief (1947).

And finally… I just got one of the strangest emails I’ve ever received:

I have recently acquired a pony named ‘Gyrus Justice’. He is a five year old imported Irish (Connemara). Trying to find out a little about why and perhaps who he is named for….what does it all mean??? Any ideas? Jennifer in the U.S.

It seemed obvious that the pony had nothing to do with me (I sense more on the background to my chosen epithet soon…); but equally, why name an animal after "any of the prominent, rounded, elevated convolutions on the surfaces of the cerebral hemispheres"? Let alone tag the word "justice" on the end…

It all got even stranger when I recalled that almost exactly 5 years ago, I was actually on a short hitching & camping jaunt down in beautiful West Cork. I had lifts from a few great people on the way (though that hardly made it a notable Irish trip). Who knows, maybe one of them got home that day and named their new-born Connemara pony after the strange guy they gave a lift to? And felt that I had been unjustly treated in some way, and wanted to advertise my plight…? Well, now it seems that news of my plight has reached the USA. Maybe I’ll get something done about it now, I’ve had bugger all luck with the UN.

(Illuminati theorists may wish to note: the period of 5 years; the sum of the current year’s numerals (2003) also being 5; my age this year being 32; and the fact that the Connemara Breeders Society was founded in 1923…)

But never fear! This wasn’t some party-pooping blasphemer trying to point out that the last orders bell at the World’s End is about to toll. The story was actually looking at what the (currently) oil-rich Middle East might do to keep it’s good ol’ economic growth festering along, once the oil’s run out. Thus, we were treated to an inside glimpse into the sleek Dubai Internet City, a booming industry hub that’s capitalising on the fact that non-western tech markets aren’t suffering from the after-effects of the dot-com bubble bursting. Did you know that some Arabian mobile phone markets are only at around 10% penetration? This rise in consumer demand, presumably together with ample local skills and investment from foreign corporations, surely points to a thriving Middle East, even when its supplies of oil run dry.

Except… What the fuck will power these technologies?

Somewhere in the background, I’m sure, is the casual assumption that by that time we’ll have completely replaced our dependence on oil as an energy source with something else. It’s scary, though, how casual this assumption is; how restricted our collective awareness of the uniqueness of oil, an irreplaceable planetary store of accumulated solar energy, is; how blithely we’re entrusting our species’ future to technologies which don’t exist yet and show no sign of existing in the near future…

We think: "Yes! Shiny new things!" We fail to see that, to keep more than a couple of billion people going (and we’re at six billion and counting), we need that archaic, finite black stuff from deep beneath the earth.