Collected Essays

by Rucker, Rudy

  The word “mathenaut” came from Norman Kagan’s classic tale “The Mathenauts.” I liked that word so much that I also used it for the title of my multi-author anthology, Mathenauts: Tales of Mathematical Wonder, (Arbor House, 1987).

  In my first two years at Autodesk, I wrote a lot of the computer code for two software products. They were CA Lab: Rudy Rucker’s Cellular Automata Laboratory (Autodesk, 1989), and James Gleick’s Chaos: The Software (Autodesk, 1990). The next Autodesk I got involved with was, oddly enough, cyberspace. William Gibson’s word had caught on to the extent that “cyberspace” was, for a time, a preferred synonym for what is also called artificial reality or virtual reality.

  The guys in the Autodesk Advanced Tech Division shipped the “Autodesk Cyberspace Developer’s Kit” early in 1991. The package was a library of computer programs meant to make it easier for programmers to create virtual reality worlds of their own. As it happened, the product was a complete flop. But during the development phase I had fun using our newly created cyberspace tools to look at tumbling hypercubes and to ride around on a chaotic 3D curve known as the Lorenz attractor. It was a good job while it lasted. The catch was that I wasn’t writing much anymore.

  Hacking Code

  Hacking is like building a scale-model cathedral out of toothpicks, except that if one toothpick is out of place the whole cathedral will disappear. And then you have to feel around for the invisible cathedral, trying to figure out which toothpick is wrong. Debuggers make it a little easier, but not much, since a truly screwed-up cutting-edge program is entirely capable of screwing up the debugger as well, so that then it’s like you’re feeling around for the missing toothpick with a stroke-crippled claw-hand. But, ah, the dark dream beauty of the hacker grind against the hidden wall that only you can see, the wall that only you wail at, you the programmer, with the brand new tools that you make up as you go along, your special new toothpick lathes and jigs and your realtime scrimshaw shaver, you alone in the dark with your wonderful tools. [Rudy Rucker, The Hacker and the Ants (William Morrow).]

  On a good day, I think of hacking as a tactile experience, like reaching into a tub of clay and kneading and forming the material into the shapes of my desires.

  A computer program is a virtual machine that you build by hand. Hacking is like building a car by building all of the parts in the car individually. The good thing is that you have full control, the bad thing is that the process can take so much longer than you expect it to. Are you sure you feel like stamping out a triple-Z O-ring gasket? And synthesizing the plastic from which to make the gasket? The hacker says, “Yaar! Sounds like fun!”

  Of course it does get easier as you build more and more. Often as not, you can re-use old pieces of code that you hacked for other projects. A hacker develops a nice virtual garage of “machine parts” that he or she can reuse. As a beginner, you start out using prefab parts made by others, but sooner or later, you’re likely to grit on down to the lowest machine levels to see just how those parts really work.

  To be a writer you need something you want to write about; to be a hacker you need something to hack about. You need to have an obsession, a vision that you want to turn into a novel, or into a virtual machine. It’s going to take you so long to finish that you will need a fanatic’s obsession to see a big project through. Essential in either case is the simple act of not giving up, of going back into it over and over again.

  I think the most interesting things to hack are programs which turn the computer into a window to a different reality. Programs which express true computer nature. Chaos, fractals, Artificial Life, cellular automata, genetic algorithms, Virtual Reality, hyperspace—these are lovely areas that the computer can see into.

  I once heard a hacker compare his computer to Leuwenhoek’s microscope, so strong was his feeling that he was peering into new worlds. In an odd way, the most interesting worlds can be found when this new “microscope” looks at itself, perhaps entering a chaotic feedback loop that can close in on some strange attractor.

  There are, of course, lame-butts who think hacking is about grubbing scraps of information about war and money. What a joke. Hacking is for delving into the hidden machinery of the universe.

  The universe? Didn’t I just say that the coolest hacks are in some sense centered on an investigation of what the computer itself can do? Yes, but the computer is a model of the universe.

  Sometimes schizos think the universe is a computer—in a bad kind of way. Like that everything is gray and controlled, and distant numbers are being read off in a monotone, and somewhere a supervisor is tabulating your ever-more-incriminating list of sins.

  But in reality, the universe is like a parallel computer, a computer with no master program, a computer filled with self-modifying code and autonomous processes—a space of computation, if you will. A good hack can capture this on a simple color monitor. The self-mirroring screen becomes an image of the world at large. As above, so below.

  The correspondence between computers and reality changes the way you understand the world. If you know about fractals, then clouds and plants don’t look the same. Once you’ve seen chaotic vibrations on a screen, you recognize them in the waving of tree branches and in the wandering of the media’s eye. Cellular automata show how social movements can emerge from individual interactions. Virtual reality instructs you in the beauty of a swooping flock of birds. Artificial Life and genetic algorithms show how intelligent processes can self-organize amidst brute thickets of random events. Hyperspace programs let you finally see into the fourth dimension and to recognize that kinky inside-out reversals are part and parcel of your potentially infinite brain.

  Hacking teaches that the secret of the universe need not be so very complex, provided that the secret is set down in a big enough space of computation equipped with feedback and parallelism. Feedback means having a program take its last output as its new input. Parallelism means letting the same program run at many different sites. The universe’s physics is the same program running in parallel everywhere, repeatedly updating itself on the basis of its current computation. Your own psychology is a parallel process endlessly revising itself.

  Hacking is a yoga, but not an easy one. How do you start? Taking a course on one of the “object-oriented” programming languages Java or C++ the probably the best way to start; or you might independently buy a C++ compiler and work through the manual’s examples. And then find a problem that is your own, something you really want to see, whether it’s chaos or whether it’s just a tic-tac-toe program. And then start trying to make your vision come to life. The computer will help to show you the way, especially if you pay close attention to your error messages, use the help files—and read the fuckin’ manual. It’s a harsh yoga; it’s a path to mastery.

  * * *

  Note on “Hacking Code”

  Written 1995.

  Appeared in Mark Frauenfelder, Carla Sinclair, and Gareth Branwyn, eds., The Happy Mutant Handbook, Riverhead Books, 1995.

  Steven Levy’s 1984 book, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, had been an inspiration to me before moving to Silicon Valley, and I was proud to become part of the scene. I met Levy in 1986, quite soon after moving to California, at the second of annual “Hackers Conferences” held near San Jose. This was the point in time when the media were just starting to use “hacker” in the negative sense of “computer criminal,” and we were all very annoyed about this.

  Mark Frauenfelder was a very pleasant and amusing man whom I’d met soon after moving to California, Carla Sinclair was his wife, and Gareth Branwyn was a hacker friend of theirs. My daughter Georgia was just starting to work as a book designer in 1995, and she did the layout for The Happy Mutant Handbook.

  Five Flavors of Cyberspace

  I’m going to discuss five interrelated strands of cyberspace. First, there is cyberspace in the sense that cyberpunk science fiction writers initially used it. Second, there is cyberspace in the sense of Virtual Reality (V
R). Third, there is cyberspace as the locale of the cultural cyberpunk phenomenon. Fourth, there is cyberspace as the worldwide computer network. The fifth flavor circles back to the first—it’s the blended vision of cyberspace that I wrote about in my novel, The Hacker and the Ants after working in Silicon Valley for a few years.

  The Science Fiction Brain-Plug

  One of the characteristic bits of technology in cyberpunk science-fiction is a direct man-to-machine interface, sometimes known as a “brain-plug.” I first read of about being plugged into machines in an SF paperback back in 1961.

  “It was an odd room, a short of shapeless, plastic-lined cocoon without furnishings. The thing had floated submerged in the fluid. It lay on the floor now, limbs twisting spasmodically.

  “It was male: the long, white beard was proof of that. It was a pitiful thing, a kind of caricature of humanity, a fantastically hairy gnome curled blindly into a fetal position. It was naked; its skin where it showed through the matted hair, was grub-white and wrinkled from the long immersion.

  “It had floated in this room in its gently moving nest of hair, nourished by the thick, fleshlike cord trailing from a tap protruding through the wall to where it had been grafted to the navel, dreaming the long, slow, happy, fetal dreams.” [James Gunn, “Name Your Pleasure,” 1954. Reprinted in his anthology, The Joy Makers, (Bantam).]

  The hedonistic gnome didn’t quite have a brain-plug—but he was definitely plugged-in!

  A lot of ideas in science fiction are symbols of archetypal human desires. Stories about time travel are often about memory and the longing to go back to the past. Telepathy is really an objective correlative for the fantasy of perfect communication. Travel to other planets is travel to exotic lands. Levitation is freedom from the shackles of ordinary life.

  The brain plug is a symbol, first and foremost, for a truly effortless computer interface. Associated with this perfect user interface are notions of intelligence increase, technological expertise, and global connectedness.

  In 1976, I wrote my first SF novel, Spacetime Donuts, which prominently features brain-plugs. In Spacetime Donuts, a brain plug is a socket in a person’s head; you plug a jack into your socket in order to connect your thoughts directly to a computer. The rush of information is too much for most people, but there is a small cadre of countercultural types who are able to withstand it.

  When I wrote Spacetime Donuts, I was a computer-illiterate academic who taught and lectured about mathematics and philosophy. I feared and hated computers. I had no idea of how to control them. Yet at the same time I craved computers, I longed for access to the marvelous things they could do—the mad graphics, the arcane info access, the manipulation of servo-mechanisms. Thus the ambivalent fascination of the plug: on the positive side, a plug provides a short-circuit no-effort path into the computer; on the negative side, a plug might turn you into the computer’s slave.

  Here’s what happens when my character Vernor Maxwell first plugs into the big central computer known as Phizwhiz.

  “It was like suddenly having your brain become thousands of times larger. Our normal thoughts consist of association blocks woven together to form patterns which change as time goes on. When Vernor was plugged into Phizwhiz, the association blocks became larger, and the patterns more complex. He recalled, for instance, having thought fleetingly of his hand on the control switch. As soon as the concept hand formed in Vernor’s mind, Phizwhiz had internally displayed every scrap of information it had relating to the key-word hand. All the literary allusions to, all the physiological studies of, all the known uses for hands were simultaneously held in the Vernor-Phizwhiz joint consciousness. All this as well as images of all the paintings, photographs, X-rays, holograms, etc. of hands which were stored in the Phizwhiz’s memory bank. And this was just a part of one association block involved in one thought pattern.” [Rudy Rucker, “Spacetime Donuts, Part I” (Unearth magazine, 1978.). The entire novel appeared from Ace Books.]

  I didn’t think of making up a word for the mental space inside Phizwhiz, and if I had, I probably would have called it a “mindscape,” meaning a landscape of information patterns, a platonic space of floating ideas.

  The Spacetime Donuts mindscape is not very much like cyberspace. Why not? Because the mindscape comes all sealed up inside one centralized building full of metal boxes, a building belonging to the government—this was the old centralized, mainframe concept of computation. I didn’t ever think about bulletin boards, or modems, or the already existing global computer network. Although I understood about connecting to computers, I didn’t understand about computers connecting to each other in the abstract network that would become cyberspace.

  In 1981, Vernor Vinge published a Net story called “True Names,” about a group of game-playing hackers who encounter sinister multinational forces in their shared Virtual Reality. Many view this story as the first depiction of cyberspace. And then William Gibson burst upon the scene with the stories collected in Burning Chrome, followed by his 1984 novel Neuromancer.

  Rather than being modeled on the outdated paradigm of computers as separate individuals, Gibson’s machines were part of a fluid continuous whole; they were trusses holding up a global computerized information network with lots of people hooked into it at once.

  Gibson usually describes his cyberspace in terms of someone flying through a landscape filled with colored 3-D geometric shapes, animated by patterns of light. This large red cube might be IBM’s data, that yellow cone is the CIA, and so on. Here, cyberspace is a great matrix with all the world’s computer data embedded in it, and it’s experienced graphically. But what about that brain-plug interface? Once you think about it very hard, it becomes clear that there really is no chance of having an actual brain plug anytime soon.

  The problem is that our physiological understanding of the fine structure of the brain cells is incredibly rudimentary. And, seriously, can you imagine wanting to be the first one to use a brain plug designed by a team of hackers on a deadline? Every new program crashes the system dozens, scores, hundreds, thousands of times during product development. But—how would you reboot your body after some stray signal in a wire shuts down your thalamus or stops your heart?

  In my novels Freeware and Realware, I tried to finesse the brain-plug issue by having a device I call an “uvvy.” Rather than being surgically wired into your brain-stem, the uvvy sits on your neck and interacts with your brain by electromagnetic fields. This futuristic technology is what the scientist Freeman Dyson calls “radioneurology.” He proposes that:

  Radioneurology might take advantage of electric and magnetic organs that already exist in many species of eels, fish, birds, and magnetotactic bacteria. In order to implant an array of tiny transmitters into a brain, genetic engineering of existing biological structures might be an easier route than microsurgery.…When we know how to put into a brain transmitters translating neural processes into radio signals, we shall also know how to insert receivers translating radio signals back into neural processes. Radiotelepathy is the technology of transferring information directly from brain to brain using radio transmitters and receivers in combination. [Freeman Dyson, Imagined Worlds, (Harvard University Press).]

  Speaking of “radiotelepathy,” I’ve unearthed an earlier use of the word, although not in exactly the same sense that Dyson uses it. This information isn’t totally relevant, but I’ll include it anyway. After all, we’re here to Seek! The passage in question occurs in one of my favorite books, The Yage Letters, where Allen Ginsberg is writing his friend William Burroughs a letter about a fairly nightmarish drug-trip he’d just had after taking a Curandero’s (a Curandero is one who “Cures”) mixture of Ayahuasca and other jungle plants in Pucallpa, Peru, in June, 1960.

  I felt faced by Death, my skull in my beard on pallet on porch rolling back and forth and settling finally as if in reproduction of the last physical move I make before settling into real death—got nauseous, rushed out and began vomiting, all cover
ed with snakes, like a Snake Seraph, colored serpents in aureole all around my body, I felt like a snake vomiting out the universe—all around me in the trees the noise of these spectral animals the other drinkers vomiting (normal part of the Cure sessions) in the night in their awful solitude in the universe—[I felt] also as if everybody in the session in central radiotelepathic contact with the same problem—the Great Being within ourselves—and at that moment—vomiting still feeling like a Great lost Serpent-seraph vomiting in consciousness of the Transfiguration to come—with the Radiotelepathy sense of a Being whose presence I had not yet fully sensed—too Horrible for me, still—to accept the fact of total communication with say everyone an eternal seraph male and female at once—and me a lost soul seeking help—well slowly the intensity began to fade. [William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, The Yage Letters, City Lights Books).]

  Virtual Reality

  Virtual reality represents a practical step that interface designers have taken to try and make for a more brain-plug-like connection to computers.

  In 1968 Ivan Sutherland built a device which his colleagues at the University of Utah called The Sword of Damocles—it was an intimidatingly heavy pair of TV screens that hung down from the ceiling to be worn like glasses. What you saw was a topographic map of the U.S. that you could fly over and zoom in on. The map was simple wire-frame graphics: meshes of green lines. Two of the main essentials of Virtual Reality were already there: (1) graphical user immersion in a 3-D construct, and (2) user-adjustable viewpoint. Soon to come as the third and fourth essentials of Virtual Reality were: (3) user manipulation of virtual objects, and (4) multiple users in the same Virtual Reality.

  By 1988, cyberpunk science fiction had become quite popular, and the word “cyberspace” was familiar to lots of people. John Walker, then the chairman at Autodesk, Inc., of Sausalito, had the idea of starting a program to create some new Virtual Reality software, and to call it “Cyberspace.” In fact Autodesk trademarked the word “Cyberspace” for their product, “The Cyberspace Developer’s Kit.” William Gibson was rather annoyed by this and reportedly said he was going to trademark “Eric Gullichsen,” this being the name of the first lead programmer on the Autodesk Cyberspace project. I was employed by Autodesk’s Advanced Technology Division at that time, and I helped write some demos for Autodesk Cyberspace.