Collected Essays

by Rucker, Rudy

  California drivers aren’t usually rude—if there is a necessity to merge, people will pause and wave each other on—but they are pushy. If you don’t take advantage of a hole in traffic, someone else will squirm around you to get at the hole. Once, in Santa Cruz, when I paused flounderingly in an intersection in our big old Chevy station wagon, two separate drivers called me an asshole. I was blocking a hole and I was driving an American station wagon with Virginia plates, therefore I was an asshole. I notice a fair amount of standoffishness and impatience among Californians. It’s like Californians know that there is the possibility of getting REALLY GOOD STUFF out here, and when they have to settle for something inadequate—like seeing a whale-wagon in the middle of an intersection—they get very miffed. When I first got here, I was so happy to see restaurants that weren’t Red Lobsters and Pizza Huts that I was bewildered by all the “Very Best Restaurants” guides I kept seeing in the paper. “Hell,” I’d say, “I don’t need the VERY BEST. I’m perfectly happy with something that’s REASONABLY ADEQUATE.” But of course now, after six years here, I don’t feel that way anymore. I’m a Californian, and I want the very best all the time!

  Some of the first Californians I befriended were fellow science fiction writers. There’s few enough SF writers that we’re always glad to see each other. The one thing that my new SF friends were most interested in telling me about was Marc Pauline of SRL (Survival Research Labs) and the cool things he did with machines. They knew, of course, that I like machines a lot—my novel Software is about the first intelligent robots, and Wetware is about the robots using bio-engineering processes to build people like machines. Cyberpunk fiction is really ABOUT the fusion of humans and machines. That’s why cyberpunk is a popular literature for this point in time—this is a historical time when computers are TAKING OVER many human functions and when humans are TAKING IN much more machine-processed information. There is a massive human/computer symbiosis developing faster than we can even think about it realistically. Instead of thinking realistically, we can think science fictionally, and that’s how we end up writing cyberpunk near-future science fiction. Cyberpunk is really about the present.

  You would think science fiction conventions would be very hip and forward-looking, but often they are dominated by a fannish, lowest-common-denominator, Star Trekkie, joiner kind of a mentality. At times there’s even a nostalgic, backwards-looking streak to science fiction gatherings, with ancient writers saying reactionary things like, “The future isn’t what it used to be.” When the idea of cyberpunk SF first developed, it was very unpopular at SF cons. Along with some of my fellow cyberpunk writers, I was practically booed off the stage for talking about cyberpunk at an SF Con in Austin a few years back. In California, I finally went to a good and intelligent science fiction conference. It was called Sercon (which is SF fan jargon for “serious and constructive”), and was held at the huge old Claremont resort hotel in Berkeley soon after I moved here. All my new San Francisco SF friends were there, and the British SF writer Ian Watson was there, too, and I spent a lot of time hanging out with him and with Faustin Bray and Brian Wallace of Sound Photosynthesis. Faustin and Brian were videotaping everything everybody said, which made us feel smart and important. In the morning the grounds of the Claremont were full of beautiful flower beds and big pastel sculptures, with a warm damp breeze off the bay. Ian Watson and I had lobster ravioli for lunch. This, I felt, was California as I’d dreamed it would be.

  Faustin brought me into contact with the editor and the owner of Mondo 2000, R. U. Sirius and Queen Mu. R.U. is a pale-skinned puffy-faced individual with very long hair and a goony gap-toothed smile. Mu is fey and spacey, thin, attractive in a toothy Camelot-Kennedy way, also with long hair. They invited me to come and give a “Reality Hackers” speech/reading in a space called Shared Visions on San Pablo Avenue in Oakland down below Berkeley. Before the reading, they gave me and my wife Sylvia a good meal at the “Mondo house”—the huge rambling redwood California Craftsman deco pile in the Berkeley hills where Mondo 2000 is produced. I was nervous about the talk, for which I was billed as a cyberpunk—in my past experience, the public’s reaction to cyberpunk had been quite negative. I kept my shades and leather jacket on and read a chapter of my novel Wetware in which some people have sex, and one of them turns out to be a robot meat-puppet with a steel rat living in his skull. The audience was about 70 strong, and R.U. and Mu had charged them $10 apiece. And they totally got into what I was talking about. I’d expected them to be snobby arty/literary East Coast types, but they weren’t like that at all. They were reality hackers, nuts, flakes, entrepreneurs, trippers, con-men, students, artists, mad engineers—Californians with the native belief that (1) There is a Better Way, and (2) I Can Do It Myself.

  To put it in a clear gelatin capsule for you, I’d say that (1) and (2) are the two beliefs that underlie what Mondo 2000 calls the New Edge. The way that Big Business or The Pig does things is obviously not the best way; it’s intrusive, kludgy, unkind, and not at all what you really want. I mean, look at what they show on TV! Look what the government does with your taxes! How can we make things better? The old political approach is to try and “work within the system,” and spend years trying to work your way up to a position of influence so you can finally set things right, only by then you no longer even want to. But now, thanks to high-tech and the breakdown of society, you’re free to turn your back on the way “they” do it, whatever it might be, and do it yourself. DIY, as the punkers say. You can make your own literature, your own music, your own television, your own life, and—most important of all—your own reality. There is no reason to believe in or even care about the stale self-serving lies being put out by the media day after dreary day. The world is full of information, and some of it is information YOU NEED TO KNOW, so why waste time on the Spectacle of the politicians and the media?

  Editors Rudy, Queen Mu, Ken Goffman, with Bart Nagel, the graphic designer. (Photo by Bart Nagel.)

  At my Reality Hackers talk, I finally relaxed enough to take off my mirrorshades and put on my regular glasses, and we all sat in a circle and people did show-and-tell. Someone had a mind machine with earphones playing pulsed sound to match the flickering rhythms in two rings of tiny red light bulbs mounted in goggles that went over your eyes. As soon as I put them on I saw close-ups of the Mandelbrot set, just like the ones I’d been seeing on my new computer. The Mandelbrot set is a mathematical pattern discovered by Benoit Mandelbrot of IBM, the same guy who coined the word “fractals.” Fractal shapes have the property that each small part resembles the whole thing. Trees are a kind of fractal, in that the branch of a tree tends to look like a shrunken version of the whole tree, and the sub-branches look like the tree as well, on down through about seven levels. The Mandelbrot set is shaped like big fat warty buttocks with a knobby disk stuck on one side, and with a bumpy stinger sticking out of the disk. If you zoom in on the edges of the Mandelbrot set you find little copies of the butt, warts, disk, and stinger, some of the copies wound around into gnarly spirals, all swathed in diaphanous veils and gauzes of the loveliest imaginable colors. The really heavy thing is that the whole endlessly various pattern is based on nothing but repeatedly evaluating a single quadratic equation. A potentially infinite information structure can emerge from one simple equation, if the equation is iteratively coupled to a repetitive computation. And THAT could very well be how the world is made, you dig, a simple rule plus lots and lots of computation. The world’s “rule” is the Secret of Life and the world’s “computer” is matter—pursuing the analogy another step, the “system software” for the world’s “computer” is physics.

  My new California physics friend is Nick Herbert. Nick is lean, button-nosed and over fifty, with Ben Franklin spectacles and a fringe of white hair around his bony pate. He holds to the belief that maybe there really IS some laboratory way to build a time-machine or a matter-transmitter or a telepathy-inducer. For all this, Nick is neither a charlatan nor is he a se
lf-deluded nut, meaning that Nick does not LIE about being already able to build these physical devices (as a venture-capitalist-wooing charlatan would), nor does he THINK that he knows how to build them on the basis of some badly flawed or even nonsensical “symbolic proof.” Nick is more like a gymnast who decides to spend the rest of his life walking on his hands, just to see how it is to have the world permanently upside-down. I already knew Nick before moving here by his having written me some letters arguing about synchronicity and time travel. When I got out here, he got me invited for a free weekend at Esalen in Big Sur. I’d read about Esalen for years of course, and was really tripped to go there. Nick’s scam was that it was a workshop having to do with fringe concepts in Mind and Physics. Esalen has workshops on all kinds of things, and if you’re a presenter it’s free and if you’re a participant it might cost a couple of hundred dollars. While the Mondo/Reality Hackers scene felt really happening, the Esalen scene did not. A lot of the other guests from the other workshops seemed very pushy, cold and uptight. They were like unkind Swiss and German tourists into their own personal health, man, I mean like readers of Self magazine. Going to Esalen felt like going to visit Thomas Jefferson’s house Monticello in Virginia. There used to be something there. The scenery is beautiful. But now it’s run for tourists by Park Rangers. At least that’s how it struck me that one time, but in all fairness to Esalen, remember that I was then still undergoing the economic and cultural “bends” at moving from hideous Lynchburg to lovely CA. The wealth of Californians annoyed me a lot at first. And the indifference. The hard glossy surfaces of people’s character armor. I soon realized that if I was going to make any money at all, I was going to have to retool and become high-tech. I began practicing looking at things—like the rocks and surf off Big Sur, for instance—and trying to believe that THIS TOO was a computer calculation. This was the big mental transformation I was needing to make—to think of everything as a computer—and talking about things like enlightenment or the theory of relativity struck me as a waste of time, dead-horse topics left over from past.

  One of the great scientific centers for the study of the mathematical theory of chaos is the University of California at Santa Cruz. Soon after moving here, I had my first opportunity to give a talk to Ralph Abraham’s chaos seminar at UC Santa Cruz. Ralph is a ruminative man with a dark beard. He speaks softly, but is somehow rather intimidating. You never feel like interrupting him. He showed me a drawer-full of computer circuit boards and said that he wanted to use computer processes to generate musical output. After my talk, we went to a great Santa Cruz Chinese restaurant called the Oh Mei. The day’s special was called “Ants on a Tree,” though that’s not really what it was, I think it was a zucchini with transparent rice-flour noodles. The talk had been publicly announced, so besides Ralph, me, and his students, a couple of random strangers showed up as well. The next time I saw Ralph he was mostly interested in talking about cosmic historical trends, about the primordial Chaos of myth, the Mother Goddess, way-out things like that. California culture is like an organico-chemical bath with thousands of distinct kinds of macromolecules with open bonding sites. No matter what kind of triple-cis-alpha-desoxy thought probe you might be waving around, you know you’ll find minds with receptor sites you can bond to.

  Speaking of chemicals, after one of my talks somewhere else, a random stranger walked outside with me and pulled out a paper packet of white powder. “This is a new drug, Rudy. It’s like Ecstasy or MDMA. Some people I know made it. They’d be very interested to hear how it affects you.” “Wow, thanks.” I saved the powder, and was finally unwise and idle enough to eat it one night a month or two later. It made me grind my teeth a lot, and then I got into a phone-calling jag, getting in touch with various weird old-time computer-programming and hacker types whom I hadn’t had the nerve to talk to before. Merged on the phone I had the feeling of being jacked into some huge synchronistic Net. But then the full force of the drug hit me, and I sat in the living room feeling crazed and frightened. The next day I was so depressed that I wanted to die—this chemically induced clinical depression being the usual aftereffect of psychedelics on me, and the reason why I very rarely take them. I enjoy READING about people taking psychedelics, and I like to THINK ABOUT the effects they have, but I don’t really like to TAKE them, nor would I wholeheartedly recommend them to others. To me the political point of being pro-psychedelic is that this means being AGAINST consensus reality, which I very strongly am. Psychedelics are a kind of objective correlative for being weird and different.

  But in the end, for many of us, drugs are a trap. Can computers supplant psychedelics? It’s worth a try. With cool graphics and Virtual Reality we can pursue the dream of the pure non-physical software high. When I first got my computer I still knew very little about programming. The only software that I had was a free Mandelbrot set program someone had given me, and my idea of “hacking” was to reach around to the back of the monitor and randomly change the little switches I found there, but this wasn’t exactly a great feat of hacking I could impress my family and friends with. “Look, when I turn this little switch the picture gets different!” No, to do neat things with my machine I needed to understand how its insides worked so I could make up my own switches. Just as you can’t write a story without having something to write about, you can’t program without having something to program about. But I knew right away what I wanted to program: cellular automata (CA for short), which are parallel computations that turn your screen into self-generating computer graphics movies. In a two-dimensional CA, every pixel on your computer screen is “alive,” in that each pixel looks at the colors of its neighboring pixels and adjusts its own color accordingly. This is analogous to the way in which each spot on the surface of a swimming pool is “alive” and sensitive to the neighboring spots. When you throw a piece of redwood bark into a swimming pool, the ripples spread out in perfect uniformity and mathematico-physical precision. How do they know where to go? Because each spot on the water’s surface is updating itself in parallel a zillion times a second. The world is a huge parallel computation that has been running for billions of years. The folks putting on this all-encompassing show we live in—they’ve really got the budget! Even within the small budget of a PC’s memory and clock-rate, CAs are a rich environment for letting the computer do weird things. By blending together a succession of CA rules you can, for instance, do something like this: start with a blank rectangle, fill it in with concentric ellipses, break some of the ellipses into globs, arrange the globs into a moving face, grow a detailed skin texture, turn the skin’s pores into small beetles that crawl around and chew the picture up, send connecting lines between nearby beetles, bend the lines into paisley shaped loops, and fill the loops with growing fetuses.

  I really got into the heart of California computer culture when I started going to the annual Hacker’s Conference held here. The first time, I was invited on the strength of my science fiction, but by then I was already trying to be a hacker, so I brought my machine to the conference to show off what I’d achieved with my cellular automata. It was the most fun I’d ever had. Everyone there seemed happy. They were happy because they could actually DO something. We stayed up all night partying, bullshitting, and hunching over each other’s machines. It all began to seem so SIGNIFICANT. The human brain gets along by grouping things into patterns and assigning meanings to them. If you have a nice fast chaotically changing computer graphics program you have lots of things to try and make patterns out of. And, unlike with watching clouds or fire, with a computer you also have the meta-level to play with; meaning that you can stop the process, go in and look at the rules generating it, tweak the rules if you like, then start it up again. And then there’s the meta-meta-level, the discourse about what this image in connection with this program MEANS—like do fire and clouds really work this way? Are the thought-patterns in our brains like computer-generated fire and clouds? While my new friends and I were gloating over each others grap
hics, other hackers were doing entirely different kinds of crazy stuff. Someone had linked his computer to the public telephone and was talking to Russia using the blank spaces between successive TV screen images going across the satellites. That little bar between frames that you see if your TV loses its vertical hold—that was this guy’s Panama canal to everywhere. And the things in the real world these guys had done! “I wrote the software for the first Versateller machines,” someone might say, or, “I wrote this arcade game your kids play,” or “my program is used in the carburetor of your car.” What really impressed me was that people could play around on machines in their homes and end up affecting the events in the big industrial world. Before hackers it seemed like you needed a factory and an accountant and a bunch of workers before you could actually make something. But in the information economy, you can package it up and ship it out right from your home. Not that all the hackers were only into information. Hacking is an elastic concept—some guys showed up at the conference without paying, and proudly told me that he’d “hacked the Hackers Conference”—hacking in the sense of finding your way through some hindering thicket. Another told me he was going to hack Death by having his head frozen. Someone else had robot cars that could sense light, little radio-controlled type trucks with no radio-control but instead with a chip that the guy himself had made. The cars liked the edges of shadows, they liked to find a place where they could keep wavering in and out of the light. In this midst of all this fun, I felt a real sense of being engaged in a Great Work, in something like the same way that the workers on the Notre Dame cathedral might have felt.