Collected Essays

by Rucker, Rudy

  I often think of Silicon Valley (and other hacking centers) as being like the Ile de France in the Middle Ages, a spot where artisans and craftspeople from all over come together to work on the Great Work. It’s certainly not a cathedral that we’re building here—so what is it? At first I thought the Great Work was Artificial Life. The idea behind Artificial Life (called A-Life for short) is that what living systems are really doing is to move information around. When living systems reproduce themselves, they are replicating their information. When a living system heads towards some food, it is using information about its environment to improve its situation. A computer virus is alive in a lowdown kind of way: it attaches itself to programs and gets those programs to make copies of it. A higher kind of Artificial Life might be an electronic ant colony with graphical critters that dart around on the screen and evolve to get better at bumping into the pixels that count as food. Much higher than that might be a program which is able to repair and even improve itself. Higher steps might be programs which not only talk like a person, but which are even able to effectively drive a robot body around in the physical world. And somewhere down the science fictional road might be robots that build robot factories that make new robots. A race of “artificially alive” machines spawned by us—the torch of life passed from carbon on to silicon.

  It’s an inspiring vision, but is Artificial Life really the Great Work which hackers are working towards? Isn’t the more important goal to make things better for the humans on Earth now instead of for some race of future robots? This line of thought views the Great Work as the achievement of some kind of material paradise on Earth, with comfort and abundance and perfect understanding for all mankind. The watchword here is Global Network, rather than Artificial Life. Great high-bandwidth communication links with people talking to each other in Virtual Reality, instantaneous electronic polling, ten thousand different TV channels, and all good stuff like that. Keeping something this complicated working would take exceptionally good computer programs, of course, and the best kind of program is going to be one that’s artificially alive, so in the end the two Great Work images may really merge into one utopian vision.

  Utopias have a way of blinding you to the real present, though, so let’s draw back from that. Let me tell you about what I saw some REAL machines do. Fellow freestyle SF writer Marc Laidlaw took me and the family to a Survival Research Labs show held under a freeway in San Francisco. It was terrific, a mad swirl of politics and collaged machinery, with a giant flame-thrower that seemed continually about to explode, a pile of burning pianos, a giant metal arm poking at the pianos, and so on. After the show, my son and I found a heap of what seemed to be unexploded dynamite—clayey substance packed into an officially printed wrapper saying “FRONT LINE DEMOLITION PURPOSES ONLY”, and with a long fuse. My son and I love fireworks. We tried lighting one, but it didn’t go off. We were spending the night at the Laidlaws’ apartment in Haight-Ashbury. Sylvia kept saying that it was too dangerous for us to keep the dynamite, that it was unstable and might go off. After some thought I agreed. So how were we to throw it away? Laidlaw didn’t exactly want it in his kitchen trashcan, so he and I went outside to ditch the dynamite. The sidewalks of Haight-Ashbury are crawling with homeless stoners every hour of the night and day, and we didn’t want them to get hold of the dynamite, so we couldn’t just leave it on the curb. The public trashcans were out of the question, as some Haighties practically LIVE in the trashcans—you throw something in a trashcan and there’s a guy inside the can to catch it. Finally we found a church with a metal grating over the entrance. We pushed the dynamite through there out of reach. A few days later I saw an article in the San Francisco Chronicle about a rash of “fake dynamite” being found all over the city. It had all been a mind game that was part of the Survival Research Labs show. The show had kept going on for several days, as it were, and the Establishment’s Spectacle had been (ever so slightly) taken over and co-opted by Marc Pauline.

  The reality is that there is no unifying Great Work, there are just a lot of people here in the pit together, slamming and hacking. Our Great Work is to stay in the pit, to control our own destinies, and to hack what we can of the world. There are no nations in the pit, no us against them, and the Japanese are not our enemies. Recently Sylvia and I went to Japan where I was to appear on a Cyberspace panel along with hacker Jaron Lanier and some others. Queen Mu of Mondo 2000 was there as well, as chance would have it. After our talks we were invited to the Gold Disco where a Mr. Takemura was putting on his monthly show. His show is a series of collaged videos he makes, also lighting effects, smoke clouds and scent clouds, and fast acid-house disco. The video-show is a mélange consisting of (1) the chaotic pattern you get by pointing a TV camera at a monitor in a feedback loop, the key thing being, as Santa Cruz chaos mathematicians discovered, to have the camera upside down, (2) gay porno films of men kissing and dicks with studs and rings, (3) dolphins and politicians in black and white d) screens from the new Sim Earth computer game, (4) SIGGRAPH style computer graphics. Standing with Mr. Takemura and Jaron by the disco control panel, and the Japanese kids dancing like crazy, vogueing, some of them in bathing suits, a geisha off there somewhere, the video projected on seventeen different screens, Sim Earth going by, Mr. DataGlove right next to me—I get this really heavy flash that the New Edge really IS happening, it matters to these people here, it is going to happen, and we’re all hanging out at the surfin’ edge. Right then Mr. T. takes my arm and leads me off to a corner of the room, past the guy in the bathing suit, past the beautiful Japanese girl in the high shorts, and there on a PC monitor is…my own program CA Lab! The “Rug” rule, boiling away, bopping right to the beat as the casual viewer might think, my program running live here in the coolest disco in Tokyo. Hallelujah, my information had made it this far on its own. I’d GOTTEN OVER, as the brothers say.

  And that thought sets off the flash that none of us hackers or writers or rappers or samplers or mappers or singers or users of the tech is in it solely for the Great Work—no, us users be here for our own good. We work for the Great Work because the work is fun. The hours are easy and the pay is good. And the product we make is viable. It travels and it gets over. And if you help make a piece of it, then that piece is part of you. You’re part of the thang.

  Now what exactly IS this Great Work which is taking place on the New Edge? We are not given to truly know WHAT IT IS. The Great Work is like a Mandelbrot Set of which we are the pixels, or even the steps of the computation. The Great Work is like a living body in which you and I are like a cell, or even like a specific chemical process, like an enzyme which copies ten thousand rungs of DNA. The Great Work is so big that nobody alive can even put a name on it. In a few hundred years they can look back and say what it was, but here inside it, nobody can see. It has something to do with people getting more and more mixed up with machines, it has to do with do-it-yourself, it has to do with sampling and collaging, it has to do with the end of the old style of politics. A wave of revolution is sweeping all of Planet Earth. Incredibleness: the Soviet Union is no more. How many more years can it be until the revolution comes back here to the United States, back to where it started? To reduce it to a bumper sticker: “IF THE RUSSIANS CAN GET RID OF THE COMMUNISTS, THE AMERICANS CAN GET RID OF THE REPUBLICANS!” Pass it on. Surely the ever-escalating rape of the environment, the crazy wastage of the “drug war,” the warmongering, the elitist selfishness, surely this will someday come to an end—blown away perhaps by the onslaught of total New Edge information? Maybe soon.

  Let’s follow the Great Work and see.

  * * *

  Note on “The Mondo Edge”

  Written 1992.

  Appeared in Rudy Rucker, R. U. Sirius, and Queen Mu, eds., The Mondo 2000 User’s Guide to the New Edge, HarperCollins, 1992.

  I met R. U. Sirius and Queen Mu quite soon after I moved to California in 1986, and I wrote a number of small pieces for their magazine Mondo 2000 over the next few yea
rs. Mondo developed quite a reputation for being weird and hip, so I was happy to be involved. Queen Mu was, to put it mildly, not a standard-issue publishing exec, and by the early nineties, Mondo was on the verge of collapse. They had the idea of making one final big score by publishing an anthology of the best bits from the past issues of Mondo. But they were having trouble getting this project together. “We need a mathematical logician for this,” proposed R. U. “We need Rudy!”

  So I came onboard as a co-editor. At this time, scanners were hopelessly inefficient and flaky, so I just typed up my favorite Mono excerpts and then placed them in alphabetical order according to the main topic being discussed. It made for a nice book, and I wrote this essay as the introduction. It appeared under the title, “On the Edge of the Pacific.”

  The Manual of Evasion

  January 7, 1994. En route to Portugal.

  No clear idea what day of the week it is, I’m still in the holiday “broken clock all gone” mode of vacation. Times like this is when it really pays off to be an academic. I don’t have to go back to work for almost three more weeks.

  I’m on my way to Portugal, to be filmed by some guy who got a grant from the city of Lisbon to make a movie about Lisbon. Edgar Pêra. The negotiations were all with his producer, Catarina Santos. Edgar’s read some of my books in Portuguese and decided to have me be in his movie, also the SF-and-conspiracy writer Robert Anton Wilson and the psychedelic prophet Terence McKenna. Edgar must be quite a character, judging from his taste in literature, but you never know with Europeans. Catarina wrote me to ask me my sizes for costumes. The movie may be fictional rather than the expected documentary, I don’t know. She called again just before I left, and I asked her what the costumes were, and she didn’t want to tell me. “It’s better if it’s a surprise.” So the theory I’ve been promulgating to my friends and family is that I’m going to Portugal to be filmed dressed as a giant chicken scratching at the ground with my feet.

  My dog Arf has been scratching the ground like crazy recently, I think it releases musk from glands by his dewlaps. I’ve been studying him in preparation for my role. If Edgar asks me to improvise, that’s what I can do. The first thing I’ll say will be, “Do you have a chicken costume I can wear?” My face showing inside the huge, open beak. Foghorn Leghorn. A wobbling featherduster wired to my padded fanny. Or, worse, the handle stuck up my naked butt. But, hey, don’t laugh, they’re paying me all expenses plus a nice fee.

  January 8, 1994. Airport hassles.

  It’s 29 hours later and I’m still in an airport. Newark was iced in, and my flight from Dulles was cancelled. I spent the night in the Dulles Hyatt in D.C., and I went back to Dulles pretty early in the morning today. Now I’m at JFK in New York.

  I had interesting dreams last night, I was in this half-awake kind of state worrying about when to get up, and started dreaming quite lucidly, knowing I was dreaming, and the dream room endless variations on the hotel room. And sometimes something would come and grab me or attack me, and I realized this time that those things are also me, they are projected by me, everything in the dream is a projection of me, so I’d like grab the imp on my shoulder and squeeze and merge with him, and have a whirlpool kind of feeling. Very unusual. The fact that I watched Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom on TV in bed just before sleep helped the dreams too no doubt.

  Here in N.Y., the tree branches are all covered with thick coats of ice. There’s been an ice storm, which is why it took me 24 hours longer to get here. I have a boarding pass for TAP (Air Portugal); here’s hoping it takes off in an hour like it’s supposed to. Bad sign: it’s doesn’t have a gate listed yet, and all the other planes do. My suitcase got away from me at Dulles yesterday, too, so I’ve been wearing these clothes for two days now, and slept in the shirt as well. Supposedly it will catch up with me or I with it in Lisbon. If I ever get there.

  Okay, we are on the plane now. I have a window seat and the plane is completely full. This is going to be rough. Nobody on the plane seems to speak English at all. The loudspeaker is playing the Lettermen singing Christmas carols. A big fat stoic lady next to me in all black and with big purse and coat and shopping bags that she doesn’t want to put in the overhead. Her face is covered with warts, warts on warts like a fractal. Her arm is sticking way into my space. It’s a good thing they’re paying me to do this.

  January 9, 1994. Lisbon, Terence McKenna.

  As it turned out, the plane sat on the ground for 2 ½ hours before taking off. While we were sitting there, Robert Anton Wilson got put on the plane, his connection had been late. I said hi to him; he looked pretty stressed, his face taut, red and masklike. Later he told me that he’s 62 and has high blood pressure. He also has post-polio syndrome, which makes him walk unsteadily.

  When we got to Lisbon, it turned out that both our suitcases were lost. It took a long time to give info to the baggage people, and when we finally got out of the airport there was surprise nobody there to meet us. So there I was, 36 hours after starting out from D.C. (where I’d made a stopover to visit my ailing Pop), with my suitcase gone, no clue what to do, and old Bob Wilson on my hands—he prefers “Bob” to “Robert.” He was starting to really lose it, obsessively complaining about everything, like that he wouldn’t have his medicine, and me falling unwillingly into the role of chirpy cheerer-upper that I’d just finished doing with Pop on the way out here. Wilson looks a bit like Pop, actually: he has white hair and beard. I told Wilson, “Don’t be so surprised they didn’t manage to meet us. I mean these are people who invited Rucker, Wilson and McKenna to be in their movie. These people have got to be nuts! These people are fucked up! It’s like…how long would you wait for Queen Mu to meet you at an airport?” We had a voice and fax phone numbers for Catarina Santos, but she wasn’t answering her phone, nor did she have a message machine.

  So Bob Wilson and I asked the tourism counter to recommend a hotel, and we got a cab to their recommended Hotel Nacional, a depressingly anonymous place in the business district, new, soulless, with a lobby of stone polished to a fierce tombstone glare; it didn’t seem as if anyone else at all was staying there. Wilson and I lay down for naps in our separate rooms. My heart was doing funny things lying there, palpitations you might call it, my poor overstressed heart fluttering at my chest. I got up in the early afternoon, and Wilson was still asleep. Fine.

  The sidewalks of Lisbon are mosaics made of miniature cobblestones, extremely slippery in the winter rain, mostly white, but with black swirly symmetric Belusov-Zhabotinsky patterns every so often. In the less traveled areas, grass grows verdant in the multiple mosaic cracks.

  I found a small funicular railway and rode it up to the Barrio Alto, a neighborhood of old houses with laundry hanging out. The walls were crumbly stucco washed over with colors. It must be glorious on a sunny day. And there are tiles everywhere. The Moorish influence. I missed having Sylvia here to show it to. I saw a little park with a nice-smelling cedar that had been trained to grow out over a circular overhead trellis—some beams up in the air making a hundred-foot-diameter disk with the branches of the cedar sprawling atop them. Old men underneath playing cards at little tables. Very quaint. I could see out over the city from one spot in the Barrio Alto—these view spots are called miradouros—I could see Teja River (called the Tagus in English, no doubt a British idea like using Leghorn for the city Livorno in Italy or, for that matter, Lisbon instead of Lisboa,) and I could see the big landmark: the Castelo de São Jorge (the tilde over the letter a in São means to pronounce it like Saoung, cognate to Saint).

  As it was Sunday, most things were closed, but I did stop in at one hole-in-the-wall cafe for a 150$00 escudo glass of beer. (The Portuguese use the $ sign for a decimal point.) The exchange rate is about 160 escudos to a dollar, so that means the beer was about ninety cents. Not that it was a big one by any means, it was a strange crippled-looking little glass. This humble cafe is beautifully appointed—tiled walls and a real wrought-iron lamp high on the wall, it’s
the kind of place that would be full of yuppies in Germany or the U.S., but here it’s full of Mediterranean men, short guys with lined faces and thin lips, guys whom in California you’d be more likely to see in the parking lot of 7-11 than in a cafe. Portugal is their country!

  I also stopped in at a cafe next to a movie theater and had a Pizza a Atum. Tuna in English is Atun in Spanish, and Atum in Portuguese. Because the cafe was next to a movie theater on a Sunday, it held two darling little groups of mother and children. How I love seeing women with their children, it is so wonderful to see the happy cute big-cheeked ice-cream-eating kids, and the loving tender mothers, the mothers albeit a bit frayed and distraught due the pressures of raising said kids—as were Sylvia and I during those three-kid-travelling-circus years of yore, raising Georgia, Rudy and Isabel. The Holy Family, the divine and darling herd.

  When I got back to the Hotel Nacional it was nearly evening. The good news when I got back was that Catarina Santos was on the phone just then looking for me. I’d sent her a fax when I got up from my nap. Catarina had been assigned to meet us at the Lisbon airport, which has an exit and a traffic that looked (to me anyway) comparable in size and complexity to the airport of, say, Lynchburg, Virginia. It’s pretty hard to miss someone at that exit, but Catarina had missed us, and had even given a frantic “Your father is missing!” call to son Rudy, back in Los Perros, at 2 AM California time, which made me want to kill her.

  Waiting for Catarina to come to the hotel, Wilson and I had a few drinks, then slept a couple more hours, and then she showed up looking much cuter than expected at about quarter of ten. And trailed by none other than Terence McKenna.

  Catarina is une jolie laide (a beautiful ugly), a woman with such lively complicated features that you love to watch her. She has a large, highly animated lips which are often drawn twitchingly up to her nose for this or that badger/gopher face of mockery or emphasis. She has a cracking, charming voice because she smokes cigarettes all the time, like all of the people here. When she met us, she was dressed all in black with a miniskirt and a black leather coat. Terence was glued to her like a limpet, apparently they were having an affair. I didn’t envy him, as she’s a sulker and a manipulator. But she was always fun to watch; her face was like a circus.