From strick@osc.versant.com Sat Jun 25 00:57:43 1994 Received: from osc.versant.com (gwarn.versant.com [192.70.173.14]) fnord by nando.yak.net (8.6.5/8.6.5) with SMTP id AAA04523 for ; Sat, 25 Jun 1994 00:56:12 -0700 Received: by osc.versant.com (TAZmail-0.0) id AA00628; Sat, 25 Jun 94 00:59:25 PDT Received: from versant.com by osc.com (4.1/SMI-4.1) id AA02833; Thu, 23 Jun 94 21:15:21 PDT Received: from well.sf.ca.us by versant.com (4.1/SMI-4.1) id AA06311; Thu, 23 Jun 94 21:14:10 PDT Received: (from strick@localhost) by well.sf.ca.us (8.6.9/8.6.9) id VAA12391 for strick; Thu, 23 Jun 1994 21:11:02 -0700 Date: Thu, 23 Jun 1994 21:11:02 -0700 From: Henry Strickland Message-Id: <199406240411.VAA12391@well.sf.ca.us> To: strick@well.sf.ca.us Subject: 014Introduction Status: O HOW TO MUTATE & TAKE OVER THE WORLD The Ultimate Self-Help Manual by R U Sirius and St. Jude How to Mutate & Take Over the World: aka The Ultimate Self-Help Manual is an over-the-new-edge fact-based fantasy, the perfect followup to MONDO 2000: A User's Guide to the New Edge. Mutate deals with real information and logical extrapolations therefrom, on the new technologies and the evolution of mass-mediated culture. This book is in the form of R. U. Sirius and St. Jude's scrapbook in the year 2001. The scrapbook contains real and fictitious news clips, photos and drawings, email, film and TV show treatments, instruction manuals, legal documents, police and government agency reports, song lyrics, sex fantasies, interviews... etc ad infinitum. The scrapbook will follow the future history that surrounds 2 conspiratorial organizations: MONDO Vanilli Corp, led by R U Sirius, and an international techno/artist/hacker Underground with St. Jude as their aboveground apologist. This alliance of media manipulators and pranksters play with turning themselves into superior beings and taking control of the planet. The book will contain lots of real information on the state of the art presently and in the near future on navigating the Information Highway... and how to become a Data Highwayman, by hacking databases and ATM machines, forging documents, designing and consuming performance-enhancing drugs, magical and self- programming techniques, spying techniques and regalia, brainwashing and hypnosis, advanced plastic surgery and body alteration, bio- and nano-technology, advertising, role playing, doing business like the Japanese, etc... The tone of the "scrapbook" will be outrageous, erotic and tongue-in-chic, functioning as a kind of parody of the excesses of cyberpunk/new edge culture, while at the same time putting out new information from the techno-phreak edge. I will ask Mark Leyner (Et Tu, Babe, My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist) to write the introduction. The scrapbook dates back to the year 1994 with real materials from our present "cyberpunk" era, and will continue on from there till 2001, with entries for each year. The book has several distinct goals and therefore several different strategies. In one sense, the book is a Trojan Horse. Wrapped in story and frivolity is hard practical technical information that could conceivably instruct the reader in such areas as making money from information systems, making guerrilla war in an info-comm world, running a postmodern-age business, understanding and succeeding in media, mind-fucking, upgrading the wetware -- body and brain -- through drugs and surgery, and likely future directions for computer and production technologies based on the current state of the art. In another sense, the story is exactly the thing. The very real individuals who play their roles within this conspiracy will, to varying degrees, be mutated through the prism of myth and exaggeration... and we will take over the world. In this process, R U Sirius and St. Jude will insist that -- as in their own work -- all the self-hype and braggadocio in the contributions of the real-life hackers, experts and media jammers must be tempered with self-mockery. One of the core messages of Mutate, hopefully implicit in the title, is the importance of self-deflating humor in those who would dare to be active at the edge of late 20th/early 21st century culture and technology. The players will be living in their future world, and we intend that Mutate will say something about the groundlessness of being and the mass-mediated cruelty of the world that we're moving into. The backdrop for our characters' activities will concretize some of the paranoias and hopes of our present time, and play with a few of its crashing contradictions. The story will on occasion brush up against the big existential questions: religion, the meaning of life, the value of activity in the world, and such. The fact that our world-beaters who try for god-like powers are essentially clueless regarding these essential matters will be left dangling. Mutate, then, has as a subtheme a sort of cyberpunk Faust, complete with instruction manual: How to Do Your Own Faustian Pact: Negotiating A Win-Win Contract, from Volo Press. In this context, the book could be viewed as a satire on the errant futurism of our times, from the Extropians (Singularity or Bust!) to the Dystopians. It provides a pretext and a platform for satires of this millennium's chiliastic mania, which features Science standing in for the Messiah. Mutate will raise a whole host of other timely social, political and psychological issues. Among the more important ideas that will get dealt with explicitly or implicitly are: % Freedom Versus Control: Mutate's major theme involves taking the side of freedom against control. Control backfires against the controllers as technological advances make for an overwhelming chaos of information and communications. Underground dialogues, harangues and pranks will explicitly delineate -- and satirize -- the anarchist and quasi-libertarian philosophies popular amongst technophiles. We see that freedom and technology creates wealth. We see also that the wild expansion of technology in a controlled system creates poverty. In the context of freedom of the artist vs. censorship, we see that a completely unfettered adult discourse is necessary and appropriate to this wild and dangerous stage of human evolution... and that attempts to stifle that discourse create an impoverished and laughable Disneyworld reality. % Mutate will dramatize the current sense that we are at the end of history and that our technology is becoming so powerful that it is overwhelming all of the givens of society. % Purists are all the same, whether they're Christian Fundamentalists, anti-sex feminists or meat-is-murder fanatics. They are all of a type. % The lesson of post-modernism is that "art" has been transmuted from something presented by the artist to an audience into an ongoing meta-conversation in which the media artist uses all that has been said up to the present as reference and source for the next addition. % Humans, however wild and ready of imagination, are vulnerable, difficult and faulty, ludicrous and perverse. And as technology accelerates time, we are ever more apt to swing betwixt mania and depression without stopping much in between. We no longer have high, medium and low. We have on/off. % Mutate will look at the psychological impact of a fully saturated media environment, and the ethics and aesthetics of persuasion, seduction and manipulation. % It will sample, channel-surfer style, modern and post-modern philosophies of revolution from Marx to Bakunin to Foucault to Donna Haraway. % Non-traditional views of sexuality and relationship will be pitched, dismissed, and certainly satirized. % Existing philosophies of media including McLuhan, Baudrillard, Derrida etc. will bleed into the R. U. Sirius philosophy of media. This includes the following notions: A fundamental goal of media-age existence is to achieve the kind of fluidity and grace in our media extensions that we have in our bodies and brains. Media is headed towards a place where the creatures and imaginings of our psyche simply come into existence- -here, let's conjure up a robot to hold the menu--within the media. This sort of fluidity is a desirable state. We'll get there much faster if we start eliminating the middleman now--primarily the legalistic and political interpositions, but also the fear of public embarrassment and peer ridicule. Relatedly, media should be considered the appropriate arena for the dangerous games: the turf where the darkest, most dangerous and destructive aspects of the human psyche can act themselves out. This is why we've evolved such a pervasive postpunk media culture. % Goddess religion & ideology will be simultaneously spoofed and embraced. The implicitly masculine thrust of the technophiles will get teased. % Everything is ridiculously funny. As seriously as we takethe Freedom vs. Control battle at the center of this book, we ultimately submit to the self-deflating dnouement.