From strick@osc.versant.com Sat Jun 25 00:58:42 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 AAA04526 for ; Sat, 25 Jun 1994 00:56:13 -0700 Received: by osc.versant.com (TAZmail-0.0) id AA00632; Sat, 25 Jun 94 00:59:26 PDT Received: from versant.com by osc.com (4.1/SMI-4.1) id AA02839; Thu, 23 Jun 94 21:15:58 PDT Received: from well.sf.ca.us by versant.com (4.1/SMI-4.1) id AA06319; Thu, 23 Jun 94 21:14:32 PDT Received: (from strick@localhost) by well.sf.ca.us (8.6.9/8.6.9) id VAA12460 for strick; Thu, 23 Jun 1994 21:11:24 -0700 Date: Thu, 23 Jun 1994 21:11:24 -0700 From: Henry Strickland Message-Id: <199406240411.VAA12460@well.sf.ca.us> To: strick@well.sf.ca.us Subject: 022The_Plot,_Thickening Status: O PLOT IN THE 1990S A MAJOR SPLIT IN THE AMERICAN PUBLIC IS BECOMING OBVIOUS: THERE IS THE NUMERICALLY LARGE MINORITY OF HIP MEDIA FANS THAT KEEPS MONDO VANILLI THE MOST POPULAR SHOW ON TV -- AND THERE IS THE STRANGE BEDFELLOWSHIP OF CONSERVATIVES AND THE POLITICALLY CORRECT. LONG WORKING OUT THEIR INCOMPATIBILITY PROBLEMS, THEY ARE NOW A POWERFUL ALLIANCE TO NARROW WHAT'S CALLED PERSONAL LIFESTYLE CHOICES -- AMONG THEM THE CHOICE TO ENGAGE WITH THE INCREASINGLY RAW AND BIZARRE EXPERIMENTAL MEDIA THAT MV LEADS. THE MOST ACTIVE GROUP IN THE NEW CONSERVATIVE MOVEMENT IS THE HUMAN ANTI- DEGRADATION LEAGUE, WHOSE ANNOUNCED GOAL IS IMPOSING ON ALL MEDIA ITS ANTI-DEGRADATION STANDARDS -- "THIS DEGRADES WOMEN, THIS IS DEGRADING TO CHILDREN. AND THIS IS DEGRADING TO..." HADL'S TAKEOVER OF THE INTERNET, "THE MARCH ON THE INFORMATION HIGHWAY" LEADS TO THE FORMATION OF AN AMERICAN UNDERGROUND, WHICH BECOMES INTERNATIONAL, JOINED BY A VARIETY OF UNDERGROUND NETS OF HACKERS [dedicated technos who play with given tech in novel ways], PHREAKERS [HARDWARE AND PHONE HACKERS], CRYPTOANARCHISTS [A HUMOROUS TERM FOR ANARCHISTS WHO WANT TO CHANGE THE WORLD WITH CRYPTOGRAPHY], AND PEOPLE JUST PLAIN PISSED OFF AT SEEING THE PLANET-WIDE DISCOURSE CENSORED. THE UNDERGROUND CREATES ITSELF WITH MANY FACTIONS AND MANIFESTATIONS. 1994 April 30, 1994: The first MONDO Vanilli album, AMERICA'S NEWEST HITMAKERS, climbs rapidly to number one on the charts. This manic reflection of chaotic times has the effect of making the times even more chaotic. 1995 May 15, 1995: Police Roadblocks on the Information Highway: Censorship enforced on the Internet by the Feds. The Net has been identified by the New Conservatives as the medium of the future. The religious Right, old-style feminists and the politically-correct Left have been pouring millions into mass recruiting for their Human Anti-Degradation League, which pressures their membership to buy modems and SIGN ON. The constituency of the Net changes over a few months to be powerfully pro-censorship. In spite of thousands of vocal nerds, net management and the FCC are pressured to draw up "Anti-Degradation standards" -- which for starts ban all the usual religious and sexual words like damn and pork, along with racially offensive or sexist terms like whitebread and chick -- enforced by Federal spot- monitoring of all messages on the Net. The parallel, pointed out at once by scandalized Libertarians, is the federal highway system: the local governments aren't REQUIRED to set 55 mph speed regulations, but they'd better if they expect to get federal funds. The Net management caves in to unremitting pressure: the Net is no longer gross. May 16, 1995: the CryptoNet. You can't censor what you can't read. Cypherpunks [A GROUP OF HACKERS, CRYPTOANARCHISTS AND CRYPTOGRAPHY FANS CONCERNED WITH PRIVACY AND FREEDOM], disbanded a year ago when they believed they had Won, reconvene. They and Libertarian cryptophreakers and hackers everywhere initiate emergency countermeasures, issuing manifestos and rants, and posting directions for obtaining encryption tech, both software and hardware [AN EXAMPLE OF ENCRYPTION HARDWARE IS THE SCRAMBLER PHONE. SOFTWARE ALLOWS EMAIL TO BE MASHED INTO WHAT LOOKS LIKE RANDOM BITS UNLESS YOU HAVE THE KEY TO UNMASH IT]. Hackers stay up all night and bash code [that is, they program] or dig out their old email encryption gear and fire it up: heh: practically overnight there are several compatible pseudonymous encrypted email systems [USING A PSEUDONYM WITH THE PROPER EMAIL SYSTEM PROTECTS YOUR CARNAL REAL IDENTITY]. Internet traffic starts to look like -- random bits! Except for the religious bits. And the random chitchat. Technical discourse seems to have disappeared from the Net. But what remains is very nice. June, 1995: The MONDO Vanilli World tour uses robots, artificial life, and 3-dimensional visual and audio technology to give attendees a wraparound full-sensory experience of such wonders as a lesbian sm session, the slaughter and cooking of a large pig, a kind of neo-Erhardt Seminar Training (EST) session and other delights. The use of the most advanced illusionist theater technology for an erotic and psychologically challenging audience experience makes the tour a wild hit. The HADL uses the MV world tour as a pretext for extending itself internationally, with very mixed results. Holland and Scandinavia predictably laugh even more than they did at MV, but in most European countries the conservatives recognize their own, and HADL signs Tem up. July 18, 1995: The long-foreseen Federal banning of "unauthorized" encryption software and devices. The battle for the Internet part 3: a special session of Congress passes a Public Safety Encryption Bill to outlaw use of non- regulated encryption, both hardware and software. This hurry- up legislation is HADL-backed, and supported by haters of child-porn GIF files everywhere [GRAPHIC INFORMATION FORMAT == A FORMAT FOR SENDING PICTURES ONLINE]. Mandatory prison terms are suggested for violations of the new bill, which is based on the old laws that ranked cryptography along with munitions as a government prerogative. The attendant new bureaucracy is called the Encryption Regulatory Commission (ERC). July 19, 1995: Nerds' Revenge: instant Underground, CounterNets, Media hacking. The Cypherpunks, world's first completely open conspiracy, becomes a secret anti- organization. Some Extropians [A SILICON VALLEY GROUP OF SCIENTISTS, MATHEMATICIANS, PROGRAMMERS AND WEIRDIES DEVOTED TO COMBATTING ENTROPY WITH EVERYTHING THE HUMAN MIND CAN THROW AT IT, TO EXTEND LIFE AND INTELLIGENCE], some Libertarians, some hacker types decide it's time to create an Underground. They do this by declaring there is one. (An Underground is first of all a semiotic construct.) They post these declarations Internet-wide without interference, since they avoid saying "fuck" or any of those other words. They seem to have a lot of fun with this: they bounce their manifestoes untraceably and sign them with faction names like The Moles [a word that means either a burrowing mammal or a deep-cover spy], their motto -- "We are the blemishes on corporate America" etc. Having declared it into being, most of them join the Underground simply by taking up a secret life based on untraceable communications. Some of them go further: becoming invisible in a data-based culture is something they've worked up to for years. They vanish. (And very happily in most cases -- those who always secretly longed for their own Revolutionary Underground... like the Rave kids who got their own Sixties.) Those who physically Go Under sometimes leave the US to join or create their own TAZes -- temporary autonomous zones -- in parts of the world where they can be free from laws, cops, and the unbearable pressures of niceness. There has been since 1992 a movement toward setting up "offshore" banks and other financial and trade institutions, free ports, etc, out of the reach of governments, particularly the U S. This movement becomes more important as these years wear on. An underground, especially a conceptual one, lives by communications. Most of the ongoing revolutionary discourse takes place (surprise!) on the Internet. Pseudonym talks to pseudonym via offshore remailer systems [USUALLY A BBS THAT SERVES AS AN EMAIL DROP, LIKE A PO BOX, SO THAT RETURN ADDRESSES CAN'T BE TRACED. USING SEVERAL REMAILERS EVERY TIME PRETTY WELL OBLITERATES YOUR TRAIL] with elaborate verification protocols to prove they are who they say they are. (The easy way to verify, with unregistered encryption keys [IF YOU ENCRYPT SOMETHING WITH YOUR PRIVATE KEY AND ONLY YOUR PUBLIC KEY UNSCRAMBLES IT, IT MUST BE FROM YOU. A GOVERNMENT PLAN TO REGISTER -- AND READ -- ALL KEYS IS IN THE WORKS.], is outlawed.) This leads to the reputation net that Cypherpunks foresaw long ago -- Skull vouches for you, so Cruncher thinks you're okay. Disguised messaging -- steganography -- is the easy way to send stuff you don't want read: into a harmless Hallmark greeting GIF you insert an encrypted goody whose presence the Feds won't suspect if your handle is AuntMarge. Pseudonymous posting on the Internet is possible by bouncing posts through remailers -- hello, Finland! But there's a growing feeling that hitchhacking -- hitching a ride on existing media -- needs to be extended. SneakerNet is one microwave relay-hacking crew. Satellite hacking is long overdue: there's a group called Reach! and another called Mooners. Over the course of months a Conelrad network is painfully hacked together in urban areas of North America: a radio-based semi-encrypted independent net -- look: no wires! The conceptual BigNet (all the nets and BBSs) that links the whole Underground together is called the Mycelium. This is typical nerdish humor: Mycelium is the underground net of fibers constituting the real body of a plant that only occasionally sprouts mushrooms. Meanwhile, other Underground hackers with long-standing grudges against broadcast media find new and fascinating ways to subvert it.... INTO THE MATING GAME FLASHES A MICROWAVE-RELAY HACKER IN A SMILEY-FACE MASK READING OFF A SHEET OF PAPER: "AND NOW, A BRIEF MESSAGE FROM YOUR HACKER UNDERGROUND: TODAY'S STUFF YOUR GOVERNMENT DOES NOT WANT YOU TO KNOW." These interruptions are REALLY POPULAR: people sit with their remotes ready to tape them, and trade them back and forth. When hackers crack into and read off long-secret government statistics on real unemployment rates -- greater than 50% in mid-1995 -- the viewing, taping public has a mass breakthrough on the reality front: most of them do little BUT view and tape. The world is the TV screen. The message is the media. And media -- especially with that self-realization -- is getting weirder by the day. Sept. 1995: MONDO Vanilli's TV show As a huge media event, the MONDO Vanilli TV show opens in tandem with a marketing push of the MONDO Vanilli headware, available for $18.95 at 7-11 stores, that allows the viewer to see and hear the program comfortably in 3D. The show is the Monkees forcibly bred with David Cronenberg -- a ridiculous pop band living together and getting silly, yeah, but beneath the surface extremely weird biological and psychic stuff is happening. The show is bizarre and sexual, but not as far Tround the bend as MV's public performances. The program's popularity, however, raises to new volume the shouts for censorship of the TV waves, now supporting over 1,000 channels and generally viewed as being both out of, and beyond control. But if they can control the Internet, thinks both sides, why not television? Oct 1, 1995: The Mutants' Manifesto is posted on the Net. The Underground, already very various, sprouts a few new manifestations: armed persons with serious politics, like the Paxton Quigley Brigade -- "We're Armed, We're Female." [MS QUIGLEY WROTE Armed and Female, DEFENDING FEMALE SELFDEFENSE. SHE TEACHES SHARPSHOOTING.] One branch of the armed wing, heh, call themselves the Mutants, dedicated to "Mutating and Taking Over the World." Their manifesto forms one of the core documents of the book. To media- and Net-hacking activities the Underground has been adding direct actions against financial and law- enforcement operations of the State and the mega-corps. Popular aboveground cyber-writer and humorist St. Jude is called the patron saint of the movement -- the saint of hopeless causes, yes -- for her satires on the goals and methods of the Underground. She denies any direct connection, but she is continuing a longterm lovership with one of the group's perceived "leaders," and helps maintain communications among factions. Oct 3, 1995: Robin Hood Day. Today people all over the United States and Canada woke up either richer or poorer. Bank accounts of less than $30,000 were mysteriously credited $3000. Accounts with more were debited the same amount. There were no public announcements, no manifestoes. Oct 31, 1995: Halloween online. Many pranks, on the Internet and on broadcast TV. Nov - Dec 1995: The X-Xmas campaign. Pirates jam Christmas advertising and traditional tired holiday hoopla, substituting advertising-parody jingles and Tom Lehrer-style carols. A couple of factions start a "Take Back the Solstice" campaign, broadcasting pagan spiral dances with torches, prayers for the safe return of the sun, etc. Immediately other segments of the Underground come back with pagan parodies and Free the Holidays campaigns -- Let My Kwanzaa Go! It's very festive. 1996 Jan 1996: Simone 3Arm does a solo performance tour, which morphs over the course of the tour into a Goddess revival-meeting format. Mass conversions result. Feb 2, 1996: The second MONDO Vanilli record release, LOTSA STUFF, comes with an album's worth of music and a full CD-ROM. This will be a pretext for exploring the evolution of computer-based multimedia technology and its links to other forms of media. LOTSA STUFF gets hacked immediately and is made freely available on line -- which fact is then heavily publicized by MV. MV thus sets a Free-the-Media precedent -- seemingly encouraging phreakers to crack and freely distribute not only its own stuff but any musical or CD-ROM release. Early 1996: How to Mutate and Take Over the World. Pirate media pranking by the Underground has evolved an ongoing shtick called Mutate and Take Over the World: SAMPLE _________________________________________________ ___ THE EVENING NEWS IS FOCUSING ON THE PLIGHT OF THE LEFT-HANDED. SUDDENLY THE SCREEN GOES PLAID. A FIGURE STEPS BEFORE THE CAMERA: THE SMILEY FACEMASK NODS ITS HEAD IN GREETING. HIS/HER VOICE IS ELECTRONICALLY TREATED TO SOUND LIKE MICKEY MOUSE: GOOD EVENING, COMRADES. THIS UNSCHEDULED INSTALLMENT OF MUTATE AND TAKE OVER THE WORLD IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE COMMIE FACTION OF THE INTERNATIONAL ANARCHIST PICNIC, AND BY THE COPYRIGHT LAWS OF SOMEBODY'S GOVERNMENT... BUT NOT MINE. WE ALL NOW UNDERSTAND THAT THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS COPYRIGHTED, PROTECTED, SAFE, TAME DATA. ONCE DATA'S DISTRIBUTED, IT GOES WILD -- FERAL DATA. IT JUST HANGS AROUND BEING FREE AND REPRODUCING ITSELF. SOUND LIKE FUN? BUT FREE DATA CAN BE TRAPPED AND SOLD: YOU CAN SELL WATER TO SOMEBODY IN THE DESERT, RIGHT? TO SOMEBODY WITH NO ACCESS, YOU CAN EVEN SELL DATA. OKAY, SAY YOU'RE A LEFTO-ANARCHIST. YOU WRITE OR PROGRAM SOMETHING TRULY SNARKY AND YOU WANT PEOPLE TO SEE IT, FREE, AND YOU DON'T WANT SOME CORPORATE SLAVEDEALER MAKING MONEY OFF IT. WHAT TO DO? REMEMBER, THE BEST HACK USES THE TOOLS AT HAND. THE COPYRIGHT LAWS OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA WERE DRAWN UP FOR JUST THIS SITCH. YOU ATTACH A LABEL TO IT, SAYING THAT IT'S COPY-PROTECTED BY LAW, THAT IT'S ILLEGAL TO DISTRIBUTE IT AND THEIR ASS CAN BE SUED OFF... UNLESS THEY DISTRIBUTE IT FREE. THIS IS CALLED COPYLEFTING, AN IDEA CREDITED TO RICHARD STALLMAN. IT'S A SMART WEAPON: IT HITS ONLY THE LAW-ABIDING. REMEMBER THIS AND TAKE COMFORT, FRIENDS: THERE ARE MILLIONS OF WAYS TO BE POLITICALLY INCORRECT. THE UNDERGROUND--dropping to a synthesized deep intimate tone-- Loves You. STAY FREE! A FEW SCENES OF A JAPANESE PORN MANGA ANIMATION, ITS TRADITIONAL BLANKED-OUT GENITALS REPLACED BY NEW-MODEL CARS , TREES, AND MAJOR HOME APPLIANCES; SLOW FADE TO BLACK. NORMAL BROADCAST RESUMES. _________________________________________________ _____ Early 1996: U. S. Ranks Worse than Cambodia in Infant Mortality! In this election year, the media starts with the damning statistics early on. While America continues to be the center for media/tech evolution and the capital of the world for entertainment and media, and while a small percentage continue to make money, America is declining into a class hierarchy typical of her former banana colonies to the south. The over-50% real unemployment rate makes for a demoralized formerly middle class and, for the less demoralized, more career opportunities in crime. So, the country that ALREADY (real life, today...) has the greatest percentage of her people imprisoned starts to turn large areas of real estate into prison "annexes." This is indicative of a possible strategy for resolving the unemployment problem without resorting to politically unpopular welfare statism. Meanwhile, mainstream economic statistics still show the economy doing OK in a "slow growth" phase. April 1, 1996: April Fool Extravaganza by pirate media prankers, hours of "Best of" and new releases from all factions. Some of them are wild beyond belief. June 1996: Simone 3Arm becomes the first televangelist for CyborGoddess, with a saturation syndication. She's pitching the religion she just founded, which begins with the Creed, "I believe in CyborGoddess, her Explicit Graphicness. I celebrate Her public rites of the CyborErotic." The religious right goes nuts, of course. Email complaints and rants, carefully unexplicit, swamp the Internet. SAMPLE _________________________________________________ _____ SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE, JUNE 19, 1996, MEDIA WATCH SIMONE OUTSTRIPS HERSELF: THE MEDIA'S RECENTLY HAD A THING FOR SMALLISH BRUNETTES WITH HOT EYES AND A STYLISH WAY WITH THE OUTRAGE. WE HAD MADONNA IN THE 80S AND EARLY 90S, WE'VE GOT SIMONE3ARM TODAY AND MAYBE INTO THE MILLENNIUM. SHE'S GOT THE MEDIA BY THE HOLY VESICLES: SHE'S THE CULT HERO WITH AN ACTUAL CULT. NOTICED THE MARKET SHARE OF THE RELIGIOUS CHANNELS RECENTLY? THAT'S NOT FROM YOUNG BILLY GRAHAM III, GUY. IF YOU DON'T WANT TO BE PREACHED AT, CATCH SIMONE ON MTV AND THE MONDO Vanilli show, BUT IF YOU REALLY WANT TO GET RELIGION, WATCH GODDESS LIVE! ON THE LIVING RELIGION CHANNEL EVERY NIGHT AT MIDNIGHT. TV FIRSTS GUARANTEED ON EVERY HALF-HOUR SEGMENT. IF YOU'RE LUCKY YOU'LL CATCH THE CELEBRATION OF THE SACRAMENT. YOW! ER... BLESSED BE! _________________________________________________ _____ Oct - Nov 1996: HADL does a saturation campaign of Paid Political Messages endorsing those candidates it can be reasonably certain will follow their line. The Human Anti- Degradation League is a powerful lobbying force, and word is they've sewn up the election. One goal of their campaign in this election is to force the reasonably certain to be re-elected Clinton(s) to move against what they perceived as media decadence. They're pounding on this maxim: if, as the prankers have forced everybody to believe, the medium really is the world, this world is messy and corrupt. The HADL lobby is pivotal in the re-election, exacting public campaign promises from all candidates to move on the issue. Oct - Nov 1996: Election media pranking. Wild parodies of all the candidates and their programs, much burlesquing of the HADL Paid Political Messages. Different segments of the Underground have different takes on this, and differing senses of humor, and it's pretty funny. Unofficially it's the most popular phenomenon on TV -- a two-month wonder. As the election comes near the Vote, What For? and the Nobody for President anarchist branches pitch their message with, other political theorists claim, too much effectiveness. Nov. 1996: Bill and Hillary -- er, GORE re-elected by a landslide. Nov: 1996: With online tax filing now fully implemented and being used by the majority of tax-paying civilians, hackers are able to corrupt the data at the point and in the moment of reception. Over 30% of the tax forms are corrupted beyond recognition. This becomes news about three months later and results in yet another sales tax increase. This action continues, implicitly, throughout the "struggle." Nov - Dec 1996: The 2nd annual XXmas and Solstice celebration. Much merriment is made. Constant Ad-slot hacking(see sample immediately below.). This year Overworld broadcasting has its own counterChristmas programming: sometimes it's hard to know which is which. SAMPLE _________________________________________________ _____ note: the reporter who writes this column will be seen to be radicalized over the course of the book: SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE, NOV 29, 1996, MEDIA WATCH THE BALANCE BETWEEN VIEWER ANNOYANCE AND VIEWER DELIGHT -- QUICK, TURN ON THE VCR! -- IS BEING SORTED OUT BY THE PIRATES OF THE AIR. NICELY TIMED AD-SLOT HACKING SEEMS TO BE EASING COMPLAINTS ABOUT INTERRUPTIONS OF SCHEDULED FAVE SHOWS AND FOOTBALL GAMES. SO, INTO OUR TRADITIONAL 3-MINUTE COMMERCIAL BREAKS ARE DROPPED SUCH FAMILIAR ANTI-ADS AS THE ONE-LINER "INSERT YOUR MESSAGE HERE", WITH THE SEVERELY OUT OF FOCUS PORN STUFF HAPPENING IN THE BACKGROUND, AND EVER-MORE-STATE-OF-THE-ART COMPUTER GRAPHICS AD PARODIES. NEW IS A FEATURE TURNING UP IN SPOTS IN THE EVENING NEWS AND THE MONDO Vanilli Show: "THE 3- MINUTE MUTANT." Late Dec 1996: A post-holiday HADL campaign on cleaning up broadcasting and squashing the pirates. Dec. 1996: The Disinformation Highway. The hardcore intruders [HACKERS WHO LIKE TO BREAK INTO SYSTEMS.] in the Underground get busy, striking at U S Government targets. One group hacks communiqus at the highest levels of the State Department and the Pentagon, breaking into allegedly hack-proof private communications networks and altering or substituting, working without publicity in hopes the changes will pass unnoticed.. Others -- or maybe the same ones, who knows? -- hit the Internet, inserting minor but time-wasting glitches in the subnetworks, even unto tweaking the PCs of home users hanging off the Net. (This generates a lot of interfactional static, some sections cherishing free communications and some just wanting to DESTROY.) Worse, oh much worse, using insider knowledge of the dynamics of interaction within selected public and private organizations (HADL affiliates and the anti-encryption agencies are only the obvious targets), they are able to sow discord and confusion within them, avoiding suspicion by mimicking the communiqus of individuals with poor face-to-face communications skills and/or with already bad interpersonal relationships. This results in severe policy mis-steps, intra- organizational warfare and job loss and, finally, a major foreign policy dbacle as U. S. troops are sent to Palestine to protect Palestinians from a minor Israeli military incursion, only to have them returned home before their arrival. This strategy of interception and replacement of communications to cause confusion becomes known as "Interpersonal Appropriation." 1997 Feb. 1997: The War Against Violence and Porn. In 1997 a bi-partisan alliance in Congress announces the War. All the media are heavily pressured to self-censor for a G-Rated [Suitable for All Audiences] content. If it's not fit for a five-yr- old it's not suitable for YOU. The response of the major networks and the print media is swift: things get Nicer than before, very rapidly. There's no censorship like self-censorship; it's moving toward a 50s Disney world on all channels -- except for the continuing media hacking from the Underground, which is perceived by the authorities as politically subversive as well as politically incorrect. There is a lot of pressure to find the "leaders" and put them away. A large part of the War Against V&P budget goes toward crushing the Underground. March 1997: The media get sweeter and sweeter. Meanwhile, the still hot MONDO Vanilli releases VANILLI DECADENCE and co-sponsors the parody "Decadent Art" show, with the Third Reich parody group, NSDAP (New School of Design Art and Performance). The show is slated to run in Los Angeles for ninety days, and includes the latest in computer wearables [COMPUTERS AND GEAR THAT, YES, CAN BE WORN.] and 3-Dimensional sensory saturation staging, the new human- like robots, and pushes to the absolute edge the physical torture of an audience using light and sound. As well as nightly live performances by MONDO Vanilli, the "Decadent Art" show features all of the leading "shock" artists of the time. It is shut down after one week and all participants are threatened with arrest. March 1997: The Underground starts a heavy pirate- publicity campaign to organize from and within the jails. It also uses the strategy of Interpersonal Appropriation in attacks on the ERC (Encryption Regulatory Commission), making great chaos in this barely formed organization. Deeply satisfied with being able to read/listen to the personal communications of the leading political enforcers of decency -- which reveals tremendous corruption and hypocrisy -- portions of the Underground turn a great deal of attention to all forms of surveillance, including video surveillaince (they hack spy satellites to their own use), and old-fashioned shadowing. Revelatory materials are widely distributed over pirated media and the Nets. The tweaked stuff is hilarious, but the actual liberated stuff is only mildly convincing, given the ability of even modestly technically sophisticated individuals to alter or even create realistic-seeming activity in any medium. Nevertheless, the sexual peccadilloes, drug habits etc of the "Moral Elite" becomes a primary source of hilarity on all the media. April 1, 1997: The 2nd April Fool Extravaganza. Anti- ads for this event have been blitzing the real ads for weeks, promising a media breakthrough, the most surprising ever: "Revealed! The Shocking Future Of Media!" April 1 evening programming draws the heaviest viewer share ever. Surprise: for the 24 hours following, ONLY REGULARLY SCHEDULED BROADCASTS. It's pretty shocking, all right. Viewers get the point. This is what life would be like if the Overworld gets its way. April 3, 1997: The Information Liberation Front -- "Information Longs to be Free" -- is raided in Mountain View, CA. An armed standoff lasting several hours ends when the Front -- one computer scientist -- cheerfully gives himself up. He passes out copies of the Information Liberation Front manifesto to the arresting officers and the gathered media, and quips to the Press that he's looking forward to jail, because he's missed all his friends. The ILF guy [who actually exists, with all sorts of name changes to protect him] will be an ongoing character: he's a gun nut, a right-Libertarian, (Heinlein tendency), and very inventive, combative and funny. We'll see his view of the prison Underground. April 8, 1997: Biotechnology Produces AIDS Counter- Virus. The AIDS virus is tamed, not destroyed, but AIDS now means only a minor susceptibility to disease and infection. The public sexual puritanism remains in place, which only makes the secretive but massive transgressions more delicious. May 1997: Pirate advertisements. Amenities of the Underground are pitched online and in ad-slot hacking on TV. Online and offshore banks are explained and pitched. Real and virtual TAZes (Temporary Autonomous Zones) are hawked with resort style promos -- "Belgian New Guinea. Where the balmy" etc. Some really ambitious hackers blitz the home shopping channels with underground "products," most of them fictional and scandalous. Parodic public broadcasting campaigns ask for viewer support for real, virtual, or completely fictional underground institutions. Promo spots like: "The few, the happy. Be all that you can be, in the Underground!" With contact information for newby-level [NEWCOMER] hookups with the Net. This is very gutsy. It indicates a move toward the Open Secret model for action. [THE NOTION THAT THERE IS NO WAY OF CRACKING A REVOLUTIONARY ORGANIZATION THAT HAS NOTHING TO HIDE AND ACCEPTS EVERYONE WHO WANTS TO JOIN.] June 1997: MONDO Vanilli, along with other media- oriented businesses finds itself in a sudden economic crunch -- because information that previous longed to be free, now is. Media has been "liberated" by the hacking that MV helped foster as its own media prank. Media in general is in chaos, but MV has its own special problems. Sponsors are leery of being hacked in the MV TV show slots, which are primo targets. MV becomes a media arm of Sony/Paramount and is given its own TV network with some unreal estate on the Internet to sweeten the deal. It becomes one of the many groups programming its own 3D interactive VR game. As usual, the bizarre content causes consternation, and subsequent fat profits. July 9, 1997: The unexpected retirement of Bill (and perforce, Hillary Rodman) Clinton as the result of a scandal so bizarre (we assume), so raw (we think) that no media were able to even hint at its nature under the new Standards of Decency -- "All the News that's Correct to Print." July 10, 1997: The succession of Al and Tipper and the appointment of Catherine McKinnon Masson as vice-President initiates full industrial-strength New Puritanism. Jesse Helms is appointed by the new administration to head the newly created Bureau of Media Standards (BMS). Noted technophobe and anti-biotech fanatic Jeremy Rifkin is appointed Secretary of the Interior. Much rejoicing from oldstyle feminists and fundamentalists in the usual flavors: Christians, Jews, Moslems, New Agers, Luddite-Revivalists et al. Correct Politicians become dominant in both parties. August 10 -13, 1997: Hacking at the End of the Universe V. Members of the American Underground openly attend a European hackers convention sponsored by Hac-Tic outside Amsterdam. Strategies for online bankers, schemes for digital cash -- an ongoingly difficult problem -- offshore hacking, and other strategies are discussed... It's an interesting event, because any face2face meating [NERD JARGON FOR ACTUALLY NONVIRTUALLY BEING WITH SOMEONE ELSE.] is possibly dangerous. Being there in one's seizable body, even in Holland... One can be fearless only online, with the proper precautions, right? Sept. 1997: Sectors of the Underground start using both "Interpersonal Appropriation" tactics and the corruption of data to undermine computer and media megacorporations, particularly 3PO, Apple-Nintendo, Madonna Inc, Paramount- Sony, and Snapple-Disney Virtuality. With underground sympathizers now making up a large minority of the society, an underground sect organizes a highly successful work-sabotage campaign which results in a season of nearly universal releases of faulty software and hardware. This causes tremendous snafus for Undergrounders themselves, particularly hackers, prankers, and extropian futurists dependent on fully functional unsabotaged tech. There is bitter infighting, with hardcore technophiles on one side vs. the punker No-Futurists, the teen lone-marauder types, and PROCESSED WORLDers [A ZINE, Processed World PUT OUT BY A SITUATIONIST-INFLUENCED GROUP THAT URGES DATA-ENTRY SLAVES, THE LOWEST IN THE HIERARCHY, TO RISE UP AND OOPS! SPILL SWEETENED COFFEE INTO THE KEYBOARD] , queasily allied on the other. Nov 1997: the War Against the Unrated, The War Against Meat, the War Against This and That Tipper's 1997 State-of-the-Union Speech: The Caring Society. She calls for bi-partisan support for the outlawing of things known to the Surgeon General to be bad for the body such as unsafe Sex and most Drugs, and those known to the Attorney General to be bad for the spirit, such as almost all forms of post-punk Rock'n'Roll and immoral happenings on broadcast TV. Before Congress breaks session for the winter holidays in 1997-1998, alcohol can be issued only by state liquor stores countrywide, and tobacco is contraband as an addictive substance. Some soreheads join the Underground, where smokers and nonsmokers bicker bitterly. As the repression rolls on, the FDA requires a new warning label on non-veg foodstuffs -- "The Surgeon General has determined that eating meat may be hazardous to your health, and meat-eating contributes to the injury and death of other sentient beings" -- and meat is made outright illegal in some municipalities -- the so-called Bluegreen Laws. There's a campaign by HADL to extend don't ask-don't tell to all sexual orientations, and to make unmarried sex between anybody definable as rape without notarized signed contracts. Carnivores and people of all the genders join the Underground. Such paradrugs as vitamin and amino supplements, many over-the-counter meds (aspirin is a powerful anticoagulant, and causes Rye Syndrome!), and of course whole constellations of tools for tinkering with one's metabolism and attitude are made illegal without a prescription and a user's manual. Those ultra-suburban segments of the Libertarian population that have not yet joined the Underground do so now. A crackdown on genetic engineering and research, and an end to nanotech [ITTYBITTY TECH: MACHINES A COUPLE OF MOLECULES ACROSS MAKE COMPLICATED THINGS FROM ATOMS AT HAND] appropriations forces biotechnologists and nanotechnologists and the last few of the Extropians underground, with Eric Drexler identified as their leader. People with friends who are supercats and pygmy elephants join the Underground too, pre-emptively. Song lyrics, and in fact all publicly available art and entertainment, are now required to be submitted to the newly- formed Jesse Helms committee for approval. Famous musicians and some of the most chic artists issue press statements and join the Underground in herds. Artists and musicians who are not famous pass out pamphlets or xeroxed position papers, and do likewise. (Ironically, since live performance obviously skips free of this approval process, club nightlife returns). The state of women's fashion in this country has never been duller. MOST fashion degrades women, it turns out. Many American designers defect to Eastern Europe, which is becoming the center for trendy new design of all kinds. Many other chic persons consider buying modems and joining the Underground. Late Nov 1997: Sub Rosa signs on. She irregularly hacks into MTV. A combination of Tokyo Rose and PUMP UP THE VOLUME, she intersperses unknown bands' videos with blatant Underground agitprop. She's an immediate hit. Dec 1997: the antiantichristmas campaign. The pirates jam themselves, interrupting scheduled broadcasts to read brief gloomy messages: THIS YEAR'S ANTIHOLIDAY CELEBRATION HAS BEEN CANCELED DUE TO GOVERNMENT REPRESSION. HAVE A NICE LIFE. MER-RY CHRISTMAS! 1998 Jan 1998: In response to the new legal pressures, to keep its comfortable status MONDO Vanilli goes lite, transforming itself into a deeply ironic, yet barely perceptable, parody of the most treacly kind of publically approved programming. Nevertheless, rumors of connections with the Underground persist. Feb - April 1998: The War Against the Wars Against. After a bad winter of increasing repression, many different sections of the Underground fight back: nerds, performance artists, genesplicers, guitarists and nicotine addicts in withdrawal take to the streets. In some areas -- Austin, Minneapolis, Seattle, New Orleans, Boston, and of course Berkeley and San Francisco -- there are armed uprisings. [This will be massively enlarged upon: this is a fun section. Everybody I know wants to pick up the gun. Good luck.] Everywhere there is street hacking: unofficial parades, stripping events, public sex. Lots of rubber (mostly) bullets from the cops, and stunners on all sides. The Spring festivities run through the summer. April 1, 1998: The day the banks stood still. An unofficial bank holiday. No transactions transacted in North America and Europe. All systems down. At 9 AM April 2, Greenwich Time, everything is back to normal. Sure. International financial structures are shellshocked. The Underground has given them a demonstration they can't fire rubber bullets at. Massive investigations follow. The hackers left no audit trails. June 1998: Violent police action against an illegal Ghetto Rage music concert sets off inner-urban rioting coast to coast. Much shooting and bloodshed throughout the summer. HappyNews mainstream media can no longer refuse to report the news, and the shocking reality comes through... Social Overview: It is noted that the murder rate in major urban areas has reached upwards of 500 killings per day. Thrill kill cults and gangs issue their own manifestos... they want to be understood. Many claim an allegiance to the underground and are extraordinarily eloquent in their ideological justifications. Some modern primitivist subcultures have turned to cannibalism and one group of pranksters are noted for convincing the completely tattooed, pierced, and otherwise physically-altered that frontal lobotomies are the next cool thing. Prostitutes, many in number since this is one of the few forms of money- making work still extant, are often violently feminist post- riotgrrrrrls. As a result, a demographic slice of the post- industrial economy, including captains of industry, are now secretly eunuchs. This continues because it gets no publicity -- guess why. With the sophisticated robotics replacing nearly all industrial workers, and with all forms of information and media available online, the only kinds of work left, outside of a few managers, are physical services such as home delivery, massage, restauranting etc. That and protection. The few enclaves of the rich are protected by heavily armed hired toughs. "Escort services" advertise discreetly: bonded bodyguards. Whatever gets you through the parking lot. The riots die down with arrests and the cooling of summer into fall. Did I hear somebody say "Cyberpunk?" Oct. 1998: Medical Science Announces New Artificial Liver, which is puffed as a great advance over the real thing, much better at detoxing the environmental, heh, poisons. The rich, both legitimate and Underground elite, rush to have their livers replaced. The economy gets a boost, and alcoholics and stimulant abusers celebrate wildly. 1999 Working together; artists, cypherpunks, hackers, media hackers, et al. keep up a barrage of assaults on the mainstream society in all its aspects. Illegal TV shows and computer networks are known to be more popular than those that are government approved, although this is widely denied. It's become a clich that the Underground sector of the economy is now bigger than what's now called even in polite circles the Overworld or Overground. There's no way this can be proved, since the border between the two -- the ground? -- is muddy. The Under overlaps into the Over by parasitising it in various ways -- maintaining a steady inflation by intercepting and altering Federal Reserve currency regulation, for example, and by siphoning off perceived fatcat money reserves. Also the intra-Underground economy isn't directly quantifiable: they're using a polymorphous free money system with a variety of means of exchange, including straight-out barter. Jan: 1999: Farming is completely dead, replaced by biotechnologically-produced self-replicating food stuffs. In spite of severe restrictions from Interior Secretary Rifkin, new, tasty and peculiar forms of healthy foods are cheap and available... but nothing quite as satisfying as a juicy steak or a roast duck, which one can eat only in private, and only after negotiating with very nasty Black Market types. Admissions of personal carnivorous habits meets with the kind of hostility previously reserved for smokers and fur wearers. Feb 1999: An Underground Cryonics lab, operated out of a prison, is busted and thousands of the "Undead" are killed, finally. March 1999: The Return of Simone 3Arm and her flock from her island retreat, and the fact that they're not bothered by the forces of repression during a 3 month tour, is indicative of the level of chaos and disrepair that this society has devolved to. Her appearance on the treacly and by now not- terribly-popular MONDO Vanilli show does raise some consternation however. April 1999: Imprisoned Extropian technophiles unveil a series of new developments including: implants capable of manipulating aspects of brain chemistry at will, an injection that will cause people to grow new skin in any color desired, and a wing-sprouting program that allows prisoners to take to the air, ignoring the prison walls. Also, an artificial liver that's BETTER than theirs. June 1999: MONDO Vanilli announces its independence from Paramount/Sony and markets a new product called Second Skin. This skin-based total immersion experience is sensation- rather than content-based, and though it's known to be sinfully pleasurable in much the same way that good sex and body drugs are, it is not perceived as needing to be censored or controlled since no sex or drug or communication is involved. A second refinement will allow wearers to experience content-based illusions from their own unconscious, in a waking state similar to lucid dreaming. Scrappi DChamp is now the CEO of MV and he lately seems to be doing a Howard Hughes, hiding behind barbed-wired in his Hawaiian estate, and not talking to anyone for weeks at a time. The rumors that he has his artificial liver removed and "disinfected" in a gross and bloody daily ritual, however, are false. Scrappi is actually one of the few people who won't get with the improved techno-liver. July 9 - 16 1999: Financial market players Gracie and Zarkov, taking advantage of increased chaos in the global mainstream financial markets, make the equivalent of the Government's yearly budget in a week by bouncing money around the globe. A biologically- based supercomputer using chaos and complexity theory allows them to do split-nanosecond trading exponentially increasing value. They stop when their wealth is equal to the US Government's. The world economy goes nuts and G & Z contribute generously to offshore and Underground financial systems. Oct. 1999: The Underground is now so rich that the wealth starts to spread to the huge underclass and things on the street mellow a little. On the heels of the Simone 3Arm tour, people start to gingerly test the waters regarding freedom of communications. Seeking to regain some momentum, the mainstream internet gives Simone3Arm some unreal estate. This territory becomes a major attractor for pomo primitives and other hipsters -- the most chic virtual TAZ of this time. Jan.-Nov. 2000: The Sirius bid for the Presidency R. U.--who has been playing it relatively straight, but is still the weirdest thing outside the Underground, announces his candidacy for the Presidency. Starting off in a prankish and playful stance, he will eventually arrives at radical anti- Overworld positions and receive Underground support. Mar 2000: Liberalism not spoken here With candidate R. U. Sirius getting alot of support from the vast numbers of extremely alienated sub-culture and underclass types, the mainstream candidates--Democrats: Al & Tipper Gore, Republicans: Senator Oliver North and Senator Arnold Schwartzenneger and perenials Ross Perot and Jerry Brown-- flash conservative again, complaining about the tendency towards a new permissiveness in media. The incumbent Gore's lead a new charge against decadent media, such as Simone 3Arm's Internet bbs, and against the underground in general. Several prisons that have formed the core of the Underground, and that were left more or less alone during the non-election years. are raided. Much death and violence ensues. The Underground is upset. April 20, 2000: Multiple Singularities. [THE SINGULARITY IS A CONCEPT INVENTED BY SCIENCEFICTION WRITER VERNOR VINGE: EVER MORE RAPID TECHNOLOGICAL EVOLUTION BROUGHT THE PLANETARY CULTURE TO THE POINT WHERE EVERYONE MYSTERIOUSLY VANISHED.] The Washington Post breaks a story that has been covered up for years: There have been local breakouts of the Singularity in nanotech research. These incidents have severely impeded advances in nanotech, keeping it always a month or more behind the point where the truly innovative researcher and his/her lab vanishes in a flash of pure data. As of March of this year, only nanotech second-stringers are left unsingulared, and science-watch reporters hint that nanotech research may be a self-limiting phenomenon. May 2000: R U Mutates for real. After a few lame public appearances, R. U. Sirius is dragged by St. Jude to an underground lab where he is given a complete upgrade. Just completed data storage technology biochips are inserted into his brain, he is given a complete physical makeover including the latest in plastic surgery and replaceable parts. Using advanced mind control techniques, he is completely brainwashed, Manchurian Candidate style, by undergrounders. And a bacterial phage programs him for perpetual vasopressin release so that he can never sleep and is always alert. Throughout the spring and summer, he is a most impressive candidate and by September 1, he is polling better than 50%. The nearest contenders, the Gores, are at 25%. September 9 2000: Public Freakout Overamped from vasopressin, having peculiar internal and external physiological effects from the confluence of physical changes, R. U. has a psychotic break during the first of the official Presidential debates. When he claims to have a palm- top nuclear bomb in his left coat pocket set to go off and, at that exact moment huge red-green boils pop out on his face, the debate is canceled and he's led off by the Secret Service for questioning. Nov 10, 2000: R. U. Sirius' attempt to spring back to life after the debate debacle, claiming exhaustion and food poisoning, doesn't succeed. The Gores are once again elected in a landslide victory. 2001 Feb 2001: R. U. Sirius busted for drugs, pornography, and steak with french fries. Scrappi DChamp announces that MONDO Vanilli is disbanded and that he will concentrate on improved 3rd and 4th versions of "Second Skin." However, he also releases a pre-digital, totally retro, all-instrumental solo album of ambient sixties style surf music called TOO STUPID FOR WORDS. It fills a yes, much-needed void and becomes extremely popular. Sept 2001: The underground cracks the finances of the empire and the multinational system, and through the manipulation of stocks, futures, and money itself is able to claim virtual ownership of everything. At the same time, the nanotech breakthrough occurs and becomes usable. After a few trivial riots and shoot-em-ups, the system is overwhelmed. Sirius and St. Jude are hailed as avatars but more in humorous nostalgia. Oct 31, 2001: The breakout of the pink goo. [THE NIGHTMARE OF THE NANOPEOPLE IS A "BREAKOUT" THAT COVERS THE EARTH WITH SELF-REPLICATING MICROMACHINES: THE GREY GOO.] A Halloween prank by a teenage nanotech hacker covers Provo, Utah in a foot-deep pink carpet of self-replicating human sex pheromones, which creeps outward from the computer center at BYU. Brigham Young students and townies roll around in the pink goo like kids, while real kids, completely immune, say "EWWW, GROSS" and go back to the Nintendo. Horrible orgies in ensue. The final cleanup takes weeks, with industrial vacuum cleaners wielded by boyscouts in gasmasks, (who are afterward quarantined, AND chaperoned.) etc. Copycat crimes sweep the globe, usually customized like Provo to hit at local vulnerabilities. Ded. 25, 2001: An all-retro, all-acoustic MONDO Vanilli reunion performance broadcast worldwide is the catalyst for tremendous pagan public celebrations, but the festivities are dampened when at the end of the program Simone 3Arm announces that they may think it's cool that now retro is avant-garde, but the whole IDEA of avant-garde is cluelessly pass, she's bored with everything but cooking, and wants only to launch her own gourmet chef TV program in the tradition of her childhood hero, Julia Childs. AFTERTHOUGHT: WORLD ENDS April 3 - May 20, 2002: The world ends. A nanotech manufacturing program used in all outlets of the multinational General Fields Nabisco has a bug, which is fixed with a bad fix, which leads to other blunders. Clouds seeded by a fire in a Mrs General factory leads to world-wide typhoons of self- replicating nano-edibles. Ultimately, the planet is smothered with Key Lime pie filling.