==Phrack Inc.== Volume 0x0b, Issue 0x3e, Phile #0x10 of 0x10 |=-----------------------------------------------------------------------=| |=--------------------=[ W O R L D N E W S ]=--------------------------=| |=-----------------------------------------------------------------------=| 1 - Break, Memory, by Richard Thieme 2 - The Geometry of Near, by Richard Thieme 3 - The Feasibility of Anarchy in America, by Anthony *** QUICK NEWS quiCK NEWS QUICK NEWS QUICK NEWS QUICK NEWS QUICK NEWS *** - Windows source code leaked http://ww.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/2/15/71552/7795 http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,62282,00.html - grsecurity 'Spender' makes fun of OpenBSD and Mac OS X http://seclists.org/lists/fulldisclosure/2004/Jun/0647.html - These guys have all the books about terrorist/anarchy/combat/... http://www.paladin-press.com - 29A releases first worm that spreads via mobile network http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/epoc.cabir.html |=-----------------------------------------------------------------------=| |=-----------------------------------------------------------------------=| |=-----------------------------------------------------------------------=| Break, Memory By Richard Thieme The Evolution of the Problem The problem was not that people couldn't remember; the problem was that people couldn't forget. As far back as the 20th century, we realized that socio-historical problems were best handled on a macro level. It was inefficient to work on individuals who were, after all, nothing but birds in digital cages. Move the cage, move the birds. The challenge was to build the cage big enough to create an illusion of freedom in flight but small enough to be moved easily. When long-term collective memory became a problem in the 21st century, it wound up on my desktop. There had always been a potential for individuals to connect the dots and cause a contextual shift. We managed the collective as best we could with Chomsky Chutes but an event could break out randomly at any time like a bubble bursting. As much as we surveil the social landscape with sensors and datamine for deep patterns, we can't catch everything. It's all sensors and statistics, after all, which have limits. If a phenomenon gets sticky or achieves critical mass, it can explode through any interface, even create the interface it needs at the moment of explosion. That can gum up the works. Remembering and forgetting changed after writing was invented. The ones that remembered best had always won. Writing shifted the advantage from those who knew to those who knew how to find what was known. Electronic communication shifted the advantage once again to those who knew what they didn't need to know but knew how to get it when they did. In the twentieth century advances in pharmacology and genetic engineering increased longevity dramatically and at the same time meaningful distinctions between backward and forward societies disappeared so far as health care was concerned. The population exploded everywhere simultaneously. People who had retired in their sixties could look forward to sixty or seventy more years of healthful living. As usual, the anticipated problems - overcrowding, scarce water and food, employment for those who wanted it - were not the big issues. Crowding was managed by staggered living, generating niches in many multiples of what used to be daylight single-sided life. Life became double- sided, then triple-sided, and so on. Like early memory storage devices that packed magnetic media inside other media, squeezing them into every bit of available space, we designed multiple niches in society that allowed people to live next to one another in densely packed communities without even noticing their neighbors. Oh, people were vaguely aware that thousands of others were on the streets or in stadiums, but they might as well have been simulants for all the difference they made. We call this the Second Neolithic, the emergence of specialization at the next level squared. The antisocial challenges posed by hackers who "flipped" through niches for weeks at a time, staying awake on Perkup, or criminals exploiting flaws inevitably present in any new system, were anticipated and handled using risk management algorithms. In short, multisided life works. Genetic engineering provided plenty of food and water. Binderhoff Day commemorates the day that water was recycled from sewage using the Binderhoff Method. A body barely relinquishes its liquid before it's back in a glass in its hand. As to food, the management of fads enables us to play musical chairs with agri-resources, smoothing the distribution curve. Lastly, people are easy to keep busy. Serial careers, marriages and identities have been pretty much standard since the twentieth century. Trends in that direction continued at incremental rather than tipping-point levels. We knew within statistical limits when too many transitions would cause a problem, jamming intersections as it were with too many vehicles, so we licensed relationships, work-terms, and personal reinvention using traffic management algorithms to control the social flow. By the twenty-first century, everybody's needs were met. Ninety-eight per cent of everything bought and sold was just plain made up. Once we started a fad, it tended to stay in motion, generating its own momentum. People spent much of their time exchanging goods and services that an objective observer might have thought useless or unnecessary, but of course, there was no such thing as an objective observer. Objectivity requires distance, historical perspective, exactly what is lacking. Every product or service introduced into the marketplace drags in its wake an army of workers to manufacture it, support it, or clean up after it which swells the stream until it becomes a river. All of those rivers flow into the sea but the sea is never full. Fantasy baseball is a good example. It had long been noticed that baseball itself, once the sport became digitized, was a simulation. Team names were made up for as many teams as the population would watch. Players for those teams were swapped back and forth so the team name was obviously arbitrary, requiring the projection of a "team gestalt" from loyal fans pretending not to notice that they booed players they had cheered as heroes the year before. Even when fans were physically present at games, the experience was mediated through digital filters; one watched or listened to digital simulations instead of the game itself, which existed increasingly on the edges of the field of perception. Then the baseball strike of 2012 triggered the Great Realization. The strike was on for forty-two days before anyone noticed the absence of flesh-and-blood players because the owners substituted players made of pixels. Game Boys created game boys. Fantasy baseball had invented itself in recognition that fans might as well swap virtual players and make up teams too but the G.R. took it to the next level. After the strike, Double Fantasy Baseball became an industry, nested like a Russian doll inside Original Fantasy Baseball. Leagues of fantasy players were swapped in meta-leagues of fantasy players. Then Triple Fantasy Baseball . Quadruple Fantasy Baseball . and now the fad is Twelves in baseball football and whack-it-ball and I understand that Lucky Thirteens is on the drawing boards, bigger and better than any of its predecessors. So no, there is no shortage of arbitrary activities or useless goods. EBay was the prototype of the future, turning the world into one gigantic swap meet. If we need a police action or a new professional sport to bleed off excess hostility or rebalance the body politic, we make it up. The Hump in the Bell Curve as we call the eighty per cent that buy and sell just about everything swim blissfully in the currents of make-believe digital rivers, all unassuming. They call it the Pursuit of Happiness. And hey - who are we to argue? The memory-longevity problem came as usual completely out of fantasy left field. People were living three, four, five generations, as we used to count generations, and vividly recalled the events of their personal histories. Pharmacological assists and genetic enhancement made the problem worse by quickening recall and ending dementia and Alzheimer's. I don't mean that every single person remembered every single thing but the Hump as a whole had pretty good recall of its collective history and that's what mattered. Peer-to-peer communication means one-knows-everyone-knows and that created problems for society in general and - as a Master of Society - that makes it my business. My name is Horicon Walsh, if you hadn't guessed, and I lead the team that designs the protocols of society. I am the man behind the Master. I am the Master behind the Plan. The Philosophical Basis of the Problem The philosophical touchstone of our efforts was defined in nineteenth century America. The only question that matters is, What good is it? Questions like, what is its nature? what is its end? are irrelevant. Take manic depression, for example. Four per cent of the naturally occurring population were manic depressive in the late twentieth century. The pharmacological fix applied to the anxious or depressive one-third of the Hump attempted to maintain a steady internal state, not too high and not too low. That standard of equilibrium was accepted without question as a benchmark for fixing manic depression. Once we got the chemistry right, the people who had swung between killing themselves and weeks of incredibly productive, often genius-level activity were tamped down in the bowl, as it were, their glowing embers a mere reflection of the fire that had once burned so brightly. Evolution, in other words, had gotten it right because their good days - viewed from the top of the tent - made up for their bad days. Losing a few to suicide was no more consequential than a few soccer fans getting trampled. Believing that the Golden Mean worked on the individual as well as the macro level, we got it all wrong. That sort of mistake, fixing things according to unexamined assumptions, happened all the time when we started tweaking things. Too many dumb but athletic children spoiled the broth. Too many waddling bespectacled geeks made it too acrid. Too many willowy beauties made it too salty. Peaks and valleys, that's what we call the first half of the 21st century, as we let people design their own progeny. The feedback loops inside society kind of worked - we didn't kill ourselves - but clearly we needed to be more aware. Regulation was obviously necessary and subsequently all genetic alteration and pharmacological enhancements were cross-referenced in a matrix calibrated to the happiness of the Hump. Executing the Plan to make it all work was our responsibility, a charge that the ten per cent of us called Masters gladly accepted. The ten per cent destined to be dregs, spending their lives picking through dumpsters and arguing loudly with themselves in loopy monologues, serve as grim reminders of what humanity would be without our enlightened guidance. That's the context in which it became clear that everybody remembering everything was a problem. The Nostalgia Riots of Greater Florida were only a symptom. The Nostalgia Riots Here you had the fat tip of a long peninsular state packed like a water balloon with millions of people well into their hundreds. One third of the population was 150 or older by 2175. Some remembered sixteen major wars and dozens of skirmishes and police actions. Some had lived through forty-six recessions and recoveries. Some had lived through so many elections they could have written the scripts, that's how bad it was. Their thoughtful reflection, nuanced perspective, and appropriate skepticism were a blight on a well-managed global free-market democracy. They did not get depressed - pharmies in the food and water made sure of that - but they sure acted like depressed people even if they didn't feel like it. And depressed people tend to get angry. West Floridians lined benches from Key West through Tampa Bay all the way to the Panhandle. The view from satellites when they lighted matches one night in midwinter to demonstrate their power shows an unbroken arc along the edge of the water like a second beach beside the darker beach. All day every day they sat there remembering, comparing notes, measuring what was happening now by what had happened before. They put together pieces of the historical puzzle the way people used to do crosswords and we had to work overtime to stay a step ahead. The long view of the Elder Sub- Hump undermined satisfaction with the present. They preferred a different, less helpful way of looking at things. When the drums of the Department of System Integration, formerly the Managed Affairs and Perception Office, began to beat loudly to rouse the population of our crowded earth to a fury against the revolutionary Martian colonists who shot their resupplies into space rather than pay taxes to the earth, we thought we would have the support of the Elder Sub-Hump. Instead they pushed the drumming into the background and recalled through numerous conversations the details of past conflicts, creating a memory net that destabilized the official Net. Their case for why our effort was doomed was air-tight, but that wasn't the problem. We didn't mind the truth being out there so long as no one connected it to the present. The problem was that so many people knew it because the Elder Sub-Hump wouldn't shut up. That created a precedent and the precedent was the problem. Long-term memory, we realized, was subversive of the body politic. Where had we gotten off course? We had led the culture to skew toward youth because youth have no memory in essence, no context for judging anything. Their righteousness is in proportion to their ignorance, as it should be. But the Elder Sub-Hump skewed that skew. We launched a campaign against the seditious seniors. Because there were so many of them, we had to use ridicule. The three legs of the stool of cover and deception operations are illusion, misdirection, and ridicule, but the greatest of these is ridicule. When the enemy is in plain sight, you have to make him look absurd so everything he says is discredited. The UFO Campaign of the twentieth century is the textbook example of that strategy. You had fighter pilots, commercial pilots, credible citizens all reporting the same thing from all over the world, their reports agreeing over many decades in the small details. So ordinary citizens were subjected to ridicule. The use of government owned and influenced media like newspapers (including agency-owned-and-operated tabloids) and television networks made people afraid to say what they saw. They came to disbelieve their own eyes so the phenomena could hide in plain sight. Pretty soon no one saw it. Even people burned by close encounters refused to believe in their own experience and accepted official explanations. We did everything possible to make old people look ridiculous. Subtle images of drooling fools were inserted into news stories, short features showed ancients playing inanely with their pets, the testimony of confused seniors was routinely dismissed in courts of law. Our trump card - entertainment - celebrated youth and its lack of perspective, extolling the beauty of young muscular bodies in contrast with sagging-skin bags of bones who paused too long before they spoke. We turned the book industry inside out so the little bit that people did know was ever more superficial. The standard for excellence in publishing became an absence of meaningful text, massive amounts of white space, and large fonts. Originality dimmed, and pretty soon the only books that sold well were mini-books of aphorisms promulgated by pseudo-gurus each in his or her self-generated niche. Slowly the cognitive functioning of the Hump degraded until abstract or creative thought became marks of the wacky, the outcast, and the impotent. Then the unexpected happened, as it always will. Despite our efforts, the Nostalgia Riots broke out one hot and steamy summer day. Govvies moved on South Florida with happy gas, trying to turn the rampaging populace into one big smiley face, but the seniors went berserk before the gas - on top of pills, mind you, chemicals in the water, and soporific stories in the media - took effect. They tore up benches from the Everglades to Tampa/St. Pete and made bonfires that made the forest fires of '64 look like fireflies. They smashed store windows, burned hovers, and looted amusement parks along the Hundred-Mile-Boardwalk. Although the Youthful Sub-Hump was slow to get on board, they burned white-hot when they finally ignited, racing through their shopping worlds with inhuman cold-blooded cries. A shiver of primordial terror chilled the Hump from end to end. That a riot broke out was not the primary problem. Riots will happen and serve many good purposes. They enable us to reinforce stereotypes, enact desirable legislation, and discharge unhelpful energies. The way we frame analyses of their causes become antecedents for future policies and police actions. We have sponsored or facilitated many a useful riot. No, the problem was that the elders' arguments were based on past events and if anybody listened, they made sense. That's what tipped the balance. Youth who had learned to ignore and disrespect their elders actually listened to what they were saying. Pretending to think things through became a fad. The young sat on quasi-elder-benches from Key Largo to Saint Augustine, pretending to have thoughtful conversations about the old days. Coffee shops came back into vogue. Lingering became fashionable again. Earth had long ago decided to back down when the Martians declared independence, so it wasn't that. It was the spectacle of the elderly strutting their stuff in a victory parade that stretched from Miami Beach to Biloxi that imaged a future we could not abide. Even before the march, we were working on solving the problem. Let them win the battle. Martians winning independence, old folks feeling their oats, those weren't the issues. How policy was determined was the issue. Our long-term strategy focused on winning that war. Beyond the Chomsky Chutes The first thing we did was review the efficacy of Chomsky Chutes. Chomsky Chutes are the various means by which current events are dumped into the memory hole, never to be remembered again. Intentional forgetting is an art. We used distraction, misdirection - massive, minimal and everything in-between, truth-in-lie-embedding, lie-in-truth-embedding, bogus fronts and false organizations (physical, simulated, live and on the Net). We created events wholesale (which some call short-term memory crowding, a species of buffer overflow), generated fads, fashions and movements sustained by concepts that changed the context of debate. Over in the entertainment wing, the most potent wing of the military-industrial- educational-entertainment complex, we invented false people, characters with made-up life stories in simulated communities more real to the Hump than family or friends. We revised historical antecedents or replaced them entirely with narratives you could track through several centuries of buried made-up clues. We sponsored scholars to pursue those clues and published their works and turned them into minipics. Some won Nobel Prizes. We invented Net discussion groups and took all sides, injecting half-true details into the discourse, just enough to bend the light. We excelled in the parallax view. We perfected the Gary Webb Gambit, using attacks by respectable media giants on independent dissenters, taking issue with things they never said, thus changing the terms of the argument and destroying their credibility. We created dummy dupes, substitute generals and politicians and dictators that looked like the originals in videos, newscasts, on the Net, in covertly distributed underground snaps, many of them pornographic. We created simulated humans and sent them out to play among their more real cousins. We used holographic projections, multispectral camouflage, simulated environments and many other stratagems. The toolbox of deception is bottomless and if anyone challenged us, we called them a conspiracy theorist and leaked details of their personal lives. It's pretty tough to be taken seriously when your words are juxtaposed with a picture of you sucking some prostitute's toes. Through all this we supported and often invented opposition groups because discordant voices, woven like a counterpoint into a fugue, showed the world that democracy worked. Meanwhile we used those groups to gather names, filling cells first in databases, then in Guantanamo camps. Chomsky Chutes worked well when the management of perception was at top-level, the level of concepts. They worked perfectly before chemicals, genetic-enhancements and bodymods had become ubiquitous. Then the balance tipped toward chemicals (both ingested and inside-engineered) and we saw that macro strategies that addressed only the conceptual level let too many percepts slip inside. Those percepts swim around like sperm and pattern into memories; when memories are spread through peer-to-peer nets, the effect can be devastating. It counters everything we do at the macro level and creates a subjective field of interpretation that resists socialization, a cognitively dissonant realm that's like an itch you can't scratch, a shadow world where "truths" as they call them are exchanged on the Black Market. Those truths can be woven together to create alternative realities. The only alternative realities we want out there are ones we create ourselves. We saw that we needed to manage perception as well as conception. Given that implants, enhancements, and mods were altering human identity through everyday life - routine medical procedures, prenatal and geriatric care, plastic surgery, eye ear nose throat and dental work, all kinds of pharmacopsychotherapies - we saw the road we had to take. We needed to change the brain and its secondary systems so that percepts would filter in and filter out as we preferred. Percepts - not all, but enough - would be pre-configured to model or not model images consistent with society's goals. Using our expertise in enterprise system programming and management, we correlated subtle changes in biochemistry and nanophysiology to a macro plan calibrated to statistical parameters of happiness in the Hump. Keeping society inside those "happy brackets" became our priority. So long as changes are incremental, people don't notice. Take corrective lenses, for example. People think that what they see through lenses is what's "real" and are trained to call what their eyes see naturally (if they are myopic, for example) a blur. In fact, it's the other way around. The eyes see what's natural and the lenses create a simulation. Over time people think that percepts mediated by technological enhancements are "real" and what they experience without enhancements is distorted. It's like that, only inside where it's invisible. It was simply a matter of working not only on electromechanical impulses of the heart, muscles, and so on as we already did or on altering senses like hearing and sight as we already did or on implanting devices that assisted locomotion, digestion, and elimination as we already did but of working directly as well on the electrochemical wetware called the memory skein or membrane, that vast complex network of hormonal systems and firing neurons where memories and therefore identity reside. Memories are merely points of reference, after all, for who we think we are and therefore how we frame ourselves as possibilities for action. All individuals have mythic histories and collective memories are nothing but shared myths. Determining those points of reference determines what is thinkable at every level of society's mind. Most of the trial and error work had been done by evolution. Our task was to infer which paths had been taken and why, then replicate them for our own ends. Short term memory, for example, is wiped out when a crisis occurs. Apparently whatever is happening in a bland sort of ho-hum way when a tiger attacks is of little relevance to survival. But reacting to the crisis is important, so we ported that awareness to the realm of the body politic. Everyday life has its minor crises but pretty much just perks along. We adjusted our sensors to alert us earlier when the Hump was paying too much attention to some event that might achieve momentum or critical mass; then we could release that tiger, so to speak, creating a crisis that got the adrenalin pumping and wiped out whatever the Hump had been thinking. After the crisis passed - and it always did, usually with a minimal loss of life - the Hump never gave a thought to what had been in the forefront of its mind a moment before. Once the average lifespan reached a couple of hundred years, much of what people remembered was irrelevant or detrimental. Who cared if there had been famine or drought a hundred and fifty years earlier? Nobody! Who cared if a war had claimed a million lives in Botswana or Tajikistan (actually, the figure in both cases was closer to two million)? Nobody! What did it matter to survivors what had caused catastrophic events? It didn't. And besides, the military-industrial-educational-entertainment establishment was such a seamless weld of collusion and mutual self- interest that what was really going on was never exposed to the light of day anyway. The media, the fifth column inside the MIEE complex, filtered out much more than was filtered in, by design. Even when people thought they were "informed," they didn't know what they were talking about. See, that's the point. People fed factoids and distortions don't know what they're talking about anyway, so why shouldn't inputs and outputs be managed more precisely? Why leave anything to chance when it can be designed? We knew we couldn't design everything but we could design the subjective field in which people lived and that would take care of the rest. That would determine what questions could be asked which in turn would make the answers irrelevant. We had to manage the entire enterprise from end to end. Now, this is the part I love, because I was in on the planning from the beginning. We remove almost nothing from the memory of the collective! But we and we alone know where everything is stored! Do you get it? Let me repeat. Almost all of the actual memories of the collective, the whole herdlike Hump, are distributed throughout the population, but because they are staggered, arranged in niches that constitute multisided life, and news is managed down to the level of perception itself, the people who have the relevant modules never plug into one another! They never talk to each other, don't you see! Each niche lives in its own deep hole and even when they find gold nuggets they don't show them to anybody. If they did, they could reconstruct the original narrative in its entirety, but they don't even know that! Isn't that elegant? Isn't that a sublime way to handle whiny neo- liberals who object to destroying fundamental elements of collective memory? We can show them how it's all there but distributed by the sixtysixfish algorithm. That algorithm, the programs that make sense of its complex operations, and the keys to the crypto are all in the hands of the Masters. I love it! Each Humpling has memory modules inserted into its wetware, calibrated to macro conceptions that govern the thinking and actions of the body politic. Because they don't know what they're missing, they don't know what they're missing. We leave intact the well-distributed peasant gene that distrusts strangers, changes, and new ideas, so if some self-appointed liberator tries to tell them how it works, they snarl or remain sullen or lower their eyes or eat too much or get drunk until they forget why they were angry. At the same time, we design a memory web that weaves people into communities that cohere, spun through vast amounts of disconnected data. Compartmentalization handles all the rest. The Hump is overloaded with memories, images, ideas, all to no purpose. We keep fads moving, quick quick quick, and we keep the Hump as gratified and happy as a pig in its own defecation. MemoRacer, Master Hacker Of course, there are misfits, antisocial criminals and hackers who want to reconstitute the past. We devised an ingenious way to manage them too. We let them have exactly what they think they want. MemoRacer comes to mind when we talk about hackers. MemoRacer flipped through niches like an asteroid through the zero-energy of space. He lived in a niche long enough to learn the parameters by which the nichelings thought and acted. Then he became invisible, dissolving into the background. When he grew bored or had learned enough, he flipped to the next niche or backtracked, sometimes living in multiple niches and changing points of reference on the fly. He was slippery and smart, but he had an ego and we knew that would be his downfall. The more he learned, the more isolated he became. The more he understood, the less he could relate to those who didn't. Understand too much, you grow unhappy on that bench listening to your neighbors' prattle. It becomes irritating. MemoRacer and his kind think complexity is exhilarating. They find differences stimulating and challenging. The Hump doesn't think that way. Complexity is threatening to the Hump and differences cause anxiety and discomfort. The Hump does not like anxiety and discomfort. MemoRacer (his real name was George Ruben, but no one remembers that) learned in his flipping that history was more complex than anyone knew. That was not merely because he amassed so many facts, storing them away on holodisc and drum as trophies to be shown to other hackers, but because he saw the links between them. He knew how to plug and play, leverage and link, that was his genius. Because he didn't fit, he called for revolution, crying out that "Memories want to be free!" I guess he meant by that vague phrase that memories had a life of their own and wanted to link up somehow and fulfill themselves by constituting a person or a society that knew who it was. In a society that knows who it is precisely because it has no idea who it is, that, Mister Master Hacker, is subversive. Once MemoRacer issued his manifesto on behalf of historical consciousness, he became a public enemy. We could not of course say that his desire to restore the memory of humankind was a crime. Technically, it wasn't. His crime was undermining the basis of transplanetary life in the twenty first century. His crime was disturbing the peace. He covered his tracks well. MemoRacer blended into so many niches so well that each one thought he belonged. But covering your tracks ninety- nine times isn't enough. It's the hundredth time, that one little slip, that tells us who and where you are. MemoRacer grew tired and forgetful despite using more Perkup than a waking-state addict - as we expected. The beneficial effects of Perkup degrade over time. It was designed that way so no one could be aware forever. That was the failsafe mechanism pharms had agreed to build in as a back door. All we had to do was wait. The niche in which he slipped up was the twenty-third business clique. This group of successful low-level managers and small manufacturers were not particularly creative but they worked long hours and made good money. MemoRacer forgot that their lack of interest in ideas, offbeat thinking, was part of their psychic bedrock. Their entertainment consisted of golf, eating, drinking, sometimes sex, then golf again. They bought their fair share of useless goods to keep society humming along, consumed huge quantities of resources to build amusement parks, golf courses, homes with designer shrubs and trees. In short, they were good citizens. But they had little interest in revolutionary ideas and George Ruben, excuse me, MemoRacer forgot that during one critical conversation. He was tired, as I said, and did not realize it. He had a couple of drinks at the club and began declaiming how the entire history of the twentieth century had been stolen from its inhabitants by masters of propaganda, PR, and the national security state. The key details that provided context were hidden or lost, he said. That's how he talked at the nineteenth hole of the Twenty-Third Club! trying to get them all stirred up about something that had happened a century earlier. Even if it was true, who cared? They didn't. What were they supposed to do about it? MemoRacer should have known that long delays in disclosure neutralize even the most shocking revelations and render outrage impotent. People don't like being made to feel uncomfortable at their contradictions. People have killed for less. One of the Twenty Third complained about his rant to the Club Manager. He did so over a holophone. Our program, alert for anomalies, caught it. The next day our people were at the Club, better disguised than MemoRacer would ever be, observing protocols - i.e. saying nothing controversial, drinking too much, and insinuating sly derogatory things about racial and religious minorities - and learned what they needed to know. They scraped the young man's DNA from the chair in which he had been sitting and broadcast the pattern on the Net. Genetic markers were scooped up routinely the next day and when he left fingerskin on a lamp-post around which he swung in too-tired up-too-long jubilation (short-lived, I can tell you) in the seventy-seven Computer Club niche, he was flagged. When he left the meeting, acting like one of the geeky guys, our people were waiting. We do this for a living, George. We are not amateurs. MemoRacer taught us how to handle hackers. He wanted to live in the past, did he? Well, that's where he was allowed to live - forever. Chemicals and implants worked their magic, making him incapable of living in the present. When he tried to focus on what was right in front of his eyes, he couldn't see it. That meant that he sounded like a blithering idiot when he tried to speak with people who lived exclusively in the present. MemoRacer lived in a vast tapestry of historical understanding that he couldn't connect in any meaningful way to the present or the lived experience of people around him. There is an entire niche now of apprehended hackers living in the historical past and exchanging data but unable to relate to contemporary niches. It's a living hell because they are immensely knowledgeable but supremely impotent and know it. They teach seminars at community centers which we support as evidence of our benevolence and how wrong they are to hate us. You want to know about the past? By all means! There's a seminar starting tomorrow, I say, scanning my planner. What's your interest? What do you want to explore? Twentieth century Chicago killers? Herbal medicine during the Ming Dynasty? Competitive intelligence in Dotcom Days? Pick your poison! And when they leave the seminar room, vague facts tumbling over one another in a chaotic flow to nowhere, they can't connect anything they have heard to their lives. So everybody pretty much has what they want or at least what they need, using the benchmarks we have established as the correct measures for society. The Hump is relatively happy. The dregs skulk about as reminders of a mythic history we have invented that everyone fears. People perceive and conceive of things in helpful and useful ways and act accordingly. And when we uplink to nets around all the planets and orbiting colonies, calling the roll on every niche in the known universe, it always comes out right. Everybody is present. Everybody is always present. Just the way we like it. # # # # # |=-----------------------------------------------------------------------=| |=-----------------------------------------------------------------------=| |=-----------------------------------------------------------------------=| The Geometry of Near By Richard Thieme It's nobody's fault. Honest. It's just how it is. The future came earlier than expected. They kicked it around for years but never knew what they had. By the time they realized what it was, it was already broken. Broken open, I should say. Even then, looking at the pieces of the egg and wondering where the bird had flown, they didn't know how to say what it was. The words they might have used had broken too. Now it's too late. The future is past. It was too far. They can't see far. They can only see near. Me and my friends, we see far, but we see near, too. It's linking near and far in fractal spirals that makes a multi-dimensional parallax view, providing perspective. It's not that we have better brains than our Moms and Pops, but hey, we were created in the image of the net and we know it. They live it, everybody has to live it now, but they still don't know it. Look at my Mom and Pop on a Thursday night in the family room. You'll see what I mean. They are sitting in front of the big screen digital television set watching a sitcom. The program is "Friends." Mom calls the six kids, the six young people excuse me, "our friends." They've been watching the show for years and know the characters better than any of the neighbors. The only reason they know the neighbors at all is because I programmed a scanner to pick up their calls. At first they said, how terrible, don't you do that. Then they said, what did she say? Did she really say that? Then they left it on, listening to cell calls from all over the city, drug deals ("I'm at the ATM, come get your stuff"), sex chat ("I'm sitting at your desk, my feet on the edge, touching myself"), trivia mostly, and once in a while the life of a house down the street broadcasting itself through a baby monitor. The way they reacted to that, the discovery that walls aren't walls anymore, reminded me of a night when I told some kids it was time to feed a live mouse to Kurtz, my boa constrictor. Oh, how horrible! they cried. Oh, I can't watch! Then they lined up at the tank, setting up folding chairs to be sure they could see the mouse trembling, the sudden strike, the big squeeze. They gaped as the hingeless jaw dropped and Kurtz swallowed the dead mouse. They waited for the tip of its tail to disappear into his mouth before getting up saying yuuuchhh! That's gross! People in the neighborhood only became real to Mom and Pop when I made them digital, don't you see, when I put them on reality radio. Only when I turned the neighbors into sitcom characters did Mom and Pop have a clue. When they hacked the system in other words. That's what hacking is, see. It's not hunching over your glowing monitor in your bedroom at three in the morning cackling like Beavus or Butthead while you break into a bank account - although sometimes it is that too - it's more of a trip into the tunnels into the sewers into the walls where the wires run and the pipes and you can see how things work. It's hitting a wall and figuring out how to move through it. How to become invisible, how to use magic. How to cut the knot, solve the puzzle, move to the next level of the game. It's seeing how shit we dump relates to people who think they don't dump shit and live as if. It's seeing how it all fits together. "Our friends." Said as if she means it. I mean, is that pathetic or what? The theme music is too loud as they sink down in overstuffed chairs and turn the volume even higher with a remote I had to program so they could use it. Their lives seldom deviate more than a few inches from the family room. Put the point of a compass down on the set and you can draw a little circle that circumscribes their lives. Everything they know is inside that circle. Two dimensions, flat on its back. The geometry of near. Those are my friends, Mom says with a laugh for the umpteenth time. The commercial dissolves and expectations settle onto the family room like the rustling wings of twilight. The acting is always overdone, they mug and posture too much, the laugh tracks are too loud. The characters say three, maybe four hundred words in half an hour, barely enough to hand in to an English teacher on a theme, but more than enough to build a tiny world like a doll's house inside a million heads. Those scripted words and intentional gestures sketch out the walls of houses, the edges of suburban lots, the city limits of their lives, all inside their heads. Hypnotized, they stare at the screen for hours, downloading near vistas, thinking they have a clue. In family rooms all over the world, drapes closed and lights low, people sit there scratching while they watch, most eat or drink something, and some masturbate. Some get off on Rachel, some Monica. Gays like Joey. Bloat-fetishists go for Chandler. I don't know who gets off on Ross. I do know, though, that all over the world there are rooms smelling of pizza, beer and semen. Some clean up the food they spill before the show is over and some leave it. Some come into a napkin and ball it up and put it on a table until a commercial but some take it straight to the garbage and wash their hands on the way back. Funny. They beat off to a fantasy character as sketchy as a cartoon but wash their hands before coming back from the commercial. After sitting there for all those hours, they ought to wash out their souls with soap, not their hands. Everybody masturbates, actually. That's what it means to watch these shows. People get off on a fantasy and pretend the emptiness fills them up so they do it again. And again. Who writes these scripts, anyway? People who have lost their souls, obviously. These people have no self. They put it down somewhere then forgot where they put it. They are seriously diminished humans. But hey, this is not a rant about people who sell their souls. That's true of everybody who lives in a world of simulations and doesn't know it. Those who know it are masters, their hands on the switches that control the flow of energy and information. Those gates create or negate meaning, modify or deny. Me and my friends we control the flow. The difference is all in the knowing and knowing how. But that's not what we were fighting about. We were fighting about real things. I just read an army paper some colonel wrote critiquing the army for thinking backwards. Thinking hierarchically, he said, thinking in terms of mechanistic warfare. The writer self-styling himself a modern insightful thinker, Net-man, an apostle of netcentric warfare, a disciple of the digerati. It's always colonels, right? trying to get noticed. The wisdom of the seminar room. Talk about masturbation. They write for the same journals they read, it's one big circle jerk. They never call each other on their shit, that's the deal, not on the real stuff, but they can't fool us all the time. Just some of the people some. It's funny, see, the colonel talks about hierarchies and nets but this guy's obviously Hierarchy Man, he lives in a pyramid, he can't help it. He has the fervor of a convert who suddenly saw the blinding light, saw that he had been living in the near, but all he can do is add on, not transform. An extra bedroom, a new bathroom, is not a new floorplan. The guy is excited, sure, he had a vision that blew his mind, but he thought that meant he could live there and he can't. Seeing may be believing but that's about all. The future is past, like I said. The evidence is guys like that writing stuff like that. Those of us who have lived here all of our lives, who never lived anywhere else, we can see that. He's a mummy inside a pyramid looking out through a chink in a sealed tomb. That's why we laugh, because he can't see himself trailing bandages through the dusty corridors. New converts always look funny to people who live on the distant shore where they just arrived, shipwrecked sailors ecstatic to feel the sand under their feet. They think it's bedrock but it's quicksand.. Here's an example. Go downstairs and go into the kitchen where another television set records the President's speech. (I had to show them how to do that too.) When we watch it together later, I point out that it's not really the president, not really a person, it's only an image in pixels, a digital head speeching in that strange jerky way he has so when you try to connect, you can't. You think you get the beat but then there's a pause, then a quick beat makes you stumble trying to synchronize. It's how his brain misfires, I think. I think he did that doing drugs, maybe drinking. He was in and out of rehab and who the hell knows what he did to himself. Of course the Clintons did coke and all kinds of shit. Anyway he is talking to people who are eating and drinking and masturbating, not even knowing it, hands alive and mobile in their pockets, getting off on his projected power and authority. He talks about "our country" and I laugh. Pop shoots me a glare because he doesn't have a clue. Pop thinks he lives in a country. Because the prez keeps saying "our country" and "this nation" and shit like that. But countries are over. Countries ended long ago. This president or his dad made money from oil or wherever else they put money to make money. Millions of it, more than enough to keep the whole family in office for generations. They have this veneer of patricians but their hands are dripping with blood. His grand-dad too, look it up. They taught evil people how to torture, kill, terrorize, but they wear this patrician veneer and drip with self- righteousness, always talking about religion. It is so dishonorable. Yet this semi-literate lamer, this poser, we honor, his father the chief of the secret police, his brother running his own state, this brain-damaged man who can't connect with himself or anyone else, his words spastic like bad animation out of synch with that smug smirk, this man we honor? Give me a fucking break. Anyway, he isn't really there, it's all pixels, that's the point. The same people who made "Friends" and made that mythical neighborhood bar and made that mythical house on the mythical prairie created him too out of whole cloth. So people sit there and scratch, eat drink and masturbate, getting off on the unseen artifice of it all. And these people they have made, these people who project power, they all have their own armies, see, they have their own security forces, their own intelligence networks. They have to because countries ended and they realized that those who are like countries, forgive me, like countries used to be, now must act like countries used to act. They have their own banks and they even have their own simulated countries. Some Arabs bought Afghanistan, the Russian mafia bought Sierra Leone, they own Israel too, can I say that without being called an anti-Semite? These people in their clouds of power allow countries to pretend to exist and download simulations of countries into the heads of masturbating scratchers because it works better to have zombies. So people who think they live in countries can relate to what they think are countries inside their heads. Zombies thinking they are "citizens of countries" because they can't think anything else, because they live inside the walls of the doll's house in their heads. "I am a citizen of this country," says the zombie, feeling safe and snug inside a non-existent house in the non-space of his programmed brain. All right then, where is it? The zombie says here, there, pointing to the air like grandma after surgery pointed to hallucinations, telling them to get her a glass of water, telling them to sit down and stop making her nervous. It's all dribble-glass stuff, zombies in Newtonian space that ended long ago; they stare through the glass at the quantum cloud-cuckoo land the rest of us live in, calling it the future. Mistaking space for time the way that colonel inside his pyramid thinks he's net-man. People who live in clouds of power live behind tall walls, taller than you can imagine. We never really see what's behind those walls. Zombies never climb those walls because of the private armies. Their "security forces" would have a zombie locked up in a heartbeat if he tried. On the network when we take over thousands of machines and load trojans letting them sit there until we are ready to use them in a massive attack, we call them zombies. The zombies are unaware what is happening to them. We bring them to life and they rise from their graves and march. Those are our clouds of power, tit for tat. Mastering the masters. Meanwhile Moms and Pops sit in their chairs not knowing that trojans are being downloaded into their brains. The code is elegant, tight, fast. Between the medium in which the code is embedded and the television or network that turns it into illusions of real people, real situations, the sleight of hand is so elegant, enticing bird-like Moms and Pops into digital cages. The when they move the cages, the birds move too. They give the birds enough room to flap their wings so they think they're free. This is what it looks like. Jerome K. Dumbass, say, a zombie with one third of a clue, decides to eliminate a CEO who made him lose his house, his job, all his stock options. The buyer did not know how to beware any more than zombies know how to avoid the download. The guy was sucked into the force field of greed while the CEO stashed his loot in a house he could keep. Pays the people to make laws to let him keep a huge house that no one can take even after his term in a country club. Dumbass wants to kill the CEO which is entirely understandable. So he climbs the wall and drops down onto the other side, twisting his ankle. The circuit breaks the minute he touches the wall, cameras swing into action, pick him up before he can say "Ow!" Dogs bark and come closer, baying and barking. Camera zooms. A close-up shows his face twisted with pain. Then fear. Dumbass drags his game leg after him, dogs bay and bark closer, louder now. Jeezus! his stupid face says as he hobbles through flowers and shrubs some of them cameras some of them alarms into the arms of waiting goons. The goons are bigger than pro tackles - excuse me, I'm explaining one simulation in terms of another. How foolish is that? But that's what we do, use words to explain words, simulations explaining same. You don't know a single linebacker do you? But you think of them as your friends, too, don't you? Anyway, a thug grabs Dumbass by the belt, twisting his belt and pants in his hand, his other hand crimping the back of his neck like a robot's claw. Dumbass cries out but there's no one to hear. Everyone is busy scratching and eating and drinking and masturbating to the dreamtime rhythm of the night. They drag him into a room behind the cabanas along the landscaped pools and Jacuzzis. It's dark in there. They throw him against the wall and he bounces off and lies in the scatter and dirt. Looks up and sees a boot coming. That's that. Out he goes. He comes around in a minute, dizzy, in pain, blood from his broken nose on his shirt. Whomp! The goon's hand slaps him, then backhands him, winds up for a forehand and whacks him back to center. "Stop!" he screams but instead the thug just whacks him back and forth like a bobblehead, wanting him to understand the foolishness of his indiscretion, don't you see. Imposing power on the dumbass on behalf of his master. So Dumbass can internalize the experience, feel utterly powerless, spread the word. Tell your buddies that you do not climb - whack! - that - whack! - wall. Somewhere in his twinkie brain it dawns on him that no one knows he is here. Sure, they call the "real" cops after a while, but these guys are real enough, mugging him in the toolshed. No one knows he is here and wouldn't care if they did. The so-called news shows handle that, turning Dumbass into the Other. Everybody cheers as they beat his brains out. Then the "real" police come and take over, beating him up in the van on the way to the station, having fun as long as the ride takes, bouncing him off the walls. Now, this is my point: the armies that this man has, this man whose face you have not even seen, you never do see, you only see manifestations of clouds of power, this man's armies are created in the image of the net. Once we no longer had countries but only the pretense of countries, those who inhabited clouds of power took the game to the next level. These armies are simply not seen. They are hidden in the faux shrubs designed to distract us. When boundaries dissolved, clouds of power emerged all over the world. They are accountable only to themselves, i.e. not. Clouds are not countries, clouds are water vapor condensing, as visible and insubstantial as mist. We too are mist but we believe in our shapes as they change. The clouds in a way are not there, really. Except they are. But try to tell that to a zombie, tell them they live in a cloud and see what they say. Now take this entire scenario and blow it up. Imagine a country with borders drawn in black. Then imagine a mouth blowing a pink bubble and the bubble bursting obliterating borders and then there's a pink cloud instead of the little wooden shapes of states or countries they used to play with when they were kids. Bubblegum splatters all over the world creating cloud- places that have no names. They are place markers until names are invented. These are the shapes kids play with now, internalizing the difference. Try telling that to zombies, though. They sit there listening as sitcoms and so-called reality shows and faux news put them into a deep sleep. Images of unreality filter into their brains and define their lives. Tiny images, seen near, seem big. Seem almost lifelike. Inside these miniature worlds, Moms and Pops believe they are far-seeing, thinking they think. Because they are told that near is far and little is big and so it is. Back to the example. Dumbass is done getting beaten up in the shed behind the bougainvillea and hibiscus. Let's press that a little. That's what neighborhoods have become, whole used-to-be-called countries. That's what societies have become, entire civilizations. Do you see, now? The map in your head is a game board intended to replace reality, not a meaningful map, it gives you manageable borders within which you watch and act in the sitcom of your life, playing a role in a script written for other purposes entirely. That's why when you open your mouth, one of those times you wake up long enough to talk about something you think is real, anyone who has a clue laughs. It isn't personal, but it can't be helped. People who have a clue laugh. We try to suppress it but a little titter becomes a giggle and then a blast that explodes before you finish your first sentence. That's what the fight was about. It wasn't personal. See we see how silly it is, the way you think, what you think is real. The only difference between our seeming rudeness and the compassion of Buddhists who also see clearly is that somehow compassion did not download from the net but the seeing did. We see what's so but without much feeling. Certainly without much empathy. If we have too much empathy, it sucks us in and then we're sunk. Besides, you're zombies. Zombies are not real human beings. In the scripts they have written you do the same things over and over again like a Marx Brothers movie. The script is boring and predictable. That's how it manages so many people so well but that's also what we think is funny. When you play out your roles without even knowing it, naturally, we laugh. It's not personal! Honest! When I was twelve I ran a line out to the telephone cable behind the house. I listened to the neighbors talk mostly about nothing until the telephone company and a cop dropped by. I pleaded stupidity and youth and Pop gave me a talk and I nodded and said yeah, right, never again. Those were the good old days when hacking and phreaking were novelties and penalties for kids were a slap on the wrist. My favorite telephone sitcom was "The Chiropractor's Wife." That woman she lived around the corner and lowered the narrowness bar beyond belief. You see her on the street with her kids or walking that damned huge dog of theirs, you wouldn't know it. She looked normal. On good days she looked good even with her blonde hair down on her shoulders, smiling hello. Still, she raised oblivious to the level of an art form. I guess she was terrified. Her life consisted of barely coping with two kids who were four and six I think and serving on a committee or two at school like for making decorations for a Halloween party. Other than that, near as I could tell, she talked to her mother and made dinner for the pseudo-doc. Talked to her mother every day, sometimes for hours. The conversation was often interrupted by long pauses. Well, the wife would say. Then her mother would say, well. Then there might be silence for twenty seconds. I am not exaggerating, I clocked it. Twenty-four seconds was their personal best. That might not sound like much but in a telephone conversation, it's eternity. Then they would go back over the same territory. They were like prisoners walking back and forth in a shared cell, saying the same things over and over. I guess it was mostly the need to talk no matter what, drawing the same circles on a little pad of paper. I imagined the wife making those circles on a doodle pad in different colors and that's when I realized that people around me lived by a different geometry entirely. How the landscape looks is determined by how you measure distance. How far to the horizon. That's when I began to invent theorems for a geometry of near. Example. Here in Wolf Cove there is the absolute silence of shuttered life. The only noise we hear is traffic from the freeway far over the trees. We have lots of trees, ravines, some little lakes. That's what it is, trees and ravines and houses among the trees. That sound of distant traffic is like holding a seashell up to your ear. It's the closest we come to having an ocean. No one can park on the street so a car that parks is suspect. The cops know everyone by sight so anyone different is stopped. The point I am making is, Wolf Cove encloses trees and lakes and houses with gates of silence, making it seem safe, but in fact it has the opposite effect. It creates fear that is bone deep. It's like a gated community with real iron gates and a rent-a-cop. It makes people inside afraid of what's outside so no one wants to leave. It's like we built an electric fence like the kinds that keep dogs inside except we're the dogs. One day there was a carjacking at a mall ten miles away. Two guys did it who looked like someone called central casting and said hey, send us a couple of mean-looking carjacker types. They held a gun on a gray lady driving a Lexus and left her hysterical in the parking lot. I knew the telephone sitcom was bound to be good so I listened in on the wife and her hold-me mother. They talked for more than two hours, the wife saying how afraid she was she wouldn't get decorations done for the Halloween party at the school. She almost cried a couple of times, she was that close to breaking, just taking care of a couple of kids and making streamers and a pumpkin pie. But every now and again she said how afraid she was they'd take her SUV at gunpoint next time she went shopping. The television had done its job of keeping her frightened, downloading images of terrified victims morning noon and night. Fear makes people manageable. Finally the wife said, maybe we ought to move. I couldn't believe my ears. I mean, she lived in Wolf Cove inside an electric fence, so where the hell would she go? Her fears loomed in shadows on the screen of the world like ghosts and ghouls at that Halloween party. Everywhere she looked, she saw danger. Wherever there was a door instead of a wall, she felt a draft, an icy chill, imagining it opening. She got out of bed and checked the locks when everyone else was asleep. Once she had to go get something on the other side of town and you would have thought she was going to the moon. She went over the route on a map with her mother. Did she turn here? Or here? She had a cell phone fully charged - she checked it twice - and a full tank of gas, just in case. Just in case of what? So I wasn't surprised when she said after the carjack that maybe they ought to move to Port Harbor, ten miles north. Then her mother said, well. Then the wife said well and then there was silence. I think I held my breath, sitting in my bedroom listening through headphones. Then her mother said, well, you would still have to shop somewhere. Oh, the wife said. I hadn't thought of that. The geometry of near. So many people live inside those little circles, more here than most places. I live on the net, I live online, I live out there. I keep the bedroom door shut but the mindspace I inhabit is the whole world. When I was eleven I found channels where I learned so much just listening. I kept my mouth shut until I knew who was who, who was a lamer shooting off his mouth and who had a clue. Then somebody asked a question I knew and I answered politely and they let me in. I wasn't a lurker any longer, but I took it easy, asking questions but not too many. I stayed up late at Border's and other midnight bookstores, aisles cluttered with open O'Reilly books, figuring out what I could before I asked. You have to do the homework and you have to show respect. Once they let me in, I helped guys on rungs below. I was pretty good at certain systems, certain kinds of PBX, and posted voice mail trophies that were a hoot. Some came from huge companies that couldn't secure their ass with a cork. The clips gave the lie to their PR, showing what bullshit it was. So everybody on the channel knew but had the good sense not to say, not let anybody know. That would be like leaning over a banister and asking the Feds to fuck us please in the ass. So I learned how to live on the grid. I mapped it inside my head, constantly recreating images of the flows, shadows in my brain creating a shadow self at the same time. The shadow self became my self except I could see it and knew how to use it. It wasn't hacking the little systems, don't you see, the boxes or the telephones, it was the Big System with a capital B and a capital S. Hacking a system means hacking the mind that makes it. It's not just code, it's the coder. The code is a shadow of the coder's mind. That's what you're hacking. You see how code relates to the coder, shit, you understand everything. Anyway, Mom and Pop were talking one night and Mom said she had seen the Bradley's out on their patio. They were staring down at the old bricks, thinking about redoing it. It meant rearranging shrubs and maybe putting it some flowers and ground cover. It sounded like big deal, the way they talked about it, making this little change sound like the Russian Revolution. It was like the time the Adams built a breakfast nook, you would have thought they had terraformed a planet. So Mom said to Virginia Bradley, how long have you been in this house now? as long as we have? Oh no, Virginia said. We've been here thirteen years. Oh, Mom said We've been fifteen. But then, Virginia said, we only moved from a block away. Mom said, Oh? I didn't know that. Virginia said, yes, we lived in that little white house on the corner the one with the green shutters for seventeen years. Mom said, I didn't know that. Not only that, Virgina said with a little laugh, but Rick, that was her husband, Rick grew up around the corner. You know that ranch where his mother lives? Mom said, the one where the sign says Bradley? I didn't realize (only neighbors thirteen years) that was his mother. Yes, he grew up in that house, then when we got married we moved to the white house with the green shutters and thirteen years ago when Stonesifers moved to the lakes then we moved here. The heart enclosed in apprehension becomes so frightened of its own journey, of knowing itself, that it draws the spiral more and more tightly, fencing itself in. Eventually the maze leads nowhere. This village with its winding lanes and gas lamps for all its faux charm was designed by a peasant culture afraid of strangers, afraid of change, a half-human heart with its own unique geometry. Yep, you guessed it. The geometry of near. Hypnosis does an effective job of Disneylanding the loneliness of people who live near. Sometimes that loneliness leaks out into their lives and that, really, was what the fighting was about. Some business group asked Pop to give a dinner speech. They asked him over a year ago, so he had it on the calendar all that time. He really looked forward to it, we could tell by the time he spent getting ready. He even practiced his delivery. They told Pop to expect a few hundred people but when he showed up with all his slides, there were only twenty-three. I am so sorry, said Merriwether Prattleblather or whoever asked him to speak. It never occurred to any of us when we scheduled your talk that this would be of all things the last episode of Jerry Seinfeld. Pop got a bit of a clue that night. He was pretty dejected but he knew why. These are people, he said, who have known each other for years. This meeting is an opportunity to spend time with real friends. But they preferred to spend the night with people who are not only not real, but don't even make sense or connect to anything real. They would rather passively download digital images, he said, using my language without realizing it, than interact with real human beings. So Pop had half a clue and I got excited, that doesn't happen every night, so I jumped in, wanting to rip to the next level and show how it all connects from Walter Lippmann to Eddie Bernays to Joseph Goebells, news PR and propaganda one and the same. That got Pop angry. It undermined that doll's house in his head, I can see now. The walls would collapse if he looked so he can't look. Besides, he had to put his frustration somewhere and I was safe. Naturally I became quite incensed at the intensity of his commitment to being clueless. Christ, Pop, I shouted, they stole your history. You haven't got a clue because everything real was hidden. Some of the nodes are real but the way they relate is disguised in lies. He shouts back that I don't know what I'm talking about. The second world war was real, he says, hitting the table, not knowing how nuts he looks. Oh yeah? Then what about Enigma? Before they disclosed it, you thought totally differently about everything in that war. You had to, Pop! Context is content and that's what they hide, making everything look different. It's all in the points of reference. They've done that with everything for fifty years. It's like multispectral camouflage that I read about in space, fake platforms intended to look real. Nothing gets through, nothing bounces back. You live in a hall or more like a hologram of mirrors, Pop, can't you see that? We both kept shouting and sooner or later I figured fuck it and went to my room which is fine with me because I would rather live in the real world than the Night of the Living Dead down there. I know why Pop can't let himself know. I understand. Particularly at his age, you can't face the emptiness of it all unless you know how to fill it again, preferably with something real. Knowing you know how to do that makes it bearable like looking at snakes on Medusa's head in a mirror. It keeps you from turning to stone. Me and my friends we don't want to turn to stone ever. Not ever. Maybe it's all infinite regress inside our heads, nobody knows. But playing the game at least keeps you flexible. It's like yoga for the soul. When do I like it best? That's easy. Four in the morning. I love it then. There's this painting by Rousseau of a lion and a gypsy and the world asleep in a frieze that never wakes up. That's what it feels like, four in the morning, online. The illusory world is asleep, shut up like a clam, I turn on the computer and the fan turns into white noise. The noise is the sound of the sea against the seawall of our lives. The monitor flickers alight like a window opening and I climb through. It's all in the symbols, see, managing the symbols. That makes the difference between half an illusion and a whole one. Do you use them or do they use you? If they use you, do you know it, do you see it, and do you use them back? Who's in charge here? Are you constantly taking back control from symbols that would sweep you up in a flood? Are you conscious of how you collude because brains are built to collude so you know and know that you know and can take back power? Then you have a chance, see, even if the hall of mirrors never shows a real reflection. Then we have a chance to get to the next level of the game if only that and that does seem to be the point. Me and my friends we prefer the geometry of far. This bedroom is a node in a network trans-planetary or trans-lunar at any rate, an intersection of lines in a grid that we navigate at lightspeed. This is soul-work, this symbol-manipulating machinery fused with our souls, we live cyborg style, wired to each other. The information we exchange is energy bootstrapping itself to a higher level of abstraction. Some nights you drop down into this incredible place and disappear. Something happens. I don't know how to describe it. It's like you drop down into this place where most of your life is lived except most of the time you don't notice. This time, somehow you go there and know it. Instead of thinking leaning forward from the top of your head its like lines of electromagnetic energy showing iron filings radiating out from the base of your skull. Information comes and goes from the base of your brain, goes in all directions. Time dilates and you use a different set of points of reference, near and far at the same time. It's a matter of wanting to go, I think, then going. Otherwise you turn into the chiropractor's wife. I want to see up close the difference that makes the difference but once I go there, "I" dissolves like countries disappeared and whatever is left inhabits clouds of power that have no names. It's better than sex, yes, better. So anyway, the point is, yes, I was laughing but not at him, exactly. You can tell him that. It was nothing personal. It just looked so funny watching someone express the truth that they didn't know. The truth of a future they'll never inhabit. It's like his mind was bouncing off a wall, you see what I mean? So I apologize, okay? You can tell him that. I understand what it must be like, coming to the end of your life and realizing how it's all been deception. When it's too late to do anything about it. Now if it's all right with you, I just want a few minutes with my friends. I just want to go where we don't need to be always explaining everything, where everybody understands. Okay? And would you mind closing the door, please, as you leave? # # # # # |=-----------------------------------------------------------------------=| |=-----------------------------------------------------------------------=| |=-----------------------------------------------------------------------=| The Feasibility of Anarchy in America By Anthony "This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing Government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it." -- Abraham Lincoln The concept of anarchy in its most general and well-known form espouses a view of removing a given governing body or hierarchy. The very word, "Anarchy," is derived from the Greek word "Anarkhos," which means, "Without a ruler." In effect, it is a view shared by those who believe that centralized governments or hierarchies of power and authority tend to corrupt those at the upper-levels. It is also a common sentiment that those power-drunken rulers at the height of the hierarchy come to abuse their power and use their newly found authority for their own, whimsical purposes to the detriment of the lower members of the organization or society over which it rules. This belief is far from new, and dates back probably as far as political philosophy has existed. Within the United States, the philosophy gained general acceptance within a few select groups during the 1960's and 1970's, and was forwarded with the rise of the "Anarchist Cookbook," in which instructions for bomb-making, guerilla warfare, and the like are expounded upon in rather brief detail. With the rise of the Internet, many groups favoring the free exchange of any and all information, as well as the destruction of any sort of proprietary and restrictive model for software development and the like, the philosophy of Anarchism has become quite widespread and supported in a variety of forms. Aside from the desire to see corrupt regimes fail and the Orwellian laws and measures become obsolete, however, we must ask ourselves: In America, is the concept of Anarchy realistically viable? It is evident to most that the majority of citizens of the United States do not view laws as anything other than rules enforced by the current regime; therefore, to them, if the regime fails for whatever reason, there are no laws by which to abide. For instance, we can see that during even minor disruptions, such as blackouts, citizens run rampant causing damage and stealing goods from other businesses. They do not connect to the greater picture, and they do not realize that, by depriving others of these goods, they do nothing but bring greater harm upon the whole of society, which includes them as well. Even with the government still active, we see a variety of crimes committed each day, some of the most serious being rape, murder, and theft. The most important question we must ask is that, if the citizens are unable to conduct themselves for the greater good and for the welfare of society, then how may they be trusted to conduct themselves properly without a governmental body enforcing its laws by threats of incarceration or death? However it has occurred, it is irrelevant: the majority of US citizens are entirely dependent upon the government and the services that it provides. It is also obvious that, without a central governing body, they could not rightfully conduct themselves responsibly so that they would need no rulers or administrators above them ensuring that civil order persists. Because of their attitude of self-centered egoism and the fulfillment of their hedonistic desires, it is very improbable that they could retain the proper attitude to make anarchy a possible way of life. Another problem relating to the lack of a proper, self-reliant attitude is the fact that most Americans are conditioned to a rather wealthy and comfortable lifestyle. They have the pleasure of relative political and military security; comfortable homes; televisions and other frivolous entertainments; and more food than most know what to do with. All but the most impoverished and destitute live a very comfortable lifestyle, and even the latter are generally not wanting for food, housing, and so forth because of government aid. It is also obvious to many that the government acts as a buffer between the individual and reality. Everything is hidden from public view, such as the enforcement of the death penalty, the frequent slaughtering of meat, and even the often-times brutal tactics of the police and military. The government attempts to keep society in a rather blissful swoon so that it does not recognize and is therefore not conditioned to the undesirable facets of reality. Therefore, it is improbable that the general public at large would have the threshold of toleration regarding hardship, and it is not likely that most would be able to adapt to a rather open and frank way of life, seeing and experiencing both its pleasant and unpleasant aspects. It is most likely that, when experiencing life without any central government shielding them from how it truly is, as well as their responsibility to themselves and the rest of society at large, they would reject such ideals and return to their previous existence and lifestyle. Too much is taken for granted, and when this is not available, the public would quickly turn upon their heels because of the fact that they are generally unconditioned to self-responsibility, self-reliance, and true hardship. A very real problem to be faced if the central government were removed is the military situation and the protection of this country from hostile foreign powers. It is well known and goes without saying that quite a few foreign nations would take little time in responding to the collapse of the government and militarily invade and occupy the nation to their political and economic advantage. Thus, it would be imperative that a collective military be formed and trained in order to resist such a fate. However, another problem then arises: if a military is formed, and there is hierarchy within this military (as there needs be if it is to be effective in protecting the nation from coordinated foreign attacks), then what is to stop it from staging a coup and forming a new governmental body under military rule, with the commanders being the upper class and the new leaders of an unwilling populace? This is not an impossible or even an improbable scenario. Take Afghanistan, for instance. After the Mujahideen shook off the yoke of Soviet dominance and government, they found themselves in quite a problem: there were several militias, all led by separate commanders with different ideals. Soon, fighting erupted between them, and the country was in a state of war-torn chaos. Nothing productive came from them, and they never ruled with any sort of authority. This serves as an example for how useless a struggle is against an oppressive regime if no stable government can be formed afterward. After their many blunders, a new group rose up against them and their corruption: the Taliban. They were originally a group of freedom fighters who claimed to have no desire for power or rule. They said that their goals were to remove the Mujahideen and their atrocities from Afghanistan, and to restore order, security, and peace to the region. We all know that, afterward, they indeed became the new rulers of Afghanistan, and were no better than the former Mujahideen in the least. This would be the same sort of problem that is to plague a nation whose central government is removed, and it is almost inevitable that foreign occupation will occur, or the newly formed military will take the power for themselves. Or, perhaps, both of these will occur as they did in Afghanistan. Another solution may form in the minds of some when thinking of this problem: perhaps if everyone who is of fighting age and ability would form a militia, so that this power would be in the hands of the population as opposed to a select fighting few. This indeed would be a good idea, if it weren't for a small problem: it would only be a matter of time before there would be disagreements as to the best course of future action in any given situation, and it is very probable that there would be separate factions that would split away and war upon each other. Thus, the nation would once more be divided and fighting for power, much like the many nations of the world do even today. Even without these severely important issues arising, it goes without question that to have everyone who is able to necessarily be a part of a given military would be nearly akin to being governed by a central regime, only on a more militarized basis. Therefore, it seems entirely likely that this would either begin as or devolve into yet another form of government, only this time harsher in its enforcement of laws given the very nature of the institution. A view espoused by some is that man should return to a more natural way of life and live primitively, as an animal, given that he is indeed an animal which is more highly evolved and retains higher faculties of reason and thought. This sort of view likewise presents another problem which is most likely impossible to overcome within anarchy: the fact that there is not anarchy within nature, and that animals are indeed governed if by nothing more than the principle of natural selection: the strong will survive, and the weak will perish. It is a fact that resources of a particular area are not unlimited, such as food, water, material for shelters, fuel, and so forth. It is also true that there will be those who are more efficient by nature in gathering food, finding themselves fortunate enough to live near and perhaps possess a source of fresh water, and so on. Therefore, those who are stronger and more efficient in these areas will by nature rule over those who are weaker and not as adept or fortunate enough to be in like position. Such an individual or individuals would thus be held in higher esteem in a given community because of the resources he/she possesses, and which the other members want or need. As we can see, this is leading to another form of government: those with the best plots of land held in private ownership will naturally become those who supply the food and necessary materials to the rest of the community, and will therefore become as an authority figure. It is trivial to understand that this situation can be prevented if private ownership of land is not allowed, or if food, water, and other relatively scarce resources are distributed equally amongst the populace. The only problem with this is that there must by definition be some sort of hierarchy or committee collecting these resources, distributing them, and ensuring that everyone is conducting themselves honestly with regard to the matter. This will likewise lead to yet another form of control and government: over time or, perhaps from the beginning depending upon how much force the committee would have or how dire the situation is at that time, they will come to form a sort of government which would provide the members of society with its needed resources, and would thus be much like the current government we have today, existing by serving society and using its natural power to threaten others to accept a given set of laws in order to preserve social order. Even the most primitive of societies have an accepted leadership, and at least have some sort of social order and a way in which to ensure that such a social order is not disrupted to the detriment of society. Hence, if the society is to be held together and not devolve into nothing more than close-knit families attempting to ensure for themselves survival without thought to the rest of the population, there must exist some sort of hierarchy or, for lack of a better term, system of government. I conclude this rather brief essay by answering the question posed in the beginning: it is not possible that anarchy can exist within America if only because of the fact that the population could not handle it, and can not be trusted to act with the best interest of society in mind. Not many in this culture of ego-gratification and self-centered hedonism would find it in their best interests to give up their many enjoyments, possessions, and sheltered way of life so that they could exist with more responsibility and self-reliance. Not only this, it would also be impossible to rid the majority of the population of the idea of private ownership of property, and because of the self-centered nature of this culture, it would be entirely out of the question to assume that a form of communism or communal-lifestyle would be acceptable to the majority involved. Besides, without some form of central government deciding the fate of this communal property and what should be done with the material harvested or grown from it, we would be hard-pressed to come to any agreement upon what should be done with it. Thus, without any sort of unification or democratic government, or even an authoritarian dictator imposing his will upon the population at large, nothing can be achieved except factionalism, strife, and inevitably destabilizing, unconstructive conflict. |=[ EOF ]=---------------------------------------------------------------=|