by Jon Lebkowsky and R.U. Sirius
Two
of the principal fathers of technocluture, electronic media activist Jon Lebkowsky and cyber-theoretician R.U. Sirius,
have known each other almost from the virtual beginning. Lebkowsky, co-creator
of the Austin-based subculture media system Fringeware, Inc., met the
co-founder and editor of Mondo 2000 — the now-defunct slick magazine
that juxtaposed computer culture with drugs, sex, and graphic art — back in
the early days of the WELL (Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link), one of the first
online communities. The two independent thinkers together created the late
online Mondo 2000 conference on the WELL, which Lebkowsky adds “had its
15 minutes as the white-hot, way-kool core of cyberculture.”
Currently, on Thursday nights on Hotwired (http://www.hotwired.com/eff), Lebkowsky hosts the Electronic Frontiers Forum
(EFF), a kind of an Internet think tank to which Net activists (and the online
public) are invited to discuss the ramifications of politics both in and on the
wired world. He’s also working with EFF-Austin and EFF-Houston to organize a
cyber rights conference slated for fall.
Though Sirius left Mondo 2000 shortly before its collapse in 1995, he
remains a ubiquitous Internet presence — a search for his name turns up 30,000
matches at URLs all over the world. (The entry http://www.scrappi.com/deceit/
leads you straight to his own “web of deceit” page.) Sirius pens a regular
column for Japan Esquire and is a contributing editor at a wide range of
publications from Wired to the zine bOING bOING. His latest book,
Cyberpunk Handbook: The Real Cyberpunk Fake Book (Random House, 1995),
was co-authored with ex-Mondo colleague St. Jude.
Below is an edited transcript of an interview the outspoken online gurus
conducted with each other over a period of weeks in a private conference on the
WELL. (The site is famous for these types of discussions, and is still going
strong at http://www.well.org) How did these media icons become cyber-cultured?
Find out as the history of an electronic identity morphs into a counsel on
Eastern thought-inspired technophilosophy.
— Jen Scoville
n
R.U. Sirius: How did you find yourself online and more generally a participant
in technoculture?
Jon Lebkowsky: Several threads in my life came together online. I was flirting
with science fiction or speculative fiction, thinking about writing within that
genre since I was around 10 years old, and then, in the early Eighties, as I
was about ready to give up on science fiction as generally moribund, I saw a
review of William Gibson’s Neuromancer [see sidebar] in
Coevolution Quarterly and found a copy at the Whole Earth Provision
Company. I’d been reading the postmodern graphic zine Heavy Metal a lot
while soaking in the bathtub, and from that I was well-acquainted with the
nascent cyberpunk vision, but Neuromancer soldered those connections.
Not long after, I bought a computer and modem, and got online. I was calling
SMOF-BBS (Secret Masters of Fandom bulletin board, see sidebar) in
Austin where I stumbled onto “Jules Verne” and “Vincent Omniaveritas,”
aka Bruce Sterling. I was reading Bruce’s e-zine Cheap Truth and
hanging out at Armadillocon, an annual SF convention in Austin where cyberpunk
evolved from Gardner Dozois’ toss-off terminology to a viable marketing niche,
as it was also catching on as an actual lifestyle concurrent with the
emergent digital cultures.
Eventually, I logged onto the WELL long distance from Texas, and got involved
in cyberactivism after the Steve Jackson raid (which I read about on SMOF the
day it happened in March, 1990). One of the SMOF-BBS regulars, Johnny Mnemonic,
showed up on the WELL as “mnemonic,” aka Mike Godwin. Godwin had just
gone to work for Electronic Frontiers Foundation (EFF) as it was being formed,
and the Steve Jackson case was the right thing at the right time for them.
Steve wanted to form an Austin EFF, which was originally supposed to be an
“alpha” chapter of a potential chapters movement. I became a founding member of
EFF-Austin, along with Sterling, John Quarterman, Smoot Carl-Mitchell, and of
course Steve. We incorporated and became very active, and I got into organizing
and promoting cyber-events in Austin, with EFF-Austin as sponsor.
I’m leaving something out. John Barlow and several others created a conference
on the WELL that later became the Hacking conference, and held a discussion
there about freedom, privacy, hacking, and cracking that attracted renowned
hackmeisters Phiber Optik and Acid Phreak. This was before I reached the WELL,
but it was extracted and printed in an issue of Harper’s. I think that
discussion was one of the threads in the evolution of EFF, and in reading it I
realized that Neuromancer was prophetic, that a digital underground was
forming, that this was an opportunity to create a new kind of community
independent of geographical considerations.
Around the same time, I noticed that the Mondo 2000 topic in the
Hacking Conference on the WELL had several diverse threads, enough to justify
its own conference. An avid fan of Mondo since the Reality
Hackers daze [see sidebar], I suggested the creation of the
Mondo conference, which you and I cohosted, and which for a time was
incredibly active with rants and raves from the edges of digital postmodern
cyberfunk.
I met Mark Frauenfelder and Gareth Branwyn on the WELL, and wrote for Gareth’s
Going Gaga zine, and for the “Beyond Cyberpunk” HyperCard stack. Mark
was expanding bOING-bOING and looking for editors; I offered to be
fiction editor. The fiction submissions weren’t that great, so we decided not
to take unsolicited fiction. The fiction editor morphed into the Cyborganic
Jivemeister, and wrote “Fiction That Bleeds Truth.”
Paco Nathan and I met through the bOING-bOING connection, and in one of
our delirious conversations came up with the idea for an online company called
FringeWare. I spent the next three years of my life working on FringeWare,
Inc., and Fringe Ware Review, and on FringeWare’s online presence, along
with Paco, Monte McCarter, and other fellow travelers. (I’ve since left
FringeWare to do other stuff.)
I’m working at the moment at defining cyborganics, a term I used in a piece I
wrote for Fringe Ware Review #2. Cyborganics is an extension of
cybernetics, a word coined by Norbert Weiner. He wrote a book called The
Human Use of Human Beings, and that title points to cyborganics. It’s about
technology as an extension and an enhancement of the human, a utopian rather
than dystopian vision of the possibilities inherent in a world where digital
technology is ubiquitous but softly applied.
RUS: Sounds like a pretty rapid trajectory from getting into cyberpunk, getting
on the Net, Mondo… bOING bOING… FringeWare… and out. Did
you have any history of alternative cultural interest or activism?
JL: Oh, yeah, all the way back I was attracted by alternative scenes, radical
politics, gonzo lifestyles, poetic humanism over, uh…, plastics. Eventually,
I moved to Austin, enrolled in the University of Texas, and wrote a few pieces
for The Rag, Austin’s underground newspaper at the time. I marched
against Vietnam, dropped acid, studied James Joyce while reading Thomas Pynchon
on the side… dropped out of school for a while and lived with drunken poets
and dopers on the fringes of Austin’s student community.
Several things coulda happened then — the most likely that I was going to
become some kind of writer for the alternative press. I was really pushing in
that direction at the time. I returned to school and was in an honors English
program studying experimental fiction, envisioning a kind of gonzo journalistic
approach � la Hunter Thompson and Tom Wolfe as my most likely “career”
path, but also considering law school with radical politix in mind. Instead I
got married, started a family, and became a case worker. Some combination of
Ivan Illich’s de-institutionalizing philosophy and Shunryu Suzuki-Roshi’s soto
Zen sorta pushed me that way. We had a couple of kids and lived a weird sort of
hippie/family lifestyle for several years, ’til the Eighties. By then, my wife
had become a realtor, and we were evolving into a weird sort of misery, putting
distance between our lifestyle and our ideals. That was when I discovered the
WELL, which pulled me back on track and gave me the opportunity to approach
both activism and writing again with a little sadder-but-wiser seasoning.
I often think about Charles Bukowski, how he stopped writing for 10 years,
just worked at the post office and lived his crazy life. I went through a
period sort of like that, only despite its crazy elements it had amazing
stability… job, marriage, kids, etc. My life has been like that. I was born
on the Aries-Taurus cusp, so part of me is on fire and part of me is on solid
ground.
RUS: Net culture and the sort of cyber subculture that FringeWare/bOING
bOING, etc., represents is a mixed generational thing, very much made up of
people in their 20s, 30s, and 40s. Do you find that our experience as old farts
from the Sixties becomes increasingly irrelevant, or does it keep on coming
around again? Is there something left to be completed, or does it just need to
be jettisoned?
JL: That’s a good question. The real problem with the age thing is that,
without saying so in so many words, the young Turks of cyberculture are
invoking the spirit of our own “don’t trust anybody over 30” ageist maxim. You
and I have lived long enough to figure how fallacious that proscription really
is, but having spouted it ourselves, we understand where it’s coming from. And
we know how futile it is to argue the point.
RUS: We were clearly onto something in the Sixties, but I think we did a poor
job of defining the problem, and I don’t think Generation X or whatever it is
has done any better. We keep looking for superficialities, but the root of the
problem is way deep. I think Sandy Stone [see sidebar] was on the right
track when she noted (possibly without intending to) that virtual community was
potentially inimical to true community because it hides our growing sense of
isolation under a comfortable layer of cyberfoo that defines itself as a coming
together. I think Howard Rheingold [see sidebar] said that we have to
have more than digital Internet-working to form community, and if that is
indeed what he said, I agree with him.
JL: We’re always going to have exploiters, and they’re buying and selling souls
in cyberspace just like they do in physpace. Some of them appear to be our
friends ’til we peel back the epidermal simulation and see what’s ticking under
there. So it’s more important than ever that we form true community, not
just to retain our humanity, but to make ever deeper exploration of the meaning
of humanity, of existence, apart from our food-chain consumptive kneejerk
day-to-day. To get this point across, and to communicate some little bit of
wisdom gained over the years, is the challenge.
RUS: Well, cyberspace involves a break with real space and with history. Thing
is, when you break with history, there’s no context. You can talk for instance
about “the natural ecology of the free market” without dealing with slavery,
right? There seems to me some value in insisting on the exploration of our
history and the meaning of our times….
JL: That’s the tricky Zen thing of acknowledging your historical context
without attaching to it. In the Sixties and Seventies, I encountered a radical
insistence on abolition of the preterit and loss of history, but it wasn’t
working, precisely because it invited recidivism, a cultural return to the same
set of errors. I think we needed something like Groundhog Day. Alluding
to that Bill Murray film, repeating an existence ’til it’s right; i.e. until
the attachments fall away….
But that’s the thing. If you don’t examine history, you repeat mistakes. If
you do examine history, you may fall into a conceptual rut. The Taoists say to
look for the middle path, and so do the 4th way folks, though not so clearly.
“I’m just doing my jigsaw puzzle before it rains anymore.”
I was talking with my friend Joseph Rowe [see sidebar] today about how
the busywork of virtuality is a good way to hide from the real need to do
various kinds o’ work on yourself. Cyberfoo fills the head with noise, and
ensures that you can’t think your way into deep crevices of the mind and
spirit. Folks who do this and have any kind of sensitivity tend to be way
depressed eventually because they’re not handling the demands of individual
evolution, the depression is really a manifestation of the need to go deeper,
or the frustration of that need. So I’m in a quandary that’s actually part
spiritual, part ape, and part cyborg… what t’do?
I think I’ve already discussed that term “cyborganics,” but I can say more. I
think it’s about finding the right relationship, in human terms, between human
and machine. It’s natural and inherent that technology will evolve and become
more powerful, a greater presence in our lives. That’s happening now, and it’s
essential to redefine in this context what it is to be human, and figure
how technology can enhance without suffocating.
RUS: On the other hand, if we hold on tightly to what we think it means to be
human, we might be missing the point. Cyborgization might be our way of
mutating ourselves against our own will…. Let the machine into your heart, as
Rudy Rucker says. The question of humanism and free will is a complicated one,
I think….
JL: Agreed. And I’m not so sure that we can “control” evolution as much as we
think. In fact, homo sapiens are characteristically delusional about
control.
RUS: Right. So how do you give up your “control” delusions without making
yourself ripe for exploitation? This is a question the guruheads should have
asked themselves in the Seventies.
JL: Oh, yeah, that really is the question. Though I’ve never studied
aikido formally, I like that approach: Learn to blend with the energy of your
opponent in a way that’s effective but not aggressive. I’d like to cultivate
that approach in myself, however, in doing so, I’m wrestling demons on both
sides — the passive and the aggressive.
RUS: So what do you do now that you’re no longer a FringeWarian?
JL: I’m cyberactive, for one thing. I’m actively involved with EFF-Austin
again, and HotWired has asked me to moderate a forum on Electronic
Frontiers. The “electronic frontier” of the Internet or, in a larger sense, the
Matrix, is booming, and if you dig the history of frontier development and boom
cycles, you can see what’s going down behind the hype.
As a frontier is settled, the newer settlers want to impose their concept of
“civilization,” close the saloons and the bawdyhouses and round up the Indians,
y’know? This implies a certain power, and success in squashing one kind of
expression leads ineluctably to an attempt to suppress others. Today, they
close the bawdyhouses and the saloons, but tomorrow, they may be shutting down
the newspaper, the minority church, or the dissenting political party.
Without strong adherence to a constitutional framework that protects the
rights of everybody, consensus politics doesn’t work to protect diversity, you
get a manipulated consensus wherein power and special interest can create a
restrictive legal template that squashes the kind of cultural and philosophical
variety that is essential for social and political life to have any
consequence.
This is happening now with the Internet, and those of us who have
spent years exploring the possibility of online community development can see
our work threatened by interests for whom evolving intentional communities in
cyberspace are irrelevant. So many folks coming to the Internet now see it in
terms of the model most familiar to them: broadcast television. They see the
World Wide Web as a set of “programs,” and they disregard the interactive
dynamics, the quality of Internet-working that, for many of us, holds the most
promise.
The broadcast model is so entrenched, and the smell of money so compelling,
that it’s hard to fight that conditioned perception. In fact, many of us who
would’ve fought that fight have trouble sustaining a sense of purpose as dust
flies from the virtual land rush, the rush to capitalize on
Internet-as-hot-new-medium within a new telecommunications context. I was
certainly guilty of putting the civil liberties issues aside to develop a
“virtual market,” until Senator Exon encouraged me to wake up and smell the
coffee.
Paradoxically, I’ve done some consultancy on the business uses of the World
Wide Web, since I seem to have developed some expertise in that area, and that
brings up another important aspect of the “boom” phenomenon, which is its
vulnerability to collapse. There’s been quite a rush to develop companies to
provide various Internet services: connectivity, Web servers, html encoding and
Web design, etc., as individuals and corporations rush to develop an online
presence. One of the points I make when I’m doing consultancy is that it’s hard
to assess the commercial impact of the medium at this point in its development,
before the fever breaks…. We still don’t know, for instance, how effective
online presence will be as advertising, or how well “online storefronts” will
work. We don’t know how well the public’s fascination with the Internet will
hold, once the novelty’s worn off. And there [are] other strange attractors. I
wouldn’t, for instance, want to be an Internet service provider right now,
because the day may come when the phone companies will blow those guys right
out of the water.
On the other hand, I really dig doing content on the Web, and I think there’ll
always be room for Webzines like TAZmedia, the one I created for
FringeWare, HotWired, and the various others that are springing up:
Suck, Salon, Urban Desire, et al.
RUS: I wonder if the frontier metaphor isn’t a little bit off the mark and
dangerous to people’s conception of how much freedom is possible “on the
frontier,” since a real frontier gets settled but electronic conceptual space
is virtually unlimited?
JL: You imply that “cyberspace” is less constrained than “physpace,” and I’m
not sure that’s true. But it’s so different. The concept of virtual space or
cyberspace depends on “consensual hallucination,” as Gibson called it, which
means that it’s socially constructed by participants in what amounts to a
quasi-delusion.
RUS: Cyberspace is constrained by certain practical technological limits as
well, in one sense. From another point of view it’s only constrained by
imagination — and the imagination of every individual therein and how far
they’re able to take it. But, certainly, the human psyche is constrained by its
programming. The question is how do you break through the unspoken conspiracy
to believe in stupid, destructive, and oppressive things? I believe that people
know better, but still dedicate their entire lives to defending those things.
JL: That sounds like the Buddha, or Gurdjieff…. The sense that most folks are
sleepwalking through life, unaware of their true nature, though it’s right
there. That lack of awareness is normal, and the lack of awareness of
the lack of awareness is metanormal. I think that’s supposed to be the curse of
existence in this particular frame of reference, whatever it is. Don’t the
physicists say that the material world is all probability, nothing “real” in a
real sense? This shit just drives me crazy.
RUS: And then somebody whacks you on the head with a stick and you’re
enlightened. And then, the next day, your head is just sore.
JL: Exactly. That elusive chaos butterfly, always causing hurricanes and
headaches.
RUS: So, do you divide up your straight life as a nine-to-fiver and your fringe
life, or do you see it all as one continuum?
JL: I’m good at what I do so I can get away with being a bit weird. Working
along the fringe cultivates a beginner’s mind; everything is new and nobody’s
an expert. That’s way different from the established organization of a
government job, so it’s a way different scene. They sorta complement each
other.
RUS: Well, you must be pretty excited about hosting the EFF forum on
Hotwired. Maybe you can have a big hit and retire from the
nine-to-five.
JL: What I’d like is more freedom to explore various juxtapositions of
consciousness, technology, and politics, so it’d be nice to “have a hit” if
that’s what it meant. Otherwise, I’ll just keep plugging away in whatever
discretionary time I can find. Paco [Nathan] used to describe me as a catalyst,
one who pulls people together and gets ’em moving in a particular direction.
One way or another, I guess I’ll keep doing that. n
E-mail Jon Lebkowsky at jonl@wired.com or visit his Website at
http://www.well.com/~jonl. Electronic Frontiers Forum takes place on 7PM PST
Thursdays (http://www.hotwired.com/eff).
This article appears in August 2 • 1996 and August 2 • 1996 (Cover).