The naturally narrative Assange’s unauthorized first draft was so adroit, so straight and secure of self, and so infectingly scribed…

Julian Assange: The Unauthorized Biography
Canongate Books Ltd.
September, 2011

I <3 Wandsworth inmate #A9379AY.  Even though he moves and shakes like this.

Said love/prisoner is Julian Paul Assange: young adult international subversive; quantum philosophical Ned Kelly; convicted hacker, implied rapist, inferred murderer, and founder of one of the mightiest implements for freedom to date: Wikileaks.org.  

In all honesty, for Assange demands it so, I feel taxed like no assignment before to review a 253 page work so pertinent, written by a man I now consider a friend — despite never having met.  The naturally narrative Assange’s unauthorized first draft (by which I was so relentlessly enthralled I only noticed a dozen or less typos) was so adroit, so straight and secure of self, and so infectingly scribed, that I still required further research into his wealth of references.  In addition to his heroic scientific prowess; kid’s a cinematic and literary savant.  

I hardly hesitate to call Assange a hero.  He was bred to be. Taking the surname of his mother’s bohemian puppeteer/activist partner, Julian — born July 3, 1971, to a distance province of a distant province (or Townsville, Queensland, Australia) — was immediately privy to the importance of optimism and the fulfillment of enacting change.  From a “moveable feast” of a childhood where “consistency was a matter of style and values;” he experienced the prejudices of human complexity early; how “bureaucracy makes a stone of the heart” and “authority drags its heels to make a point.”  Like when his family home was destroyed by fire, and because of their leanings (though not hippie, which was “appallingly apolitical”), no one really bothered to help.  

His first word was why, and his playpen reads were Tarzan, Dr. Seuss, and Animal Farm.  His life was a “heavenly” fugitivism, until the age of 9 when his mother left troubled adopted-father Brett (on this I wouldn’t have minded more delineation, but I respect Assange’s unspoken assertion that it’s a truth which wouldn’t necessarily serve me in his self-prostitution).  I, of course, refer to Assange’s opinion of the memoir; which he offers in all his blunt, Wilde-like humor.  Seriously, I love this kid.

He writes as if conceived for it, propelling an already awesome personal account with confidence and an unfailing reverence for beauty and truth.  Then his mother (yeah, you could argue she was a little self-engaged and unbalanced) fell for a cult-spawn, hateful, abusive “dark-force Heathcliff in shorts and thongs” who traded their simplicity for fear as he tracked them all over the expansive continent, introducing Assange to deceit and imbuing him with a paranoia that would adhere interminably.  This was when the itinerant nature of his life thus far would cease to be heaven. So at 10, Assange focused on being an expert beekeeper — a discipline to resurrect itself at 16 when Assange’s consciousness welded with a Commodore 64, and he would teach himself to enter the Pentagon’s 8th Command Group computers (among other classified sites, NASA much).  

Yes, maintaining a 2 story beehive almost exclusively in your mother’s runaway wagon while your younger half-brother fathers a rooster that occasionally needs to shit is certainly another component to Assange’s already unusual, Tom Sawyer upbringing.  In the interest of time, I’ll skip his fascinating genealogy; his childhood gangs (where he constantly shopped for something to oppose, a “congenital temperament”); his time in the village of Goolmanger where he learned “manly competence;” his final lesson in Australian survival and his mother’s penal run-ins (investigating the Maralinga nuclear test site and effectively ended her activism). Per Assange, life wouldn’t be life “if it didn’t cede to dark complications.”  

It’s a credit almost expected of this exceptional individual that at 16 he longed — and thusly autodidactically mastered how — to reach “an infinity point where selfhood dissolves into history;” to disappear into and serve something larger than oneself. He becomes a full-on Romeo in describing his marvel of coding, the web, and all the fish.  Like an astronaut considers space with all the love-spell of some acme Aphrodite, so does Assange the innate revolution that is computer programming. For him, hacking is betterment driven by imagination; a manner to upload oneself as an instrument of the hivemind, the pleasure of creation itself.  He may gush a bit on this point but I’m still rapt. It’s that rhapsodic.  Also his vocab is fun (scuppered?)

So in a mood for mathematical truth (the purest kind) and moral necessity (Assange’s subatomic function), this young man, now 20, and an individual who would — and will — suffer “Kafkaesque miasma’s” rather than sell out to “Faustian pacts” of government bankroll, hacks Nortel (Canada’s telecommunications corporation; another gripping account of a most cinematic cat and mouse) when he is busted by fledgling internet legislation.  And I think, in honor of Assange’s first-draft garnishes, I’m gonna let that humongous run-on stand.  

He’s the brother I never had, Bill Hicks with a command of code and the metrics of modern jounalism. For Assange, the struggle (beyond opposing the cancer of modern power and forcing a new, honest relationship between people and their governments), is “always to be oneself.”  Well, his self broke an online pedophilia ring before being arrested on 31 counts of cybercrime (none of which could prove he ever stole anything more than phone time; on one occasion allocating such to the entirety of New York for a day just cause he could).  Even some 15 years later, when he would be imprisoned for farcically contrived allegations of sexual misconduct, Assange would still only own one pair of shoes, essentially surviving as a squatter (even starting a union for it prior to the hacking convictions).  This is a rare man who has no need for materials other than the ones required to operate the non-for-profit, learn-as-they-went Wikileaks.  

Yet, this being — this prone to prose and alliteration cypherpunk — this cognoscenti who feels the “pulse of history through a flashing cursor” pangs not to divulge his faults, like being mono-minded (really just minor and understandable personality defects in the wake of his selfless global pursuits). His zero-wanking journalistic inclinations have spotlighted (and subsequently helped amend) government corruption in Kenya under the Kibaki regime; in Malaysia following the murder of Altantuya Shaariibuu, and during the grotesque bank-rape of Iceland — in all places Assange maintained his inordinately modest nomadism before even getting to the “fetishistic hatred” revealed in the Guantanamo, Irag, Afghanistan, and Cablegate leaks.  His methods for fact-checking and protecting sources are utterly noble.  

If anything, the kid was a little too trusting of newspapermen and ready-to-go females (the latter a criminally common trait among nerdos, of whom I’ve been known to collect, masticate, and expectorate myself).  As to the naughty with the aspiring politico/tartlets alluded to only as “A_______” and “W_______,” it was patently a chaotic time that Assange is almost embarrassingly honest in disclosing.  More intriguing, the theory of Sweden’s mainstream hardcore feminism catapulting his prosecution — but I’d still like to read his 46 page defense against the root beer who cried molestation despite having already started consensual copulation. You heard me. Admittedly, Assange is the type of occasionally chauvinist ”up for affection” nerdo to find himself in a sticky sexual situation, though it was directly after being told the US would grab his balls through illegal means as a result of the Afghan logs leak.    

He was a single dad during his “retreat to the realm of pure thinking” in “unreality” (or studying Mathematics and Science in the University of Melbourne,) when a bike accident and some Tramadol inspired him to seek “theories of change through true measure;” how to reconfigure, increase proactive observers and eliminate blockages in the “pipeline” by which flows all informational matter through all Earth’s residents.  Sure he trips on such techie gnostications sometimes, but this is a man who’s never in his life known calm, a man truly anguished by injustice.  He himself would liken to a Jesus figure, if he didn’t think the Devil had the best lines.

Also admittedly an obsessive, Assange returns with a pointed frequency to the concepts of justice, decency, and honesty.  He’s not anti-Western, he’s pro-information and anti-bastard (i.e., french nurses with hardons for paracetamol – inside joke if you read the book – and the kind of journalism which “seeks to put a curse on peoples suffering”).  His utmost and underlying point: “the truth is not anyone’s to own, but a fabric of our worlds’ reality.  To own them you’d need to be big brother.”  You’d think an Orwell pygmy was permanently attached to Assange’s shoulder, perhaps another reason I fell for him so ardently (I have Benjamin the donkey tattooed between heiroglyphs of truth on my thigh). 

Hey, if you’re alive, you might as well commit to living fully in the world (per Assange, that’s how you’ll understand your own mind).  Victims of the rampant, brutal military culture, put down your “human casualty is no different from a videogame” mentality and instead reward the torturers with further revelations of truth.  Authoritarian power strengthens itself through conspiracy, and Assange argues that to combat this, enough people need to understand the conspiracy. For the Fox News audience, I’ll report how Assange quotes Teddy Roosevelt, in that “to befoul this unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of statesmenship.”  Further, and for the rest, I’ll quote Assange directly: “You are what you know, and no state has the right to make you less than you are.”  If he’s ever verging on idealism, the prior declaration (and others like it) speak such plain hard fact that any judgment of mushiness evaporates.  

Julian Assange has inspired me immeasurably — though being a cynic, I wonder whether he was simply programming the reader to sympathize? By his own admission, virtual reality is a mainstay of modern life. But doubts and charges of poor hygiene aside, I thank this man for his efforts to hold governments accountable to those who elect and ought rule those governments.  He doesn’t want the credit, just the outcome.  I, too, hope for the day we may live in one big openness haven (maybe in the imagination nation that is the internet).  

Julian Assange, it’s been nice playing with your system. 

I wrote a line on the Acceler8or Facebook page that went ‎”I look for the ‘dirty’ uses of technology, and then trace backwards from them to the ‘pristine’ uses.” R.U. wanted me to explain that line a little more and discuss exactly what I meant by it.

So I’d like to start by discussing why I stress “being a succubus” as part of my articles, because it’s part and parcel of those “dirty uses” I was talking about, and it gives me a chance to talk about myself and how I see this coming about in a manner that might sound a lot less like “wishful thinking” than most of you probably think possible.

So, first off, let’s start by examining the end result: Valkyrie Ice, 7 foot tall Amazon succubus. She has batwings, cloven hooves, a long prehensile tail with a spaded tip that can act as a third hand, pointed ears, upper and lower fangs, and rams horns. Why I want to look like this isn’t important. I simply do, and I am willing to go to great lengths to get my way because I’m human, irrational, and don’t give a flying fuck about whether you approve of my desires in any way.  Pretty much like most humans. The big difference is that I’m actually willing to be honest about my desires instead of keeping them concealed out of fear of being socially acceptable. You might not find succubi attractive, but I know for a fact that there are many other people out there besides me who do, and while “the majority” might raise an eyebrow at me, that still leaves millions of people in the “long tail” who are going to be perfectly happy chasing mine.

If you are not familiar with “The Long Tail” it’s the marketing term for the ever smaller demographic divisions that lie outside the “mass market.” It’s the “niche” market, the subdividisions between 1 person and “everybody.” Everybody likes food. Not everyone likes “Aunt Wheezies Real Coon Squeezins!” (No, that’s not a real product.) The “Long Tail” is what powers Amazon and EBay, finding the other people who want that still packaged 1st edition Jawa with vinyl cape and basically catering to desires that are too “small” for the big guys to bother with. The “Giant’s” can’t concern themselves with anything that won’t sell to everyone, and this has been the model for the entire industrial revolution. If “Everyone” doesn’t buy it, it’s just not worth making. However, in the age of the internet, the “Long Tail” is proving to be a market many times larger than the “Mass Market” and some companies are beginning to realize diversity is the future, not the old “You can have it in any color you like so long as it’s Black” mindset of the megacorps.

And with so many numerous technological developments ongoing, understanding the “long tail” is crucial to any attempts to predict the future. In short, any future predictions that assume that the current corporate ideals of “You take it our way, or you get nothing” will continue to remain in force are flawed. Any assumption that the “majority” will prevent the development of “odd and strange” technology to cater to individuals like me is based in the illusion that there actually is a “Majority” when in truth, every single one of us belongs to one small subsection of the “Long Tail” in one way or another. You may not want hooves and tails, but you might love to have a new nose, or to look like Angelina Jolie or Brad Pitt. You might want neon hair, or just hair that is curly, but everyone has some desire that is not  universally shared.  

And this is what leads to the Law of Unintended consequences, technology version. “For every developed technology, there will be the ‘intended use’ it was created for and an unknown number of ‘unintended uses’ that will be found for it.”

So let’s look at my desires to be a succubus again, now that we understand that those desires are neither unique nor universal, merely one demographic among endless others in the “Long Tail.” In fact, if you go to SecondLife and do a search for “demons” you will find there are hundreds of shops dedicated to… well, horns, hooves, spaded tails, wings and everything else “demonic.” In fact, one of the most successful long term shops in all of SL is Grendel’s Children, a shop exclusively for non-human Avatars and accessories.

So I’m going to set aside long term futuristic developments in biotech and such which could lead to my physically becoming a succubus, and even set aside such “dismissible” technology as VR to look at how I could physically look like a succubus inside of ten years. We’re going to let our imaginations go wild and think like a Hollywood makeup technician with free reign on methods and an unlimited budget, and design a “succubus suit” that would allow me to walk onto a set looking like the demoness I want to be. That shouldn’t really be a huge stretch, since it’s already been done with Tim Curry in his role as “Darkness” in Ridley Scott’s Legend. I will however add one caveat, I’m going to assume the use of a lot of “in the lab” technology that could enable me to act in this suit exactly like I really had this body without any “digital” effects being added in post processing or needing a crew of puppeteers to control.

So, first off, let’s start with the body suit itself. I’m going to want it to be lightweight and unrestrictive while still supporting wings, horns, hooves and a tail. It’s going to have to fit to my form and allow me to “be naked” while still being “in costume.” It’s also going to need to be tough enough to stand up to stunts and to contain its own animatronics for the wings, tail and hooves because I’m expecting to be filmed using 360 degree camera technology and I can’t have cables and power lines connected to the suit or it will ruin the “no post processing digital effects” rule. In fact, I want this suit to look so realistic that I can walk down the street in it and not have people be able to tell it’s a suit. I’m even going to want it to be wearable dancing… and even during sex.

I know, I’m so demanding. I’m making this nearly impossible… or am I? The fact is, I’m deliberately setting the conditions to illustrate that there are numerous “in the lab” technologies that could make this a reality, with only minor modifications to suit my “other than intended” uses.

Let’s start off with the actual body suit, because it should be obvious that it’s going to require some pretty sophisticated materials to make. Metal and plastic are just not going to cut it. Traditional servomotors won’t do either. So we look to the labs, and we see a lot of developments in metamaterials. There’s a variety of potential materials to chose from, graphene being one of the most promising, although boron carbide is also a potential choice, or possibly even Kevlar. We’ve even got Aluminum foam, aerogels (and artificial muscles made from spider-silk, CNTs, and various polymers. That makes it pretty clear that while I cannot specifically say which of the various laboratory-made metamaterials will be cheap, easy to manufacture, or which will be easiest to use in a 3d printer, I can be pretty sure that one or another of them will be available to do the various things I’m going to need this suit to do.

The first thing is that it has to be skin tight. If I look at the artificial muscles being worked on, I can envision the possibility of a suit made from them that will “shrink to fit” perfectly. And as they are extremely lightweight fibers, there’s a good possibility I can make it transparent. Additionally, given the strength of said “muscles,” making a harness to keep the wings firmly attached to my back, tail firmly attached to my rear, and make sure my hoof shoes and horns fit without wobbling should be pretty easy as well. As these parts would be made out of extremely lightweight but superstrong materials, as discussed above, they should be fairly easy to keep tightly fitted to the body in the appropriate areas, especially if we have the entire suit being actively controlled to maintain optimum fit by minimally expanding and contracting as it senses my body motions.

Wait a minute, you say, how is it supposed to do that? Well, that’s where printable electronics comes in. Stanford University just perfected a means to make a “decal” out of an electronic circuit that can then be applied to any material. That suit could be literally controlled on a thread by thread basis to ensure perfect fit. In addition, it could be adjusted to provide support, like a bit of tummy tuck and breast support. While wearing it, my body could look as perfect as it’s possible to look, while (hopefully) still allowing for a “nude” look and full freedom of motion. And those same “artificial muscles” could be used to mimic the actual muscles that would be found in batwings, making them able to extend and flex just like a real one. With properly made wings, the “bouncing” effect seen in many mechanical devices that use servos could be eliminated. Also, the same “muscle cloth” could be used as the wing membranes. As for the tail, well Festo’s already created a robot “elephant’s trunk” arm, meaning a full prehensile tail is quite feasible.

In fact, the hooves might be one of the more difficult things to properly make, because it has to keep my foot on tiptoe, provide support to keep it that way without sacrificing the ability to bend my ankle, as well as control the actual hoof to keep the base of the hoof aligned to the plain of the floor to ensure good footing. This likely means a bit of exoskeleton will be needed, essentially making the hooves a prosthetic device that fits over my foot and compensates for the stress of walking like a ballerina all day. (And yes, I could, if asked, draw a potential design sketch.)

But how to control it? Well, Epoch’s Emotiv EEG headset is already available, so we simply include a version of it into the skull cap that is snuggly fitted to my head, keeping my horns solidly in place, and viola — with the proper control software and some practice, I have a “Succubus” suit that fit’s like a second skin. But we still need to provide power for all those electronics don’t we? Lucky me that several dozen different breakthroughs in ultracapacitor batteries (Google it as there are far too many to link), as well as flexible solar have been in the headlines recently, no? Those wings, with their large surface areas would make great solar collectors and there are multiple flexible storage solutions that could be sandwiched into the membranes as well.

Now a lot of this would be difficult to make right now, but with the likely advances in 3d printing over the next decade, we can certainly assume that while my suit might not be “cheap” it is likely going to be within the realm of technical feasibility. So, now that we’ve shown how we could potentially create such a suit, we have to look outside the narrow demographic of “people who want to look like succubi” and see if there’s a much broader demographic that could use this collection of technology as a solution to a much wider range of issues. I can certainly think of several. For example, the wings and musculature is likely to be seen first in a next generation model artificial arm or leg. The “skin suit” has applications as a replacement for the current “pressure suits” worn by pilots who experience high-g’s. Combined with graphene or boron carbide and some clever design, it could even be a means to create a form fitting “Ironman” exoskeleton type suit for soldiers, police, firemen, and even athletes.  Combined with an Epoc, it could possibly even be a means to enable the paralyzed to control their bodies again (prior to stemcell regeneration of nerves.) And that’s not even to mention the clothes that true “skin tight” cloth could make possible. So we can be pretty sure that a good possibility exists for the creation of the “skin suit” for reasons much less “kinky” than my demoness fetish. So now we have the “pure” uses of this technology, i.e. the uses which are broad enough to be “intentional,” and thus more likely to be developed than my rather narrow uses.

However, there is yet another factor to consider. What other demographics in the “long tail” would have alternative uses for the same technology? And I can also find plenty of those, from transvestites wanting “girl suits” to furries who would add an animal facemask with animatronics and video camera eyes to the rest, to motorcyclists (the “armored” version would probably act like a full body helmet) and even to more modest uses like “control top” panty hose that actually could act like a girdle without sacrificing important functions… like breathing.

So now, here we are, with a whole bevy of technological puzzle pieces, and a few potential ways they could be fitted together to make a variety of “solutions” to various “problems.” Will they be put together this way? Who knows? But there is a demand for products like these — or very similar ones — regardless of whether everyone shares in the demand or not. And as the “long tail” grows ever more prominent as more and more “niche markets” find their customers, I don’t doubt that my succubus suit, or something very like it, will come to be. After all, I’m a human with a desire, and willing to pay to have that desire filled, and sooner or later, someone is going to create the supply to meet my demand.

And when they do, I’m going to have fun getting my tail chased.

“This magazine is about what to do until the millennium comes. We’re talking about Total Possibilities. Radical assaults on the limits of biology, gravity and time. The end of Artificial Scarcity. The dawn of a new humanism. Highjacking technology for personal empowerment, fun and games. Flexing those synapses! Stoking those neuropeptides! Making Bliss States our normal waking consciousness. Becoming the Bionic Angel.”

If it is the task of a magazine editorial to inform readers in clear language what to expect in the pages to come, this editorial of the first issue of Mondo 2000 in 1989 didn’t quite live up to its promise. It bent the minds of the readers in an uneasy twist: while making far-reaching claims about the promising, even spiritual nature of technological futures to come, its hyperbolic style begged the reader not to take such claims seriously. Critics have often tried to unveil the “real message” underneath such New Edge double-sidedness. Yet, I argue here, the paradoxical style of New Edge shows us exactly what it means to live with the unresolvable tensions of today’s information society. And the 1960s hippies were there to see it first.

Oxymoronic Futures

The editorial of the first Mondo formed the overtures of a magazine that baffled through its irony, incomprehensible language, screaming images, and particularly through the collision of many different, oppositional modes of thought. It flirted, for instance, with the utopian idealism and spiritual longings of the 1960s as well as with the technological entrepreneurialism of the 1980s; and it was nostalgically romantic at the same time that it was futuristic and high-tech. So one ad recommended digital image enhancement software as a tool for conveying “the shamanic experience;” and Mondo contributor Timothy Leary claimed that  “spiritual realities for centuries imagined” could perhaps now “finally be realized” through the “electronic-digital.”

Such a fusion of  New Agey spirituality, tribalism and nostalgia with an entrepreneurial, futuristic and technology-loving attitude was not unique to the magazine, but was part of a larger Californian culture some key members came to think of as “New Edge.” One element of this New Edge culture was electronic dance events — raves — wherein Earth Goddesses were worshipped while geeks spun electronic music and beamed fractal-shaped artificial life forms onto the walls. In flyers for such events, as well as in magazines, manifestos, cyberpunk fiction and conferences, information technology was both advertised as a clever tool for individual empowerment, and was seen itself a self-evolving higher form of consciousness. Today, such a blend of attitudes still characterizes the annual Burning Man festival, and tech-psychedelic events like the Mindstates conferences.

Not surprisingly, scholars and other commentators who have looked at this confusing blend of attitudes and worldviews have struggled to interpret it. Regarding Mondo 2000, the art critic Vivian Sobchack wondered — in a 1990 article for ARTFORUM International: “What was being enacted here, what was really being sold?” “At first sight,” Sobchack answered herself, M2 seemed “somehow, important in its utopian plunge into the user-friendly future of better living not only through the chemistry left over from the 1960s, but also through personal computing (…).” Yet Sobchack eventually judged the magazine “the stuff of a romantic, swashbuckling, irresponsible individualism that fills the dreams of “mondoids” who, by day, sit at computer consoles working for (and becoming) corporate America.” “Combined with an ‘unabashed commitment to consumerism,’ its political idealism leads to an ‘oxymoronic cosmology of the future,” she wrote.

Sobchack’s reading of Mondo 2000 belongs to a broader line of commentaries that look with suspicion at the way in which Silicon Valley technologies have acted as vehicles for “countercultural” utopian and liberal messages. Most of such critical writings treat the hippie rhetoric with which Californian technology enthusiasts promise the latest high tech invention to offer individual empowerment, social unity, a clean environment and democratic freedom as no more than a smokescreen; shielding from view the actual selfishness, greed and exploitative nature of high tech practice. Often these critiques have been accompanied by nostalgic looks at a countercultural past where intentions were “pure” and products of liberation were “untainted” by corporate cooptation and mainstream hype.

Differences are often noted — for example — between the ethos of open sharing that characterized hacker culture in the 1970s and the secretive sphere of nondisclosure and patenting that characterizes technology development today; or between early 1990s Virtual Reality where people were actively and creatively involved in interactive online worlds and later VR theme parks where the technology was now used for quick consumption and entertainment; or between the creativity of the first websites and the standardized sites today. In similar fashion, one might reflect on post-countercultural communal experiments such as Burning Man. Each year, participants and organizers of this desert city go through cycles of anxious self-criticism. Can a festival that attracts 50.000 participants still be called subversive? Despite the ethos of radical self-expression and creativity, don’t the majority of visitors come to passively consume the scenery? What about the pollution caused by the festival… and what does the fact that most of its visitors are caucasian say about its universalistic, inclusive ethos?

Such questions, I believe, are important. Yet, if they lead only to the cynical conclusion that we are here dealing with coopted and contrived forms of once authentic cultural practices, we forget something crucial. While critical thinkers scrutinize New Edge culture for how it is actually conservative, mainstream and selfish rather than progressive, subversive and socially responsible, they don’t take into account that New Edge positioned itself at the pinnacle of a cultural environment that cannot adequately be accounted for in such familiar binary terms. Starting from this point of view, in my recent dissertation “New Edge. Technology and Spirituality in the San Francisco Bay Area” I have sought to understand this dimension of New Edge: the extent to which it gives voice and form to a cultural moment that is still ill understood in all its tensions and experiential contradictions.

Taking Control Over Perception and Evolution

My study of New Edge begins in the 1960s and ’70s, amidst a network of people, ideas and organizations, all of which cannot easily be characterized in terms of distinctions between counterculture and corporate culture, spiritual or scientific orientation, and technological or rustic-romantic focus.

Take the Human Potential Movement at Esalen, inspired by Aldous Huxley’s notion that there are “still a great many potentialities — for rationality, for affection and kindliness, for creativity — still lying latent in man.” Huxley believed that “since everything has speeded up so enormously in recent years, that we shall find methods for going almost as far beyond the point we have reached now within a few hundred years.” In their pursuit to “produce extraordinary things out of this strange piece of work that a man is,” therapists and intellectuals at Esalen were inspired by Eastern spirituality as much as by cutting edge science and technology. As Esalen historian Walter Truett Anderson writes, they even turned “the flowing together of East and West, the ancient and the modern, science and religion, scholarship and art” as a guiding principle.

Or think of the entrepreneur Stewart Brand, who initiated the famous Whole Earth Catalog as a compendium filled with tools and intellectual baggage  — both rustic and high tech — with the intention of helping “hippie” communards in their pursuit for self-reliant living. Although the Catalog supported a culture that imagined itself to ‘counter’ the corporate mainstream, Brand was open about the fact that the Catalog itself was an “advantage seeking” product, financed through investment aid from his parents, and by means of stock bought in his name.

Anticipating the boundary-crossing New Edge culture were also academic scientists like Gregory Bateson and Norbert Wiener whose interest in cybernetics became foundational for thinking about human-computer interaction as it also became entwined with other strands of holistic thought.

Not to forget the Merry Pranksters, a group of hippies that formed around the writer Ken Kesey, who wholeheartedly embraced the blinking, speedy consumer goods that postwar America had to offer while their attitude began to involve, as Tom Wolfe wrote about them, “the main things religious mystics have always felt, things common to Hindus, Buddhists, Christians, and for that matter Theosophists and even flying-saucer cultists. Namely, the experience of an Other World, a higher level of reality. And a perception of the cosmic unity of this higher level.”

What connected these networks of people was an aspiration for human empowerment and positive global change that came from humanity’s heightened perception and understanding. This understanding was to come from the growing availability of chemicals such as LSD, high tech tools and exercises that were able to compensate for the otherwise poor perceptive capacities of humans. In his famous essay “The Doors of Perception,” Aldous Huxley called the human brain a “reducing valve” that, in everyday life, only allows a “measly trickle of consciousness.” Huxley talked about mescaline as a tool that could “reopen” humanity’s door of perception — it made people aware of the “totality of awareness” or “Mind at Large.” Similarly, the Whole Earth Catalog invested strongly in the idea that high tech could bring about just such a growth of awareness. The very name of the Catalog was, in fact, inspired by the greatest technological achievement of that time — a picture of the earth as seen from the Apollo, which appeared on the front cover of each edition. As John Markoff put it: “He [Brand] realized that an image of the whole earth might inspire others to have a more complete sense of man’s place within the planet’s ecology and all of the implications that flowed from such a view of the world.” The paradoxical hope was that in its union with high tech, man would restore holistic and more complete ways of seeing and experiencing that it had learned to forget in the course of modern life. Also, biofeedback equipment — which measures heart rate, blood pressure, perspiration or brainwaves and feeds such information back to the user as a way of making her aware of her level of relaxation — was advertised in 1970s manuals as a technique for obtaining a “real knowledge of the self” — a knowledge that “has been lost by humanity over centuries by civilization.”

Both the use of psychedelics and high tech endorsed the experience among these early pioneers that they were godlike in their potential for comprehending reality. “We are as gods and might as well get good at it,” as Stewart Brand famously stated in the pages of the Whole Earth Catalog. “Being as gods” meant, among other things, not only having greater perception but being able to take part in evolution itself. Additionally, this idea cut across spheres where spiritual practices dominated and where high tech pioneering took place: at Esalen, new forms of therapeutic practice such as “Rolfing” came to be thought of as the “first conscious attempt at evolution made by any species in modern times;” while at the Stanford Research Institute, the computer scientist Douglas Engelbart employed the term “co-evolution” to describe the “symbiotic, co-adaptive learning process by means of which humans and computers develop as one intelligent system.” Whether one was taking psychedelics, hooking oneself up to a biofeedback system, logged on to mainframe computers, or taking part in consciousness raising sessions at Esalen, a pervasive sense thus existed within these networks of tinkerers that humans were taking control over their own evolutionary development.

The World Slipping Away

What makes this belief in the capacity of high tech and science to turn people into all-knowing gods so interesting to me is that it combined with a very contradictory notion. In the course of all those practices — psychedelic or technological — whereby people extended and sharpened their ability to perceive and intuit the truths of the world, the world itself seemed to slip away and disappear from view. With perception meaning not so much the ability to touch things with the hand or to taste with the mouth, but to see patterns of connections as they were translated into information by cybernetic machines or to experience synchronistic connections between events across time and space, the world came to be constructed increasingly in invisible, untouchable, and imperceptible terms. “We are migrating from a world governed primarily by the laws of thermodynamics to a world governed primarily by cybernetics — a weightless world (…) whose events are the impinging of information on information,” wrote Stewart Brand in the Catalog. “We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves,” read another entry in the Catalog, in response to the cybernetic work of Norbert Wiener, Buckminster Fuller, the eclectic scientist, guru of the counterculture and main inspiring figure for the Whole Earth Catalog sketched a similar vision of the world when he wrote: “In World War I industry suddenly went from the visible to the invisible base, from the track to the trackless, from the wire to the wireless, from visible structuring to invisible structuring in alloy.” As a result, Fuller wrote, engineers and scientists have “lost their true mastery, because they didn’t personally understand what was going on. If you don’t understand you cannot master.” The writer Susan Sontag even called the “present cultural condition” one in which “Western man (…) has been undergoing a massive sensory anesthesia.” Sontag ascribed this “anesthesia” to the fact that scientific and technological developments have changed the daily environment of human beings into one “that cannot be grasped by the human senses.” And Californian therapist Peter Marin wrote: “What is real becomes still harder to touch, to sense, to act upon.”

Peons in a Simulation Game

Today, in the way that people all over the world are seeking to come to terms with the hopes and fears of living in an “information society,” these two oppositional experiences play an equally large role. Together, they make it impossible to settle permanently on the question of whether information technology gives us more or less understanding of — and creative power in — the world. Software such as Google Earth and the powers of parallel computing may give the illusion that we can see, think and self-evolve better — even better than earlier gods. At the same time, crises wrought by computer automated stock trading; the invisible ways in which small devices in our daily environments communicate with each other about personal details we didn’t even know were there; or software so complex that not one programmer is capable of debugging it; make us feel as if we are but peons in a simulation game wrought by alien powers. All over the world, opinion leaders, think tanks, politicians and educators wrestle with the question of what kinds of ethics and moralities should guide our decisions regarding technology development and use. Yet, they are increasingly at a loss because they are unable to permanently identify and locate the sources of power they are confronted with. Claims about the empowering capacity of high tech are canceled out by claims about loss-of-control… and vice versa. For instance, certain thinkers have emphasized the potential significance of self-enhancement technologies to be used by women for “self-determination.” Yet others wonder what self-determination means when technologies injected in the body work incomprehensibly, through programs created in secretive ways by globally dispersed teams with no one being clearly and visibly accountable for the outcomes.

Advanced technologies today don’t only appeal to ourselves as rational autonomous self-determined beings and as divine creators of our own fates, but also embed us in out-of-control worlds that act godlike in their totalizing powers, magical complexity, pervasive invisibility and unaccountability. In order to live happily in this world, we need to be able to use high tech tools to understand and act rationally in the world, but we also need to trust a system that we cannot understand and that is immeasurably bigger than we are. In other words, we need to both act as rational human beings and also as believers. It happens that, in western societies, these two attitudes have historically been seen as incompatible. “Belief” — the capacity to trust in a higher power and to give oneself over to it –—is generally associated with “irrationality” and “religion.” And religion has come to be seen as the absolute opposite of science — which is characterized by objective rationality; the idea that individual humans are able to logically comprehend and control their environment. To imagine a rational human being will believe in a system he cannot perceive nor understand is difficult, yet it is this paradoxical attitude that is being solicited from all of us if we are to live in this world without being continuously anxious and paranoid.

“If You Think It’s All A Joke You Miss the Punch Line”

What made New Edge culture and its 1960s antecedents significant, I believe, is precisely that it accounted for these two different experiential dimensions of living in today’s world. And I suspect that we could understand the irony of MONDO 2000 as well as the many playful aspects of New Edge culture at large, as ways in which this is done.

The irony of Mondo 2000 invited Sobchack to wonder what the actual, real message of the magazine was. She concluded that it was one of the aspects that made the magazine disingenuous in its idealism. “M2 sits squarely, and safely, on the postmodern fence, covering its postmodern ass, using irony not only to back off from a too-serious commitment to its own stance, but also to unsettle the grounds from which it might be criticized,” Sobchack wrote. For Sobchack, the irony of the magazine was proof of its nihilistic and uncommitted stance. Yet, taking into account the historical context in which New Edge emerged, I think it is more accurate to understand this irony as a way of being radically inclusive, committed to extremely different attitudes to technology simultaneously: the ironically hyperbolic tone of the first Mondo 2000 editorial, for instance, forcefully calls for faith in the power of technology to bring salvation from scarcity and other human sufferings, and simultaneously allows a rational and objective stance vis a vis this faith. Its “New Edgy” ironic posture allowed the magazine to conjure up worldviews very similar to what was being proposed in New Age circles, while also including distant, skeptical, rationalistic stances. Irony here works in the way that the literary theorist Michael Saler describes it; as a way to “reconcile enchantment with the rational and secular tenets of modernity.” It provides, he writes, a “ludic space in which reason and imagination cavort, neither succumbing to the other.”

Raves, Virtual Reality environments, postcyberpunk fiction, MMORPG’s and the Burning Man festival continue today to provide similar ‘ludic’ spaces where the unspeakable is allowed: namely the combined presence of “religious” attitudes with rational distance and skepticism. Whether through the celebration of parody cults, performance art, hyperbolic language or ironic self-mockery, play and serious devotion combine, deep connections occur that are fleeting and temporary, and one is absolutely certain of the deep Truth while being in absolute doubt about it. Here, one can be like a typical worshipper of “Bob” — God of the parody cult The Church of Subgenus, as described in one Mondo edition — displaying a “puzzling attitude combining extreme distrust, forced or at least reluctant worship, and sudden, unexpected spastic spurts of blind, unquestioning faith.”

Some may interpret such irony as taking no actual position, but I believe it expresses the desire to take all positions at once — to embrace and accept the logically incompatible realities, perspectives and experiences that are part of the current information society. As such, the best of the worlds of religion and science come together — the capacity to be subjected to a god and to be a god yourself; the cathartic experience of letting go of ego, of giving yourself over to a larger entity on the one hand, and the godlike experience of being individually empowered and able to create your own destiny on the other. As such, it offers a temporary and appealing release from the anxiety and paranoia that befall many people today and that comes from not knowing what you see, what you know and who is actually in control.

I’d like you to imagine it’s the year 2019. You are wearing a set of extremely lightweight wraparound lenses and have just gotten off the train in an unfamiliar part of the city to meet your friend at a new club. As you look around, you see a floating icon over a board against the wall. You point at it, and before your eyes, a transparent map of the city opens, floating in midair before you. You tell it your destination, and the map zooms into where you are, highlights a path to where you want to go, and then zooms in even more as it tilts and merges with the scenery around you, the path now an illuminated line on the floor.

You follow the path out to the stairs, and up to the street, but as you come to street level, a warning pops up advising you that it’s started to rain and that its previous path will result in you getting drenched, so would you like to reroute along a longer path that will keep you dry? You nod in acknowledgement and follow the line into a shopping district across the street. As you enter the mall, a small sign pops up in front of you asking if you’d like to see a list of current sales. You shake your head, and the sign vanishes. You continue to follow the line through the mall, looking around at the various people standing in front of store windows, making waving motions as they browse through the inventories. For you, all you see is a blank screen with the store’s logo and a button saying “touch here for catalog”.

You do happen to notice a logo for a store you frequent, and pause to hit the catalog button. The window clears and an attractive lady with horns and a spaded tail appears. “Hiya, and Welcome to the Succubus’s Den! We’re having a special today on horns and halos, all models are 50% off. Would you like to browse our selection?”

“Sure” you say, as a three way mirror pops up in front of you showing your present appearance. You frown as you take in your business attire, and decide it’s just way to boring for a night at a club. A request sign pops up asking if you’d like to deactivate “professional mode” and you think “yes” at it.

Suddenly the mall around you transforms from a rather dull set of storefronts to a sylvan glade, with elves, and centaurs, even a couple of fairies mixed in with trolls, Klingons, and what appears to be a storm trooper shopping behind you. Your suit and tie have also vanished and you look at the brawny barbarian warrior you chose to wear when you were playing an MMO last night. As you think about changing it, a menu pops up and you decide to go with your goth avatar, the image in the mirror changing. The sales clerk smiles. “Ohhh, I have a nice pair of wings and a black light halo that would match that avatar so well!”

You tell her to let you see it, and in an instant, you are admiring the smoky black wings and the shimmering purple halo. You nod in approval, and tell the clerk you’ll take them. A small icon shows the price and you think “yes” at it. A note comes up showing that “Goth Angel” has been added to your inventory. You thank the clerk and start following your guideline again.  As you walk down the mall, you note a couple of vampire girls licking their fangs as you pass. At the far end of the mall a shimmering portal opens onto the city street, where you can see the rain is still falling. Your guideline leads under an awning along the sidewalk, and down the street. You can see a glowing arrow pointing down at the club you are heading for. You head down the sidewalk, then stop when a warning sign pops up pointing at an alley entrance just ahead of you, and you wait as the delivery truck pulls out onto the road.

As you enter the club, you look around and note that there’s a nice mix of reals and virtuals, only a small icon over the heads of those visiting entirely in VR enabling you to tell who’s physically there, and who isn’t. A flashing icon calls your attention to where your friend is waiting, and as you head towards him, a small fairy flutters up and asks you what you’d like from the bar. You order, and by the time you get to the table, the waitress, who the fairy was a small sized copy of, has your drink waiting.  You smile as you anticipate a nice evening and settle down to have some fun.

That’s just a taste of a world in which VR and reality are intermixed, and I’m sure it’s pretty simplistic compared to what we will actually experience, but nonetheless, it’s sufficient to make this article’s real point, which is  actually not the uses of VR. Instead, I’m hoping I can get you thinking about what’s going to make this sort of VR possible, and the implications of that technology.

So let’s start with our map, shall we? How, exactly, did we call it up in front of us?  It should be obvious that we’re wearing a pair of video lenses capable of overlaying graphics on our view of the world, but how did the map know we wanted to access it? How did the sign realize we clicked on it from who knows how far away?

The short answer is that there’s communication between our glasses and the sign, but the reality is that it’s not quite that simple. In order to position a button on the map, our glasses had to know where in our field of vision the sign was, which means our glasses had to be aware of the environment around us. It had to be aware of the 3 dimensional space surrounding us; be aware of the physical objects in that environment, and on top of everything else, know that the map was a map. It could do this many ways — by scanning our environment with a lidar, or THz wave scanner; it could link to a local system which has a 3d map of the station already created; it could communicate with a set of lidars or other scanners in the environment, and their are quite a few other methods it could employ. The common factor in all of them is still the same. You are being watched continuously by an untold number of sensors and cameras.

Got it? Every person in that station has a device just like yours, watching you and your every action, recording every twitch of every muscle. For that map to provide the “guideline,” it has to know to a millimeter where you are. Same for the “weather warning.” The “mall” knew when you entered. The store knew when you were standing in front of it, and who you were, what your avatar looked like, and how to access your payment info. To allow others to see your avatar, they had to be enabled to know what that avatar was, and overlay it over your physical position, again, requiring sensors able to map you to millimeter precision. And what’s more, to enable such things as the warning about the truck, your lenses had to know more about the environment than you did. It had to “see around corners” by connecting to sensors in the alleyway. In both the mall and club, it had to access not only the “real” environment, it had to know the “virtual” one as well, and be able to distinguish which one you desired to see at any given moment, as well as create the appearance of virtual objects overlaying the real world. In other words, our environment was “self aware.”

Now, think about that for a second — think about how many cameras and sensors it’s going to take to make our environments “aware” of itself and us, so it can enable such VR interactivity.

Then think about being able to walk onto an airplane without having to pass security, because no one with explosives would be able to get within ten miles of the airport. Think about being able to walk down the darkest alleyway in NYC in perfect safety, because there are no more muggers, because everyone knows that it’s impossible to escape arrest it you try. Imagine your car speeding down the road at 200 mph while you are surfing the web without the slightest fear of being arrested for speeding or crashing because you’re distracted, because your car knows where every other car is on the road, and is driving itself. Imagine working in space, while living in Iowa, telecommuting to a remote teleprescence unit building a new and much larger space station. Imagine a classroom filled with students from nations all around the world, learning about ancient Rome by visiting it. Think about a million other uses for VR that we will demand, and the endless other potentials made possible by a self aware environment.

Think about it, and maybe you’ll understand why I laugh at those who continue to believe that we will never become a “Transparent Society.”

The future will not be a monopoly of the current superpowers, but lies in the hands of tech-savvy youth from around the world, trying desperately to survive at all costs in an increasingly asymmetrical world.

Imagine a young African boy staring wide-eyed at the grainy images of an old television set tuned to a VHF channel; a child discovering for the first time the sights and sounds of a wonderfully weird world beyond city limits. This is one of my earliest memories; growing up during the mid-nineties in a tranquil compound house in Maamobi; an enclave of the Nima suburb, one of the most notorious slums in Accra. Besides the government-run Ghana Broadcasting Corporation, only two other television stations operated in the country at the time, and satellite television was way beyond my family’s means. Nevertheless, all kinds of interesting programming from around the world occasionally found its way onto those public broadcasts. This was how I first met science fiction; not from the tomes of great authors, but from distilled approximations of their grand visions.

This was at a time when cyberpunk was arguably at its peak, and concepts like robotics, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence were rife in mainstream media. Not only were these programs incredibly fun to watch, the ideas that they propagated left a lasting impression on my young mind for years to come. This early exposure to high technology sent me scavenging through piles of discarded mechanical parts in our backyard; searching for the most intriguing sculptures of steel from which I would dream up schematics for contraptions that would change the world as we knew it. With the television set for inspiration and the junkyard for experimentation, I spent my early childhood immersed in a discordant reality where dreams caked with rust and choked with weeds came alive in a not-so-distant future; my young mind well aware of the process of transformation occurring in the world around me; a world I was only just beginning to understand.

I am only now able to appreciate the significance of this early exposure to high technology in shaping my outlook on the world. From my infancy I became keenly aware of the potential for science and technology to radically transform my environment, and I knew instinctively that society was destined to continue being reshaped and restructured for the rest of my life. Mind you, I am only one of many millions in a generation of African children born during the rise of the global media nation; children raised on Nigerian movies and kung-fu flicks; Hindi musicals and gangster rap; Transformers, Spider Man, and Ananse stories; BBC, RFI, and Deutsche-Welle TV; the Nintendo/Playstation generation. Those of us born in this time would grow up to accept the fact that the only constant was change; that the world around us was perceptibly advancing at an alarming pace; that nothing would ever remain the same.

Just as my limited exposure to advanced technology shaped my outlook on the world for years to come, the youth of the developing world today are being shaped by far more radical technologies to which they now have unprecedented access. The result is the rise of a completely different mindset from the ones that has dominated the developing world until very recently; a growing recognition among these youth of the immense potential for science and technology to induce tangible social change. The role of social networking in facilitating the Bouazizi and Tahrir Square revolutions is perhaps one of greatest testaments to that fact, but it is not the first, and far from the last. What happens when third world youth gain increasing access to technologies that were practically unimaginable just a few years earlier? What happens if this trend continues, say, fifty years into the future? And whose job is it to answer these questions? Science fiction writers, of course.

This train of thought leads to realization that the boundaries of contemporary science fiction lie not in the Wild Western frontiers of outer space, but in the forgotten corners of our planet. I created the AfroCyberPunk blog in order to share some of these insights and questions with the world. The overwhelming response it generated was the first indication that the literary world was beginning to take an interest, but there are more signs that we are at the beginning of a global awakening to the role of the developing world in the future of science fiction. My own novel-in-progress began as a cyberpunk thriller set in a future North America, simply because whenever I tried to imagine an African future I found myself having to deal with issues I wished someone else had already dealt with; having to answer questions I wished someone else already had. I realized that I had no groundwork; no foundation whatsoever, and that to imagine a future Africa I would have to begin from scratch.

From the first time Western civilizations came into full contact with the developing world until today, we have primarily been net consumers of foreign technology, and the result of this asymmetrical relationship is that the mechanisms for development and regulation of technology simply do not exist in our parts of the world to the same level of sophistication as they do in the developed world. We are now observing what happens when developing societies acquire thousands of years of technological innovation within the space of a few years. I can only imagine what goes through the mind of young boys in Nima today as they surf Facebook across 3G networks on smart phones, Skype with friends all over the world, or go shopping online with someone else’s credit card. We clearly are sailing headfirst into uncharted waters, and the mapmakers—science fiction writers of the world—are only now scrambling to plot the course of our future.

Since I began writing my novel more than two years ago, the story has undergone a transformation which parallels the same trend that I see beginning in science fiction; a bold move out of largely familiar territory towards the developing worlds on the frontiers of the contemporary imagination. This article from The Independent sums up my sentiments quite succinctly, citing Nnedi Okorafor, Ian MacDonald, Lauren Beukes, Paolo Bacigalupi, and Alastair Reynolds as writers whose award-winning works herald a changing trend in the settings of contemporary science fiction novels, while District 9 and Kajola represent noteworthy attempts by African movie-makers to break into the science fiction genre. Through the course of this decade, we can expect to witness the emergence of a new brand of science fiction; one which makes the developing world central — rather than peripheral — to its narrative.

It’s becoming increasingly apparent that the future will not be a monopoly of the current superpowers, but lies in the hands of tech-savvy youth from around the world, trying desperately to survive at all costs in an increasingly asymmetrical world. Youths from Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, and Sub-Saharan Africa represent the single largest subgroup of the human population, and with the aid of advanced technology they will go on to shape the geopolitical destiny of our civilization. Science fiction has a lot of catching up to do in order to chronicle this new frontier in which the developing world plays a defining role; a frontier that has been neglected by mainstream science fiction for just about long enough. I’m proud to count myself among the new wave of writers exploring the immense potential of developing world science fiction, and I now look to the future with a renewed sense of anticipation, because the future I’ve waited for all my life is finally coming home.