Date: Thu, 11 Nov 93 09:31:00 PST


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popE x Mass = accelerated_j e s u s

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--- issue 1, no 1 -----------------------------------------------

#include <stdio.h> W E L C O M E !
int main() ...to the first
{ issue of popE x
printf("Editor: Johannes Kepler \n"); Mass = accelera
printf("Copyright (c) 1993 by James Still"); ted_jesus......
} I'll be your ed
itor for this
So I'm sitting here eating a fucking piroshki 'zine, so please
store-bought from King Stupid's, and thinking observe the no
about stealing 4 megs of *beautiful* RAM from smoking sign....
my work computer. The other eight shouldn't sit back, relax
miss their SIMM stick brother, and I sure and breath deep.
could use the adrenaline rush at home. I'm eagerly look
ing for submissi
I remember reading the other day on some alt ons of articles,
dot net posting how armed gangs are horking observations,
Pentium chips and RAM sticks from Silicon rants, raves, or
Valley companies. Right off the loading dock anything worth
just scooping 'em up like gummie bears outta reading... Send
the grocery-store bulk bins. RAM used to them to:
stand for "Random Access Memory" but I think <still@kailua.
its becoming "Rare As Money." I ask the guy colorado.edu>
on the phone, "why the hell has RAM gone up or upload to the
so much?" and he mumbles something about a Hieroglyphic Voo
chip manufacturer's plant blowing up in doo Machine BBS
Japan. Blows up? How did that happen? at +1 303 443
Cutting off my supply like that --I'm tryin' 2457 (V.32bis).
to score here and keep coming up dry... Hone those writi
ng skills...
Meanwhile VMaster's e-mailing and braggin'
to me about his decked-out machine with it's
pregnant banks of 16 whole megs. Damn. The
Cypherpunk mailing list is going on about "Digicash" and "Virtual
Money." It's a cool concept sure, pass some PGP-signed
sawbucks my way, but its still just vaporware. RAM is real. RAM
*is* money right now.

I'm still eyeing that case and fingering the Phillips that could
crack it wide open. You'll have to excuse me, but that 4-meg is
whispering my name.

------ f e a t u r e -------------------------------------------

INHERITING THE BUGGED CODE OF VERSION 1.0


by James Still


Come on you can admit it. The anarcho-seasoned angst that still
languishes on the Internet is getting boring. Remember when
rebellion used to be hip, happenin' and wow? Now it's about as
exciting as a sterile postcard photo of Sid Vicious. Even the
ancient how-to philes on building atomic bombs seem like an
amnesiatic blast from the past of Kubrick's Dr. StrangeLove. The
lock-step to a neuromanced-Marxism, liberally sprinkled with
sci-fi romance, has a whole generation lashing out in immature
frustration. Few look beyond the smoke of a paranoiac war to
make sure that the fascists are still there. Have we built an
ideology of absurdity? No, we+re just renting it. The truth is
we never asked "why" when we eagerly grabbed the bits of
disembodied leftovers of 60's activism, Reagonomic pipe-dreams,
and post-punk skepticism. Like a witch's brew, our generation
has thrown all of these things, plus a healthy dose of our own
disgust and apathy, into a boiling cauldron of schizophrenic
identity. But turn the ladle and stir the soup in search of a
real ethics that smacks of something worth computing for, and
you'll find only a watered down mixture of sickly broth. No meat
and potatoes. No huevos.


Ethics Version 2.0

The beta test is over for version 1.0, and the end user lost. I
can think of no better way for a confused schizo to rethink his
or her ethics and identity than with that lovely concept called
object-oriented programming. After all what is OOP? Objects are understandable, we can see them, point to them and say, "Look at
that thing, that object." Just as a car has parts; a steering
wheel, engine, wheels, etc., a program's object has parts called
methods. Those methods are encapsulated together and the
programmer inherits them into his program. We computer nerds
think and understand this confusion called 'life' best when it is
reduced to a defined structure like OOP. The 'objects' we
inherited and incorporated into our own individual programs aren't
our own. It's like someone opened up our brain at birth and
poured in the weaknesses of dogma, racism, rigidity, narrow-
mindedness, and a whole host of other damning ideas masquarading
as "moral ethics." When do we stop inheriting the bugged source
code of other ideologies and political dead weight and start
thinking for ourselves? Now is the time to look closer at the
society we live in and tame the ideological monster in order to
make room for a code that works.(1)


The Gears of Society

Our society is a flow of machines that "work best when constantly
breaking down," according to anti-Oedipal thinking. Like Donna
Hathaway's cyborgs, we are all interconnected as living machines
in a global system of valves, breaks, and cables, and operating
in a flux of material flow. Everything flows. The bee that
vomits the honey to the mouth that eats it, to the penis that
produces a flow of urine, to the anus that cuts off a flow of
shit. Penetration of the vagina by that penis, to the explusion
of infant from the same. Humans interact in libidinal context at
two levels according to French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and
Felix Guattari, in their work entitled Anti-Oedipus. One level
is as desiring machines and the other is a courtship with a
lifeless entity called the body without organs. We are all
desiring machines at a most basic level. Our connections to
other people, working, giving, taking, killing, fucking, flowing,
and the ethics with which we treat them, produces an ebb and flow
called desire production. Were it not for the millions of
"nervous systems all going tick-tick"(2) producing this desire,
we could not collectively create the body without organs. Marx
and Deleuze call this body Capital. For us, that body is
Information. The Internet exists as thousands of tendrils that
reach out in an endless electronic network of inorganic fingers.
We have created the Internet Information body and stitched it up
with our own material flow. It can't survive without us spoon-
feeding it the nourishment of purpose. This interaction blurs
the line between man and machine until, like a surgical graft we
and it are completely connected. A true philosophical Cyborg.
But this connection is a double-edged sword, for while we may
gain the swift efficiency of the machine, we will not survive
without the well-oiled cooperation of the other working parts.
Sartre describes all human relationships as "being locked in
tension and conflict, ... a constant struggle to absorb others
and resist being absorbed by them." Remember Naked Lunch's
paranoid fear of absorption? By not rethinking an ethics now,
the man/machine graft will result in the machine gaining the
power over the man simply by default. Absorbing the man. Even
if the cyborg were to consist of complete automation in every
detail save for a head and maybe a trunk of flesh, if that flesh
contains ethics, it will maintain humanity, and not sink
completely into cold circuitry. This is the reality upon which
our on-line ethics must be based. We are becoming one with the
machine. This machine can go on breaking down, or the parts can
bond together in a collective, cohesive morality.


Nietzsche killed God, Call a Doctor

Ever since Zarathustra spoke thus our own human voices echo a
little too loudly across the gaping void where God once ruled.
The problems of societal breakdown cannot be blamed or projected
on a perceived lack of religious morality. We are completely on
our own. But hasn't it always been that way really? The epic
question of Plato's Euthephro dilemma shows us how even if there
is a God, we are still utterly alone in deciding right and wrong.
Kant recognized this when he wrote in Religion within the Bounds
of Pure Reason,

"... every man creates his God. ... For in whatever
way ... the Diety should be made known to you, even...
if He should reveal Himself to you, it is you... who
must judge whether you are permitted (by your conscience)
to believe in Him and to worship Him."

Humans have always been forced to make up the rules for right and
wrong. Sometimes we write leather-bound books with impressive
gold trim and attribute those rules to a god, but some flunky had
to put quill to parchment to initially write the damn thing. We
are back to the central question: What do I do that is right?
Of course there is a more selfish question which is all too
common among on-line rebels, that being: Why should I do what is
right? Self-interest is the monkey-wrench of moral philosophy.
It worried the hell out of Hobbes, Butler and as far back as
Plato, who wrote about the Master Criminal who killed the king,
raped the queen, and usurped the entire kingdom for himself.
(They had Conan comics back then?) Kant had the Hardened
Scoundrel who asked, "Why should I here and now do the thing
which is ethically right, when it will pay me better to do the
wrong thing?"

This little philosophical gem, known as rational egoism, hits
home in cyberspace. If the body without organs is Information,
and our Deleuzean desire tells us to rape that hollow body,
before the Master Criminal can get to it, why wait? Isn't it
imperative to follow the libindal drive and take all you can in
good beer commercial, 'gusto' fashion? (Hoping that everyone
else will follow their ethics so that your conquests are
possible). These are difficult questions. The paradox is that
if everyone stole software, hacked and raped the virginal
mainframe systems of a so-called "Big Brother," or destroyed
the local BBS with a well-placed Trojan, there would be no one
left in the subsequent electronic rubble. The current excuses
we hear are no more than lame attempts at moralizing and
rationalizing a purported war against the Telco and 'Phed' enemy.
It is an odd time when a plunderer makes excuses for his thefts,
rather than accepting moral (or immoral) responsibilities for
them. Are our ethics so weak that we have to soothe our guilty
conscious by pointing to the fat profit margins of an AT&T? If
our intent is to steal, then let's admit at least that much, and
incorporate that into our object-oriented ethics. But let's not
steal under the false banner of an antifascism. The games of
moralizing an ideology, rather than an action, good or evil, is
awash in schizophrenic ethics. "There has never been so much
moralizing as in the century of Stalin and Hitler," wrote
philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy. But we go on using the macerated
semantics of "fascist," "capitalist," and "Marxist," anyway to
justify our fast-food, drive-thru anarchy. Because the on-line
rebel has issued an all-but battle-cry (everyone except me is to
behave and do so and so), we risk sinking into Levy's dreaded
"barbarism." The most pointless part of this impending barbarism,
is that we will sift through the rubble never knowing the good or
the evil, or who we are fighting for, against, or why.


It's the Isis and Bacchus Show

Internet e-mail swells with the signifiers and taglines of a
postmodern paganism. Bacchus' pleasures once again blow sweet
nothings into the collective ears of a reccession-weary,
disgruntled cyberspace. It wasn't that long ago that the Nordic
motif spun out of Mein Kampf wooed another depressed society with
its subtle charms. Paganism has a mind-numbing way of putting
off and forgetting the responsibilities that we have toward
developing an ethics. Its attitude is that of a Star Trek rerun
on planet Lotus, where everyone is drunk with the carefree wine
of irresponsibility until Spock finally discovers the antidote
called Rationalism. The anti-pagan, consumptive era of the
eighties, with its monotheistic duality and Satanic 'backward
masking' scares, spawned an epic battle of good versus evil
(Capital versus Marx) that reached new heights of absurdity.
Paganism is a comforting dialectic, representing the cool
detachment of an anti-Reagan, anti-consumptive minimalism.
It is a halted, hesitancy that has decided 'desire' is more
important than humanity.


Make Room for Mac-Daddy

The bug-riddled program of monotheistic morality hasn't worked
very well and the time has come to delete it from the collective
hard drive of our ingrained consciousness. If we also can shut
our ears to the honeyed song of the sirens of paganism as well,
we may be able to formulate a sound ethics that can get us by.
Even if only barely. The mistake is thinking in the worn-out
duality terms of a Marxist or a Capitalist, a Democrat or a
Republican, a Christian or a Pagan; they are all valid for a
fleeting moment and in a certain context, yet riddled with
ideological disease. Their meaning is lost in a sea of illusion
and half-truth. We must make room for an ethics by tossing into
that sea, all the baggage of ideology. We must inherit an
object-oriented ethics of our own, based on individual
responsibility for our own actions. If the code doesn't work
quite right, we can fine-tune it, modify it, or even delete it,
the choice is ours. But we must make that choice, and no one
else.

In a world of polarized extremes, I don't envy the making of
those choices. There will be plenty of debugging going on while
we search for the elusive moraliste. It may take a while to
find such a creature among the electronic rubble of reactionism,
and there's no guarantee that barbarism won't rule the computer
networks anyway. But you probably spend too much time shut up
indoors with your computer as it is. Get out in the sunshine
why don't you?

Just don't forget to take your laptop. ;)


Footnotes:

^1 "Limit politics to make room for ethics." Bernard-Henri
Levy, The Testament of God, p. 37.

^2 "Having checked it, loved it, been brought down and moved
on by it, I've come to see that the real world doesn't exist:
only millions and millions of small individual ones, all
rushing about with their heads cut off but their nervous
systems still tick-ticking."

- Exerpts from the Mind of the Cappuccino Kid


----.sig --------------------------------------------------------

popE x Mass = accelerated_j e s u s is published
periodically by the sysop of the Hieroglyphic Voodoo Machine BBS
which boasts and toasts --> V.32bis N81 at --> +1 303 443 2457.

entire contents of this file is copyrighted 1993 (c) by James
Still, aka Johannes Kepler and may *not* be extracted or re-
published with prior consent from James Still. All Rights
Reserved Poncho...

send submissions, gripes, comments to: still@kailua.colorado.edu

----EOF----------------------------------------------------------

Bill Dean
http://ricksbbs.synchro.net:8080
telnet://ricksbbs.synchro.net:23
---
þ Synchronet þ Rick's BBS telnet://ricksbbs.synchro.net:23