UPDATE: what follows is a few pages of "Cyberia" that mainly deal with Genesis and T.O.P.Y...Author Douglas Rushkoff has made the entire work of "Cyberia" availiable to read on online or download here http://www.rushkoff.com/downloadables/cyberiabook/
Material from cyberia "life in the trenches of hyperspace " by Douglas Rushkoff
pgs 117-118 the origins of "Acid house" and Gen's first experience with it.
Let's leave Toon Town for a moment to get a look at thehistory of this thing called house.'' Most Americans say it began in Chicago, where DJs at smaller, private parties and membership-only clubs (particularly one called The Warehouse)began aggressively mixing records, adding their own electronic percussion and sampling tracks, making music that--like the home-made vinaigrette at an Italian restaurant--was called"house.'' The fast disco and hip-hop---influenced recordings would sample pieces of music that were called bites'' so (others spell it "bytes,'' to indicate that these are digital samples that can be measured in terms of RAM size). Especially evocative bites were called acid bites.'' Thus, music of the house, made up of these acid bites, became known as "acid house.''
When this sound got to England, it was reinterpreted, along with its name. Folklore has it that industrial (hard, fast,high-tech, and psychedelic) music superstar Genesis P. Orridge was in a record store when he saw a bin of disks labeled "acid,'' which he figured was psychedelic music--tunes to play while on LSD. He and his cohorts added their own hallucinogenic flavor to the beats and samples, and British acid house was born.
CHAPTER 12 Gardeners Ov Thee Abyss
The strength of any magic in Cyberia is directly proportional to that magic's ability to permeate the network.Like cultural viruses, the techniques of magic are thought to gain strength as they gain acceptance by larger groups of people.Computer technology fits in to cyberian spirituality in two ways: as a way to spread magic, and as a magic itself.
Thee Temple Ov Psychick Youth is a nett-work for the dissemination of majick (their spellings) through the culture for the purpose of human emancipation. TOPY (rhymes with soapy) began as a fan club and ideological forum for Genesis P. Orridge,founder of industrial band Throbbing Gristle and its house spin-off Psychic TV, but soon developed into a massive cultish web of majick practitioners and datasphere enthusiasts. They are the most severe example of technopaganism, consciously stretching backward through medievalism to ancient pagan spirituality and up through computer technology to the creation of a global,informational being. They predate and maybe even spawned House culture, but have remained pretty separate from the lovey-dovey,soft and squishy Ecstasy crowd.
All male initiates to TOPY take the name Coyote, and all women Kali. The name is followed by a number so that members can identify one another. Kali is the name of a female sex goddess known as the destroyer''; the coyote is found in many mythologies, usually symbolizing wisdom and an adventurous nature.
The nett-work consists of access points, or stations, which are post office boxes, fax machines, computer modems, or 800 phone numbers. Each access point gathers information from places off the web, then distributes it throughout the network, and in turn takes information from the web and makes it available to local members. As one initiate explains: The main memory can be accessed from the stations, then downloaded via correspondents through Xeroxes.'' Or, in English, someone reads his mail or plays his message machine, then types it up and gives copies to his friends. "The main memory'' refers to the TOPY idea that all its members compose a single, informational being.
The information passed about consists of majickal techniques'' from drugs and incantations to computer hardware and engineering tricks, as well as general TOPY philosophy. In someways, the entire TOPY network is really just an elaborate metaphor for the postmodern Gaian brain. The information they pass around is much less important than the way in which it is passed. TOPY documents are immediately recognizable because they spell words in obsolete or newly made-up ways. This is seen as away of retaking control of language, which has been used and abused for so long by the illegitimate power mongers of Western culture, which are directing the planet toward certain doom.
However well TOPY has permeated the net, its members rarely peep up out of the underground into the light of day and consensus reality. For all their 800-number accessibility, very few cyberians regularly socialize with flesh-and-blood TOPYmembers. It's almost as if their presence as human beings is less important than their presence as a cultural virus or informational entity.
All on the Same Side
Today, Diana is on Haight Street, distributing fliers forthe next Toon Town. Unlike most promoters, who target likely''clubgoers--kids with house-style clothes, computer-hippies,college cliques--Diana is dedicated to spreading the house phenomenon to the uninitiated. A freespirited club girl with a slight Mother Theresa complex, Diana is the female, emotional,caring counter to Toon Town's otherwise heady patriarchy,especially now that Earth Girl works at Big Heart City. Each human to whom she hands a flier is a potential link to dozens more. The more people brought in to the scene, she reasons, the more it grows, the more they grow, the further enlightened and loving the world is. This is the philosophy that got Diana to leave protective campus life at Berkeley and move into the city to promote Toon Town full-time.
When Diana approaches an unlikely cluster of young men cladin leather and army fatigues and smoking a joint in front of a record store, she unwittingly hits the networking jackpot. Her Toon Town promotional bill is grabbed up by the trio, who exchange it for a leaflet of their own, The Wheel of Torture,''a poem by Coyote 107:
EYE WAS ON THEE WHEEL OV TORTUREON THAT TABLE, I WAS SPUN LIKE AZ A VORTICE. IN AN ACT OV ATTRACTING VIOLENCE TO MY BEING. THEE VIOLENCE WAS EXPRESSED THROUGH TORTURE, WHICH BECAME AN ACT OVALCHEMICAL PROCESS. MY SENSES WERE BEING PULVERIZED. THROWN INTOSHOCK. PULVERIZATION WAS BEING SHOVED DOWN MY THROAT. EVERY OUNCE OV MY EMOTION WAS NULLIFIED. STEPPED ON AND SPIT ON. TOTALAPPLICATION OV NEGATION. TOTAL ACT OV NON SERVITUDE. REJECTING MY OWN PERSONALITY. NOT LETTING MY EGO TAKE KONTROL. VIOLATING MY OWN EGO IZ AN ACT OV KONTROL OVER IT. A REBELLION AND A REJECTION. HOPING FOR COMPLETE REVOLUTION WITHIN MYSELF AND NOTWAITING FOR THEE GENERATIONZ TO CATCH UP. (FUCK THE EVOLUTIONARY PROCESS! WHEN THINGS NEED TO CHANGE THEY WILL; THROUGH WILL.) THIS TYPE OV NULLIFICATION IZ THEE PROCESS OV PURIFICATION THROUGH PULVERIZATION. AN INITIATION INTO THE SELF. THE TRUESELF. NOT THEE ILLUZION OUR EGO FEEDZ US. LOSS OV EGO IZ PART OV THEE AWAKENING PROCCESS. THEE LIBERATION PROCESS. TO LIBERATEYOURSELF IZ TO NEGATE AND NULLIFY THAT WHICH RESTRICTS YOU. WHAT RESTRICTS YOU FROM EXPRESSION AND EXPLORATION. EXPLORE YOURSELF AND BE READY. BE ABLE AND CAPABLE. TRANZFORM AND COMMUNICATE. TRUE COMMUNICATION ONLY HAPPENZ BETWEEN EQUALS. YOU MUST MUTATE TO COMMUNICATE. YOU MUST SHARE VIBRATIONAL FREQUENCY, WHICH IZWHAT YOU ARE. ALL LIFE IZ VIBRATION AND MOVEMENT. NOTHING IZ IN A FIXED POSITION. FIXED POSITIONS ARE ONLY TEMPORARY. TRUE STATESARE TEMPORAL BECAUSE CHANGE IZ INEVITABLE. CHANGE MAKES BALANCE. CHANGE IZ MOVEMENT. MOVEMENT IZ UNIVERSAL YET DEPENDENT AND DEFINABLE. MOVEMENT HAS VELOCITY AND DIRECTION. MOVEMENT IZ MAJICK. MAJICK IS SETTING FORTH THEE WILL INTO MOTION TOWARDS A GOAL. ALLEGORY IZ THEE VEHICAL. LEARN TO KONTROL THEE VEHICAL. GET BEHIND THE WHEEL. STEER YOUR LIFE IN THEE DIRECTION YOUCHOOSE. YOU DON'T HAVE TO MAKE PIT-STOPS FOR YOUR EGO.PULVERIZE & PURITY.
The majick, kontrol, and steering happen in two ways. First, the techniques and ideas spread throughout the United States and England empower individual pagans to develop their own personal strategies for moving through life. Second, and more important,the dissemination of the information itself creates a sub- oreven countercultural infrastructure. In a meta'' way, the new lines of communication create the global, informational being, inthis case based on majick and pagan technology. Unlike GreenFire, though, whose gentle androgyny is quite Disney in its softness, TOPY members are medieval-styled skinheads. Pierced lips and noses, tattoos, army clothes, spikes, leather, bizarre beards, crew cuts, shaved heads and mohawks for the men; the women dress either in sixties naturale or psychedelic partyclothes beneath heavy army coats and leather jackets.
Magick. Cool. We're into that, too,'' Diana says, looking up from the small document. Unlike most with whom the TOPYs come in contact, Diana knows that they're not punk rockers. "We have a Nutrient Cafe, a virtual reality booth, brain machines. Plus alot of good information about all those things.'' Diana's attempt at cross-culturalization opens a Pandora's box.
We're trying to achieve total control over information.''Kurt, the leader of the group, speaks with a forced eloquence,ironically counterpointing his belligerent styling. "That allows us to decontrol the imprints that are implanted within the information itself. Everyone has the right to exchange information. What flows through TOPY is occult-lit,computer-tech, shamanistic information and majick--majick as actually a technology, as a tool, or a sort of correlative technology based on intuitive will. It's an intuitive correlative technology that is used by the individual who's realized that heor she has his or her own will which they have the freedom toexercise the way they want. That's kind of how I see majick.''
To TOPYs, magic is just the realization and redirection ofthe will toward conscious ends. To do this, people must disconnect from all sources of information that attempt to program them into unconscious submission, and replace them withi nformation that opens them to their own magical and technological abilities.
While Kurt is more in your face'' and confrontational abouthis majickal designs on culture than is Green Fire or Earth Girl,Diana is confident that they all share in the basic belief that magic and spirituality are technologies that must be utilized to prepare and develop the planet for the coming age.
Well, we're all on the same side.'' She's hip to their codified lifestyle and too determined to get them to her club to let their critical tone or angry-looking fashion choices get in the way. At Berkeley there were kids plenty more strung out than these guys. Besides, if she can turn one TOPY into a Toon Towner,thousands could follow. Kurt has the same intention. Toon Town would be an excellent venue to distribute TOPY literature.
Everyone's trying to turn everyone else on to basically the same thing. Diana takes their names down for the ever-expanding guest list (Preston won't be happy about that) and moves on.
The Protocol of Empathy
Back at Kurt's apartment later that day, the group preparesto go to Toon Town for the evening. They'll check out the club,it's decided, and give out some of their latest propaganda. A new member of the group--a runaway teenager who was found at a concert last weekend--wonders why everyone is so preoccupied withspreading the word. Kurt is quick to answer him.
That's what TOPY's always existed for: to help people realize that this society is in a crisis point. People have towake up instead of sleeping in front of the TV, which is a window on information which you don't even realize is subliminal `cause the intentions aren't even known to all the people.''
Kurt's tiny black-and-white television set has the word virus scrawled across its screen in indelible marker, a constant reminder to all viewers that the media is carrying potentially infectious subliminal ideas.
It's the programming that's dangerous. The television networks create programs which program the reality of the viewer.Each viewer is defined by nothing more than his programming.''
So, TOPY members replace regular, power-depleting television programming with information of their own: magick.
Majick is a map of the external reality. Pagans who've understood that throughout history have stayed away from the church, and used the occult as a type of underground communication. Symbols which were agreed upon.''
The revelation of the subcultural lattice work vanishes as Kurt's girlfriend suddenly enters.
I got an electric shock,'' she announces, with a certainamount of wonderment in relating the incident. "And it made my finger go numb. I was plugging in my hair dryer to the socket,and my finger's numb. I don't know what to do! It hurts like hell. I mean, it doesn't hurt at all, but ... I got shocked and it affected me.''
Do you have any cigarettes, Kim?'' Kurt asks her in an eventone.
Yeah,'' she answers. "Do you want one? Want some pot?''
She goes out, still staring at her thumb, to search for tobacco and/or cannabis. Although these kids are far out on a technopagan limb, their familial interactions look as traditionally patriarchal as the Bunkers. In one sense they seem to have taken cyber paganism the farthest. Their model of the human being is really that of the computer with will. But in another way, they appear to have adopted a more sexist and radically traditional value system than their parents could have had. The Coyotes have all become pack animals, roaming thestreets for adventure, while the Kalis stay at home, shop for clothes, or mix potions.
When Kurt does get to the topic of socializing, he speaks about it in a language more suited to computer modem protocol than human interaction:
When computers talk, there's a basic hand shake that happens between two terminals. The computer is analogous to the human biosystem, or a neural linguistic coalitive technological system.'' Kim sits up on Kurt's knee as he continues. She lights Kurt's cigarette for him and puts it into his mouth.
Empathy is caused by frequencies being shared by people, and when they interlock their frequencies, they cause a certain level of syncopation. The closer that that level of syncopationis together, the closer that those frequencies are locked in the higher level of communication that you're experiencing. Interlocking can happen in what we now call protocol: the terms that are agreed by the two users.''
The highest level of protocol between two users is, of course, sexual intercourse, an act of creativity that TOPYmembers are trying to demystify. Since they see sex as the connective energy in all interactions, the word of has been replaced in TOPY-spell by the word ov, representative of ovum,''the sexual energy, which needs to be liberated from society's restrictions and reintegrated with the will. In a practical sense, this means using the sexual energy for the practice of majick.
Your dick is majick wand if you know how to use it,'' one roommate loves to say. As another of the many leaflets around the house insists in block type:
We are thee gardeners ov thee abyss. Working to reclaim a strangled paradise choked with unwilled weeds, subconscious manifestations ov fear and self-hate. We embrace this fear and our shadow to assimilate all that we think we are not. Realigning ourselves on thee lattice ov power. Change is our strength. We turn the soil to expose thee roots ov ourconditioned behavioral responses. Identifying and dissimilatingthe thought structures that blind us ov our beauty and imprison us from our power. We thrash these weeds beyond recognition, beyond meaning, beyond existence to the consistency of nothingness. Returning them to their origin,thee abyss. Thee fertile void revealed is pure creative inspiration. in coum-union, we impregnate thee abyss; thee omninada; thee all nothingness, with thee seed ov creation.Cultivating, through will and self-love, thee infinite beauty and love that is Creation.
The creative energy in TOPY is always linked with the darkness. It is through recognition of the shadow (what Radzikconsiders the anima liberated by Ecstasy) that new life may see the light. The fertile void revealed is pure creative inspiration,'' because an acknowledgment of the unconscious programming and darkness within us opens the possibility fortheir obliteration. Leaving them in the unconscious or repressingthem turns them into monsters, which will sooner or later have to be dealt with in the form of Charlie Mansons, Chernobyl disasters, or worse. Still, to most of Cyberia, the TOPY view is unnecessarily dark and its treatment of the human organism too mechanistic.They have an almost puritanical obeisance to the forces they believe are controlling the universe. Ecstasy produces many experiences, but fear and paranoia are very rare.
Jody Radzik, for example, believes he once encountered the spirit of Kali directly. To him, there was nothing dark about it,he tells me as he makes a graffiti picture of the goddess onto a billboard at a construction site in downtown Oakland:
I can positively describe that experience as making love with God. I know that's what it was. Nobody can tell me different. I will argue until the day I die that that's what my experience was. It was a wonderful experience and it's led me to greater opening. Every now and then I do Ecstasy again because it brings me back to that incredible experience that I can't even begin to describe. It's there. It's there that I learned how to make love with God. It's how I offered myself as a sex slave to God, through MDMA, and it's brought me to really a wonderful experience of life.''
Several TOPYs who are walking by stop to watch Radzik paint. Whoah!'' exclaims one girl. They stare in astonishment.
Better be careful, man!'' warns the largest of the guys,whose nose has at least three rings in it. "Kali is dangerous.She'll get you really hard. She's the Destroyer.''
The TOPYs shake their heads and walk on in horror anddisdain. Radzik looks up from his work and shouts after them with a wide smile: Kali has her fist up my ass up to her elbow andshe loves every minute of it!''
As he puts the finishing touches on his masterpiece: Fucking art critics!''
SECTION OF CHAPTER 13
Coyote 1
The TOPYs, of course, took the idea of a collision-based nett-work even further. "Industrial'' pioneer and TOPY founderGenesis P. Orridge also bases his music on Muzak, attempting to create an even more violently anti brainwashing style of song writing than Eno's. His original group, Throbbing Gristle,was the first major industrial band, and even his current industrial/house band, Psychic TV, incorporates industrial sound sto deprogram what he sees as a Muzak-hypnotized youth culture. In his treatise on fighting Muzak, P. Orridge testified:
We openly declared we were inventing an anti-muzak that,instead of cushioning the sounds of a factory environment, made use of those very sounds to create rhythmic patterns andstructures that incorporated the liberating effects of music by unexpected means. This approach is diametrically opposed to the position of official muzak, as supplied by the Muzak Corporation of America. Their intention is to disguise stress, to control and direct human activity in order to generate maximum productivity and minimum discontent.''
Throbbing Gristle's mission was a social reengineering effort to decode brainwashing stimuli from the oppressive status quo. This motivated them to create what they called "metabolic'' music, for which cut-and-paste computer techniques werenecessary. They took irritating machine noises, factory sounds,and other annoying postmodern samples and overlaid them using thecomputer to create a new kind of acoustic assault. They knew the new sound was unpleasant--so much so that they considered it a"nonentertainment-motivated music.'' Orridge was more interested in affecting the body directly through the textures of his soundsthan he was in making any aesthetic statement throughentertaining songs or ear-pleasing harmonic structures.
The bare-bones quality of his music was thought to go right past the analytic mind, de-composing the listener's expectations about music. Making use of Muzak's painstaking research into theeffects of various frequencies and pulses on the physiology and psychology of listeners, Orridge picked his sounds on the basis of their ability to decondition social restraints on thought andthe body.'' Orridge claims certain passages of his songs can even induce orgasms. In industrial music, it was not important thatlisteners understood what was happening to them any more than it was in Muzak technology. The music needed only to deprogram theaudience in any way available.
For his current, more house-oriented Psychic TV project, Orridge has made a more self-conscious effort to expose Muzak andthe societal values it supports. The music still contains deconditioning elements, but is a more transparent parody of Muzak techniques. Listeners can feel the way the music works andenjoy it. It is less angry and abrasive because it no longer seeks to provoke fear and anxiety as its weapon against passivity-inducing Muzak. Instead, this lighter music invites thought and even humor by creating new and greater pleasures.Orridge is not merely fighting against Muzak; he is trying to do it better than they are. He not only deprograms his audience but reprograms as well, and makes listeners fully aware of the conditioning techniques of modern society in the process. This creates what Orridge calls a distorted mirror reflecting Muzak back on itself.'' He believes he can show his listeners and followers--through self-consciously cut-and-paste house music--that the technologies in place around them can be successfully analyzed and reversed. They contain, in code, "the seeds of their own destruction and hopefully the structure thatnurtures it.''
Cut and paste technology, applied to music, becomes a political statement. While beginning as a confrontational assaul ton programming, it developed into a race to beat Muzak at its own game. Muzak teaches that the world is smooth and safe. There is no such thing as a discontinuity. If a shopper in the grocery store experiences a discontinuity, he may take a moment to reevaluate his purchases: Did I buy that because I wanted it, or was I still influenced by the commercial I saw yesterday?'' If a voter experiences a discontinuity, the incumbency is challenged.Muzak's continuous soundtrack promotes the notion that we are in a world that behaves in an orderly, linear fashion. Cut-and-paste music like Psychic TV is an exercise in discontinuity. But rather than angrily shattering people's illusions about a continuous reality, it brings its listeners into a heightened state of pleasure. The teaching technique is bliss induction directly through the sound technology:
We've been saying that pleasure has become a weapon now.You know, confrontation just doesn't work. They know all about that game, the authorities, the conglomerates, and even the supermarkets, they know all those scams. So straight-on confrontation isn't necessarily the most effective tactic at the moment. Ironically, what used to be the most conservative thing,which was dance music, is now the most radical. And that's where the most radical ideas are being put across, and the most jarring combinations of sounds and sources as well.''
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