Date: Wed, 5 May 93 19:34:20 PDT Reply-To: Return-Path: Message-ID: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain From: surfpunk@osc.versant.com (whfg ubcvat gb svaq gur gvzr) To: surfpunk@osc.versant.com (SURFPUNK Technical Journal) Subject: [surfpunk-0085] XANALOGY: SURFPUNK backissues available via WWW | From: germuska@antioch.acns.nwu.edu (Joe Germuska) | Subject: vat is dees, xanalogical access? | To: surfpunk-request@osc.versant.com | Date: Fri, 30 Apr 1993 12:21:11 -0500 (CDT) | | Hey Strick: I've been playing a lot with XMosaic | and the WWW, and have a hypertext server running | here on Antioch -- are you working yet on | xanalogy, or just hoping to find the time? I'd | be glad to at least array back surfpunks, and | maybe I could even figure out some clever ways to | hyperlink them... interested? Joe 1. just hoping to find time. 2. yeah, interested. 3. we done it. thanks for the boost, joe! If you have a WorldWideWeb browser, plug it into http://antioch.acns.nwu.edu/surfpunk/ You might try these two commands: www http://antioch.acns.nwu.edu/surfpunk/ xmosaic http://antioch.acns.nwu.edu/surfpunk/ If you need www sources, look on info.cern.ch, or ask archie. So get your SURFPUNK backissues now ... strick ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ Subject: BLINK electronic magazine - The Cure for What Ails Ya From: germuska@antioch.acns.nwu.edu (Joe Germuska) To: surfpunk@osc.versant.com, future-request@nyx.cs.du.edu, extropians@gnu.ai.mit.edu, ejournal@albanyvms.bitnet Date: Sun, 2 May 1993 18:38:19 -0500 (CDT) Cc: mondo2k@well.sf.ca.us, editor@wired.com !ATTENTION CHANNELHEADS! Get connected to BLINK magazine, the all-electronic journal of the information age. BLINK is dedicated to addressing the changes and culture of cyberdelic society -- both on and off the net. BLINK wants to present a straightforward look at the implications of technology use in our globally connected, info- sodden world. Come taste our mindcandy: Essays, non-fiction articles, satire, fiction and poetry. BLINK is offered at no cost. We'll set you up with a free e- mail subscription, just send mail to: listserv@merle.acns.nwu.edu. Type a message body of: subscribe blink [your name] If you support a MIME compliant mail reader, type: subscribe blink-mime [your name] You should get an ASCII or MIME document in your mailbox sometime during the second week in May. For those who can't wait, here's a peek at our upcoming issue: ROMANCIN' THE NET. Users can find romantic bliss, erotic satisfaction or sexual humiliation in many specialized network neighborhoods. BLINK looks at the users behind the screen who have been bitten by the digital love bug. SCHANK SPEAKS. AI guru Roger Schank discusses the social implications of educational technology. BLINK's Joe Germuska administers his own version of the Turing Test to Schank in an exclusive interview. DENKMAL, INC. Fiction by T.J. Park. "The surgeon thought with pride of his conversion of the captured dissidents Denkmal had sent his way over the years. There had been a total of sixty-three -- fifty-six of whom had been easily converted. The remaining dissidents had been dispatched quickly and quietly -- aortas severed by laser, their corpses joined the decaying bodies of the thousands of dead malcontents on display in L.A.'s corporate square." AND MUCH MORE! Including a complimentary text browser provided to every ASCII BLINK subscriber. So subscribe now to BLINK and dive into cyberdelia. Or if you have any questions, drop us a line at: blink@merle.acns.nwu.edu -- joe germuska | j-germuska@nwu.edu | Network Response Center ACNS-Distributed Systems Services, Northwestern University "The only thing that speaks the truth is the eloquence of passing time; the spoken word is a jacket too tight..." ________________________________________________________________________ Date: Fri, 30 Apr 93 9:28:30 CDT From: matthew john baggott To: There is a new pirate radio station broadcasting out of Berekely on Sunday nights at 9:00 pm. 88.1 FM. --M@ ________________________________________________________________________ Sender: gt7950b@prism.gatech.edu From: abfhb@stdvax.DNET.NASA.GOV (unknown) SB SAREX @ AMSAT $STS-55.016 SAREX Packet Ops May 1, 1993 @ 02:00 To all radio amateurs: The SAREX Operations team at the Johnson Space Center have recently drafted a flight note to the STS-55 crew asking them to turn on the SAREX packet robot. This has been approved by the Shuttle flight operations team and has been uplinked to the crew. While the SAREX Working Group cannot guarantee that the packet robot will be turned on, we anticipate that it will be operating over the next few days. SAREX packet operations are conducted on the following frequencies: Downlink: 145.55 MHz Uplink: 144.49 MHz Please listen on the downlink frequency for Shuttle packet activity BEFORE sending uplink packets. Station Callsign: W5RRR-1 Those of you who have been listening to the Shuttle downlink from NASA select and WA3NAN are well aware that NASA has made a concerted effort over the past few days to conserve power on the Shuttle. This was being performed in an attempt to extend the mission an additional day. SAREX packet activity has been also curtailed over the past few days as part of this power conservation effort. Although this power conservation activity is still in progress, the crew was given the go ahead to turn on the packet robot. Good luck and 73, Frank H. Bauer, KA3HDO for the SAREX working group ________________________________________________________________________ From: Mike Mitten Subject: On Virtual Reality To: surfpunk@osc.versant.com, ... Date: Tue, 4 May 1993 10:21:11 -0400 (EDT) Greetings, The following text is from the Spring 1993 issue (#36) of _Anarchy:_A_Journal_of_Desire_Armed_. The text is complete to the best of my ability. Words and phrases in italics in the original are surrounded by /slashes/. All transcription errors are mine. _Anarchy_ is available from C.A.L. Press, POB 1446, Columbia, MO. 65205-1446, U.S.A. This text is distributed without permission. -Mike Mike Mitten - gnome@pd.org - AMA#675197 - DoD#522 Straight but not narrow. '90 Bianchi Backstreet '82 Suzuki GS850GL Irony is the spice of life. "The revolution will not be televised." On Virtual Reality Commentary by Bob Brubaker The following commentary is excerpted from a personal letter in which Bob Brubaker evaluated articles published in /Sect 7: Notes from the Tokyo Underground/ by Jonathan Seidenfeld and Andy Frith. The articles included "State of the cyberpunk nation" in issue #1 and "Passive media, interactive media" & "Severin's dekapitation korner" from issue #2, and may still be available from /Sect 7/ (Nagareya, Masukopo-Takadanobaba 1-D, Takadanobaba 1-25-5, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo, Japan; /or/ 640 Polk St. #302, San Francisco, CA. 94102, USA) Frith's and Seidenfelds's pieces on computers, media, and "virtual reality" were simply revolting. These aren't critical analyses in any sense of the term - they're /advertisements/, promo pieces for the information age. This isn't the place to go into all my objections to their technophilia; suffice it to say that Frith takes for granted one of the biggest intellectual frauds to be foisted upon the public since the advent of behaviorism: the crude reductionist notion that the mind is at bottom simply a highly sophisticated "information processor," or in the words of computer scientist Marvin Minsky of MIT, "a computer made of meat." Frith reduces complex societal developments to a single factor, /information/, and simply assumes in a caricature of abundance, "the more information the better." As he puts it: "The human eye is capable of scanning gigabytes of information every second, but by relying heavily on the written word as our major information source we are restricting ourselves to the kilobyte range. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a 3-D representation of the picture is worth a million, and a 3-D spatial environment that I can move around and interact with is worth a billion." Frith's words may make glib advertising copy, but they will scarcely serve as an analysis of the relationship of humans to information. If the human brain really /were/ merely an information processor, then Frith would be right. Why operate an information processor at less than full capacity? But as the above quote demonstrates, Frith merely /assumes/ that humans should be 'scanning' as much information as possible. But why? Just because we are 'capable' of it? Herein lies the danger of the reductionist metaphor of the brain as an information processor: by abstracting from concrete human experience, this metaphor recasts humanity in the image of a machine. What is lost sight of here is that the human mind exists not only to take in 'information' but to /think/. And as Theodore Roszak persuasively argues in his book /The Cult of Information: The Folklore of Computers and the True Art of Thinking/ (a book Frith and Seidenfeld would do well to read, that is if they don't mind 'restricting' themselves to the kilobyte range for a few hours), "/the mind thinks with ideas, not with information/." (Roszak's emphasis). Indeed, some of the mind's richest and most fruitful ideas - what Roszak calls "master ideas," "the great moral, religious, and metaphysical teachings which are the foundation of culture" - take shape in a context in which the importance of information and its means - computer data banks, CD-ROM disks, mass media - dwindle to insignificance. Roszak spends considerable time discussing these ideas because "they bear a peculiarly revealing relationship to information.../Master ideas are based on no information whatever/ (Roszak's emphasis). I will be using them, therefore, to emphasize the radical difference between ideas and data which the cult of information has done so much to obscure." Roszak points out that /ideas/, not information, are at the center of every culture; in fact a culture "survives by the power, plasticity, and fertility of its ideas. Ideas come first, because ideas define, contain, and eventually produce information. The principal task of education, therefore, is to teach young minds how to deal with ideas: how to evaluate them, extend them, adapt them to new uses. This can be done with the use of very little information, perhaps none at all. It certainly does not require data processing machinery of any kind. An excess of information may actually crowd out ideas, leaving the mind (young minds especially) distracted by sterile, disconnect facts, lost among shapeless heaps of data." Frith asserts that "only the modern generation of TV children brought up on a diet of fast-cut commercials, rapid-fire news and increasingly larger amounts of compressed information can relate to this information overload." But is it really true that the post-1970-born "technologically literate" are more able to "keep up" with the information explosion than their parents and grandparents? I would guess that the situation is precisely the opposite. Consider the example of information overload which Frith cites: "one CD-ROM disk made by /Encyclopedia Britannica/ [which] contains a 26-volume encyclopedia with over 32,000 articles, thousands of color pictures, animated subjects, including a world atlas, 60 minutes of famous speeches, music and sounds, a complete dictionary and a scientific glossary that pronounces words." So who is most able to "keep up" with this facet of the information explosion, the modern generation of "TV children" or their "technologically illiterate" parents and grandparents? Considering the relevant evidence, from falling S.A.T. scores to rising rates of illiteracy among the young, it seems obvious that it is the allegedly "technologically literate" TV children who are failing to "keep up." Indeed, many youth have dropped out of the race altogether, and for the very reason Roszak mentions: Lost among shapeless heaps of information, unable to make sense of the welter of data, factoids, images, and sound- bytes with which they are bombarded every day, many young people are simply /overwhelmed/, to the point of exhaustion, numbness, and finally indifference. Frith simply ignores this "falling rate of intelligence," as it has been called, in his inappropriate euphoria over the information explosion. In fact, he and his accomplice Seidenfeld wish to bypass the mind altogether, to propel us directly into the world of "virtual reality," a world of total simulation in which the mind, normal perception, thinking, and the written word are supplanted by a programmed total information environment. In the VR world of 'cyberspace', as Seidenfeld names it, information is literally injected into the brain via various types of VR hardware so that "the user feels as if he or she is actually walking around inside a three dimensional computer graphics display." According to Seidenfeld, cyberspace is the ultimate experience, "Mysterious faces, people with no past, a bizarre fantasy for some, an adventure escape for others, and always a constant parade of the outrageous, the bizarre. Visitors are linked by modem from their offices and work stations all over the world." Actually, Seidenfeld's futuristic euphoria notwithstanding, VR is little more than the latest designer drug, a banal escapism, a cybernetic Disneyland, for jaded yuppies and computer geeks. (The motto of cyberspace, to be posted at every portal and entranceway, should read: "Abandon Thought, All Ye Who Enter Here.") It's no accident that Seidenfeld describes his envisioned "cybertropolis" as "a marketplace of goods and services" where "hotshot programmers [show] off their latest creations" and "everything is payable by electronic bank transfer or by credit card." VR is /capital's/ world, and the corporate elite who manufacture the hardware and software aren't going to let you forget that fact for a second. VR is capital's wold in another, more sinister sense, too. Capital would like nothing more than for people to turn their back on the real world and its problems - the world of social misery and ecological destruction, the world of political and social struggles and their repression by the forces of power, the wold of critical thought and utopian dreams - for the VR world, a world of escape, fantasy, and simulated 'solutions'. In this respect, 'cybertropolis' is quite similar to the futuristic world depicted in the movie /Bladerunner/: a city of pure artifice, of technological perfection, controlled and policed by giant multinational corporations and off-limits to the poor and working masses, an elite world built upon the burnt-out, polluted, rotting carcass of old Los Angeles. For Frith and Seidenfeld, VR may portend "the future," but for most of us VR is no future at all, just another form of escape, accessible only to those who can afford it, while those who cannot watch as the real world quietly goes to hell. Thanks to Richard Evanoff for permission to publish this letter. ________________________________________________________________________ Date: Tue, 4 May 93 16:14 GMT From: Don Webb <0004200716@mcimail.com> To: surfpunk , ... Subject: Acts of Rebellion Dear Folk, An acquaintance of mine is collecting a book on Acts of rebellion. If you're interested in sharing your rebellions with others (Text submissions only!). Send an SASE for details to: Acts of Rebellion Ashley Parker Owens PO Box 597996 Chicago, IL 60659 I figure if you write your reebellion -- you may help get freedoms for other people too. 0004200716@mcimail.com Don Webb The Secret of magic is to transform the magician. ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ The SURFPUNK Technical Journal is a dangerous multinational hacker zine originating near BARRNET in the fashionable western arm of the northern California matrix. Quantum Californians appear in one of two states, spin surf or spin punk. Undetected, we are both, or might be neither. ________________________________________________________________________ Send postings to , subscription requests to . MIME encouraged. Xanalogical archive access soon. This is for tax reasons. ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ "Bob" has no known fixed address. This is for tax reasons. However, "Bob" lives whenever and wherever he wants, and he visits all clenches at least once, sometimes often, sometimes several times at once, sometimes several clenches at a time. "Bob" always "leaves too soon". "Bob" always "wears out his welcome". Your brain is "Bob"'s brain. Very correct. Your dollars go directly to me. Miasma is pStench- and more- miasma is stench. "Every OberMan and OverWoman a church". You carry your clench with you. To put it very crudely, a clench is a subgeniis church. "Bob" could have any pipe he choose to, but not all pipes are "Bob"s. Only the ONE TRUE PIPE is the ONE TRUE PIPE, at any given time. "Bob"'s pipes are WHITE AROUND THE HOLE. The great salty fermented BEAN is ONE, but there are infinitely many of it. At least, more than anyone would care to count. the BEAN has been et countless times. I personally have consumed the BEAN, and the BEAN, me. The BEAN cares not how often it is eaten. There is always the BEAN. Do not beat a dead horse unless it is in your SLACK to do so. If it is in your SLACK to do so, dont stop beating that dead horse until it is not in your SLACK to do so. As for me, I've done it. I recomend it. ALWAYS SHOUT BACK IF YOU DISAGREE, unless its not in your SLACK to do so. Buy wheatgerm and spraypaint. DER BLeNDER- chop wring spittle wretch. SLACK. The true joys of slack. sLack. slAck. slaCk. slacK. SLACK! What is slack? What is a slack awareness? Oh, to fill you with an apreciation of the ways of slack! Better I dont. its way out: consider two lasers- green lasers- mounted with the most absolute precision such that from here to the end of the universe the beams are exactly parallel, ignoring the influences of the existence of matter, etc. cross the beams, then uncross them. the process takes you a moment. the point of intercection goes from HERE to beyond infinity durring that moment, moving much much faster then the speed of light. the tortise reaches the wall. How far away was it that the beams finally uncrossed? SLACK was here, and it got there first. its about how far off from conveying a true slack awareness i am. A slack awareness must either be awakened, or it can be brought in Dobbstown. -- "Joshua D. Glasser"