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SURFPUNK Technical Journal 085
Date: Wed, 5 May 93 19:34:20 PDT
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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 <bagg@midway.uchicago.edu>
To: <surfpunk@osc.versant.com>
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 <gnome@noel.pd.org>
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 <surfpunk@osc.versant.com>, ...
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 <surfpunk@osc.versant.com>, subscription requests
to <surfpunk-request@osc.versant.com>. 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"
<glasserj@sun.mcs.clarkson.edu>
