"CYBER-GURU" RU SIRIUS

                                                                                                                      by Jose Carlos Neves

There is no doubt that we have seen a "turning-point" in the history of cyberculture or, better still, two points: the advent of the internet and the appearance of the acclaimed magazine MONDO  2000. A periodical that evolved from an earlier neopsychedelic zine, MONDO 2000 added to its own post-punk irreverence a unique computer-enhanced graphic style, and generated a media illusion of a new cultural trend - a kind of a phenomenon of the early 90s. It was even considered the predecessor to the acclaimed Wired. And, behind it was its original Editor-in-Chief, the emblematic prankster, Freelance writer, editor, speaker and performer, R.U. Sirius, one of the creators of the powerful meme that  is the cyberculture.
After leaving Mondo 2000, Sirius has contributed his increasingly acerbic writing to publications ranging from ARTFORUM International to Wired to San Francisco Examiner. In 1994, he recorded an unreleased album called IOU Babe for Trent Reznor's Nothing Records with his conceptual-art rock band MV Inc.(formerly called Mondo Vanilli). He has also co-authored two books with St. Jude, who recently died of cancer  at the age of sixty-four: Cyberpunk Handbook: the Real Cyberpunk Fakebook (Random House), and How to Mutate and Take Over the World (Ballantine). He currently edits an occassional journal called The Thresher (www.thethresher.com) and his online writings and interviews on are currently accessible at www.revolting.com/media.html.

I feel myself privileged to share with you all the followingn"questionnaire" with this true icon to Digital Culture -- a radical thinker or a post-post-luddite? You should find your own conclusion...

Q: First of all, Sirius, please let’s begin with some background. Your age, marital status, sons? Academic graduation and profession?
RU: I’m a thousand years old, married to my profession ?- neo-taoist blockhead, and I’m a son-of-a-bitch. In-real-time I’m 51, engaged to a woman named Eve, I’ve had no children, and I write professionally  (also,Executive Editor and lecturer when I’m lucky!). I have a BA in English and went half way through a Master’s Degree in "Fiction Writing" before dropping out of college in upstate New York and moving to the SF Bay area in 1982.
Trent Reznor

Q: R.U. stands for?
RU: Reginald Ubermensch

Q: How did you get started?
RU: My father’s DNA mixed with my mothers. My father was a rare bird;  amiddle-class American freethinker ?- cautious of habit but very liberal of thought. He was an atheist and an absurdist and an Occassionally politically active left-liberal who wrote stories influenced by Beckett and Kafka but never published. My mother was an agnostic and a  liberal,although even less of an activist. She later became a nudist.

My first publishing experience was an "underground paper;" a snotty Xerox broadside that I passed around in High School in 1969. It was  veryunpopular until the school principal banned it. After that, it was a hit.

Q: What is it that attracted you to writing and Pop culture? What were your influences?
RU: My earliest influence was Mad magazine and "Catcher in the Rye." Before the hippies came along in 1967, I was really struck by Dostoievsky’s "Notes From Underground" and by African American writers like James Baldwin and Malcolm X. In high school, I read all the Marxists, but they only made a moderate impression on me. At the same time, I read psychedelic literature like Huxley and Leary which, at the time, didn’t effect me much more than the Marxists although I really appreciated my few experiences on those few occasions when I could try  a decent hallucinogen. I was really struck again by Abbie Hoffman’s "Revolution For the Hell of It" in 1969. After that, I became interested in Dadaism and Surrealism. In the mid-seventies I took particularly to Salvador Dali and Andy Warhol because even the avant-gardists considered them vulgar and I needed a break from the new left’s self-righteousness. And then I was philosophically converted to a sort of psychedelic post-modernism; a philosophic opposition to absolutes by Tim Leary and Robert Anton Wilson and the stuff they were writing in the mid-and-late 1970s. The rest has been gravy.

Q: How did you first become interested in Science Fiction? What are  your earliest memories as far as that goes?
RU: I never cared that much about science fiction, unless you count Burroughs, whose book "Wild Boys" excited me in the early seventies, when I was active in the Yippies (Youth International Party). Right after reading Wild Boys, I went back and read "Naked Lunch" and the cut-up trilogy, "Soft Machine" etc. I was in a very post-literate, fragmented state of mind, even though mostly my only drugs at the time were pot and beer. The cut-up novels made perfect sense to me. I kept them on the toilet top, opened them up to wherever and whenever I pleased and started reading. It helped that I’d heard a tape of Burroughs reading, so I could hear his voice and rhythm and appreciate the work as both comedy and psychedelic experimentation. Outside of Burroughs, in the early seventies, a lot of hipsters were developing world views based on novels, but I didn’t really get  Dick(huh huh heh heh heh) until I finally read VALIS in the early ‘80s. 
OnceI read VALIS, I had to read a lot of his other stuff.

In the late ‘80s, Leary went around telling everybody he knew to check out Gibson, which led to "cyberpunk" writers like Bruce Sterling, John Shirley, Rudy Rucker and others. And I really liked most of their works. I still do, in fact. And they all turned out to be really great guys, although they might want to deny it.

-When you were young, what kind of Science Fiction did you liked to read?
RU:I didn’t like SF when I was young. In fact, pre-adolescent, I only wanted to read biographies of baseball players and about the American and French revolutions of the late 18th Century, which caught my imagination. And Edgar Allan Poe, which my vaguely beatnikish Uncle Ed turned me on to.

-Tell us your growing-up story in the SF field. Do you consider yourself also as a science fiction writer?
RU:I have only one published fiction work, a collaboration with the recently deceased St. Jude. I don’t really think of it as Science Fiction although it was looking a few years ahead into the future. I thought it was an experiment with narrative, mainly. Most people think it failed, although there were a few dozen people who told us they thought it was THE book of the nineties. I personally don’t know what  to think about it, which is generally the case once I’ve finished something.

Q: Thinking about cinema, music and comics: what kind of stories influenced you most?
RU: I liked Fellini’s 8 1/2 and I’ve always defended any artist’s right to put him or herself in that position, as center of a kind of human cyclone around whom people reveal themselves as rather like circus freaks and as loveable, fallible human beings both. That’s become very taboo now. There’s a kind of democratic hostility towards artists expressing themselves in that way. Witness the critical hostility to "Masked and Anonymous" the recent collaboration involving Bob Dylan. I thought it was an interesting movie.

As far as music, that’s just too broad a topic. I’m very Catholic in terms of liking lots of different types of music. I’ve always been a huge fan of David Bowie’s lyrics. I think, along with Dylan, he’s the best lyricist, which I think is a controversial view.

Q: What do you think is your most important activity?
RU: Sitting and waiting. Not jumping the gun.

Q: What is your wildest dream?
RU: In answer to a similar question in 1994 I answered "A harem. World revolution. Unimaginable novelties occurring with great frequency"  But as my nation’s founding fathers, Paul Revere and the Raiders once said, "Kicks just keep getting harder to find." I think rather than thrills, I would love within my lifetime to witness an actual, verifiable, evolutionary mutation in the human species. Not necessarily the entire species although that would be cool. But I would love to see something theorists would have to say, "OK. NOW you’ve done it!" That would be really interesting. Of course, most mainstream evolutionary theorists like Stephan Jay Gould say that this won’t happen soon or ever; that we’re the end of the line.

It can be argued, of course, that it has already happened through culture and media or through cyborgian aspects of humanity, but I’m talking about something that’s not vague; that’s undeniable and conclusive.

-What do you consider the three most important events in your life?
RU:I have a difficult time making hierarchies of experience anymore; even favorite songs are hard. It depends on the context. Still, I’ll say a 500 microgram LSD experience a few days after John Lennon was shot, which put me in touch with something that Aldous Huxley called "the essential all-rightness" of all things. Meeting Queen Mu at a party in Oakland, California which lead to the existence of Mondo 2000. And asking my fiancé Eve to marry me.

Q: What about nowadays, what is seminal for you now?
RU: I’m about to take up Taoist meditation. It seems to me that any agency I have in the active world in the future will flow out of that.

Q: I really share with you a love to the writing of the late and overwhelming thinker Terence McKenna. He had written (concerning his stunning " time-wave-zero theory"): "From the way the gyre is tightening, I predict that concrescence will occur soon around 2012 AD It will be the entry of our species into hyperspace, but it will appear to be the end of physical laws accompanied by the release of the mind into the imagination." What do you think he had tried to convey with this? How do you conceive his "apocalyptic" predictions and do you believe them?
RU:Terence was a marvelous Irish visionary, and to hear him speak was to  be transported. However, I never "believed" in his 2012 vision, or anything else. I don’t believe in belief. I understand the essence of his vision; that the evolution of technology seems to be taking us to a place where it should become possible to externalize anything we can imagine, and in tandem with a corresponding renaissance in psychedelic culture, that should lead to something both wild and benevolent. But I would be very surprised to see this sort of thing happen outside of virtuality before say 2060.

Q: What do you see coming along up to 2012?
RU: Dick Cheney as President? Europe under water? You can’t peer into the future any more. There are too many "Game Over" scenarios to talk very clearly about any far out visions, not in the sense of total annihilation or some great singularity, but in terms of real, on-the-ground mass human difficulty, warfare, and emiseration.

Q: And after that?
RU: Same answer.

Q: To be a little philosophical again, what is your conception of  Time? The fourth dimension of space, like Einstein’s idea or something else?
RU: I think of it mostly in those conventional terms as an operative convenience. I would only add that this notion doesn’t exist without consciousness, that each moment is embedded in eternity and that ultimately all these categories collapse.

Q: What do you imagine a being (or an object, like the Tesseract) from the Fourth Dimension if he/it could appear in our tridimensional reality?
RU: "Appear" would probably be the wrong word. I would expect it to  be accessible to some other sense, probably an unacknowledged one.

Q: Do you view our inability to see the higher reality as a problem related only to human perceptions or does it involve our spiritual aspect?
RU: Well, I would question the use of the word "higher", but if you  are talking about dimensions that are not available to our senses, the question answers itself. Psychedelic drugs seem to be, as McKenna, Leary and others have suggested, access codes or messengers that allow us to dip into other-dimensional realities. They’re not higher though, just other..

Q: Are the cognitive limitations of present-day man technological, philosophical or epistemological?
RU: I would say technological. Any philosophical or epistemological insights that you might use to overcome limitations would become a technique.

Q: Have you read any good story, book, essay or text about the Fourth  -and higher - dimensions that you would recommended? And images concerning (films, pictures, painting, comics?
RU: Rudy Rucker’s most recent novel, I think it was called Flatlands, but I can’t remember and I’m away from my bookshelf, was delightful and fun.

Q: The Rucker´s novel is entitled "Spaceland", actually. If you do read (or even have read) comics, what was the first comic by Alan Moore did you read?
RU: I’m sorry but I don’t much read comics. My ex-writing partner St. Jude occasionally foisted one on me and I may have read something by Moore but I don’t remember it. I’ve enjoyed reading interviews with  him though.

Q: Do you agree with Chaos theory that our world (and the Universe as a whole by extension) is ruled by fractals, strange attractors and so on, where a little alteration on initial conditions could cause big and unexpected alterations on the final ones?
RU: I don’t agree with anything. But the last part of that assertion seems obvious.

Q: Labels are just a convenience, I know. So do you think that "cyberpunk" was just a marketing term, coopted by a huge commercial mainstream?
RU: Well, it was a descriptive term of convenience for an SF critic first; and it was a source both of publicity and identity for an SF avant-garde secondly; and then it was that for a broader cultural avant-garde; and then it was a cliché; and now it’s something that  never caught on enough to even be recognizable to say your average Fifty  Cents fan.

Q: Do you think its "original mentors"- Sterling, Gibson, Cadigan, Rucker and the like - have had an intentional, active participation in this "marketing" aspect of it? Or were they actually a "victim" of the vicious process that undermines every real creative trend, if you know what I mean?
RU: I think they all gained in their careers from the trend, and I don’t think they let it rule their creative output. Sterling certainly took advantage of the trend. For the most part, we all do our work as best we can. Trends and art movements are like ad hoc associations arranged by the zeitgeist.

Q: How do you imagine real-life computers and digital technologies in ten years?
RU: No predictions

Q: Bill Joy, one of the inventors of Java, claims that the robotics, genetics and nanotechnology that are fueling the global economy also contain the seeds of our self-destruction. Do you think Joy's thesis is plausible and what are the ethics of your writings?
RU: It’s plausible in the specific that any of these technologies  could deliver a knock-out punch to various earth bound species including our own, however the "seeds" of self-destruction seems to be in outmoded survival programs or maybe our awareness of our own mortality; and in our ability to experience dissatisfaction in a way that propels us towards violence both explicit and implicit. I think in a world that’s largely in conflict over resource scarcity, and likely to soon be more so, it’s far more dangerous NOT to develop nanotechnology.

As for my writing ethics, I don’t really think about it in those terms. I go from day to day. I try not to censor myself, so that may be an ethic.

Q: What is your view about the 9/11 terrorist attacks? Some anarchists are even considering these tragic events as a "hoax". Perhaps a great culture representative like you has a personal theory/view about it.
RU: It doesn’t require a theorist, even an anarchist theorist, for a bunch of people to act. Something actually happened in the phenomenal world and the people who did it were probably self-motivated. There’s always the chance that they were manipulated by other forces. I think it probably happened pretty much the way it has been described but I also think there hasn’t been sufficient investigation by either the media or the US Congress.

Q: Do you have a political agenda? What is it?
RU: I’m going to try to advance my agenda by not having one. Now that I’ve gotten my newfound knee-jerk Taoism out of the way, I’d say that aside from being a civil libertarian absolutist, my current agenda is vague even to me. I can sense it, but I can’t describe it. It’s like I’m in the middle of an investigation and haven’t reached a conclusion yet.

Q: What do you see as the missing link necessary to bring AI research up to speed with your visions of intelligent machines?
RU: I just think they’re wasting their time. Artificial Life is interesting making programs that evolve. But I think with nanotechnology, we should be able to simply build or mimic or copy neurons.

Q: In your opinion, are culture and war the instruments of American supremacy over the world and how do you judge the neoconservatism of Bush administration.
RU: If the goal is to create global revulsion against American military and political hegemony, you couldn’t do a better job than the Bush administration. If anything, they are subverting the power of American or Western cultural "supremacy," which has had its good as well as bad points.

Q: How do you perceive science and technology nowadays, and do you think that we may lose control over them one day in the future?
RU: Look at electric blackouts in a 21st Century city. I was just in one. Electricity is as vital as food or water to us and in fact inextricably linked. That’s technology AND nature and the only reason we haven’t lost control over it is because we never really had it. There’s no control, of course, only process.

Q: The potential of nanotechnology seems vast. How do you think its development will affect human consciousness in the future?
RU: Well, p2p technology is like training wheels for the economics of nanotech. You will go thorough this period where everyone will still  bentrying to control property rights etc. Ultimately it should remove economics as a vital arbiter in human affairs, but no doubt some enclaves will cling to the economic lifestyle. What ultimately happens to human consciousness when there’s no necessity to suffer? There’s no telling but undoubtedly it will be wildly varied.

Q: Synchronicity is a major theme that runs through pop culture nowadays. What model do you use at present for interpreting this mysterious phenomenon?
RU: I’m constantly reminded that I’m in some kind of feedback system with all-that-is. It’s humbling.

Q: What do you think happens to consciousness after physical death?
RU: I think the individual identity goes out after about five minutes  of brain activity, assuming you’re not already brain-dead when you go out. That brain activity may BE eternity since any boundary between the subjective and the objective is likely to have collapsed. After that, whatever happens probably can’t really be apprehended by embodied consciousness.

Q: How do you see consciousness evolving into this twenty-first
century?
RU:That’s too big a question. I think though that some of the ideas in Leary’s future history series about the "post-terrestrial brain circuits" might prove to be prescient metaphors (his sixth "neuro-electric circuit" already is a vital metaphor for current electronic communication culture) although probably not literally true.

Q: The methods of science and art are beginning to achieve some wonderful things together. What do you think created such a chasm between the two disciplines in the first place, and why do you think they are now merging?
RU: Probably if their brains were mapped (and maybe they have been already and I’m forgetting), we would see that the people who are described as scientists and those described as artists are privileging different parts of their brains. But many people are becoming neurologically polymorphous these days.

Q: Can you tell us which SF author, from the new generation, we should keep an eye on, as far as your opinion is concerned?
RU: It’s probably old news to your readers, but I’m interested in Jeff Noon.

Q: Any titles to underline, in particular?
RU: I particularly liked "Pollen."

Q: How do you explain the popularity of Luddite and anti-progress views?
RU: If god sucks, the devil must be hip. Or vice versa. People see a threat and seek absolutes instead of parsing the details.

Q: How about distributing your books on the net for free? What if the" bad guys" scan them and distribute them on the web? How can you stop them?
RU:I think some of my books are available through the Gutenberg Project. But maybe if I find some time, I’ll put some more of them up. I’m always happy to see my stuff up on the web, but I don’t like it when I find someone taking credit for an entire piece I’ve written, which has happened a few times. But I don’t really worry about it.

Q: What about drugs? Do you think that acid ( and other kind of drugs, like the mushrooms of Terence McKenna, the DMT) could help us in  opening the gates to altered states of consciousness? For you, are these "states" another reality, a parallel universe, another dimension, an alien landscape, an inner world - like the "immateria" concept by Alan Moore, the summ of all this or anything else?
RU:It probably depends on the drug and the dosage level, but I’m more inclined towards the notion of dipping into other dimensions than other universes or "alien landscapes." Just seems closer at hand. At lower dosages, I think they give your neurons a kind of elasticity.

Q: Are there any questions about your work that no one has ever asked you but that you would like to have been asked because you can provide an interesting/informative answer?
RU: I prefer Executive Editing dreaming up periodicals over writing and yes, I will be open to invitations to do that.

Q: How do you think the underground has changed since the 60s?
RU: People are much more sophisticated now but less hopeful. In fact, for many if not most counterculture types the idea of "changing the world" doesn’t even deserve consideration. Finding a "temporary autonomous zone" or some fun shared obsession to hide inside of is the best that can be hoped for, or at least that seems to be a widely embraced perspective.

Q:Whom do you read and respect nowadays?
RU:Bruce Sterling. He also irritates me. Erik Davis. There’s a new magazine out called "The Believer" that runs interesting essays by people whose names haven’t become familiar to me yet. It’s published by McSweeney’s and is well worth checking out.

Q: Is there anything you’re working on that you´d like to tell us  about?
RU: I just completed a book called "Countercultures Through the Ages: From Abraham to Acid House". It’s a history book about fifteen influential anti-authoritarian or non-authoritarian cultural movements and it shows how many of the same tropes keep coming up. It took me 26 months to write and it will be published fall 2004 by Villard Books, which is part of Random House.

Q: What do you think is the main disadvantage of contemporary computers, besides being slow?
RU: They are counterintuitive in so many ways I don’t even want to talk about it. And they still cost more than $100.

Q: Finally, which places in the Net do you visit most often?
RU: I’m sort of bored with the net lately. I’m reading more books,  going for walks. I catch up on very sane, moderate (at least from a hipster point of view), left-liberal, alternative political views every few  days by going to www.commondreams.org. Other than that, I sometimes drift around but no sites specifically come to mind.

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Folks,

I¹m editing a new monthly webzine dedicated to all things "neophile." 
Ihope you¹ll check it out at
http://www.life-enhancement.com/neofiles/default.asp

And pass on the word to others who like this sort of thingŠ

best
RU Sirius

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Information on R.U. Sirius
CURRENT:
Chairman of THE REVOLUTION, a new political party for people who feel excluded  by mainstream politics.
Freelance writer, editor, speaker and performer
Titular Editor-In-Chief: Axcess magazine. Axcess is a Berkeley, California  based, GenX oriented magazine with a circulation of 20,000. Sirius was recently  hired to bring quality writing into the publication.
Publisher/Editor of REVOLTING! www.revolting.com. "Radical Ta