Friday 9/4 only (on Bandcamp Friday, one gets to keep the full payment for the music purchased)

Lilly has late-stage cancer

She must either raise her rent money or fly to her homeland Ethiopia, which she longs to see during her final days (or both)

I will recommend a specific album to buy on Bandcamp Friday

here :

It’s title

“2.Infinite Gesture (Sacred  Monsters Version)”. It’s by R.U. Sirius & Friends & Phriendz.

As you can see, there are a few songs already up but it’s not complete yet. You can hear it all tomorrow.

It will be a pop-up album. It will appear in full tomorrow, be available on Bandcamp Friday, and then be made private some time Saturday. 

You are, of course, welcome to purchase any music prior to Friday. It’s still a benefit.

ps: This is what I’m doing. I’m doing this. I prefer not to engage with “why don’t you do this other thing instead?” Maybe later.

I hope you will contribute, buy, listen and help spread the word about this benefit and the elegant pop-up album that you will be able to hear in full tomorrow.

Deliria springs eternal.

Thank you for your attention to this mess.

R.U. Sirius

We ain’t the Waterboys
We ain’t the Watermarks
We’re the Virtual renderers
We’re just the renderers

Europe has its mediocrity
America has its lunacy
Put us in the Delria sea
Never gonna make a mainline outta me

Suck it in spit it out
Suck it in spit it out
It begins by design
It began at the time
Everybody got online
Everything seemed kind of fine
Take that girl spill the wine
She’s not there I don’t care

Suck it in spit it out x8

I live inside the eye of the hoax
Trickster news coast to coast
Every man gets his own celebrity roast
The fire this time season of the ghost
 
The sour incandescence of the grinding abyss
Don’t you know he was taking the piss?
Faded image of a raised fist
I lived inside the mind of the mist

I live in the eye of the hoax
Trickster news coast to coast
Every day is April Fools’ day now
Every minute brings another evil clown

It’s been raining cats and dogma
Come on up if you really wanna
Stanch a fallacy break a legacy
Every man gets his own foreign policy
 
I live inside the eye of the hoax
Trickster news coast to coast
Every day is April Fools day now
Every minute brings another evil clown
 
History’s a nightmare
They’re trying to erase
They’re trying to replace
Every place is no place

I’m your watermarxist
Property is robbery
A pox on all your houses
A box on every browsers

Suck it in spit it out x8

So you’re thinking he should be posting about Deliria 2 — the astounding event that just happened at Gray Area SF but my mind has been replaced by the profound simcerity of the Virtual Pretenderers

Also, it’s gonna take me a couple of days before I’m ready to write about the blessed event

The Rolling Stones have a unique and ambiguous relationship to originality. Musically they built their work firstly out of American blues and then soul music, country music, and then — a style of pop music that evolved to a great degree out of the original attitudes and styles off the British Invasion lead by The Beatles and quickly followed on by the Stones. They mixed these influences together winningly, rebelliously. Using this hybridization, they made something new(ish).

Their creative peak (1968 - 1972) had still other things going on. The Stones were connected to the intensity of the cultural, political, sexual radicalism of that period, a situation that they reflected back to us through their albums and live tours, while wavering between embracing “the revolution,” questioning it, and giving themselves a degree of ironic distance from it. (I first saw the phrase ironic distancing in a special Rolling Stone magazine 15th anniversary of the Rolling Stones edition — published in 1977 (maybe ’78). Jagger and Richards (and, of course, dear Brian Jones) particularly were occasional participants in very countercultural situation while evading and shying away from any consistent commitments.

What originality the Stones had came from, yes, the hard (for the times) edges of the sound (try Have You Seen Your Mother Baby Standing In The Shadows) but also, the lyrics, mainly by Jagger, who starting bringing it early with Satisfaction, but who peaked in those years from 1968 - 1972.

David Bowie, who did truly original distinct works (under a far wider set of influences) spoke credibly, in the late ‘70s (the “Berlin period”), of he and Brian Eno opening up a new language for pop and rock music. This is not something the Rolling Stones ever attempted.

What gave The Stones their significance — the cherry on top of the tasty licks and driving rhythms — was the lyrics from that period. You Can’t Always Get What You Want; Gimme Shelter; Midnight Rambler; Sympathy For The Devil, Street Fighting Man, Brown Sugar (yes, naughty insouciance is part of it)…. These songs and many others are part of the conscious and unconscious vocabulary of western life (and have drifted to spaces beyond).

Then there’s the very extreme Jagger solo piece Memo From Turner from the dark surreal noir film Performance. And allow me to focus a soft lens on the song “Live With Me,” from Let It Bleed (1969) because it’s mainly silly, but he toyed with that well… and it says so much about how Jagger functioned as lyricist and functions still as a human being.

Live With Me’s immediate appeal is to the casual sexism of the 1960s in which the plea to the “chick” is that he has a place for her “in between the sheets.” It’s utterly cringe. But it’s also a funny satirical glimpse at the the then-contemporary aristocracy, with the mutating children (“earphone heads, dirty necks” cuing up for the bathroom at 7:35) and the lifestyle/living spaces with the servants, the footman, the cook, the butler, the maid and the chauffeur all brimming over with eccentricities …and with the payoff line, the Jagger line “Don’t you think there’s a place for us right across the street?” That’s it!

Jagger doesn’t do that anymore. He doesn’t seem particularly connected to the fact that he did. Sir Mick has long been securely right across the street.

It’s Only Rock and Roll (1974) was a Statement of (Lack of) Purpose. When Jagger is asked about the glimpses of political concerns in Foreign Tongues, he tells the NY Times reporter that people don’t want to hear him “preach.”

Mick! Those great lyrics and songs that energized so many of us during the 1968 - 1972 period didn’t preach. They painted pictures, conveyed felt attitudes with lucid and deceptive complexity… they reflected the bloody zeitgeist. They captured the moment in a way that brought the Rolling Stones a level of glory that was, of course, a bit over the top (which is why Mick and Keith shied away from it all. Like Bob Dylan, they didn’t want to be “the voice of a generation.)”

The Rolling Stones. Smart guys. Still rocking pretty hard. But in terms of really bringing something original to the cultural and musical table, their importance was created by the intensity of their moment. Indeed, what distinguishes David Bowie and Bob Dylan from Jagger is that their geniuses surfaced or resurfaced late in life because it had to. They had — or have genius — and even when cushioned by too much money, it had to surface. They had to bring it lyrically; to reflect weird intense stuff because that’s who they were (and are). Jagger isn’t that.

If you listen to the NY Times interview with Mick that has won much praise from some quarters, he speaks of himself not as an artist as did Bowie — or from a place of extreme eccentricity as Dylan continues to do. He continually relates his work to entertainment, and even weirder, to sports. I had thought exactly that watching a film of him onstage some time in the 1980s. I said to a friend something along the lines of… “he’s not connecting to the lyrics. Now he’s a businessman and an athlete.” Just a memory of a love that used to mean so much to me.

I mean, it’s all good. But it’s not very original.

[Aside from captaining the upcoming counterculture event that is all over this substack and in other places, I am a Virtual Pretenderer]

An explication of sorts

In February 2025, R.U. Sirius & Phriendz released The Smarter Kings of Deliria.

The Celebrity from Celebrity Apprentice had just reacquired its throne. It had — several years prior — already racked up the crowning achievement of early 21st Century life. It was without question the biggest celebrity the world had ever seen. Everybody’s miserable attention was on this Ubu

There hadn’t yet been any “No Kings” gatherings. We were uncrowned Kings of Deliria on a mere jaunt thru bandcamp, glibly wondering what you would wear to the new civil war with little fanfare.

The zone was already flooded with delirious excrement — chaotic signs and signals (sigils?) grifting with brain-fragging chaos of the ugly and banal sort monopolizing the memes of production.

Deliria required no explanation but it did require an album release event. But who what where and, finally, what the…?

So it grew into a gathering of the ‘90s cybertribes. We pretty much filled up the Gray Area Grand Theater. Some people said… “Hey. Do it again!”

Fuck those idiots!

But wait. The actual history of the Deliria events?

Dada formed in 1916. It was said to be a reaction to the war of all against all that was World War One. Men…. bureaucrats… appeared to be deep in the throes of rationality and rigidity as millions went off to crawl around in the muck and mire and poison gas. The ruling classes were understood to be, in the arcana of Freud, “anal retentive.” (Also, some European artists were bored with the self-seriousness of others like — but then also unlike — themselves.

Dada sought to explode language, reason, artistic presentation. It did did didn’t did… as a neighborhood kid used to sputter when challenged. Or as Tristan Tzara put it…

“Ideal, Ideal, Ideal
Knowledge, Knowledge, Knowledge,
Boomboom, Boomboom, Boomboom”

That was then. This is now.

And now the Ruling Crass is anal expulsive. We’re covered in it. And so, dear reader, you have every reason and every right to return to facts and thoughtful discourse.

But there’s something deadening about all the relentless pontificating, even when brilliant and a bit funny, which might explain my anxiety to complete this text that I already regret. (John Lilly suggested we should only use language for necessary instructions. I disagree. We should also use language for whimsical corrosive lyrics.)

So I’ll conclude. Come to the Gulf of Deliria was 2025. Come to the Strait of Deliria is 2026. Come on 8/12 for Nova ‘78, the Bay Area premiere film with Burroughs and all the hippest people in the USA in 1978.

via Mondo

_{Patti Smith will not be live but will be present}

Stay for the Deliria on 8/13 and for Guillermo Gómez-Peña.

And for still more deliria, witness The Ritual Sacrifice of the Posthuman

Move to the electronic complexities of Cyrnai

and remember “Nothing is new. Everything is permuted.” Hassan-i-Sirius

Early bird tickets

“It’s the end of recorded music. Pull the rug pull/Pull the plug fool”

Gray Area for tickets

Oh Lordy Miss Claudia
I know I’m losing the race
But I gotta keep pace
For the debasement tapes

Hey Suno Bono
It’s Cher and Cher alike
A phony bologna
Bob sold the songs to Sony
And who am I who are you?
Are you serious is what you do
I’m not a fighter for the red white and blue
Are we through with being cool?

Reckoning
Beckoning 
Seconding that emotion
Mentoring
Hectoring
Savoring that commotion

It’s the end of recorded music
Pull the rug then pull the plug
It’s the end of recorded music
Pull the rug pull - pull the plug fool
Studio tricks was the first grift
Recorded music does not exist
I’m the man 
Royal Scam 
Sgt. Peckerhead Lowly mutts new brand

Somewhere at the intersection of Genghis Khan and John Sinclair
Satyricon and Fred Astaire
Hermann Munster and a brilliant punster
Richard Nixon and fuck the system
Our contradictions your indecision
Salvador Dali and little ol’ me
Where did you go Alice Cooper
Our nation turns it’s bloody black eyes to you 
Koo Koo Kachoo

It’s the end of recorded music
Pull the rug then pull the plug
It’s the end of recorded music
Pull the rug pull pull the plug
Studio tricks was the first grift
Recorded music should not exist
I’m the man  
Royal Scam 
Sgt. Peckerhead says I am

Oh Lordy Miss Claudia
I know I’m losing the race
But I gotta keep pace
For the debasement tapes

[rept]

[No song by The Virtual Pretenderers should ever be considered complete]

The Debasement Tapes video by Hassan i Sirius "Nothing is new. Everything is permuted"

No Rest For The Precariat  (2019)

Dumb easy feckless proles
Matrons danced the Watusi
Hoodlum malcontents did the stroll
Early tech geeks couldn’t find sushi

Assholes like me were relentlessly droll
Dads at home acted like il Duce
Middle class kids weren’t on the dole
Everyone bowled and went to the movies

But now there’s no rest
Now there’s no rest
Now there’s no rest
For the Precariat
But now there’s no rest
Now there’s no rest
Now there’s no rest
For the Precariat

Punters fighting punters
Owners sailing yachts
We can jump into the fire
But we cant afford new Reeboks
Nothing much is left to say
It’s cyberwar from day to day
Street distress from night to night
Play instruments of madcap blight

And now there’s no rest
Now there’s no rest
Now there’s no rest
For the Precariat
But now there’s no rest
Now there’s no rest
Now there’s no rest
For the Precariat

[most of these songs are still unrecorded. I’m your big break]

https://www.mondo2000.com/infinite-gesture-21-lyrics-in-search-of-music/

Eric Packer (played by Robert Pattison) — reigning master of the universe of unencumbered digital financial trading — spends most of his disastrous day in the back of a limo determined to make it across New York City in the midst of traffic chaos caused by a presidential motorcade, to get a haircut, but not, as we will discover, any haircut.

Impeccably dressed, physically perfect, emotionally smooth, and despite a series of sexual encounters during this single day with beautiful female subordinates — Packer’s world, until today, is nothing but data.

At the beginning of the film, we see massive data flows zipping around a small computer screen operated by a hacker employee, and we understand that his world of unfailing predictions based on this data has been disrupted by an error that threatens him with massive financial losses. But Packer, despite the seeming practicality of the bad day he is facing, is more interested in his existential situation. He’s having a crisis of meaning and of feeling.

As he and his driver make their way through NYC’s jammed streets, various courtiers slip into his limo to talk about some aspect of his business situation only to be peppered by stark questions that tilt away from business and lean towards meaning. And yet, his quasi-philosophical inquiries are all oriented towards calculation as opposed to insight (and how many of our singularitarian friends would acknowledge that a distinction exists?). Packer is in the vanguard of his generations’ and our culture’s reorientation from lived to statistical experience.

The film hinges on two particular events. Event one: Packer’s previously unfailing prediction machine has failed to predict a crisis in the yuan. Event two: Packer’s daily medical examination turns up a peculiar (and contextually funny) problem that I won’t spoil for you… but both problems revolve around the incursion of irregularity into his smooth world.

Here we have the Quantified Life at its apotheosis. Even in the midst of sexual encounters, there are conversations that seek information about the nature of the business and sexual relationships and — during the peak of one sex scene — his female partner reports on her successful jogging routine and provides a statistical particular about her fat-to-muscle ratio.

In mixed reviews, much has been made of Cronenberg taking on Wall Street capitalism (and let’s remember that all this is based on the critically underrated DeLillo 2003 novel of the same name) in a biting satire that’s not at all a comedy. There is that. But the critics miss the larger undercurrent, which should have clarified for them during the last scene (and I will spare you any further spoilers). Several shocking scenes (yes, this is Cronenberg), including the finale, bring home for us that Packer is seeking some experience — any experience — that is not quantifiable. Whether he finds it or not, I’ll leave for you to sort out.

Oscar Wilde famously said of his countrymen, “They know the price of everything and the value of nothing.” But he was thinking of craggy old industrialists who actually traded in things. For Packer, price and value are both de-prioritized by the ersatz bliss of those baptized in data-flow. It’s a cold but pleasurably high, until something unsmooth, like a poor person or a bodily peculiarity, makes an unpredicted intervention.

afterword 2026: My quite unsmooth digital life suffered its own even less-smooth disjunction when this article on Gizmodo reminded me that the above piece would be a nice addition to my Substack. But when I sallied forth online to find it, I discovered it was lost deep in the memory hole. I had a moment — feeling pale, unsubstantiated, my teensy-tiny celebrity ration seemed to be, itself, sliding into the mediated abyss.

Don’t misunderstand The clock in my head always says it’s half-passed I don’t give a fuck again.

And oh yes, I did try the Wayback Machine. Crickets.

Time for a walk. Touch grass. Ok… don’t actually touch grass. Buy half-and-half and whipped cream at the corner store. Come home.

My friend Paul Shelton — he who has joined the Point Reyes Dickheads that are investigating reality— had, with the assistance of Claude — found the piece buried deep in the Wayback.

Claude! Praise Claude. Know the miracle that is Claude. Expect to pay ever more for its basic functioning. On your feet or on your knees! As Bob might have said, you’ll pay to know what you really thought.

In some ways, articles written just a couple of years ago… or even just last year… about AI for creative work feel more archaic than stuff written 20 or more years ago.

The first line immediately below was written by the editors at magazine.mindplex.ai The article was originally published there. Check it at magazine.mindplex.a

Jn the 80s and 90s, taping and sampling were said to be killing the music industry. Now, AI is said to steal artists’ work and threaten their jobs. Is Generative AI an accelerated version of remix culture?

Will AI be used constructively or destructively? It possibly depends on sociological and political factors external to AI or technology. An irruption of barbarism (for example, in the much-ballyhooed upcoming American civil war) would bring destructive uses of AI, mainly fraud and trickery. It’s hard to think of a turn towards empathy doing much good, since it only takes a minority of bad actors to wreak havoc, but one can dream. Between Wall Street traders laughing about screwing middle-class investors out of 401ks back during the financial collapse and bailout of 2008, to the relentless news of corporate predations, manipulative politics, and the plague of more street-level grifters tricking the elderly out of their cash, the evidence is pretty high that the abuse of AI will be front and center in our minds and discussions going into the immediate future.

But there is one area in which your relationship to AI may be more self-selective: the active versus the passive use of these apps and opportunities for creative work and experimentation. Here we have a richer and more complicated set of relations and possibilities.

Inappropriate Appropriation?

The artist Molly Crabapple recently posted a totalist objection to the use of AI in the arts, writing, “There’s no ethical way to use the major AI image generators. All of them are trained on stolen images, and all of them are built for the purpose of deskilling, disempowering, and replacing real artists”

On reading this I started thinking about how, at Mondo 2000 (the magazine that I co-created), the use of appropriation in creative work was consistently advocated. The main idea, of course, was that you appropriate — use found materials — to make something original, drawing a line between plagiarism and use, although there were exceptions. Our writer Gareth Branwyn amusedly quoted the Austin Texas based Tape Beatles slogan “Plagiarism Saves Time”. Even our ever-provocative Mondo 2000 softened that for our own “appropriation saves time.”

One might compare the incursion of AI for creative use in visual art, writing, music etc. to both the advent of the cassette recorder and the digital synthesizer. We saw the same reactions from musicians and the music industry. With home taping, users of the technology could make copies of recorded music by taping from the radio or a friend’s record collection. The tape itself could then also be copied. In the early ‘80s, the music industry adopted the slogan “Home Taping is Killing Music”, engaged in several lawsuits and lobbied the US Congress (as well as other institutions in Canada and Europe) for legal action to cover their perceived losses from the cassette taping menace. With the advent of the digital synthesizer — the sampler — the floodgates opened to a deluge of conflicts over ownership of music content. Old musicians and their lawyers demanding money from young sampling whippersnappers fuelled the disappointment that GenXers felt about the Baby Boom generation.

For Mondo 2000, Rickey Vincent, author of Funk: The Music, The People and the Rhythm of the One, wrote about the connection between hip-hop, rap, and the cyberpunk aesthetic as enacted by that genre’s playful use of found materials via the technology of the digital sampler: “Sampling is the auditory form of hacking through a database. A certain functional anarchy is involved which one might argue is good for the soul. For hip-hop, a sampler is not a toy. It’s an important instrument in the function of the rap song statement.”

More broadly, in the pages of Mondo 2000, the audio-collage band Negativland, whose use of found material sometimes landed them in lawsuits and hot water, were given the kind of coverage that Rolling Stone would have preserved for Janet Jackson. Our friend and frequent subject, the literary avant-gardiste Kathy Acker, blatantly lifted entire pages out of classic texts, mashing them up with biographical material, fantasy, philosophy and whatever else seemed to work to create her well-regarded (by some) novels. In his Mondo interview with Negativland, Beat historian Stephen Ronan declaimed, “appropriation is the hallmark of postmodernism.”

Mondo art director Bart Nagel’s playful take on our love affair with appropriation from Issue #10 is too amusing not to share in full:

Some guidelines for appropriation

1. Remember: Appropriation saves time.

2. Appropriate your images from old books and magazines where, chances are, all parties who could make a case against you are dead or failingly old.

3. Unfocus the image slightly to avoid the moiré pattern (in Photoshop try a 0.8 Gaussian blur).

4. Morph, tweak or otherwise alter the image unrecognizably.

5. Don’t alter the image at all; have Italian craftsmen sculpt a simulacrum (not guaranteed to work).

6. Appropriate images from MONDO 2000 – these may already have been appropriated. Let’s confuse the trail.

7. Appropriate images from ads in RAY GUN and submit them to MONDO — now it’s come full circle — and it’s ecologically sound (recycling is good).

8. It’s hip hop.

9. And finally, this: if you take someone else’s image it’s appropriation, or resonating, or recommodification; if someone takes your image — it’s stealing.

Self-satire aside, the complications over use and reuse are myriad.

Culture Uses Culture: News Uses News

In journalism, the hard work of the person who “gets the story” will lead to multiple news items, most of which don’t credit the original source. For those engaged in consequential investigations, it is more important that the information spread accurately than for the originator to be repeatedly credited. Just as songs enter common usage for people to sing or play as they will in daily life, the hard work of the journalist becomes fodder for other news stories, dinner table debates, opinion columns, tantrums on TV or combat at conferences.

All of this is to say that the ownership of one’s content is the blurriest of lines. It certainly keeps our courts busy.

But Does AI Make It All Too Easy?

It’s true using AI for creativity might be different from the sampling we’ve seen so far. Sometimes more becomes different. It’s a matter of degree: the amount of content grabbed by AIs and the degree to which the origins of AI-created content may be obscured makes it a different situation. The first cause of concern is that AIs may be good enough — or may get good enough soon — at some types of creation that the creative people will no longer be required. This is a situation touched on by my previous column about the writers’ strike. AI alienates human creatives in a way that sampling didn’t, and the concerns about it putting people out of work are being widely expressed — and are legitimate. When it comes to alienating types of labor, one response is some sort of guaranteed income, and a movement towards a sense of purpose around unpaid activities. The identity and self-esteem of those engaged in creative work however is deeply embedded into that social role, and getting paid tends to defines one as a capital A-Artist or capital W-Writer, because otherwise everybody does the same thing you do.

The artists’ natural affinity and passion for quality work is another source of angst, as covered by my previous article on ‘facsimile culture’. The replacement of quality work with the facsimile of quality strikes many artists deeply; the war against mediocrity being a great motivator, particularly for alienated young crea finding their footing.

Back in the day, you couldn’t switch on your sampler or even your synthesizer and prompt it “make a recording that sounds just like Public Enemy with Chuck D rapping about Kanye West’s weird fashion sense”, and have it spit out something credible with no intervention from creators/copiers. The AI creation of “fake” Drake and The Weekend collaboration freaked some people out — mainly because they suspect that it took less creative effort than a possible actual collaboration between them. But sometimes laziness in music can also produce good results

Finally, and probably most importantly, the degree to which creative AIs are tied into the billionaire and corporate classes validates Crabapple’s broadbrush claim that its primary intended uses are to serve their interests, and to disempower more freelance or democratic or unionized groups of creative workers. The list of large corporations and billionaires engaged in AI development includes Musk, Bezos, Brin, Peter Thiel, Google, Microsoft, Baidu. These persons and organisms are all suspect. The notion that Big Tech wants to deliver us cool tools in a non-exploitive way has lost its luster since the more trusting days of early internet culture. A trend towards unionization increases the likelihood that these companies are acting out of anxiety to get rid of expensive and messy humans, as does the recent spate of layoffs.

For The Individual: The Passive v. Active Uses of AI

Still, there’s room for us to work and play with the tools handed down to us by the corporate monsters. (I type this on a Mac, designed by one of the world’s richest and most litigious corporations.)

Passive uses of AI might include the obvious things we are subjected to like phone-answering bots that declaim “I understand full sentences. What can I help you with?”, to the automated checkouts at supermarkets, to whatever your bank or financial institutions are doing with your money. If you’ve been reading CNET or Buzzfeed and didn’t know that some articles were written by bots, you might, in some sense, feel you’re being used by chatbots. And if you were to use ChatGPT and give it one simple instruction — maybe and ask it to write something for you about the current House of Representatives in the style of Hunter S. Thompson, that would be a passive use of ChatGPT. (The results would also be disappointing. The bot is most likely prevented from getting mean about individuals, even when they deserve it.)

Active users have multiple strategies. With most creative-oriented AIs you can, in a sense, dialogue. You can respond, ask for more, use multiple prompts. The writer and sound engineer Paul Boutin [RIP] (Wired, NY Times) presented impressive results on Facebook as the result of asking ChatGPT to write a column in the style of the acerbic and critical tech culture magazine Valleywag (now inactive). I asked him what his strategy was for getting more out of that app:

Boutin: “To get ChatGPT to write more like yourself, think about not only your prose style and vocabulary, but what mindset do you bring to your writing? I got it to do a pretty good version of an old Valleywag blog post by instructing it several times over a half dozen drafts: Don’t be even-handed, be unapologetic. Don’t say but convey that you know you’re smarter than the people you’re criticizing, even though they presume the opposite. Don’t hedge — you don’t care what they think or fear repercussions. Be funny, in a sarcastic condescending way. Don’t insult people with names, but express amusement at their foolish actions and words in the specific topic. Also to never say but always convey: Everyone thinks they can do what you do, but they couldn’t no matter how hard they try. They foolishly think they will be able to match your skills with enough prompt engineering.”

“Here’s what ChatGPT gave me on its sixth try:

AI Authors: The Future of Laziness

Bravo, AI-author enthusiasts! Why work hard on your literary masterpieces when you can let an AI remix internet content? Skip the pesky interviews and firsthand accounts—let’s keep literature artificial and unoriginal. Who needs talent, depth, or hard work when you’ve got an algorithm? Just remember, every time you sip your latté while the AI ‘writes’, you’re celebrating a new era of mediocrity. Cheers to the rise of the machine!”

Another strategy for creativity has been long used by creatives engaged in appropriation. A lot of musicians (including David Bowie and Mick Jagger) used William S. Burroughs “cut-up technique” for recombining words to launch a lyric. A fragment of Chatbot text could be deployed in the same manner, to get started, break writer’s block, write a transition, or summing up.

It could, in fact, be argued that for a truly creative piece of writing built on a skeleton of facts, the facts are the boring part. It might not be a crime against writing to grab your skeleton entirely or almost entirely from a chatbot and flesh it out with your own imagination or insight… but be sure to factcheck the AI.

In the visual arts, AI might help you rapidly generate alternative samples of a work, varying shading, color, proportions, etc. This is very likely something you already use a machine to do. AI will simply be making the work happen faster. In other words, the active user is engaged in some conscious way with creative AI and doesn’t need to be told what tools to use.

Risk and Precarity

In an economically, socially, sexually and environmentally anxious moment, the excitability of those inclined towards neophilia (love of the new) brushes up not just against neophobia, but against the very real conditions of our historical moment. Very few of us can dismiss the fears of being displaced, mislabeled, denied or messed about by people and institutions using AI.

Technoculture was built on the romance of risk and “disruption”, and, now that the chickens are coming home to roost, culture is not altogether happy to be disrupted. A column about risk and precarity in relation to the culture of technology (which now is, of course, culture itself) beckons sometime soon…

(2026: I do have two conversations about risk and precarity that I will share here at some point)

My initial impulse is to edit out or explain the bits I would no longer write or that I'm not comfortable with, or references that might have timed out, but I think letting this stand as an artifact of 1991 is the better choice. So tell me what's cringe. (R.U., 2026)

One world / one mind / one thought / We do what were told 
—Peter Gabriel 

He could sell a rat’s asshole for a wedding ring 
—American street saying 

You’ve gotta look sharp / and you’ve gotta have no illusions / just keep going 
your way looking over your shoulder 
—Joe Jackson 


Back in our second issue, commenting on the end of the cold war, I warned of a
“legalistic, megacorporate, one-world, peace on earth.” 

Right. Welcome to the New World Order. 

So here we are — decadent softcore commercial anarchists operating out of multinational 
Japan’s favorite 2-bit Banana Republic, this mercenary entertainment state with a big Hollywood Rambo ego, all glitter on the edges and profoundly stupid in the middle. How can we resist the New World Order, irresistible as it is? 

There’s always been the idealistic hope, ever since The League of Nations, that in this time of increased interpenetration and communication, nations great and small could come together to blah blah blah ad nauseum. Forget it! The New World Order is the 
thousand year Reich of the international well-behaved center, with a small sexually pent-up macho American adolescent core of police protectors and overseas mercenaries. 

To resist the New World Order, spread chaos and confusion, first amongst your selves. 
Don’t come together. Come apart. Don’t identify with the nation state, the tribe, your race, gender, bulletin board or dance club. That’s how you get suckered. Be mercilessly politically incorrect. Be commercially successful by being pleasingly offensive. Subvert through media, not because you think you can “change the system” but because successfully tickling America’s self-loathing funny bone is an amusing form of foreplay. And believe us, everybody’s gonna get fucked. 

Holocaust German-style, 1940’s: piled up dead Jews, gypsies and communists in a concentration camp. Holocaust American-style, 1990’s: Consumer goods spill out of the guts of bombed-out cars in a silent traffic jam in the Kuwaiti desert. With dead Iraqis hidden from view inside. 

Johnny’s come marching home. America is transformed in its pride. The American media completely capitulated to state censorship. That job is done. 

Have no illusions. Something has changed. You blinked your eyes and there was suddenly a juggernaut. Blink again and it’s breaking down your door. Abortion. Drugs. Freedom of speech. You could wake up tomorrow and find out that if it ain’t whitebread, it ain’t allowed. We can now see how fast it can happen. 

So the New World DisOrder — which is all you have left — starts within yourself. It starts when somebody says “we should (or shouldn’t) fight against Iraq” and you think, “What the fuck do you mean by we? I’m not gonna fight, you’re not gonna fight, and I’m not a member of any nation state. There is no we.” The New World DisOrder starts when you realize that safe sex is boring sex, cheap thrills are fun and you’re as atavistic as they are. The New World DisOrder starts when you no longer can listen to debates about whether the nice guys or the mean guys can make the trains run on time. This ain’t a reasoned debate. This is Jehovah against Dionysus. Let’s drink that tired old 
self-righteous motherfucker under the table. 

Eye of the Hoax

I lived in the eye of the hoax
Trickster news coast to coast
Every man gets his own celebrity roast
The fire this time season of the ghost

The sour incandescence of the grinding abyss
Don’t you know he was taking the piss?
Faded image of a raised fist
I lived in the mind of the mist

I lived in the eye of the hoax
Trickster news coast to coast
Everyone saying  post post post
The fire this time season of the ghost

It’s been raining cats and dogma
Come on up if you really wanna
Stanch a fallacy break a legacy
Every man gets his own foreign policy

Get thee out for free
Go and climb a tree
Get thee out for free
Go and climb a tree

Just stay in and pet the cougar
Whisper about the fame abusers
Get in losers get in the car
We’re getting Ebola or maybe SARS

I lived in the eye of the hoax
Trickster news coast to coast
Everyone saying  post post post
The fire this time season of the ghost

History’s a nightmare
They’re trying to erase
They’re trying to replace
Every place is no place

Get thee out for free
Go and climb a tree
Get thee out for free
Go and climb a tree

Since I first made fun of AI panic back in my second column, I’ve been growing increasingly disturbed. The striking writers of the entertainment industry are demanding to “Regulate use of material produced using artificial intelligence or similar technologies”. These writers are the first line of resistance against cultural productions being turned into facsimiles of creative work. This has become a point of emphasis among the signs being carried on the picket lines, an indication of its populist appeal. It’s likely that the strike will actually make entertainment bigwigs more attracted to the possibility of ditching the humans for compliant chatbots with no demands and few needs. The fight against AI taking over TV writing is one that should be taken up ‘by viewers like you’ (as PBS likes to say). If you like complex TV shows and films with brilliant dialogue, it’s in your interests to keep the humans and not let the products of their minds be replaced by an AI-created facsimile.

In The Art World Facsimiles Have Become A Field Of Play in Which Toying with Financial Valuation Serves as a Sort Of Content

In the art world, the distinction between the real thing and a copy of the real thing has been obscured for many years, with a wide variety of consequences. In visual arts, copying became a field of play. The philosopher Walter Benjamin set the terms of the discourse in 1935 with his essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’. Benjamin was dealing with physical objects, and he theorized that an original artwork carried an ‘aura’ that gave it a high capital valuation. In the age of increased reproducibility, Benjamin conjectured that the value or the original would diminish. This hasn’t happened, as originals both old and new fetch huge prices. At least since the Pop Art movement of the 1960s, the art world has toyed with this trope — this predicted tug-of-war between the original and the facsimile, by just saying yes; delivering both originals and multiples. Warhol started mass distributing postcards of his most widely-recognized works in the early 1960s, while the original maintained its ‘aura’ and could be sold to collectors (although it took the pale man’s actual demise for the aura to glow enough to attract really spectacular sums.)

An odd twist comes into play in the land of NFTs. The work is infinitely replicable and can be distributed in moments to billions of internet users, and the NFT-collector may or may not be purchasing exclusive access. What the collector seems to be after is not the aura of the artwork, but the aura of ownership in and of itself – or of a particular relationship to the work.

The Mass Distribution of the Facsimile of Recorded Music

In the world of recorded music, Neil Young stood out as the loudest early curmudgeon complaining that digitally-created CDs and later music files offer a pallid facsimile of what a recording artist intends. (Of course, it could be argued that recorded music itself is a facsimile of the way music was experienced for millennia prior to its invention, but I’m not going to try to unpack that here. In 1931, The American Federation of Musicians denounced recorded music as, basically, a facsimile of live music that would debase the art.) Over the years, Young’s complaint has become a generally accepted wisdom. We trade quality for the facsimile that is easily distributed and conveniently available.

When it comes to digital music My friend ChatGPT agrees: “Digital audio compression works by removing parts of the audio signal that are perceived as less important or less noticeable, in order to reduce the file size and make it more convenient for storage and distribution. However, this process can also result in the loss of subtle nuances and details that contribute to the overall richness and depth of the sound.

“Studies have shown that digital audio compression can result in a loss of dynamic range, which is the difference between the loudest and softest parts of a recording. This can make the music sound less dynamic and less engaging, particularly in genres such as classical music that rely on subtle changes in volume and tone.”

Will the ironies never cease?

Is All Cultural Production A Facsimile of Life?

[note 2026: I was writing this for an audience that may not have been familiar with Situationism, so this might be a bit obvious to you hipsters.]

Taking a sharply anarchic left turn in this exploration, we might take up the view of the European radicals of the 1960s, the Situationists, who viewed all cultural production as contributing to the ‘society of the spectacle’. In his book, ‘Society of the Spectacle’, Guy Debord wrote, “The spectacle is a social relation between people that is mediated by an accumulation of images that serve to alienate us from a genuinely lived life. The image is thus an historical mutation of the form of commodity fetishism.” In other words, all art (from the word artifice or artificial) alienates us from direct experience. Among the practices used by the Situationists, the one most familiar to us today would probably be actions that contemporary people would call pranking. These were actions designed to break the trances of citizens going through their normal routines. The Situationists called this tactic ‘construction’, and it involved created situations that would disrupt the status quo and encourage spontaneous excitement, joy or, for that matter, anxiety.

Situationism pretty much abandons mediation completely for intensely lived daily lives, what Situationist Raoul Vaneigem called ‘the revolution of everyday life’.

An eruption of this sort of consciousness would pretty much put the striking writers out to pasture. But this is not our world today.

Remember When Youtube Was Going To Wipe Out Professional Television Production?

Aside from AI creativity — or possibly in combination with it — another specter looming up to challenge TV writers is the democratization of video production. This was, first of all, the dream of avant-gardists like Nam June Paik: that everyone could be a video artist. It was believed that it would become a medium of creative self-expression and break up the confining linearity of storytelling. And, back in the earlier years of this century, Wired magazine related pundits like Kevin Kelly and Chris Anderson predicted that the “long tail” of small scale content creators (video in particular) would create niche audiences that would seriously impact and begin to replace the big movie and television productions. This doesn’t appear to have happened, although it could be that TikTok is grabbing them while they’re young and a generation will emerge that prefer 30-second clips of someone having their cat speak in a funny voice to the complex plots and dialogues of shows like ‘Succession’ or ‘Atlanta’.

Maybe Our Lives Are A Facsimile

Finally we come to Simulation Theory, that favorite 21st century cosmology that our very lives themselves may be, in a sense, a facsimile, a mediated creation… a computer simulation. In this case, we may as well carry on by emphasizing that which gives us pleasure – at least until we find a way to bust out of The Matrix without switching off our facsimile universe. Like Pinochio and Zuckerberg, we all long to be real boys (or others).

What Is To Be Done?

I’ve seen mixed results from attempts to get Chatbots to achieve authentic creative madness. So I think we should place our bets on a proven winner. That would be the screenwriters who have managed to send some wonders to our screens in this century, from the aforementioned ‘Succession’ and ‘Atlanta’ to ‘Fleabag’, ‘Black Mirror’, ‘Mad Men’, ‘Fargo’… the list of well-written shows goes on.

I mean, assuming there won’t be a revolution in everyday life in which we achieve some kind of unmediated intensely experienced existence, I suggest we try to keep these writer-freaks employed, well-paid and supplying us with cool content. (Why do I imagine that a Situationist revolution of unmediated intensely experienced existence could end up being as exhausting as having to work all the time? It’s a bit like being asked to constantly engage in leisure activity as a participant when sometimes you just want to kick back and watch a good TV show. Sometimes we choose slack over engagement.) Speaking of which, after completing the first draft of this piece, it was announced that Facebook’s ‘Metaverse’ had failed and was being shut down. It’s unclear whether the failed attempt to bring VR to Facebooks’ 3 billion users represents a rejection of VR as a participatory medium that some, as far back as the early 1990s, thought would replace TV, or if the technology is still too raw for people to want to climb in, or whether Facebook’s particular attempt was somehow flawed.

In any case, we should support our striking writers lest the profiteers of television decide that they could fill the air with cheap reality programming, some of it possibly featuring dumb AIs and even dumber humans engaged in banal contests, and that they don’t need any pesky humans, even if the award-winning smart shows disappear. After all, reality TV gets a big viewership and is extremely profitable. I fear this may be the ultimate result of the great battle of the Hollywood writers against the entertainment machines.

This piece was originally published on Mindplex. I’ve altered it a bit.

In an excellent conversation on Mindplex, Cory Doctorow went on a bit of a rant about how there were more changes over the 20th century leading up to the so-called digital revolution than in this hyped-up virtualized period that started in the 1980s and continues today.

It’s worth sharing most of it:

Doctorow: Mid century America, from post-war to 1980, is probably the most dynamic era in industrial history. In terms of total ground covered, we’re talking about a period that went from literal horse drawn carriages as a standard mode of transportation for a significant fraction of Americans to rocket ships… the number of changes you had to absorb from cradle to grave over that period are far more significant than the ones we’ve had now… someone born, like me, in 1971, has had to deal with computers getting faster and more ubiquitous, but not the invention of computers per se…. not the invention of telecommunications per se…

Accelerationists, check under the pedal. It may be bricked. (ed: R.U. Sirius uses the term accelerationist to mean those wishing to intensify technological change and not specifically to indicate the reactionary use of the term.)

Accelerating Into Digital Delirium

The point is well taken.

I would only counter that, in a sense, Cory is comparing oranges to apples (or Apples, if you prefer). The 21st century is seeing a particular type of extreme acceleration: an acceleration out of physicality into nonphysical virtual space. And as the result of a number of factors, not least of which are already distorted economic and political cultures — this appears to be an acceleration towards something of a mass psychotic break with reality. From people shooting a lot of people at once as a lifestyle choice (over the last few days, shooting anyone that unexpectedly enters your personal space has become trendy), to the predations of the followers of the cult of QAnon, the evidence is all around us, particularly in the hypermediated hot zone that is the USA.

On Twitter, Chris Stein reports on an example of this confusion: “Today I saw a guy with two hundred and eighty thousand followers promoting a story about McDonald’s in the UK serving dead babies and there were numerous comments that were like ‘yeah! Criminal! We are outraged! This is bad’” A few days ago Vice reported that “someone is selling computer generated swatting services.” Automated terror as an amusement for some young males. The very fact that swatting seems like a fun game to some young people is one of the myriad examples of the degree to which people today are buffered from physicality by mediation… divorced from the consequences of their actions. Taken alone, these examples may not strike the reader as being as impactful as, say, the twentieth century killing fields of Cambodia. But I would aver that the plague of bad weird actions caused by digital interference in our ability to separate reality from virtuality are the first signs of a fast spreading mass delirium.

In a 1991 MONDO 2000 interview, the late avant-garde novelist Kathy Acker said: “When reality—the meanings associated with reality—is up for grabs, then the body itself becomes the only thing you can return to.” Today, virtuality assaults that body turning it into an appendage to be activated by the introduction of (mostly) toxic memes.

A Kind Of Social Singularity

Vernor Vinge’s original concept of the Singularity (note: I am not a believer in the technological singularity) suggested that we can’t understand or predict who (or what) we will be, or what life — our societies, psychologies, politics, technologies etc. — will be beyond the point when we develop smarter-than-human AIs. It would, according to Vinge, all be a kind of unimaginable blank slate. My less extravagant thought is that we have induced a kind of Social Singularity when we herded billions of humans onto the net.

Get Your Money Worth Nothing & Your Clicks For Free

In his essay ‘Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit’, the anarchist writer and philosopher David Graeber wrote about how the end of bipolar competition between the US and the USSR might have been instrumental in changing the priorities of the US. Specifically, we backed off the Space Race – but we abandoned most other big physical/material projects as well. (The critical theorist Arthur Kroker referred to the period after the fall of the Soviet Bloc as “the recline of Western Civilization”). Graeber wrote “Where… are the flying cars? Where are the force fields, tractor beams, teleportation pods, antigravity sleds, tricorders, immortality drugs, colonies on Mars, and all the other technological wonders any child growing up in the mid-to-late twentieth century assumed would exist by now? Even those inventions that seemed ready to emerge—like cloning or cryogenics.” Graeber goes on to note that we’re in “a technological environment in which the only breakthroughs were those that made it easier to create, transfer, and rearrange virtual projections of things that either already existed, or, we came to realize, never would.”

Graeber points out that social analysts identified the Space Race as key to the 20th century public’s exaggerated expectations of transformative technological magic. But Graeber goes further than that. He writes that the Soviet Union constituted a greater challenge to American technological superiority than is usually recognized.

Graeber: “There was the awesome space race, alongside frenetic efforts by U.S. industrial planners to apply existing technologies to consumer purposes, to create an optimistic sense of burgeoning prosperity and guaranteed progress that would undercut the appeal of working-class politics.

“These moves were reactions to initiatives from the Soviet Union. But this part of the history is difficult for Americans to remember, because at the end of the Cold War, the popular image of the Soviet Union switched from terrifyingly bold rival to pathetic basket case—the exemplar of a society that could not work. Back in the fifties, in fact, many United States planners suspected the Soviet system worked better. Certainly, they recalled the fact that in the thirties, while the United States had been mired in depression, the Soviet Union had maintained almost unprecedented economic growth rates of 10 percent to 12 percent a year.”

Graeber’s piece does not claim the end of the Cold War was the sole reason (or even the most important reason) for the retreat from making stuff — real material stuff that might have transformed our lives. It’s just an element of the essay that has stuck in my mind ever since I read it about a decade ago.

Still, it seems that the fall of the Soviet Bloc and, with it, the final closure of any sense that there was a competition for bragging rights, was perfectly timed for a lot of capital to abandon the physical and relocate in cyberspace, resulting in what has been — in terms of real material productivity — largely a massive circlejerk. IDC FutureScape and Business Wire recently reported that by 2022, “more than half the global economy will be based on or influenced by digital.”

That “giant sucking sound” Ross Perot thought was going to come from Mexico and Canada is the sound of all the investment of time, energy, imagination and creativity being sucked into virtuality. When we think of the massive amounts of capital that have flowed in and out of the monsters of online life like Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, etcetera, we understand that it has produced sound and fury signifying nothing, certainly not many improvements that justify this mass shift in priorities.

Today, the long stagnant “space race” and other presumed world-altering big tech plans are the plaything of billionaires, something they can do with their excess. For some undeterred utopians, these projects justify concentration of capital in a few hands — a concentration that only a people that have been been fed decades of free market propaganda could palate. These projects assuage the egos of the very few while alienating most people from any techno-progressive dreams. The excitement about technology that was so ubiquitous in the 1990s, and even at the start of this century, has turned almost entirely bitter.

Post-Scarcity Again Then?

Perhaps the only response to such disgust is to go with the new batch of left wing technotopians advocating for Fully Automatic Luxury Communism and the like. In an early draft of the book about Mondo 2000 (2027 Strange Attractor Press) I characterized myself as surprised and bemused by these recurring hopes that we might yet find machines of loving grace by deploying a spirit of mutualism, but what the hell. Maybe it’s time for just such a Hail Mary pass.

written for https://magazine.mindplex.ai/ Check it out

The Twilight's Last Gloating

The kids are not alright 
The pigs are high and mighty 
The fig leaf in the garden
That tricky lady gets her pardon 
And the rockets red glibness
The bums bursting with sickness
In the twilights last gloating 
In Venezuela waters floating
And it’s on to the green lands
And the Bombs in the desert sands
80 proof thru the night
That our manhood still has bite

The newsman’s Wolf Blitzer
The last suppers at Sizzler 
Jesus and the Jets
Crypto casino taking bets
Nothing left but the debts 
Bot tabulates drone collects
And the devolution was televised
As we ride into our final sunrise

Additionally, my current piece for Mindplex touches on issues tangentially related to what I covered here for The Verge in 2013

The Verge felt the need to explain me to their readers and started the thing with this

In 1989, when the internet was predominantly ASCII-based and HyperCard had yet to give birth (or at least act as a midwife) to the world wide web, R.U. Sirius launched Mondo 2000. “I’d say it was arguably the representative underground magazine of its pre-web day,” William Gibson said in a recent interview. “Posterity, looking at this, should also consider Mondo 2000 as a focus of something that was happening.”

Twenty years ago, it was cypherpunk that was happening.

And it’s happening again today.

EARLY CYPHERPUNK IN FACT AND FICTION
CYPHERPUNK WAS BOTH AN EXCITING NEW VISION FOR SOCIAL CHANGE AND A FUN SUBCULTURE DEDICATED TO MAKING IT HAPPEN

Flashback: Berkeley, California 1992. I pick up the ringing phone. My writing partner, St. Jude Milhon, is shouting down the line: “I’ve got it! Cypherpunk!”

Jude was an excitable girl and she was particularly excitable when there was a new boyfriend involved. She’d been raving about Eric Hughes for days. I paid no attention.

At the time, Jude and I were contracted to write a novel titled How to Mutate and Take Over the World. I wanted the fiction to contain the truth. I wanted to tell people how creative hackers could do it — mutate and take over the world — by the end of the decade. Not knowing many of those details ourselves, we threw down a challenge on various hacker boards and in the places where extropians gathered to share their superhuman fantasies. “Take on a character,” we said, “and let that character mutate and/or take over.” The results were vague and unsatisfying. These early transhumanists didn’t actually know how to mutate, and the hackers couldn’t actually take over the world. It seemed that we were asking for too much too soon.

And so I wound up there, holding the phone away from my ear as Jude shouted out the solution, at least to the “taking over” part of our problem. Strong encryption, she explained, will sever all the ties binding us to hostile states and other institutions. Encryption will level the playing field, protecting even the least of us from government interference. It will liberate pretty much everything, toute de suite. The cypherpunks would make this happen.

For Jude, cypherpunk was both an exciting new vision for social change and a fun subculture dedicated to making it happen. Sure, I was skeptical. But I was also desperate for something to hang the plot of our book on. A few days later I found myself at the feet of Eric Hughes — who, along with John Gilmore and Tim May, is considered one of the founders of the cypherpunk movement — getting the total download.

This was my first exposure to “The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto.” Written by Tim May, it opens by mimicking The Communist Manifesto: “A specter is haunting the modern world, the specter of crypto anarchy.” In a fit of hyperbole that perfectly foreshadowed the mood of tech culture in the 1990s — from my own Mondo 2000 to the “long boom” of digital capitalism — May declared that encrypted communication and anonymity online would “alter completely the nature of government regulation, the ability to tax and control economic interactions, the ability to keep information secret.” The result would be nothing less than “both a social and economic revolution.”

Just as a seemingly minor invention like barbed wire made possible the fencing-off of vast ranches and farms, thus altering forever the concepts of land and property rights in the frontier West, so too will the seemingly minor discovery out of an arcane branch of mathematics come to be the wire clippers which dismantle the barbed wire around intellectual property.

Those words were written way back in 1988. By 1993, a bunch of crypto freaks were gathering fairly regularly in the San Francisco Bay Area. In his lengthy Wired cover story, Steven Levy would describe them as mostly “having beards and long hair — like Smith Brothers [cough drops] gone digital.” Their antics would become legendary.

John Gilmore set off a firestorm by sharing classified documents on cryptography that a friend of his had found in public libraries (they had previously been declassified). The NSA threatened Gilmore with a charge of violating the Espionage Act, but after he responded with publicity and his own legal threats, the NSA — probably recognizing in Gilmore a well-connected dissident who they couldn’t intimidate — backed down and once again declassified the documents.

Phil Zimmermann’s PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) software was being circulated largely thanks to cypherpunk enthusiasts. According to Tim May’s Cyphernomicon, PGP was “the most important crypto tool” available at the time, “having single-handedly spread public key methods around the world.” It was available free of charge for non-commercial users, and complete source code was included with all copies. Most importantly, May wrote, “almost no understanding of how PGP works in detail is needed,” so anyone could use its encryption to securely send data over the net.

In April 1993, the Clinton administration announced its encryption policy initiative. The Clipper Chip was an NSA-developed encryption chipset for “secure” voice communication (the government would have a key for every chip manufactured). “Not to worry,” Phil Zimmermann cuttingly wrote in an essay about PGP. “The government promises that they will use these keys to read your traffic only ‘when duly authorized by law.” Not that anyone believed the promises. “To make Clipper completely effective,” Zimmermann continued, “the next logical step would be to outlaw other forms of cryptography.” This threat brought cypherpunks to the oppositional front lines in one of the early struggles over Internet rights, eventually defeating government plans.

John Gilmore summed up the accomplishments of the cypherpunks in a recent email: “We did reshape the world,” he wrote. “We broke encryption loose from government control in the commercial and free software world, in a big way. We built solid encryption and both circumvented and changed the corrupt US legal regime so that strong encryption could be developed by anyone worldwide and deployed by anyone worldwide,” including WikiLeaks.

As the 1990s rolled forward, many cypherpunks went to work for the man, bringing strong crypto to financial services and banks (on the whole, probably better than the alternative). Still, crypto-activism continued and the cypherpunk mailing list blossomed as an exchange for both practical encryption data and spirited, sometimes-gleeful argumentation, before finally peaking in 1997. This was when cypherpunk’s mindshare seemed to recede, possibly in proportion to the utopian effervescence of the early cyberculture. But the cypherpunk meme may now be finding a sort of rebirth in one of the biggest and most important stories in the fledgeling 21st century.

would you buy a used movement from this man?

I AM ANNOYED

THIS IS BEGINNING TO SOUND VERY MUCH LIKE A DYSTOPIAN FANTASY

Flashback: 1995. Julian Assange’s first words on the cypherpunk email list: “I am annoyed.”

Of course, Julian Assange has gone on to annoy powerful players all over the world as the legendary fugitive editor-in-chief and spokesperson for WikiLeaks, publisher of secret information, news leaks, and classified media from anonymous sources. And while the mass media world has tracked nearly every aspect of Assange’s personal drama, it’s done very little to increase people’s understanding of WikiLeaks’ underlying technologies or the principles those technologies embody.

In the recent book Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet, Assange enlists the help of three fellow heroes of free information to set the record straight, aligning those principles with the ideas that Tim May dreamed up in 1989 with “The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto.”

The book is based on a series of conversations filmed for the television show The World Tomorrow while Assange was on house arrest in Norfolk, England during all of 2011. Attending were Jacob Appelbaum, the American advocate and researcher for the Tor project who has been in the sights of US authorities since substituting as a speaker for Assange at a US hackers conference; Andy Müller-Maguhn, one of the earliest members of the legendary Chaos Computer Club; and Jérémie Zimmerman, a French advocate for internet anonymity and freedom.

The conversation is sobering. If 1990s cypherpunk, like the broader tech culture that it was immersed in, was a little bit giddy with its potential to change the world, contemporary cypherpunk finds itself on the verge of what Assange calls “a postmodern surveillance dystopia, from which escape for all but the most skilled individuals will be impossible.”

How did we get here? The obvious political answer is 9/11. The event provided an opportunity for a vast expansion of national security states both here and abroad, including, of course, a diminution of protections against surveillance. The legalities involved in the US are a confusing and ever-shifting set of rules that are under constant legal contestation in the courts. Whatever the letter of the law, a September 2012 ACLU bulletin gave us the essence of the situation:

Justice Department documents released today by the ACLU reveal that federal law enforcement agencies are increasingly monitoring Americans’ electronic communications, and doing so without warrants, sufficient oversight, or meaningful accountability.

The documents, handed over by the government only after months of litigation, are the attorney general’s 2010 and 2011 reports on the use of “pen register” and “trap and trace” surveillance powers. The reports show a dramatic increase in the use of these surveillance tools, which are used to gather information about telephone, email, and other Internet communications. The revelations underscore the importance of regulating and overseeing the government’s surveillance power.

“In fact,” the report continues, “more people were subjected to pen register and trap and trace surveillance in the past two years than in the entire previous decade.”

Beyond the political and legal powers vested in the US intelligence community and in others around the world, there is the very real fact that technology once only accessible to the world’s superpowers is now commercially available. One example documented on WikiLeaks (and discussed in Cypherpunks) is the Zebra strategic surveillance system sold by VASTech. For $10 million, the South African company will sell you a turnkey system that can intercept all communications in a middle-sized country. A similar system called Eagle was used in Gadhafi’s Libya, as first reported by The Wall Street Journal in 2011. Sold by the French company Amesys, this is a commercial product, right down to the label on the box: “Nationwide Intercept System.” In the face of systems designed to scoop up all electronic communication and store it indefinitely, any showcase civil libertarian exceptions written into the surveillance laws are meaningless. But the threat isn’t limited to the surveillance state. There are more than a few self-interested financial players with $10 million lying around, many of whom would love to track all the private data in a several thousand mile radius.

All of this is beginning to sound very much like a dystopian fantasy from cyberpunk science fiction.

TOTAL SURVEILLANCE

If, in 1995, some cypherpunks had published a book about the upcoming “postmodern surveillance dystopia,” most commentators would have shrugged it off as just a wee bit paranoid and ushered them into the Philip K. Dick Reading Room. Now, it is more likely that people will shrug and say, “that ship has already sailed.”

And then there’s David Brin. The author of The Transparent Society is well known for his skepticism regarding the likelihood of maintaining at least some types of privacy as well as his relative cheerfulness in the face of universal transparency, although to say that he is unconcerned about individual privacy would be a mistake. In an email, I asked him about the cypherpunk ethic, as expressed by Julian Assange: “privacy for the weak and transparency for the powerful.”

Brin’s response was scathing. The ethic, he says, is “already enshrined in law. A meek normal person can sue for invasion of privacy, a prominent person may not.” He’s just getting started:

But at a deeper level it is simply stupid. Any loophole in transparency ‘to protect the meek’ can far better be exploited by the mighty than by the meek. Their shills, lawyers and factotums will (1) ensure that ‘privacy protections’ have big options for the mighty and (2) that those options will be maximally exploited. Moreover (3) as I show in The Transparent Society, encryption-based ‘privacy’ is the weakest version of all. The meek can never verify that their bought algorithm and service is working as promised, or isn’t a bought-out front for the NSA or a criminal gang.

Above all, protecting the weak or meek with shadows and cutouts and privacy laws is like setting up Potemkin villages, designed to create surface illusions. Anyone who believes they can blind society’s elites — of government, commerce, wealth, criminality and tech-geekery — is a fool…

In other words, cypherpunk may be doing a disservice by spreading the illusion of freedom from surveillance.

I posed a similar question to Adrian Lamo, who reported Bradley Manning to federal authorities. Not surprisingly, Lamo is even more cynical.

“Privacy is quite dead,” he responded to me in an email. “That people still worship at its corpse doesn’t change that. In [the unreleased documentary] Hackers Wanted I gave out my SSN, and I’ve never had cause to regret that. Anyone could get it trivially. The biggest threat to our privacy is our own limited understanding of how little privacy we truly have.”

In Cypherpunks, Assange raises an essential point that at least partly refutes this skepticism: “The universe believes in encryption. It is easier to encrypt information than it is to decrypt it.” And while Appelbaum admits that even strong encryption can’t last forever, saying, “We’re probably not using one hundred year (safe) crypto,” he implies that pretty good privacy that lasts a pretty long time is far better than no privacy at all.

Assuming that some degree of privacy is still possible, most people don’t seem to think it’s worth the effort. The cypherpunks and their ilk fought to keep things like the PGP encryption program legal — and we don’t use them. We know Facebook and Google leak our personal online habits like a sieve and we don’t make much effort to cover our tracks. Perhaps some of us buy the good citizen cliché that if you’re not doing anything wrong, you don’t have anything to worry about, but most of us are just opting for convenience. We’ve got enough to deal with day to day without engaging in a privacy regimen. Occasionally, some slacker may lose his job because he posted a photo of himself cradling his bong or the like, but as with civil liberties more generally, as long as the daily outrages against individuals don’t reach epic proportions, we rubberneck in horror and then return to our daily activities.

Beneath this complacent surface lies a disquieting and mostly unexamined question. To what degree is the ubiquity of state surveillance a form of intimidation, a way to keep people away from social movements or from directly communicating their views?

Do you hesitate before liking WikiLeaks on Facebook?

“PRIVACY IS QUITE DEAD. THAT PEOPLE STILL WORSHIP AT ITS CORPSE DOESN’T CHANGE THAT.”

Throughout its entire history, the FBI has used secret intelligence operations to spy on, disrupt, and otherwise target activists and groups it considered subversive (mostly on the political left). The most notorious incidents occurred between 1956 and 1971, under the umbrella of COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program). When the FBI’s activities were revealed first in 1971 and later, more fully by the 1976 Church Committee, no politically astute person shrugged it off. It was understood without question that mega surveillance of political activists was an act of suppression period,full stop.

Part of the shock of the COINTELPRO revelations was the FBI’s engagement in illegal activities to destroy political organizations. The government’s violation of its own surveillance laws even trumped the desire to punish the “symbolic bombings” of the Weather Underground. Since the FBI used illegal breaking and entering surveillance in an attempt to destroy the radical group, the leaders received light sentences when they emerged from underground. The same FBI techniques, once illegal, are undoubtedly so legal now under anti-terrorism laws that US Attorney General Holder could conduct the searches personally, dressed like Elvis and surrounded by the Real Housewives of Orange County in front of the cameras on a popular reality show.

What a difference a ph makes: Eric Hughes, OC Original Cypherpunk on cover of the Cyberpunk Handbook (alongside Tiffany Lee Brown)

“THE UNIVERSE BELIEVES IN ENCRYPTION. IT IS EASIER TO ENCRYPT INFORMATION THAN IT IS TO DECRYPT IT.”

We have, perhaps, already let the surveillance culture slide too long.

It’s not as though the spirit of COINTELPRO has left us. Jacob Appelbaum, who has never been accused of any crime, has been subjected to relentless harassment, starting in the summer of 2010, when he was held up at Newark Airport where he was frisked, his laptop was inspected, and his three mobile phones were taken. He was then passed along to US Army officials for four hours of questioning. One army interrogator told him, menacingly, “You don’t look like you’re going to do so well in prison.” Several contacts found on the confiscated cell phones were then also given a hard time at airports and border crossings. In December of that year he was — along with other WikiLeaks activists — one of the subjects of a court order that compelled Twitter to let the feds snoop inside his account. (He only knows this because Twitter won a petition to be able to inform the subjects.) He has since been continually harassed by airport security and has been detained at the US border twelve times.

That this harassment is happening to someone who hasn’t been charged with a crime is particularly frightening.

“The Galgenhumor of our era,” Appelbaum told me in an email, “revolves around things that most people simply thought impossible in our lifetime.” He lists a number of chilling examples, including indefinite detention under the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012, warrantless wiretaps, drone strikes, state-sponsored malware, and the Patriot Act.

“It isn’t a great time to be a dissenting voice of any kind in our American empire,” he continues. But it isn’t the myriad of ways that civil liberties have been gutted that we’ll look back upon. “What we will remember is the absolute silence of so many, when the above things became normalized.”

St. Jude Was A Cypherpunk by R.U. Sirius & Phriends video by SatoriD (just because I can)

first published at The Verge – 2013

image by Chad Essley

I think this one will be multipart

Simcerity: I’m Against NFTs (It doesn’t matter much to me)

1: WE ARE DUCHAMPIAN OF THE WORLD

When Marcel Duchamp — possibly at the suggestion of Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven — dropped that urinal on an art gallery back in 1917, he signaled the world of art, contemporaryness, galleries and capital that their was a new jest in town.

image by Jay Cornell

Value was to be an abject/object poke in the eye of the beholder. Bourgeois 20th Century was readymade for its closeup pisstake. Warhol branded it in the context of mediation — firing not the first but the most influential implication of infinite gesture into the rapidly virtualizing human condition. Now, in 2023, someone has finally popped Jeff Koons balloon. Are we free yet?

2: Simcerely — MONDO VANILLI’s Authentic Inauthentic

CNN: “Vanderbilt University apologizes for using ChatGPT to write mass-shooting email.”

Simcerity has always been at least somewhat reflexive in the public arena. The medicine showmen who mounted the stage. The corporate publicists who still do… the countercultural media pranking yippies, and all the purchasable cultural products from recordings to cinematic experience — all have worked and hustled (and continue to) this tricksy interzone between direct lived experience and virtuality — an otherish imaginal space of work play and mutual infections.

In 1990, the fake band Milli Vanilli was busted in the media for lip-syncing music that was recorded and sung by by professional studio musicians. A preposterously bland piece of pap, one of the brands’ recording was rewarded with a Grammy by the wise persons of the music industry.

I read about the great lip-syncing crisis while editing a piece for MONDO 2000 about mediated virtualized life, I decided to form the band MONDO Vanilli. It was to be a VR band. We embraced authentic inauthenticity — taking the pretense out of pretense. If we would make music (and we weren’t sure whether actually engaging in activity other than gestural branding was a violation of our spirit), we would lip-sync without apologies. We would franchise MONDO Vanilli, allowing only performance artists and ultra-banal copy bands to use the moniker. Eventually we actually used $90,000 of Trent Reznor’s Nothing Records’ money to record an actual album. Nothing was released. Credit Reznor with being true to his brand.

Some years later… in 2022, two of the three MONDO Vanilli members reunited across 1000 California miles — and with help from punk rock madman Blag Dahlia — we recorded the song “I’m Against NFTs.”

It has since been turned into a virtual space by PlayLa.bz

We planned, of course, to offer our anti-NFT song as an NFT. (This never underwent the formality of occurring. ha ha stole a phrase from Wittgenstein)

3: REPLICABILITY, VALUATION & THE DIGITIZED VAGUENESS

In 1991, in MONDO 2000 magazine, Timothy Leary wrote a piece about the David Byrne produced book Reproduced Authentic. In his review (advocacy really) Leary celebrated the hoped-for death of the value of the “rarity” in favor of the (early) internet fueled aesthetic of replicability and direct person-to-person or group-to-group transmission of art without the intercession of stuffed shirt art establishment gallery owners or, presumably, capital.

Mostly borrowing from Walter Benjamin, Leary wrote “Transmissibility replaces rarity. According to German philosopher, Walter Benjamin, ‘The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning ranging from its substantive duration… to the history which it has experienced. ‘Rarity’ now is a… mask of art’s potential for meaning and no longer constitutes the criterion of authenticity. Art’s meaning then becomes socially (and politically) formed by the living.’

Leary continues, “…recreating the Mona Lisa. The 12 year-old inner city kid can slide the Mona Lisa onto her Mac screen, color the eyes green, modem it to her pal in Paris who adds purple lipstick and runs it through a laser copier which is then faxed to Joseph Kusuth for the next GALERIE VIA EIGHT show in Tokyo.” (Or as Bill Burroughs wrote, “LOOT THE LOUVRE!”)

Ahh, but the demands of capital remained static even as the signifiers started getting confused. Rent seekers still wanted some of that good ol’ fashion “fiat” currency.

And so we accelerate into a darker cavern built by Mondo’s anarcho-capitalist pals (we were friendly sorts, perhaps too friendly) the cypherpunks. And with help from a cryptographically, quasi-democratized means of exchange, we sink at last into the unalloyed chaos of mass digitization as it merges with gold-rush obsessions with inauthentic/authentic/inauthentic cryptocurrencies. Spendable (or sometimes not) digits with Joker names and Riddler brandings like Shitcoin or Cumrocket pretending to have all the veracity of Bank of America or Well Fargo (i.e. not much) appeared and continue to. Some have the intent of running scams. Others are intent on keeping your stash (sort-of) hidden from the man. And the folks we love best are intent on giving opportunities to starving artists and excitable nerds.

I have decided that there’s no conclusion to this Substack entry. Inconclusive seems like appropriate punctuation.

Get your money worth nothing and your clicks for free

2026

I wrote my objections to Kevin Kelly’s pro-surveillance piece a dozen years ago. It felt as if the panopticon was already completed, but its depth and intimacy has been vastly accelerated, right alongside the increasingly barefaced ill will of the prevailing government in the US and elsewhere, multiplied and in tandem with omnicidal trends among the tech bro feudal lords. IBMs history repeats in Palantir, only this time with full intention and enthusiastic engagement.

2014

So original Wired editor Kevin Kelly checks in this week with a Wired article provocatively titled, Why We Should Embrace Survellance, Not Fight It

The thesis, developed with Kelly’s typical assumption of technological inevitability (he wrote the book What Does Technology Want?), is that total mass tracking is coming anyway, so we should make the choice for “a mutual, transparent kind of ‘coveillance’ that involves watching the watchers.”

It may or may not be true that total surveillance is inevitable. We rather have it now and I’m among those who push back against it. As future speculation, Kelly’s piece is just about tolerable, but as contemporary politics it’s horrendous. And it is framed (and it must be framed) in the context of current conditions.

What too many people fail to understand is that the surveillance carried out by the super state (NSA, CIA, Big Capital, etcetera) doesn’t just create unequal transparency. One of its main functions is as a fortress against transparency. With rare exception, the only way we find out anything about the inner workings of our government or some other powerful institution, whether private or public, that they don’t want us to know, is via whistleblowers and, in many cases, their contacts with the media. And total surveillance is a clear, present and effective form of intimidation as discussed in this report from the Committee to Protect Journalists.

The underlying mistake in Kelly’s analysis is when he says that we should “think in terms of coveillance” and make a “choice” against the panopticon (and for that coveillance). We can think anything we like, but power will choose. You’re never going to be able to hone in on data about where Lloyd Blankenfein or John Arnold shopped yesterday; what they’re reading, where they went with their cell phones ad infinitum. You are transparent to them. They are not going to be transparent to you. Ever. And if you have a strategy to make them more transparent, they’re gonna know about it. You’re transparent so they don’t have to be.

CTHEORY: Notions like the end of work and scarcity are very obscure right now. Why do you think they’re relevant?

RU: All you have to do is look at the situation to realize that it’s the only relevant political position for anybody who isn’t rich. As the result of automation and internationalization, the economic power of ordinary people, which used to reside in the “working class,” has completely disappeared - which, incidentally, is why a lot of people have little reason to be thrilled by the relative democratization of media communications that Wired and Mondo have touted. Also, the virtual economy has overwhelmed the “real” economy of goods and services... at the cutting edge of capitalism, you’re in a pure “transacting” economy of derivatives, currency exchanges, options and so forth that has displaced economics. Networked electronic trading is very much its own unique ecology. “Money” is being made not in the investing itself but on the abstraction of the transacting of conceptual wealth. Tremendous profits can be conjured from the consensual hallucination that a transaction that doesn’t necessarily have to happen might accumulate (for example) interest at a later date.

The important thing here is that not only doesn’t capitalism require as many workers, it doesn’t require as many consumers. An economy that trades in pure abstraction is self-sufficient. It can satisfy itself building hallucinatory fortunes that can be cashed in for ownership of property and advanced techno-toys for your wired elite. It’s all just bits and bytes really. It’s a trick. But it conflates nicely with the logic of late capitalism which is to eliminate that which is superfluous, in other words the formerly working class people who are no longer needed as workers or consumers. That’s what downsizing is about... killing the poor. This is not even a slight exaggeration. This is exactly the trajectory of late capitalism, and specifically of the Republican revolution.

Anyway, grant me that we’re in a situation where workers are increasingly superfluous. I don’t have the figures on hand, but some extraordinary percentage of those people who are employed work for temp agencies. Hazel Henderson told me that 60% of the American people are either unemployable, unemployed, working temp, or working without benefits or job security. A week after she said that, I saw Labor Secretary Robert Reich on television saying more or less the same thing, but the figure was 70%. But a recent poll shows that something like 95% identify themselves as middle class. Hah! They’re not middle class.

What you actually have, in vaguely Marxist terminology, is an enormous lumpenproletariat. In other words, non-working or barely-working poor. I mean, this is the most oppressed country in the Western world according to all kinds of statistics. The Reagan Revolution turned the average American into a citizen of the third world. And here comes Newtie to finish the job.

People identify with the middle class though... they’re temp workers with televisions, cd players, and hip clothes and hairstyles.

The only alternative to a world of human refuse, serfs and slaves abandoned by an increasingly self-sufficient corporate cyber/media oligarchy is a revolution of this lumpenproletariat (the formerly working class), based not in neo-Luddite refusal but in desire, a desire to live. Which means that the essentials should be given away free, unconditionally. This notion is of course completely in opposition to the current political discourse, and probably goes against every instinct in, say, the average Wired reader’s brain. I’d like them to just think of me as the anti-Newt.

Cyberculture (a meme that I’m at least partly responsible for generating, incidentally) has emerged as a gleeful apologist for this kill-the-poor trajectory of the Republican revolution. You find it all over Wired - this mix of chaos theory and biological modeling that is somehow interpreted as scientific proof of the need to devolve and decentralize the social welfare state while also deregulating and empowering the powerful, autocratic, multinational corporations. You’ve basically got the breakdown of nation states into global economies simultaneous with the atomization of individuals or their balkanization into disconnected sub-groups, because digital technology conflates space while decentralizing communication and attention. The result is a clear playing field for a mutating corporate oligarchy, which is what we have. I mean, people think it’s really liberating because the old industrial ruling class has been liquefied and it’s possible for young players to amass extraordinary instant dynasties. But it’s savage and inhuman. Maybe the wired elite think that’s hip. But then don’t go around crying about crime in the streets or pretending to be concerned with ethics.

It’s particularly sad and poignant for me to witness how comfortably the subcultural contempt for the normal, the hunger for novelty and change, and the basic anarchistic temperament that was at the core of Mondo 2000 fits the hip, smug, boundary-breaking, fast-moving, no-time-for-social-niceties world of your wired mega-corporate info/comm/media players. You can find our dirty fingerprints, our rhetoric, all over their advertising style. The joke’s on me.