Joseph Matheny is the co-founder and CTO of Hukilau, host of the GSpot podcast, publisher of Alterati, co-creator of Incunabula (one of the first Alternate Reality Games), and about a million other things. He recently published in conjunction with Original Falcon Robert Anton Wilson: The Lost Studio Session. Having been interviewed by Joe three times now, I thought it was time to turn the tables on him and find out what he’s up to at Hukilau. Read on to find out how you can get an early look at Hukilau.(Update: The private betas are all gone now)

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Tom Henderson, aka Mathpunk on Twitter, is a mathematics lecturer at Portland State University and an improve comedian with the group The Light Finger Five. He edits mathpunk.net and is co-host of the podcast Math for Primates (with scientist and professional weightlifter graduate student and competitive weigh lifter Nick Horton). He received the Pandora Award (Bronze) from Chris DiBona, Open Source Program Manager for Google, for his participation in the game Superstruct.

Klint Finley: What does it mean to be a (or, rather THE) “mathpunk”?

Tom Henderson: Ha! Okay. When I was maybe 20 years old, my high school girlfriend was telling me about a punk band called “Green Dave.” I told her that I found punk to be totally unimpressive, because it was a musical genre that, near as I could tell, was founded upon not knowing how to play your instrument.

She set me straight. The point of punk, she said, was that ANYone could get the experience of being in a band, of performing in front of peers, of expressing yourself, without there being a prerequisite to participate.

This blew my mind, and it was that conversation that turned me from a nascent douchebag into a self-aware poser.

Later, a girlfriend who had honest-to-god Southern California punk credibility — this was the time that The Offspring was getting radio play so, what, she was probably most deep in the hardcore scene? — got me interested in the music, and explained to me that punks could be astronomers or Shakespeare devotees with no clash. (Pardon the pun.)

So, these things are tucked into my brain. Later, I move to Portland. I move to Portland with the extensive plan of “take math classes until head blows up, or degree achieved.”

This is the first serious long-term plan I’ve ever had. I figure, Shit, I’m a guy with long term plans now? I need to re-roll my character sheet. I start with appearance (self-aware poser), and ramp up the mathematical angle, to cobble together a philosophy of punk rock mathematics.

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Photo by Kris Krug

Amber Case is a cyborg anthropologist and the co-founder and co-organizer of Cyborg Camp. You can find her on Twitter here.

Klint Finley: Please tell us what you mean by “cyborg anthropology” and explain what it is that you do on a day-to-day basis.

Amber Case: Cyborg anthropology is the study of human and non-human interaction, especially tools and networks that are formed by networks of human and non human objects.

My work relates to tracing the history of tool use and how it has affected culture over time.

For instance, one can look at a hammer and notice that over the last 300 years the design and function of the hammer has not changed very much.

The shape and form and function are still similar but when one looks at the first computers, which were large machines running on vacuum tubes, and computers now — one sees that the computer’s overall look and function and shape and size has drastically changed.

So then one must look at the idea of the hammer or knife. An animal must evolve a better tooth, or sharp edge in which to capture and kill prey. If a tooth breaks, or is not sharp enough, or the animal is not fast enough, that animal dies and cannot reproduce.

But the human has externalized the evolution by making a tool outside of their mouths. The knife is an extension of the tooth that can be thrown. The speed and excellence of the knife depends on the worker or the person who has power enough to have a worker who can create that tool.

Once we externalized objects and processes, we externalized evolution.

But the computer is different. Tool use has been physical for most of human evolution. Now we see computers as an interface not to the physical self, but to the mental self.

The mental self is an internal space, which is unseen, and a lot of what we see on a computer is unseen unless we look at it through an interface or portal.

So what I do in cyborg anthropology is consider how people upload their bodies into hyperspace, and how humanness is produced through machines and machines through humanness.

I also consider online presence, cell phones and the technosocial self.

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Above: Kassiane giving the The American Sign Language sign for “autism.” The sign, which evokes the notion of “closed off,” raises issues in the neurodiversity community.

Kassiane, who prefers I don’t run her last name, is a neurodiversity advocate based in Portland, OR. She was born autistic & epileptic and has spoken at neurodiversity conferences around the world. She spoke to me via instant messenger.

Klint Finley: Could you give us a brief overview of what “neurodiversity” means, or at least what it means to you?

Kassiane: Neurodiversity, the word, simply means the whole variety of different brain wirings people have…from the different kinds of normal to the different kinds of not so normal. Then there’s Neurodiversity, the movement which is the shocking idea that people with non standard wiring are human and deserve to be treated as such without being “fixed” first.

What conditions may be included in the movement?

Autistic/Asperger people tend to make up the base of the movement, because we latch onto things so well, but we’re really inclusive…ADHD, learning disabilities, mental health issues, cognitive conditions like Down Syndrome, epilepsy, migraines, neurotypical allies, Not Diagnosed Just Weird…we’re accepting of pretty much everyone.

Is there a point at which a line is drawn between “neurodiverse” and disabled?

The 2 aren’t mutually exclusive. You can be different and disabled, but being disabled doesn’t keep you from being a human worthy of respect.

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Multi-instrumentalist Joshua Ellis, who records under the name Red State Soundsystem, has just self-released his debut album Ghosts a Burning City. Ellis – whose music sounds like a cross between Paul Simon and Nine Inch Nails – recorded, mixed, and mastered the album himself. I caught up with him via instant messenger to talk about his music and DIY music production.

Klint Finley: Can you explain the name “Red State Soundsystem”?

Joshua Ellis: It started from a lame joke. When the band Cansei de Ser Sexy came out, I noticed everybody abbreviated their name to CSS. Being a Web nerd, I giggled.

I used to release stuff under my own name, but I dug the idea of having a sort of secret identity. Plus I wanted to maybe collaborate with various other people. So I wanted a band name. I started thinking about Web acronyms — HTML, PHP…RSS. What would be a cool name that could be abbreviated as RSS?

And it came to me. It just sounded cool and vaguely political and funny. Then I came up with my logo — the old red pickup truck in a field with bigass soundsystem speakers in the bed. And it just seemed perfect.
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(Image from this old post by Nick P)

First thing first, Robert Paxton’s definition of fascism:

Fascism is a system of political authority and social order intended to reinforce the unity, energy, and purity of communities in which liberal democracy stands accused of producing division and decline. [...]

A form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

Now, Sara Robinson on the question “Are we there yet?”:

And every time this question got asked, people like Chip Berlet and Dave Neiwert and Fred Clarkson and yours truly would look up from our maps like a parent on a long drive, and smile a wan smile of reassurance. “Wellll…we’re on a bad road, and if we don’t change course, we could end up there soon enough. But there’s also still plenty of time and opportunity to turn back. Watch, but don’t worry. As bad as this looks: no — we are not there yet.”

In tracking the mileage on this trip to perdition, many of us relied on the work of historian Robert Paxton, who is probably the world’s pre-eminent scholar on the subject of how countries turn fascist. In a 1998 paper published in The Journal of Modern History, Paxton argued that the best way to recognize emerging fascist movements isn’t by their rhetoric, their politics, or their aesthetics. Rather, he said, mature democracies turn fascist by a recognizable process, a set of five stages that may be the most important family resemblance that links all the whole motley collection of 20th Century fascisms together. According to our reading of Paxton’s stages, we weren’t there yet. There were certain signs — one in particular — we were keeping an eye out for, and we just weren’t seeing it.

And now we are. In fact, if you know what you’re looking for, it’s suddenly everywhere. [...]

All through the Bush years, progressive right-wing watchers refused to call it “fascism” because, though we kept looking, we never saw clear signs of a deliberate, committed institutional partnership forming between America’s conservative elites and its emerging homegrown brownshirt horde. We caught tantalizing signs of brief flirtations — passing political alliances, money passing hands, far-right moonbat talking points flying out of the mouths of “mainstream” conservative leaders. But it was all circumstantial, and fairly transitory. The two sides kept a discreet distance from each other, at least in public. What went on behind closed doors, we could only guess. They certainly didn’t act like a married couple.

Now, the guessing game is over. We know beyond doubt that the Teabag movement was created out of whole cloth by astroturf groups like Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks and Tim Phillips’ Americans for Prosperity, with massive media help from FOX News. We see the Birther fracas — the kind of urban myth-making that should have never made it out of the pages of the National Enquirer — being openly ratified by Congressional Republicans. We’ve seen Armey’s own professionally-produced field manual that carefully instructs conservative goon squads in the fine art of disrupting the democratic governing process — and the film of public officials being terrorized and threatened to the point where some of them required armed escorts to leave the building. We’ve seen Republican House Minority Leader John Boehner applauding and promoting a video of the disruptions and looking forward to “a long, hot August for Democrats in Congress.”

This is the sign we were waiting for — the one that tells us that yes, kids: we are there now. America’s conservative elites have openly thrown in with the country’s legions of discontented far right thugs. They have explicitly deputized them and empowered them to act as their enforcement arm on America’s streets, sanctioning the physical harassment and intimidation of workers, liberals, and public officials who won’t do their political or economic bidding.

This is the catalyzing moment at which honest-to-Hitler fascism begins. It’s also our very last chance to stop it.

Alternet: Is the U.S. on the Brink of Fascism?

Robinson has 2 follow-up posts: 7 Ways We Can Fight Back Against the Rising Fascist Threat and 5 Ways to Build a Fascist-Proof America

I don’t share Robinson’s faith that we can pull out of this. I don’t have her faith in the Democratic Party, which I think plays the role of “good cop” in what’s actually a one party system. I think the entire establishment media, not just Fox News, is a party of that system and can never be made to “get the story right.” I don’t think we can rely on the police to do the “heavy lifting.”

I have, however, been considering what can be done. I will share my thoughts and conclusions eventually (unless of course I do decide there really isn’t anything that can be done).

In the meantime, here are some other things to consider.

Naomi Wolf in her own piece claiming we’re in the late stages of a fascist shift: (from 2007)

A friend emails me a story from USA Today about a 24-year-old college graduate who testified before Congress about her family of immigrants and the difficulties they face; shortly afterward, the entire family was arrested by immigration agents. Another online piece reports that Blackwater is setting up operations along the US/Mexico border and an insightful post on Daily Kos describes how the TSA list will revert from the airlines to the management of the Department of Homeland Security shortly and that by February we may well face the need to apply to the State for permission to travel. If this proposed regulation goes through, we will move from 1931 to about 1934–when the borders started to close– with the stroke of a pen. Jews in America have hardwired into their DNA a sense of the distinction between those who got out before the borders closed and those who waited a moment too long.

And these thoughts about life during totalitarianism from William S. Burroughs and RU Sirius.

This Labor Day weekend we learned that unemployment shot up again in August, after the false hope of an artificially low rate reported for July. And we learned that 1/9 of Americans are receiving food stamps.

And, in a major victory in their apparent quest to turn all of the United States into the town from Gummo, Republicans pressured the nation’s “green jobs czar,” into resigning for not being nice enough to the people who got us into this mess.

That professional Republican propagandists can paint Jones as an uncivil and racially insensitive conspiracy theorist is a major coup for them, and that these matters are more important than the state of our ever crumbling economy is telling.

How is that with a minority in both the house and senate, having lost the presidency, and with its political leadership in disarray the Republicans are still setting the agenda and winning political battles? Why are the Democrats bending over backwards to accommodate these swine that so cynically sold the nation up the river?

The easy answer is that there isn’t really much difference between the two parties. But that answer doesn’t tell the whole story.

To say “there’s no difference between the Democrats and Republicans” is to drastically over simplify. The worst Democrats in recent history (ex: Joe Biden and Joe Lieberman) are nowhere near as bad as the worst Republicans in recent history (ex: Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond). The best Republican senators in recent history (ex: Arlen Specter) are no where near as good as the best Democratic senators in recent history (ex: Russ Feingold) George W. Bush was clearly a worse president than Bill Clinton.

But there is no denying that both parties serve the same corporate masters. The Democrats and Republicans are engaged in a perpetual game of “Good Cop, Bad Cop.” And this latest election cycle, and the first few months of Obama’s presidency, has made their pattern of action clear: 1) Get a conservative president or two (Reagan, Bush) into office, let them run the country into the ground. 2) Let the Dems take over for a while, but perpetuate Republican policy 3) Even though the Dems are essentially only maintaining previous Republican policy, attack, attack, attack 4) Get an even more conservative president into office. 5) Loop back to step 2.

At this stage of the process, the Republicans don’t need a strong political leader as long as their propaganda force -the Limbaughs and Becks – is in full effect. The Democrats evidently have no will to stand-up to these attacks, meaning we can expect a further rightward march off the cliff for the foreseeable future.

“I’ve just recently realized the degree to which the Net and Web represents a victory for counter and subculturalism in one sense: The generation currently in their teens won’t even be able to recognize a consensus reality or know what the mainline politics of the moment allegedly is, because they won’t even look at centralized media.” – R.U. Sirius, Mondo 2000 issue 16, winter 1996

“Today’s cutting-edge youth demands free access to uncensored information over the Internet with universal encryption to guarantee secure, unmediated communications. Once again, through a technological backdoor, we are witnessing a social movement that threatens to pull the plug on the powers-that-be. As it loses its traditional control over information, government becomes irrelevant. After all the loudmouthed posturing and wishful thinking, all the manifestos and ephemera, will it really be the ones and zeros of the computer’s binary code that render authority obsolete and redefine human relations?” – Peter Stansill, Preface to the 1999 edition of BAMN: Outlaw Manifestos & Ephemera 1965 – 1970.

“It’s a total cacophony of disparate voices and ideologies. For every Noam Chomsky Archive or Mother Jones web site, there’s an Aryan Dating Service or a Holohoax site or a godhatesfags.com. It doesn’t favor one school of thought over another. But that’s a good thing! More chaos! More ideological Balkanization, please! Push the pedal to the metal of the Hegelian dialectic as hard and as fast as possible!

At root level, these competing voices all have certain things in common – a deep mistrust of the government and the capitalist elite, death-sucking powers that be. The Left hates something like NAFTA, but so does the Buchanan Brigade. I prsonally find myself in agreement with the Archie Bunker types when it comes to despising the New World Order of corporate greedheads who are reducing the working class of this country to renting their lives out like fucking slaves to Walmart and McDonalds for five bucks an hour.” – Richard Metzger, 21C, 1997.

In the 90s, the advent of the Internet age, many people, including myself, thought the Internet’s democratization of media would be vehicle for social progress. R.U. Sirius was correct that “consensus reality” would be demolished. But instead of a new enlightenment, we have a new dark age in which disinformation flows at will and even educated people can’t be bothered to check Snopes before hitting forward on the latest right wing chain e-mail.

The thinking seemed to go: access to information outside the mainstream media would in itself cause the media establishment’s authority to crumble and foster a new age of critical thinking. “The people” would get a better sense of what was really going on in the world, and demand change. People, awash in unverified sources, would also become more critical thinkers.

By 2002, in the wake of 9/11, and the rise of the “Warbloggers” it should have been clear that this simply wasn’t happening.

“Blogging” first entered mainstream consciousness with the rise of the “warblog” – pro-war often nominally libertarian blogs that launched after 9/11. Back before liberal sites like Daily Kos and the Huffington Post stole the show, Glenn Reynold’s Instapundit was the best known political blog. Reynolds was actually one of the most civil warblogs – others had a “most blood thirsty warblogger contest” (results, and no, it wasn’t a joke). Example post from Cato the Youngest:

Who calls for the destruction of an entire city in every post, and most comments and e-mails? Who has wished, in the pages of his blog, that he could be the bombadier-navigator on a B-1B, loaded with 38 200-kT AGM-69 missiles, with orders to scour the Middle East with thermonuclear fire? Who has suggested that the Israelis could annihilate Egypt by breaking the Aswan dams, in order to drive people to high ground, then nuking them? Cato the Youngest.

That is what the radical democratization of media wrought.

Maybe it should have been predictable. Ever since the death of Alan Berg at the hands of Nazis in 1984, the right has dominated talk radio – starting with Rush Limbaugh’s issue talk in 1984. And since the fairness doctrine was repealed in 1987, we’ve seen a lot more Limbaughs than Amy Goodmans.

“I think that the apparatus that we have, in terms of democracy and free speech, is probably as good as it’s going to get — we just have to find a way back to real power within the democratic apparatus that’s been captured by money and so forth.” – R.U. Sirius, Shift , July 2002.

“The base is not reality based.” – Jay Rosen, February 2009.

Which brings us to the “birthers.” Although the birthers are often compared to truthers, these people are even more deranged. At their best truthers raise valid questions about the government’s response to 9/11. At their worst, they extrapolate wild claims based on thin shreds of evidence.

Birthers don’t even have these sorts of thin shreds from which to spin their stories. They stand steadfast in the resolve to disbelieve Obama’s citizenship in the face of all contrary evidence, while offering not one bit of evidence themselves. (I wish they would apply the same standard of evidence to the existence of god as they do to the citizenship of Obama). If you show these people Snopes, they’ll dismiss it as conspiracy. They are allergic to the truth.

Meanwhile, the lack of centralized control has done little to rattle the powers that be. There are web sites dedicated to supporting any fringe belief you can think of. Everyone from StormFront to IndyMedia is routinely ignored by the establishment.

Not that the mainstream media is any better than the Internet. The Birthers have been given ample coverage, in a “he said, she said” treatment that legitimizes their lunacy. As much as the right loves to rail against relativism and post-modernism, their maniacal insistence that they be given “equal treatment,” and the media’s compliance with those demands, does more to create a postmodern, truth-less world than any French academic ever did.

Sadly, even as bloggers explain in detail how Goldman Sachs screwed America and provide factual analysis of Sotomayor’s record, lies and propaganda are able to shout them down. And our “watchdogs” choose to go after Matt Taibi instead of Goldman Sachs and to treat the “debate” over Sotomayor’s record like an actual controversy instead of a bunch of a nonsense. There seems to be no point in speaking truth to power. Power does not care what is spoken to it.

This should not be read as a reactionary rant. The yearning for a “golden age” of investigative journalism is a case of rosy retrospection.

What to do then when the watchmen are evil, and the populace is mad? I have no answers. My only solace at this point is that every outbreak of insanity seems to die down eventually, even if society writ large learns nothing from them.

Hands-On Chaos Magic: Reality Manipulation through the Ovayki Current

Llewellyn has just published its first, to the best of my knowledge, book on chaos magic: Hands on Chaos Magic by Key 23 contributor Andrieh Vitimus. He took some time out of his busy schedule to answer a few questions for me.

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Government at all levels are scrambling to stimulate the economy, mostly through either big spending packages or through tax cuts.

One way to increase economic activity without spending much, if any money, is the liberalization of vice laws. At present cities, states, and even entire countries loose revenue to locations that have more liberal laws concerning sex, drugs, and gambling. All these stimulus projects would require is the repeal or loosening of a few existing laws and regulations.

I’m a big proponent of ending drug prohibition. However, that’s going to be hard to do and there is is a huge bureaucracy and multiple government agencies in place for drug enforcement. So using drug legalization or decriminalization as a stimulus is a longer and more complicated process than legalizing/decriminalizing other vices*.

Federal:

State:

City:

*One alternative would be to start by un-scheduling drugs that don’t currently take a lot of law enforcements resources currently, such as ketamine, LSD, DMT, psilocybin, and various analogs. This leaves all law enforcement agencies in-tact and operating at or near present levels while freeing up the market to ramp up sale and manufacture of these drugs. Also, change the scheduling of many prescription drugs to make them easier to obtain without a prescription.

I was recently going through my books when I found a signed copy of “Eros, Magic, and The Murder of Professor Culianu” by Ted Anton that was given to me by a friend. For those unfamiliar, Ioan P. Culianu (or Couliano) was a professor of divinity at The University of Chicago. He also taught Romanian history. His most famous work was “Eros and Magic in The Renaissance” which was a study on how magic in the Renaissance was “a scientifically plausible attempt to manipulate individuals and groups based on a knowledge of motivations, particularly erotic motivations. In addition, the magician relied on a profound knowledge of the art of memory to manipulate the imagination of his subjects. In these respects, Culiano suggests, magic is the precursor of the modern psychological and sociological sciences, and the magician is the distant ancestor of the of the psychoanalyst and the advertising and publicity agent.”

Besides being a scholar of ancient magic and the occult (he worked frequently with Mircea Eliade and many other notable minds), he was an outspoken activist against the government of Romania. Born and raised there, Culianu later defected to Italy and eventually put down roots in Chicago. After Ceausescu was ousted, Culianu was forthright in insisting the new government staged a coup, and that the Romanian people were duped into believing they were headed toward democracy when in reality they were not. Of the previous government he said ”Why did we accept so much suffering without saying anything? Why did we permit ourselves to be robbed more than other people in the world…? This stain is more difficult to remove than that of original sin.” In a piece he wrote for an Italian news magazine called Panorama, he noted Romania’s history with dictators and aptly titled the article “The King is Dead. Watch Out for an Heir.” In this article he states that “all events that happen in our poor country are the repetition of some archetypes embedded in our religious history”, and that “Umberto Eco says that everything depends on what use one makes of symbols. The case of Romania shows that he is right. No sooner had the people forced the bloody dictator to leave the presidential palace than the government that was formed took the name National Salvation Front. They couldn’t have chosen a less fortunate label: the name calls to mind the fascist National Renascence Front, which was the sole party created by King Carol II in 1938 after he dissolved parliament and proclaimed himself dictator”.

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“At one time or another Sue Lange has been one of the following (pretty much in this order): child, student, potato picker, first chair flautist, librarian, last chair flautist, babysitter, newspaper deliverer, apple picker, form cutter, drama club treasurer, track and field timer, Ponderosa Steak House salad server (before the salad bar days, of course), disco dance instructor, waitress, wire harness assembler, usher, Baskin-Robbins ice cream dipper, volleyball team captain, biology club treasurer, circuit board checker, form reader, day camp counselor, tutor, stock room attendant, nurse aide, chemistry technician, senior chemistry technician, right fielder, Plant Laboratory Supervisor–non-radiological, house sitter, first base, receptionist, stage manager, data input technician, actor, bookkeeper, vocalist, typesetter, songwriter, recording artist, home builder, viticulturist, Digital Production Manager, orchardist, and Applescripter. Lately she’s been writing.”

TiamatsVision- For those unfamiliar with your work, tell us a bit about yourself.

Sue Lange- Well I started out as a child, and then I grew up. After that terrifying experience I moved to New York City and discovered who I really was. Turns out I was musician so I started a band. Crabby Lady was the last incarnation. I stripped the music from my lyrics and published my story as science fiction (“Tritcheon Hash”). That went over like a lead balloon so I tried again (“We, Robots”). Blowing my modicum of success with the second book all of out of proportion gave me the nerve to try it once more, hence my third book, “The Textile Planet”.

TiamatsVision- How did the idea for Book View Café come about and what was involved in putting the site together?

Sue Lange- A number of people on the SF-FFW Yahoo group (women writers of speculative fiction) started yakking about offering fiction for free online to create some buzz for our work. We read stuff like Cory Doctorow’s manifesto on the subject and got inspired. Never one for talk without action, Sarah Zettel grew tired of our ranting and said, “Let’s do it.” A bunch of us got eager and jumped on the band wagon, and voila, BVC is born.

TiamatsVision- What do you see happening with Book View Café in the future?

Sue Lange- I think we’re going to become a publisher. We’re going to have a model in place for publishing Internet fiction and making money at it. We’ll know how to make it, serve it, promote it, and sell it. We’ll have a handful of formidable partners that will be able to distribute our product in the myriad formats out there. We’ll have content in Internet formats, ebooks, print books, and podcasts. Wherever there is content, we will be there.

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Susan Wright writes science fiction novels and nonfiction books on art and popular culture. New York City is her home, where she lives with her husband Kelly Beaton. After graduating from Arizona State University in 1986, Susan moved to Manhattan to get her masters in Art History from New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts. Susan is currently the Spokesperson for the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom, a national organization committed to protecting freedom of sexual expression among consenting adults.

TiamatsVision- For those unfamiliar with you and your work, tell us a bit about yourself.

Susan Wright- I’ve written over 25 novels and nonfiction books on art and popular culture. Right after I got my masters in art history from New York University, instead of becoming a professor as I had intended, I started writing. I was lucky enough to get an agent and in 1994, I published my first Star Trek novel, “Sins of Commission”. I wrote 9 Star Trek novels in all, and I have a new story in the Mirror Universe Shards and Shadows anthology coming out in January, 2009 called “Bitter Fruit”.

I’m also the spokesperson for the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom. I talk to the media about BDSM, swinging and polyamory to debunk stereotypes and defend our communities’ right to hold events. NCSF is a great organization, the only one devoted to helping people in need. The website is www.ncsfreedom.org

TiamatsVision- You recently released a book called “A Pound of Flesh”  which is a sequel to “To Serve and Submit” . What is this series about and what was your inspiration in writing it?

Susan Wright- These two books are about pleasure training houses in the 11th century – Viking sex! In “To Serve and Submit” , Marja is a submissive heroine who learns through her battles to save her homeland how to use her true nature to become a powerful woman. She falls in love with her master, Lexander. I got the idea from artifacts found in Newfoundland of Viking settlements, and I imagined what would that society be like if it had flourished. I knew the first “new world” settlement would include Native Americans as well as Vikings. Marja’s mother is a Skraeling and her father is Nordic so she straddles those worlds.

In “A Pound of Flesh” , Marja travels to Europe to save the slaves from the pleasure houses, but she has to fight Lexander, her former master and lover, to do it. I loved writing the BDSM scenes in this book because I think it makes the sex more creative – they aren’t the typical love scene. I have much more ability to move the story along during these scenes because the interactions are more intense.

TiamatsVision- Did you have to do any special research for this series?

Susan Wright- LOL! I found the leather community in New York City in 1991 and have been thoroughly involved ever since. So the BDSM is a completely natural expression for me.

For the Viking and real-world building, yes I did a tremendous amount of research. I also benefited because I studied art history for 7 years with an emphasis on the Middle Ages so I have a strong grounding in medieval societies.

TiamatsVision- Are there any future books planned for this series?

Susan Wright- Yes, but my editor left Roc and the future of this series is in doubt. At some point, however, I will return to Marja and Lexander’s story. They will go to Tantalis to deal directly with Lexander’s people who are enslaving poor misfortunates into their pleasure houses.

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“There were only two rules for construction: electricity had to be provided to avoid fire, and the buildings could be no more than fourteen stories high, because of the nearby airport.”

When I was 17, I started constantly re-reading Hakim Bey’s TAZ, or as I like to call it, “His Only Good Book.” I had no problem with Jonathan Kozol, but Peter Lamborn Wilson builds a sentence like Turkish Muslims build a shrine. Before I discovered the playground of “Academic Critical Theory,” from Marshall McLuhan to Manuel de Landa, TAZ was the most dense language artifact I’d ever seen.

Even then, though, I wondered why Hakim Bey didn’t discuss the only real “TAZ” I could think of – the Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong. “Kowloon” means “Nine Dragons,” and you can only visit the ruins today.  After an eviction process that took years and cost billions of Hong Kong dollars, the city was destroyed in 1993 and only a park remains.  While it lasted, though, it was the closest thing to Pure Anarchy the world has seen outside of a war zone.

At it’s most overgrown peak in early 1987, Kowloon Walled City was home to 50,000 inhabitants.  From 1899, these tenacious squatters had repelled the British, the Japanese and every would-be landlord and “property owner” in the history of Hong Kong.  So why not make them the centerpiece of the book?

I’ve since come to realize it’s because he was writing a personal historical fantasy, not a tactical or practical guide. Although Kowloon truly was a Temporary Autonomous Zone, and it’s a cool idea to read and think about, it truly sucked to live there. This is best summed up by Coilhouse’s conclusion:

Yes, the anarchistic types out there are correct when they say that the Walled City is evidence that humans can co-exist, and even thrive, without laws constantly piled on them. But it’s not that simple. After all, without massive police raids (government incarnate), the place would have probably become a mob-run tyranny. Its residents had a degree of freedom that anyone who comes home to piles of bills or endless forms can’t help but envy. They also had darkness, a lower life expectancy, filthy living conditions and huge numbers of drug addicts.

But if the Walled City is a reminder that lawlessness isn’t quite as cleanly romantic as some might think, it also reminds us that a staggering number of societies are possible “‘ and that every one of them has a price.

It’s also worth meditating on how Kowloon came to achieve their “hands-off” status: by kicking up such a profound shit-storm of noise and problems, every single time someone tried to exert their authority, that everyone in power simply gave up. As David Robinson puts it in his great Tofu Magazine piece, “British policy came to regard Walled City as something of a hornets nest “‘ best not to be kicked unless absolutely necessary.”

Perhaps the lesson here is that there are no little things when it comes to defending your freedom. If either of those words are supposed to mean something, there are no acceptable tradeoffs or reasonable comprimises.

FURTHER READING: The best narrative summary is from Coilhouse, and the Wiki is surprisingly dense.  My Father Lived in Kowloon City, and the hilariously mis-translated but quite interesting story of a Japanese expedition into the city the week before it was demolished in 1993. If you’re interesting in more photos, more information, and more pages to scroll through, then say hello the Skyscraper Forum, who have collected pretty much all there is to know in one thread.

I originally wrote this in October 2007 and it was first published in OVO: Money. It has become increasingly relevant.

Since the colonial period, the United States has been fighting to control currency. In fact, this battle was part of the foundation of the country. Prior to 1764, colonists issued “Bills of Credit” to deal with a shortage of hard currency. Some were issued by “land banks” and backed by the value of land. Others were merely promises of credit. [1] In 1764 the British Parliment passed the Currency Act, which prohibited the use of these Bills of Credit. This caused significant economic hardship for the colonies, and helped set the stage for the Revolution. [2]

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“Man is the only creature that strives to surpass himself, and yearns for the impossible.”  – Eric Hoffer

“Few things are impossible to diligence and skill. Great works are performed not by strength, but perseverance.” - Samuel Johnson

“A great many things have been pronounced untrue and absurd, and even impossible, by the highest authorities in the age in which they lived, which have afterwards, and, indeed, within a very short period, been found to be both possible and true” . – Catherine Crowe

We’re bombarded on a daily basis with waves of negativity. Mainstream media and people stuck in a negative groove are constantly reminding us how awful everything is. Politics, the economy, how bad the weather is, and the inevitable “Oh my, did you here about ___(insert horrible news here)?!”  coming from everyday acquaintances to people we meet on the street, constantly remind us how imperfect the world is. There are some people I know who don’t own a TV or listen to any MSM because of this, and they are some of the happiest people I know. They’re also deeply involved in their work and are successful at what they do. At times (when free to do so), I’ve taken their cue and turned off all media (including my telephone) and go off to do what helps center me; write, read, play music, or head for the great outdoors.

I recently read about a twelve year old boy, Jordan Romero, who has climbed 5 of the 7 highest peaks in the world. His goal is to climb all of them by the time he reaches 16, and I can see him accomplishing this. So I decided to look into some more amazing people, and found a large list of disabled musicians; a couple of quadriplegic sculptors, Alistair Green and Garry Curry; and a writer named Karen Lynn-Chlup, who has cerebral palsy and learning disabilities, just to name a few. You’re not going to hear too much about these people because crisis, tragedy, and criticism are what get the major hits on blogs and news sites. Not the success stories.

Yes, the economic crisis is bad. People are losing their jobs, retirement funds and their houses, and at times it seems like everything sucks. But there are people out there who are achieving things no one thought possible. Twenty years ago who would’ve thought that an African American would be elected president? How about the men with no legs, Oscar Pistorius (who’s also blind and ran in the Olympics) and Mark Inglis, who made it to the summit of Mount Everest? Or the amputees who rock climb? If you’re feeling down, or are going through a hard time, know that you’re not alone, and that there are people out there surmounting obstacles and achieving goals that few thought they could. It’s during these difficult times that it’s most important to remember that sometimes the glass isn’t half empty, but half full.

This article was original written for Key 64’s Guns, Dope, and Fucking in the Streets PDF zine. I have no idea when the zine will see the light of day, so I’m running this here now.

If you have a fixed idea of what a “typical gun owner” looks like, the coffee table book Armed America may surprise you. If your main exposure to “gun culture” is the mainstream media, or magazines like the American Rifleman or Guns and Ammo, you could be forgiven for thinking all gun owners are rural, middle aged white men who dress in cammo and are desperately worried about protecting the families from gun toting “urban youth.” Armed America, a collection of photographs of gun owners by Kyle Cassidy, includes Montana survivalists and young urban black men, but also tattooed punk rockers, single moms, and American families who couldn’t look any more normal without being creepy.

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A bald, drug addicted architect cum mad scientist returns to the futuristic city he helped build to save its people from the misapplied “psychetecture” he designed. That’s the basic plot of Mister X, a comic series by Dean Motter and various artists first published in the 1984 by Vortex Comics. Motter, a graphic designer by trade, crafted the entire visual presentation of the series – going so far to create a new logo for every issue. The graphic influence of Mister X can be found in Watchmen, Transmetropolitan, and countless other subsequent series.

Dark Horse recently published The Mister X Archives, a complete collection of Motter’s run on Mister X. Klint Finley catches up with Motter to talk about the behind-the-scenes history of Mister X, and Motter’s future projects – including an all new Mister X series, Mister X: Condemned from Dark Horse.

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Above: 19th century anatomical study cabinet No.1

Klint Finley talks to cryptozoological pseudoscientific artist assemblage Alex CF about what goes into his work and staying ahead of the copycats.

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I’ve been collecting a history of Temporary Autonomous Zones. I’m grateful to Hakim Bey for the conceptual phrase, but his history was more romantic than tactically useful…and after all, he is something of a pedo. So in honor of the TAZ going down right now in PDX — YOU KNOW ABOUT ESOZONE, YES?? — I’ll be sharing some of the best stories this weekend.

One of my favorite corners of Southern History was an all-black community hidden in Northern Mississippi. The story of Mound Bayou stretches across centuries and winds through everything from the Civil War to the Civil Rights movement. Sadly, Mound Bayou exists almost nowhere online. The Wikipedia is shallow filler, and most of the online histories are short and sloppy.

Isaiah Montgomery and Ben Green founded Mound Bayou in 1887, but the story begins with Montgomery’s father, Ben, who was a slave on the David Bend plantation. For most folks alive today, our images of a plantation are based on Roots, but things were very different at Davis Bend. It was owned by Joeseph Davis (the brother of Confederate president Jefferson Davis) and he was heavily inspired by the “socialist utopianism” of an obscure thinker named Robert Owen.

As a side note, Technoccult readers might be interested to know that “Owen insisted he could communicate with great minds of the past by means of electricity.” The precise details are lost to history, but it should be noted Owens was unusually blunt after death, telling Spritualist mediums who summoned him “Oh! How you have misunderstood the laws which connect spirit with spirit…you will never understand these things…”

David Bend was an experiment in education and empowerment, and yes, I do realize how absurd that sounds when I’m still talking about white people owning slaves. Rather than draconian dormitory conditions, though, Joeseph Davis encouraged his slaves to educate themselves and even own businesses. In the aftermath of the Civil War, Davis sold his land holdings to Ben Montgomery, who had run the plantation store. The price was $300,000 in gold, and with that David Bend became one of the first autonomous black communities in the South.

The Owen-inspired focus on learning and skills carried into Mound Bayou, especially when Booker T. Washington got involved later on. This isn’t just a look into the past, though: I think that Mound Bayou has a signifigant lesson to offer us here in 2008. During the many “exodus” movements which happened throughout the history of both Davis Bend and Mound Bayou, the Montgomery family was adamant about building a strong foundation instead of leaving for the mere promise of something better. Most importantly, the education they focused on was agricultural tech and self-sufficiency techniques:

Through outlets like the town’s newspaper, The Demonstrator (1900), Mound Bayou promoted education as an essential path to community survival, in particular vocational education in scientific agriculture through the Mound Bayou Normal and Industrial Institute.

Here in 2008, John Robb, one of my favorite Big Thinkers and the author of Brave New War, has been doing an amazing series of short, potent articles revolving around global systems collapse and the concept of the Resilient Community. Although fairy tales like Gabriele D’Annunzio taking over Fiume are beautiful, they’re not realistic or sustainable solutions. Mound Bayou is a model that lasted, and it was based on smart design and hard work, not poetry and wine.

Someone sent me a link to a site that is promoting a re-enactment of the protests at the Democratic Convention of 1968. While some of my older activist friends and I kinda like the idea of a ritual in remembrance of this day, the first question that popped in our heads was ‘What’s the point?’ Their mission statement says:

‘40 years ago this August, the streets of Chicago became a bloody open forum on the politics of power and resistance, as the Democratic National Convention lapsed into chaos and protesters in the streets were met with the gas and bayonets of Law and Order. The ghosts of this unresolved history haunt us to this day. We meet on August 28 in Grant Park to peacefully purge these ghosts and to make sense of our past through ritual reenactment, a living history lesson for the city of Chicago which asks, where were we then?, and where are we now?’

Although it may be an interesting and memorable history lesson, these are very different times, and re-enacting a violent day in history will do nothing to change the status quo. But the questions are being asked in order to gain some perspective. This led me to question how activism has changed during the past 40 years, and to wonder where it will go from here.

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Bill Whitcomb – author of The Magician’s Reflection (soon to be re-released and expanded by Immanion Press), The Magician’s Companion, and the forthcoming Selections from the Dream Manual – gives us a lesson in the theory and practice of psychotronics.

Bill’s recommended reading:

Rays From the Capstone, Christopher Hills
Secrets of the Life Force, Christopher Hills
Supersensonics, Christopher Hills

Psionics 101, Charles W. Cosimano

Amazing and Wonderful Mind Machines You Can Build, G. Harry Stine

Websites:

Chuck Cosimano’s website

KeelyNet

Rex Research

Borderland Research

Information Unlimited

Reflections on the Ether and some Notes on the Convergence between Homoeopathy and Radionics

Imagine receiving a letter in your mailbox asking you to participate in a study for cancer research, and that your doctor didn’t mention anything about cancer during your last physical. This is what happened to 400 women in Maryland. According to the Baltimore Sun, ‘A state contractor tampered with Maryland’s cancer registry, a database used by researchers to track the disease’s impact, counting hundreds of patients as having cancer when they did not, according to a legislative audit released yesterday. The company, Macro International Inc., found in an internal investigation that data were deliberately altered between August 2004 and December of that year. The company fired the employee responsible for the cancer registry. State officials said that Macro employees apparently overreported the incidence of cancer to ensure that the database met standards set by a national certification association, which closely monitors registries to ensure that states have a complete count of cases.’ These letters were sent in 2005, and they’re just addressing it now.

If this can happen with a cancer registry’s database, imagine what could happen with someone’s personal health records. The argument for computerized records is simple. It will eliminate many errors that occur with paperwork, and will help emergency workers to assist a patient if the patient is unable to communicate. While this seems like a great idea in general, the issues of privacy, confidentiality, and abuses of the system lie in the back of many people’s minds. And for good reasons.

It’s not only our health records that are vulnerable. The WSJ Health Blog reports ‘In yet another example of the health industry mishandling private patient records, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Georgia sent some 202,000 explanation of benefits letters to the wrong addresses last week, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports. The letters, which were mistakenly directed to the addresses of other policyholders, included names and insurance identification numbers of patients as well as the names of the doctors and other medical providers they were using.[..] A small proportion of the letters also had Social Security numbers, a spokeswoman for the company told the paper. Vulnerability to identity theft is one concern. But EOB letters are especially sensitive from a privacy standpoint because they contain some treatment information. And this is one of a steady stream of mistakes by the health-care industry when it comes to protecting electronic data. Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Georgia told the AJC that a computer system change was to blame, and it’s taken steps to avoid the problem in the future.’

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In the second part of our interview with Nemo he talks about the visionary art world, his store the Revolutionary Exchange, the late Seth Fisher, and his advice for aspiring artists.

(Full disclosure: the Revolutionary Exchange is an official sponsor of Esozone)

Bonus: Remastered version of the first episode w/ Antero Alli

Antero Alli returns to talk about Dr. Christopher Hyatt’s legacy, and how he met Robert Anton Wilson.

Update: The Myspace and Archive.org versions were cut-off at the end. Here is another version, on Google Video.

Direct link to Google Video (download available there)