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Boing Boing interviews R.U. Sirius

November 3, 2004 /

R.U.’s former co-conspirator Mark interviews R.U. on the Boing Boing blog:

I think it does the job of establishing that there is this stream; a spirit really, that runs through history. Several spirits perhaps. This non-authoritarian, non-conformist, antic, changeable character, or community of characters, keeps coming up throughout human history. Sometimes they show up as artists or anti-artists, sometimes as religions or spiritual path; sometimes as a political revolution or change, sometimes as a scientific movement, sometimes as nihilism. Some seem to contradict others; representing opposite political sides. Or they represent opposite attitudes towards civilization and technological development ? that comes up quite a bit. And yet, I think the book shows various memetic lines of transmission that sometimes seem to run in parallel and sometimes seem to criss-cross.

Boing Boing: RU Sirius interview about his new book, Counterculture Through the Ages: From Abraham to Acid House

Excellent interview with RU Sirius

July 19, 2004 /

Best interview I’ve read with RU in a long time. I know from experience he’s a sort of difficult interview subject. Not that he isn’t forthcoming, but I think he’s a bit sick of talking about all the same things. This guy had some good questions and got some good stuff out of him.

R.U. Sirius is kind of a pseudo-occult name that I took up in the mid 1980s, when I was doing ludicrous magic with the magazine High Frontiers, trying to bring about a psychedelic renaissance. High Frontiers eventually became Mondo 2000, and R.U. Sirius developed as a character also, I’m not quite sure, in the mid-90s R.U. Sirius became a combination of Marquis De Sade and a raver. […]

In terms of social engineering, I think that, you know, you think of yourself as being in a story, and life will start to have the kind of dynamics that you would have if you were in a story, rather than if you were part of some dire laborious mechanism, you know…

Better Propaganda: R.U. Sirius Interview

(via New World Disorder)

RU Sirius interview on Better Humans

June 23, 2004 /

Technoccult pal and former guest editor, Philip Shropshire, interviewed RU Sirius for Better Humans.

Self-enhancement in general is common sense. But I would say that when it’s taken into the realm of the transhumanist project it is uncommon sense. There’s an element of the grail quest in there that I wouldn’t sell short. I think it’s a sort of mythic adventure?this attempt to overcome the perceived limitations of biology, or gravity, or the brain, or what-have-you. I think it’s romantic as well as rational, and that’s a good thing. It’s logic but it’s not just logic. We know that inspiration, invention, great hacks tend to emerge. It seems that when we get the fullest possible picture of how our brains and nervous systems work at their peak, what we call logic will be a useful subset of a larger gestalt.

I’ve got to say that I don’t personally subscribe. I’m an issue-by-issue philosophic purchaser. I don’t embrace any belief systems. I’m a fuzzy believer. I might say that I 95% believe that humans will achieve a lifespan beyond the current biological limits; I 50% believe that this will work out well on a social-political level; I 95% believe that we will get really precise control over our minds and moods; I 60% believe that the future of most of humanity is pretty well fucked; I 10% believe that something very much like the singularity will actually occur; I 1% believe that it will happen in my lifetime. I could go on.

Better Humans:

(via New World Disorder)

New Neofiles: Richard Metzger and more

December 26, 2003 /

The new NeoFiles is out already! It includes a new interview with Richard Metzger:

Aleister Crowley said once that the “magical” way to open a door was to walk across the room, turn the knob and pull and so – and I am being serious when I say this – the fact that you can basically go on the Internet and with a few simple “commands” make a book appear in the mail a few days later – that’s a magical act. You don’t even have to leave your home! And that also serves to illustrate how computer programming can be seen as directly analogous to following a spell from a medieval grimoire, if you take my point. It’s all about putting the effort into the right place isn’t it? I mean, you could try to constrain a demon to do your bidding and bring you that book, too, of course, but Amazon might be a little quicker!

Which is not to say that there isn?t a “hoodoo” component to magick, either, and when strange synchronicities and coincidences start to give you the “cosmic wink” well then you know you’re doing something right. But that’s another discussion entirely.

NeoFiles: Magical Connections.

New life enhancement web zine from R.U Sirius

October 18, 2003 /

Neofiles is a new web zine by R.U. Sirius, sponsored by a supplement company called Life Enhancement:

The conception that human beings could radically alter their own situation the phenomenological world by understanding and using its gifts is at least as old as alchemy. Dreams that people may one day fly (done), project their voices and images over vast distances (done), go to the moon (done), and live for hundreds of years (working on it), occupied a psychological terrain on the borderline between science and magic for long centuries. By the late 20th Century it was clear that the radical expansion of possibilities was a science project.

Neofiles

(via Boing Boing).

R.U. Sirius interviews Howard Rheingold

October 4, 2003 /

People have a problem discriminating between the investment bubble and the long-term impact of the Internet. The printing press didn?t create democracy or science, but both those institutions were enabled by, and are impossible without, a literate population. I think most people would agree that democracy and science, with all their limits and faults, have improved life, over the long run, for most people. But printing didn?t abolish war (indeed, science and technology helped make war more deadly to more people) or poverty or injustice. People should stop expecting new technologies to produce utopia. People use tools to improve life, and to lie, cheat, and steal. I?m optimistic that the more we know about our tools, the better our chances to influence beneficial outcomes and protect against destructive ones.

(via New World Disorder).

Signum Press

July 2, 2002 /

Signum Press is a cool online zine based in the northwest and has featured writers such as R.U. Sirius and Douglas Rushkoff. They’ve covered all sorts of interesting stuff. From their Kool Keith interview:

I’m still crazy. I will still stick a screwdriver in your back if I have to. I was in the mental hospital because I’m a quick-tempered guy. It’s like with Dr. Dooom, if I didn’t write that stuff, I probably would be a mad psycho, someone who spends the rest of his life in jail. I think rap saved me, allowing me to get out a lot of my pressures on paper. At the hospital, I was getting therapy about knowing my own strength, because at the time I felt like I could just go up and punch a gorilla in the face. I actually felt like going into the Bronx Zoo at times, climbing over the cages and punching the gorilla up in the face.

Signum Press

(via Boing Boing)

Yet another neat web log

May 31, 2002 /

Andy Baio, a former Getting It editor resident tech, has an excellent blog called Waxy. He’s recently covered abnormally large kidneys, why the new start-up There.com sounds cool, and Usenet kook Daryl “Shawn” Kabatoff who thinks a person’s name correlates to when they were born.

Waxy

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