Excursions to the Far Side of the Mind: A Book of Memes

By Howard Rheingold

Renowned for exploring the social implications of modern technology, Howard Rheingold has been dubbed by MIT "the first citizen of the Internet." In this collection of funny, prescient, thought-provoking essays, originally published during the 1970s and 1980s, he offers a glimpse into the changes wrought during that explosive period.

From the effects of the graphic user interface (GUI) not only on how we work but how we think, to "technarchist" movements that presaged both the hacker mentality and the anarchist idealism of Burning Man today, to a ground-floor view of the very earliest of what Rheingold was the first to dub virtual communities, his Excursions run the gamut from the silly to the profound.

These essays remain fascinating, amusing, and relevant. "Most of my work in recent decades," Rheingold says, "has focused on the consequences of digital media and networked publics. Before the digital wave came along, I wrote about a more diverse range of subjects: What causes anger? What’s it like to be in a car crash? What’s insect sex like? Do invisible airborne chemicals affect behavior? Can we control our dreams? How will people get high in the future? Will money evolve into new forms? In the second decade of the twenty-first century, these short pieces re-present my explorations during my think about anything years to a wider public who may be familiar with my work on digital culture."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stillpoint Digital Press
• Release date: Nov 25, 2012
• ISBN: 9781938808012

Book preview

Excursions

to the Far Side of the Mind:

A Book of Memes

by Howard Rheingold

tillpoint/Thought

Text copyright © 1988 by Howard Rheingold

Digital edition copyright © 2012 by Howard Rheingold

All images copyright © 2012 by Howard Rheingold

Published by Stillpoint Digital Press on Smashwords

All rights reserved

No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from Stillpoint Digital Press. To quote from or reprint sections of this book, contact Stillpoint Digital Press at [e-mail]

ISBN: 978-1-938808-01-2

Originally published by William Morrow, Inc.

Print edition ISBN: 978-0688092078

Portions or earlier versions of many of these excursions appeared in California Living, Image, Oui, Playboy, Wet, and Whole Earth Review.

Cover image by Justin Hall

Digital edition designed and edited by David Kudler

Stillpoint Digital Press

stillpointdigital.com

Dedicated

To My Judy

Foreword to the 2012 Edition

Howard Rheingold in Rome

In 1970, at the age of twenty-three

, I set out to make a living as a freelance writer. I was jazzed by the Kerouackian romance of the vagabond writer, attracted to the possibility that as a freelancer I wouldn’t have to sell my soul to a corporation, and, overwhelmingly driven by a desire to gain the freedom to think about whatever I wanted to think about. It took more than ten years into the writing enterprise begin to gain the intellectual liberty I sought, and another ten years to get a handle on what to think about, but that turned out to be just the beginning. Thinking about what you want to think about for an extended period can build on itself. At my website (www.rheingold.com), you can see a great deal of what my thinking has been adding up to over the past forty years.

Me at sixteen:

Howard at 16

Me at twenty:

Howard at 20

Me at sixty-four:

Howard at 63

Excursions to the Far Side of the Mind was first published twenty-four years ago, before digital rights or networks for distributing digital texts existed. The original William Morrow edition is long out of print, and the rights have been reverted to me at my request. Two of these texts, the one about virtual communities (that article, apparently, is where the word entered popular parlance), and the one about trees as the shape of the universe, were later reprinted in Whole Earth Review. Several of these essays were originally published in Oui, Playboy, and California Living. Now that it’s easy to distribute digital texts, I’ve collaborated with e-publisher David Kudler to make these ancient essays available to 21st century readers.

In more recent decades, the territory I started exploring in Virtual Communities circa 1987 expanded into a broad beat about sociality on the Internet and then the Web. Most of my work in recent decades has focused on the consequences of digital media and networked publics. Before the digital wave came along, I wrote about a more diverse range of subjects: What causes anger? What’s it like to be in a car crash? What’s insect sex like? Do invisible airborne chemicals affect behavior? Can we control our dreams? How will people get high in the future? Will money evolve into new forms? These short pieces in the second decade of the twenty-first century re-present my explorations during my think about anything years to a wider public who may be familiar with my work on digital culture.

The illustrations in this book are derived from digital photographs of my analog oil and acrylic paintings. My mind is the only direct connection between the subject matter of the paintings and these textual excursions. They don’t illustrate the essays so much as illustrate a different facet of my creative work.

I’ve always painted. My mother, Geraldine Rheingold, was the art teacher in my elementary school in Phoenix, Arizona, in the late 1950s. Unruly students of either the unchallenged or pre-criminal variety were usually sent to the art room, where relative chaos reigned in comparison to the desks-in-a-row discipline of our homerooms. My mom believed that all humans need to express ourselves creatively, using our hands, eyes, and imagination, but that most people shut themselves down creatively when they are young in response to criticism. Someone looks over your shoulder when you’re a kid and tells you that your sketch of a horse looks nothing like a horse, so you better leave art to the professionals. My mother taught something much more important than techniques ñ she taught permission. I continued painting when I left home for college ñ one of the paintings in this book goes back to 1964, my first days in my first home away from home, at age seventeen. In 1995, when it first became possible to take pictures of my paintings with digital cameras and upload them to the Web, I started displaying them online. I don’t sell them. Now that technology makes it possible, I’ve included a selection of digital reproductions of some of my paintings in this book.

This is my mother at the age of ninety-nine, not long before she passed away. Thank you, mom, for defending my right to color outside the lines:

Geraldine Rheingold

Howard Rheingold

Mill Valley, 2012

Introduction: The Origins of Offplanet Journalism

Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passes it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain. As my colleague N. K. Humphrey neatly summed up an earlier draft of this chapter: ... memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically. When you plant a fertile meme in my mind, you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell. And this isn't just a way of talking—the meme for, say, 'belief in life after death' is actually realized physically, millions of times over, as a structure in the nervous systems of individual men the world over.

—Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

At the beginning of my writing career, I was colonized by a particularly potent meme. I now realize that my worldview was irrevocably reprogrammed the moment I saw my home town through the eyes of a martian. I've been an extraterrestrial anthropologist for more than a decade now, and in the extraterrestrial anthropology game if you don't alter your perspective regularly and unpredictably, you're not really playing fair. I've also discovered that this perspective-warping effect can be infectious when I do it right. When you read some of these reports from my years of fieldwork, it is possible that you will find your own consciousness changing. It's only ethical that I warn you that your gestalt might find itself unalterably reconfigured if you let enough of my speculations lead your thoughts beyond the bounds of your known world.

It started for me with The Martian Report, a low-budget surreal documentary I helped create in San Francisco in the mid 1970s, during the earliest days of cable television.

Marvin K Martian

The Martian Report (c. 1976)

To view more of the Martian Report, click here

The star of the show was Howard K. Martian, an anthropologist from the planet Mars who traveled to Earth to report to the rest of the galaxy about the strange antics of earthlings. I was the scriptwriter and the martian. My partner Jimmy was the director, cameraman, and producer.

Jimmy had a PortaPak, Sony's first vaguely portable videotape recorder. He strapped it to a packframe, buckled a bandolier of batteries around his waist, hefted the camera onto his shoulder, and declared himself ready to join the ranks of the video guerillas—so long as he didn't crash into anything while wandering in traffic with a hundred pounds of technology on his back. I had a spiffy red and grey satin martian observer costume made to order and blocked out the first script about a visit to the dominant religious cult on the planet. We planned to send our martian observer to participate with the gray flannel pilgrims who worshipped something called the almighty dollar at temples known as banks.

Howard K Martian

Howard K. Martian

Howard K. Martian wore a pair of insect-like antennae on his head, with bright pink and turquoise plastic flowers at the ends. On the back of my silver tunic was emblazoned the legend: Martian Bureau of Investigation. Under the tunic, a small radio-mike was taped to my body. Our first shoot was at the Bank of America World Headquarters building in San Francisco, which happened to be my temporary place of employment at that time. Jimmy installed telephoto lens on his rig, positioned himself at an advantageous line of sight within the radio perimeter of the microphone, and Howard K. Martian started approaching strangers as they left the building, asking them what they knew about the mysterious financial cult.

A counterculture shoe magnate agreed to sponsor the series, so we did thirteen weeks of field investigations, and the martian agreed to wear various examples of holistic sandles with his constume. Those thirteen weeks of extraterrestrial street theater were like a self-imposed regimen of cultural reprogramming, because I've never been able to shake the habit of looking at our native customs from the outside in. When the American Association of Anthropologists convened at the Fairmont Hotel, we gave them a dose of their own medicine by investigating them as a primitive culture.

My day job, or rather, my night job, since I worked the swing-shift, led to the first of my field reports. It was originally conceived as a way of financing my Howard K. Martian habit, since our sponsor only paid for the broadcasts, not for our efforts in producing the programs. I simply looked at my temporary job from the extraterrestrial perspective, wrote up my field notes, and sent them to the local Sunday supplement. When the San Francisco Examiner's California Living magazine bought my article on The Ultimate Cashflow, the off-planet perspective began to pay off. Ten years later, Image Magazine, the successor to California Living, published A Stroll Through Local Spacetime, my urban paleontologist's look at the Haight Ashbury, which is the least thinly-disguised martian field report, and therefore the lead essay in this collection. During the intervening decade, I managed to disguise other field reports as articles for Oui, Playboy, and The Whole Earth Review.

The present collection is the first time that these disguised investigations have been presented in their true form, along with an assortment of field reports, fabulations, and speculations that have not previously been seen outside the archives of the martian bureau of investigation. Taken together, the collection is intended to be stranger than the sum of its parts, for the effect of extraterrestrial anthropologizing is a cumulative kind of thing. For the purposes of sheer ritual taxonomy, they have been arranged in four semipermeable categories: Extraterrestrial Anthropology, Over the Edge of Science, Cognitive Technologies, and Magnetic Fieldwork. Before you embark, a second fair warning is in order: If I've done my job properly, the world will never look the same to you again after you meditate on future highs, pheromones, oneironauts, radical biology, viruses from the future, the shape of the universe, insect erotica, the anatomy of anger, the hundred-million-year-old high, the ultimate cash-flow, virtual communities and Saturday night with the technarchists.

Howard Rheingold

Mill Valley, 1988

Part One: Extraterrestrial Anthropology

A Stroll Through Local Spacetime

Shoes

We moved out of Haight Ashbury in late 1986 to the comparatively somnolent suburb of Mill Valley, north of the Golden Gate, and the daughter mentioned in this 1998 story now works at Google. The Age of Aquarius is even more anachronistic in 2012 than it had been in 1985. Haight is still a lively carnival, where hipsters who weren’t born until a quarter century after the Summer of Love now line up for the fusion tapas joint. Hippie children are a grimmer lot these days. Teenage boy alcoholics with attack dogs wearing spiked collars ñ boy and dog. Mill Valley had a notable sprinkling of poets, painters, and musicians when we moved here; most of them have been displaced by dotcom entrepreneurs, their bankers and their lawyers. My daughter and I occasionally meet in the Haight for lunch and some light time travel for both of us ñ Haight and Cole is where she learned to walk.—HR

Anyone who lives in the vicinity

of San Francisco's Haight Ashbury long enough becomes an urban paleontologist by default. It has to do with the way certain sights seem to recur spasmodically, as if history was skipping like an old record: the young person of either gender, bearing a backpack and carrying a guitar, who can be observed daily throughout the summer, striding into the Stanyan fog bank; the Deadheads and the Rainbow people parking their vans along the Panhandle during mysteriously synchronized pauses in their yearly migrations; the young blonde derelict with the blue burned-out eyes, who, I am convinced, is the model for the stand up comedian's routine about the bag-person who decides, each morning, to wear every article of clothing he owns.

Less frequently, and only if the observer is in the proper frame of mind, the shade of Neal Cassady can be seen leaning against the chain-link fence surrounding the hole in the ground where the Straight Theater used to be. Emmett Grogan, Magnolia Thunderpussy, Terry the Tramp, the pH Factor Jug Band, and Harlow (the groupie, not the movie star) have been known to make themselves visible to selected souls from time to time. In a few places, the layers of encrusted time are dense enough to induce a contact high. A trip to the bakery can drag me through four eras and five dimensions if I'm not careful about where I put my perceptions.

Unlike almost all other volatile neighborhoods, where irreversible social transformations like gentrification or urban decay replace the former occupants and occupations of the community with new demographics, the Haight seems to lurch from era to era in a disjointed, unpredictable manner. New worldviews, lifestyles, cults, trends, intoxicants, costumes, no matter how aggressive, evangelical, or voracious their adherents may be, never wholly replace the older versions. A few stubborn survivors of previous micro-cultures, going back to the prehistoric epochs before the Summer of Love, always remain to mingle with novitiates of subcultures too new to have names.

The corner of Haight and Cole is particularly rich in local archeological significance. There's the upscale fish market across the street from where the subteen skinheads hang out. Wasn't that the site of a speed-freak laundromat in the late sixties? Right over there, where the recently airborne Scottish smoked salmon now stares at a slab of pompano—wasn't that where devotees of central-nervous-system stimulants used to cluster, aiming their garble at newcomers dimwitted or weird-karmaed enough to attempt to wash laundry here?

For the last six months I've been taking my young daughter on regular afternoon strolls through locales I have explored sporadically for the past 18 years. A well-stocked stroller, I have learned, is a handy vehicle for urban field-work, since it can be used as a conversation piece if I want to hang out, a prow to move quickly through crowds when mobility is prudent, and a talisman of neutrality in hostile turf—at least for that crucial first half-second of every encounter. If you are a regular denizen of the Haight, you've seen my daughter, or, more likely, she has seen you: she's the one with the dark, laser-intensity gaze, who sweeps the perimeter for eye contact while I roll her along and survey the scene less overtly.

Time-warp is a hot commodity in the Haight. They just can't keep authentic vintage '67 bellbottom paisley velvet trousers on the racks of the newest nostalgia stores. Next to the gourmet fish shop is a place where aficionados of the 1950s can buy mint-condition Fiestaware, and 1930s freaks can find deco knickknacks. Between the two stores is a psychedelic rainbow mural that was the focus of controversy a couple of years ago. The proprietors of the time-warp shop painted over the mural when they first moved in, which they soon discovered was a matter of deep significance to more than a few old-timers in the neighborhood. Heated words were exchanged. Flyers, rallies, petitions, letters to editors, and stormy community meetings resulted in a restoration of the mural. The original artist was rounded up to apply a new layer of rainbow over the old layer of beige over the older layer of rainbow.

A year or so after the mural furor, the skins started congregating across the street. Like the punkers before them, it is hard to distinguish true sociopaths from the art students who emulate them, unless you move closer than most observers care to get. Magic-marker graffiti recently started to invade a corner of the mural. The last time I stopped for a close look at this latest mural stratum, a young lady with half a head of orange hair broke away from her group and took an interest in my daughter. It was hard not to notice the tattoo on the shaved half of the young lady's cranium: A purple hole was etched onto her scalp; a red-eyed, pink-tailed, gnarly-toothed rat peeked out of it. She couldn't have been older than fifteen. I wonder what my daughter will have to do in order to look rebellious in this environment when she hits adolescence, around the turn of the next millennium.

The skinheads were lounging a few feet away, exuding casual derision and displaying carefully constructed auras of menace. It was unlikely that any of them knew they weren't the first to pose menacingly at the precise spot where three flower children got stomped by grief-stricken, acid-and-seconal-crazed bikers in the aftermath of Chocolate George's funeral. I'd imagine that the young lady who stands there today with a leather-covered skateboard at her feet and what appear to be metal spikes emerging from her neck probably wasn't even born in 1967.

Across Haight, where Cole turns a dogleg, and behind the chain-link fence, PG&E now parks all the big yellow machines it has been using to rip up the side-streets. After a long, bitter, prototypically anarchic community debate about what to do with the long-padlocked Straight Theater, it was razed a few years back—an