the late 80s early 90s VR scene was a wild psychedelic philosophical wonderland and I really wish we had more of this sort of thing today. heres an article by John Perry Barlow from @2000_mondo Issue 2

we start with a @GreatDismal quote

we proceed to disembodiment and the question of angela dancing on the heads ogborn's transposed, with virtualized humans as ersatz angels -- are we visitors to this space like angels, messengers from supreme reality?

more disembodiment, as well as some philosophical connections

"It's Disneyland for epistemologists"

"Cyberspace is a ready crawling with delighted acid heads."

the cyberspace in question is a low resolution, low poly, forest in space with mouths on the trees

this surrealism was the bread and butter of early VR

'"Our brains are learning how to exhale as well as inhale in the datasphere," Leary said.'

Leary of course being Timothy Leary, the guy who popularized LSD in the 60s

when I read things like this I cant help but think about the ways in which this is affected by the nature of the computer world until that point, and the nature of VR until that point

we talk about about digital natives, and folx born into the net, etc but we really need to ask, what SORT of digitality are they born into?

my first exposures to the net were through AOL in 1996 or so. a walled garden that had a non-trivial emphasis on business shopping

how did that frame my comprehension of the net?

kids today are born into a world with a handful of dominant companies and websites, which act as pseudo-walled gardens of enclosed territoriality

tiktoks live on tiktok unless someone goes through the effort of transferring them

and then, where are you transferring them to? youtube. twitter. facebook. more enclosed territories

but the folx in this article? the folx who were living and breathing the incipient VR revolution in 1990? they were free from these enclosures

and its not just an enclosure of STUFF, of the net, of VR, etc.

its an enclosure of the imagination. computers and the net and VR have been colonized by corporate parasites to such an extent that its hard to imagine being as free from their mind altering effects as Barlow is

not mind altering in the Cambridge Analytica Is Turning My Uncle Racist sense

mind altering in the Your Memeplex Only Contains Corporate Memes And You Can Only Think Corporate Thoughts

but Barlow and Leary and Lanier and the rest, they were also serious acid heads

LSD creates weird and wonderful connections between widely disparate parts of the mind, letting you think wild new thoughts

so maybe we need a new Computerized LSD culture

anyone got some cid?

im quite serious about this too. Oakland has legalized magic mushrooms so maybe thats a better start, but like, let's start a new Cult of the Psychedelic Computer where our highest sacrament is to take lots of drugs and design weird computer systems of the future

and howd this situation get this way I wonder? how did we end up in this place of hypercorporatized garbage?

i mean no small part of this is capitalism. money smells a way to grow itself and off it goes, the corporate parasite takes off

but these things were genuinely hard and expensive in the late 80s and early 90s. they werent us, they didnt have predecessors 30 years earlier doing some heavy lifting. so of course they had to eventually try to become self sustaining businesses. within capitalism, profit is all

but we are here now. we have dirt cheap electronics and 3d printers and laser cutters and hackerspaces that make these accessible and cheap-to-free. anyone who wants a computer and has a few bucks can get a raspberry pi. we're no longer in the same world of resource scarcity

we are in a position now that folx of 1990 only dreamed of, we just have to choose to build the new infrastructure of the Weird Cyberdelic, rather than hoping someone ELSE will build it for us

my advice if you want to see a better, brighter, cyber future, is to learn to code, learn some electronics hacking, learn some physical hacking so you can build objects (3d printing, laser cutting, maybe cnc milling?)

share these skills freely with others

and most importantly: go BUILD things, and share the designs you've made, the software you've made. put some really nasty copyright license on it that companies shy away from, maybe GPL but better yet, the anticapitalist license

oh and maybe do drugs of course

thinking a bit more on this:

i used to be of the opinion that trying to DIY everything yourself was often a waste of money b/c you can usually get lots of things cheaper and better from a hardware store or fabric store or whatnot, and for a lot of things thats still true

but i think being in the habit of trying to DIY a solution to a problem before buying one is actually kind of really good. yeah you might spend some extra money on this or that, but the habit of thought, the instinct, to MAKE rather than BUY, thats important

and when you dont have the skills or resources to make a solution, the habit of first asking your fellow dorks, instead of trying to shop for a solution, is important too -- if someone else can help you out, thats good! its an opportunity to learn, and you strengthen social bonds

im of the opinion that the most important thing that we do, for building a better future, is develop new cultures of anarchistic community and creativity, so the personal habit of first trying to solve problems directly yourself, and then through help of your community, is good

i dont think we're going to see our way through the corporatized computer world by merely buying things. consumerism wont solve it. having all the gadgets in the world wont solve it even, tho having good tools is important

the only way is to have the culture and community for it

a new, totalizing, culture. a religion of anarchic hackerdom, where the highest commandment is to respond, as @2000_mondo''s St Jude described, to the thought "I can't do that, I don't know how, I don't have the skills" with the rebuttal, "well I think I'll do it then"