Tripod Interview: R.U. Sirius

Tripod Home | New | TriTeca | Work/Money | Politics/Community | Living/Travel | Planet T | Daily Scoop
LIVING & TRAVEL

R.U. Sirius
interviewed by Emma Taylor on February 21, 1996

"It's very weird stuff, it's just like the whole thing is some weird precognition fevered dream of what's going to happen in the world."

R.U. Sirius co-authored "How to Mutate and Take Over the World." The authors call the book "an exploded post-novel" -- it follows the Net to the year 2002, through a combination of fictional interviews, newspaper clippings and email diaries. R.U. Sirius is also co-founder and former editor-in-chief of the original cyberculture magazine Mondo 2000.
Eighteen months ago, when they proposed the book online, R.U. Sirius and St. Jude had no idea that the government would be so quick to act out their musings on draconian censorship of the Net.

Tripod: Did you get lucky with the timing of this book, or did you see the Decency Act coming?
RUS: We got kind of lucky, I guess. I have mixed feelings about it. In some ways I wish all this stuff hadn't happened before the book was released, because it makes us look unoriginal. People aren't going to know that we thought of all this stuff a year and a half ago. And that's not the only thing that's happened that also seems to be happening in the real world. Even like the Joan Collins lawsuit with Random House, about not finishing her book. It's very weird stuff, it's just like the whole thing is some weird precognition fevered dream of what's going to happen in the world. Which is scary if you think about the ending! Is the world really going to end in a nanotech disaster involving Key Lime pie? I'm beginning to believe that it is.
Tripod: Did the real world reflection of your book take some of the fun our of your whole project? I was looking at your Mutate Project on the Web, and a lot of the submissions seem more serious than your book, now that censorship of the Net is a real threat. Is it less fun now that it's not a fantasy?
RUS: I don't know about that. In some ways it makes it all the more interesting and fun. It was a black comedy from the beginning, and it was definitely intended to be a reflection of where our world is headed, although I don't think it was intended to be exactly an accurate prediction. And some of the things in there are already things that happened in a different way than the way we set them up in the book. So it is a work of fiction. I'm used to laughing, and black humor is about laughing in the face of horror, anyway, so a fact that a lot of this is coming to pass doesn't make things look any less funny, I don't think.
Tripod: you talk a lot about media pranks in your book. To what extent is the book itself a media prank? You pre-empt everyone's reviews and contempt within the book, so there's really nothing left for people to say about it.
RUS: Yeah, yeah. There are a whole bunch of levels at which the book is a media prank, and if it's effective, I think that how it operates in the world also becomes part of the media prank. One of the things that we started on the Well that we're also going to start on the Web site, is that we're encouraging people to write angry and upset letters to the Christian Coalition, to Ralph Reed, and Bob Dole, Tipper Gore, various people, underlining passages in the book. We're trying to raise some kind of response.
So the media pranks continue beyond the book. Yeah, the book itself is totally -- I mean, the fact that Ballantine is publishing it. We included about a page and a half of instructions on how to make your own credit card, actually, we included a credit card scam, not so much because we want to encourage people to make credit cards, just to see if we could get away with it, and get Ballantine Books to publish something like that.
We actually threw a bunch of stuff into the book that we expected that they would want to censor, as sort of a Trojan horse, so that they wouldn't notice a lot of other stuff that they would want to censor. They wound up only going after two things in the book, one text and one visual. The text -- in the original thing, where the guy sends the offensive email via PGP to the White House, instead of Socks, it was Chelsea. So instead of being the cat, it was Chelsea Clinton that was getting -- and they were rightly offended by that. It was intended to be offensive, but nobody was out to hurt Chelsea Clinton's feelings any more than they've already been hurt. So we agreed to recall that. And also there was a picture on the page with the thing about Al Gore being an alien in the White House -- the picture there actually had a big penis attached to it, and that was whited out by the people who designed the book for Ballantine.
Tripod: One of the plots in your book is your relationship with Trudy, your editor at Ballantine. Do you think Ballantine understood what they were getting into?
RUS: I don't think they understood. The original book proposal is actually available on the Web. There was no sense that there would be this meta-plot, this sub-dialogue about the book itself; that sort of came up. We didn't know we were going to do it either. It's the same process that anybody goes through, I think, in writing fiction. You never know where it's going to take you, so it just came up, it seemed like a good idea.
Basically, it came out of the idea that there really would be these questions, that an editor would ask, and that a reader would ask, in our book, saying, "I can't understand this, can you explain it to me?" And it became an excuse to actually go in and explain things to people. That's how it started, and then it turned entirely into something else. It became a reflection of the fact that we were trying to write this really complicated novel. We'd set up a very complicated plot structure that we pretty much gave up on.
Our deadline was actually four months, and we did the whole thing in six or seven months. I'm convinced that if you really want to write a novel, that you should take a couple of years with it. So this became an exploded post-novel -- and all that is real, in a sense, that whole dialogue. It's a reflection of our frustration, and also of the speed and the fragmentation of our own lives, trying to cope with this project.
Tripod: If it's such a post-novel, why did you write it as a book, and not on the Web?
RUS: Well, to be honest, it was just another business deal. We could get an advance for writing a book. Originally -- and this is reflected in the book -- it was a CD-ROM proposal. I was also flinging some book proposals at an agent, I actually sent him seven different proposals at once, which sort of is typical of the way I write, and partly a reflection of what's in the book. Anyway, he chose this one, which didn't make me that happy, because it was the most difficult one to realize. The other books were just a collection of essays, pretty straightforward. This was the most complicated one. But this was the one that seemed to be interesting to people. So we went forward from there.
Once we got into it, it became pretty all-involving, and it remains an ongoing process. It's funny, because I haven't been able to read the book for a couple of months, and I've read it about twenty times in process, and now I'm onto the next phase of this thing. I look back on this book as an effective first promotion for our overall project, and not particularly as an effective piece of propaganda. It's a very intentionally self-sabotaging piece of propaganda.

"We're turning into part human, part machine."

Tripod: Has anyone told you that you've sold out? You moved from this underground hacker culture into mainstream publishing ...
RUS: Well, it hasn't really gotten out there a lot yet, so I haven't got that kind of response, and I'm not getting that kind of response from the people who are participating in the Mutate Project. Generally speaking, I don't think people are as punk-unsophisticated as they were four or five years ago. If you can get a book out, or if you can get a record out, or a CD, or whatever it is that you're doing, more power to you. As long as you remain authentic to your own voice and your own project, you can go in all directions at once. You go with the mainstream publishing industry, and you go with the really populist media that's evolving now, and you just do it all.
Tripod: But hackers used to be their own subculture, they used to be weird. Now Sandra Bullock plays a hacker on film, and it's not weird or strange anymore. What happened to that whole subculture?
RUS: Well, it continues, and it grow larger. I think that the hacker ethic continues, largely among a younger crowd. Teenagers come along and they have their own approach to it. They are underground, and if the media wants to pay some attention to them, they're usually happy to be a dancing monkey for them for a few minutes, and then they go back to whatever work they're up to. We have such a high level of media saturation in our culture, it's such a high attention culture that everybody gets under the spotlight at one point or another, and it's just not that big a deal, really.
Tripod: What are you planning on doing next?
RUS: Well we're continuing on with this Mutate Project and trying to bring more people into the public forum, and spinning off from that into a Web-based magazine.
Tripod: What's the goal of this? Does it have much to do with the Communications Decency Act?
RUS: No, well, it has a little bit to do with it, but the goal of the magazine really, it will be an online library, and the goal is to really organize a kind of database for the notions that are brushed up against in the book. One being how to take over the world, the ways in which one might be able to formulate political and social change, kind of around a mix of a liberal and a libertarian agenda, having how do you deceive scarcity, and how do you encourage freedom, both at the same time. So that will be one aspect of it, and the other aspect, that got kind of short shrift in the book, will be about mutation, about the process by which we're being cyborged. We're turning into part human, part machine. What does genetic engineering mean, what are the possibilities of nanotechnology, etcetera. Hopefully it'll be a participatory database.
Tripod: I saw something on your own site about the election. What did you think of Buchanan's win in New Hampshire?
RUS: Well we have a parody going up today, but I don't think, realistically, that we're going to have any kind of impact on their actions. I always run a joke campaign, but I never try to draw too much attention to it. I just offer my name as the only possible reply to the political situation. So I don't know, something may develop around this election. I certainly think it's a pretty sad situation. It focuses people's attention on where they think this culture and this society should be going in the future.
Tripod: Where do you see the Web a year from now?
RUS: The Web. Well, you never know, I mean, I didn't expect the Web, when it happened. We were in the middle of writing this book when the Web took off, I didn't even deal with it for several months, because I was busy writing this book. I think that there's going to be more broadcast-type materials, it's going to become easier to do multimedia on there. I think eventually it will become more pleasing, I don't think it's that pleasing an experience right now because of all the waiting involved. I think it will just go in all directions at once, it will contain more information, it will be better for scholarship, it'll be better for media, it'll be better for hype ...
Tripod: Will it be censored?
RUS: Well, it is, in a sense. There's a level of intimidation already involved in this bill, that's causing people to look twice at what they do. There's a great deal of self-censorship, so, yeah, I think it is censored, I think it will be censored. Sort of like how people deal with drug laws. A lot of people choose to ignore them, and a lot of people choose to obey them. Only, in this case, you're right out front with whatever you're doing, it's public. But they can't keep track of everything. I think enforcement of censorship on the Net will probably be sort of random, like it is with the drug laws. If they want to get somebody, then they can use this law to get somebody.
Tripod: Are they going to get you?
RUS: Well, my hope is usually they don't try to get people who are public. They don't go after the big mouths, because they don't want to give them publicity. If they do, let them. We have established a couple of rules for our board. We're not going to have anything that could be construed as child pornography on it, and we probably won't have any visuals that include genitals on it, and on that level, we're compromising to try to protect our own asses, basically. Other than that, I don't think there's going to be anything on there that's going to provoke that kind of a bust. I think at first, they're just going to go after child pornography, stuff like that.

The Mutate Project Forum can be found at http://www.onworld.com:80/mutate/

Read excerpts from "How to Mutate and Take Over the World"

For more on R.U. Sirius's antics, check out his Web of Deceit

Map | Search | Help | Send Us Comments