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The Mondo 2000 User’s Guide To The New Edge
by Rudy Rucker, R.U. Sirius and Queen Mu
(HarperCollins, 317 pages, $26.75)
We’re standing right
on the edge of a brave new world. The
authors of The Mondo 2000 Guide to the New Edge live out there already, and
now they’ve cranked out a book explaining it all for you, the latent Luddite.
By their lights, the brave new world is comprised
of computers, second-hand music, computers, drugs, computers, robots, drugs,
French literary theory, drugs, conspiracy theories, computers and more computers.
This brave new world is post-everything. In mondo 2000, there is
no literature except for science fiction and “appropriation” by people like
postmodern “author” Kathy Acker. William Burroughs is deemed a god-like figure
because he manages to be a drug-sucking literary provocateur who writes science
fiction, thereby scoring some kind of New Edge stand-up triple. Tomorrow’s
soundtrack is a collage of other, older music, sampled and reprocessed and
pre-masticated for your listening enjoyment. There is no art — only montages
of found images scanned into graphics programs.
There is no reality. There is plenty of virtual
reality, which is almost the same as plain old reality, but a lot less trouble,
since you don’t have to leave the house.
The authors bravely contend that this is the information
age, which it is, to a degree. Unfortunately, they have failed to notice
that information is not always automatically good. Sometimes it’s dumb and
making an effort to digest it is a waste of time. But these people see information
as an end in and of itself. If information is good, then more of the same
information is, naturally, better. And that helps explain why this book is
so tedious. The same severely limited range of topics gets chewed over endlessly,
though under slightly different names.
The only bad information is anything that is disseminated
by The Media, which, as we all know, is a vast, monolithic, single-minded
conspiracy bent on infecting everyone with its own decidedly non-groovy
version of consensus reality. And opposing consensus reality is what this
authorial triumvirate says its life and the New Edge are all about.
Calling them authors is overly generous. They
did scribble some of the passages here. Mostly what they did was chop up
back issues of the magazine they run — Mondo 2000 — and arrange them in this
book.
Computers, we’re assured repeatedly, will save
us all from consensus reality and its attendant evils. And if our computers
should become momentarily boring, well, psychotropic drugs work almost as
well.
There’s a cheery, maddeningly naïve optimism
glinting through every sentence. Much of this book is reminiscent of 1948
editions of Popular Mechanics magazine wherein it was fearlessly predicted
that by 1960 we would all the taking the transatlantic undersea train to
Paris in two hours and using our personal atomic gyrocopters to zap off to Moscow
for lunch on weekdays.
The book is laid out in a fractured way. Being
non-linear is very much a point of pride out on the Frontier of Tomorrow.
It’s also convenient, because it renders any demand for coherence, intellectual
rigor or reasoning pointless. The principal factoids and info-nuggets run
down the left side of each page. The right side of the page contains explanatory
blurbs meant to help the uninitiated figure out what’s being talked about
in the verbiage on the left. The cumulative effect is like trying to watch
a documentary on videotape while somebody else hits the pause button every
15 seconds to explain what you’re looking at.
There you are, zapping along in the amoral, postmodern
ether of tomorrow, or just rapping in the airless confines of the Cyberspace
Mindless Fellowship Pavilion when suddenly one of the authors starts talking
like a stoned high school student circa 1973.
In this case, Mr. Sirius: “It’s an article of
faith among denizens of the New Edge that we are living in media saturation,
where simulations of the real have utterly replaced the real. For us, the
media — both the one-way broadcasting media and the interactive media — are
a playground and battleground for competing fantasies. Media pranksters use
the mass media’s appetite for the sensational, and its inevitable reduction
of experience and information to lowest-common-denominator clichés,
as a way of getting attention for our own activities, and as a way of exposing
the utter fraud of modern politics.” On the heavy profundity scale, that
statement — like countless others throughout the book — is distressingly close
to “No man, rully . . . have you ever, like, rully looked at your hands, man?”
Every page of this book contains one person or
another putting a frighteningly inordinate amount of faith in what is, after
all, only a tool. And the fact that psychoactive drugs alter one’s perceptions
by briefly jiggering one’s brain chemistry does not alter certain stubbornly
consistent facts about bad old consensus reality. Plenty of people are convinced
they can fly as a result of swallowing a lot of LSD, just as they may believe
they can fly as a result of spending too much time locked in the virtual-reality
mode of some computer. But when they hit ground at 120 feet per second it
becomes obvious that sometimes consensus reality just won’t be made to understand
how darned old-fashioned and outmoded it is.
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