(message from Mark Thompson to DVG, 1-Feb-92)

Here's a dump of quasi-paragraphs for a 0th-draft of the broadside:

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The notion of Language and Intelligence as emergent phenomena in sufficiently
complex turbulent systems implies that evolution can be stimulated by
increasing the levels of both complexity and chaos.
Meme Theory. Language and Image as computer-viruses of the human mind.

Applied chaos linguistics:
Verbal collage: Brion Gysin and William S. Burrough's work with cut-ups.
Noise projection techniques/threshold modulation...
Tape Loop induction of auditory hallucinations  (Lilly)
Glossolalia of the Internal Dialog -    (McKenna, Castaneda)
The still, small voice within babbing away in unknown tongues, dancing to
a different drummer high on silicon and psilocybin...   (Thoreau-Pentacost)
Projective techniques from psychology (verbal rorschach blots)
artificial glossolalia/xenoglossy/automatic writing/ranters
Semantically blind chaotic processes... Semantic noise... induced metaphor

Light-to-sound synaesthesia. Interactive media. The music dances to YOU.

Jacking in: direct brain stimulation. Scalp feeds.
We've been working with a system that allows a group of people to
share a consensus visual/interior experience using scalp electrodes,
headphones and photic stimuli.  Of these, the scalp electrode system is
perhaps the first step toward "Jacking In" to a consensus cyberspace.

Cyberdelic Shamanism - new practices that can only arise in cultures with
advanced technologies. As ancient cultures used available materials
(psychotropic plants, cave painting, dance, ritual, crystals, sacred sites,
megaliths) post-industrial cybernetic cultures use the available technology
(computers, neurochemistry, electronic media, genetic engineering,
holography, money) to access and explore new psycho-spiritual dimensions.

Psychotherapy, hypnosis, pharmacology, direct brain stimulation,
computer graphics, mind machines, biofeedback - all of these and more -
are the raw materials from which new shamanic practices are being fabricated.

Computer graphics have been compared to the invention of the telescope, since
computer graphics allow the visualization of complex theoretical phenomena that
otherwise have no visual counterpart in the natural or mental world.
(who said that? Minsky?)

McLuhan (The medium is the message) - the novel class of messages that a
new medium MAKES POSSIBLE has more of an impact on culture than the actual
content of those messages. New kinds of lies become possible, and new
truths emerge to which human culture has no prior immunity. You can get
away with anything in the chaotic interface between old social orders and
new media.

Mass access to technologicial means of consciousness alteration are
intrinsically anarchic and Non-hierarchical: Networks rather than Pyramids.
The priesthoods and lineages of the past are no longer viable models for
organizing culture.

This may explain the historical tendencies of such hierarchies (governments,
organized religions, corporations) to attempt to supress these technologies
when it is no longer possible for an elite to control access to them.

The existing institution of the stock corporation may, however, provide
a escape route from hierarchical toward anarchic social organization:
a widely-held stock corporation with a decentralized networked decision-making
process, owned entirely by the people who produce and consume it's products,
resources and energy is very nearly a realization of the ideals of
Anarcho-Syndicalism. Such anarcorporations can be created and liquidated
on an ad-hoc basis as the need for them arises or dissipates.

Money and Information as hive pheromones.
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Ancient spiritual practices were handed across generations in an oral
tradition. Like a game of "Telephone" these traditions were distorted by
interpersonal noise residing in the culture and personalities of their
practitioners. This process was low-fidelity at best; but is high fidelity
desirable? Noise and distortions between generations and individuals may well
be the mutations that allow a spiritual tradition to evolve, opening the
process to individual interpretation, innovation and improvisation.

How will new spiritual practices arise and be transmitted in a cybernetic
culture? What constitutes interpersonal contact or an "oral tradition"
in a virtual environment of interactive media with electronic recording,
playback and mass replication and distribution of these recordings and
signals? What sorts of distortion and noise mutations can arise and be
amplified, replicated, edited, synthesized in a chaotic information
environment where these processes take place at the speed of light,
and trial-and-error testing is performed by large numbers of individuals
and groups, asynchronously and in parallel?