Collected Essays (15 page)

I was a little nervous going to a hackers convention—I mean, was I a poser? But it was the most welcoming atmosphere I’ve felt since I went to my very first science fiction convention, Seacon at Brighton in ‘80. In straight academia there’s not enough money and they usually don’t welcome newcomers. But in science fiction, and again in the hackers world, I got a feeling of “Come on in! The more the merrier! There’s enough for all of us! We’re having fun, yeeeee-haw!”

Some of the guys at Hackers had read some of my books, which made me happy, and we stayed up all night playing with my CAM-6. Like many others, I’d brought my machine with me. One guy explained to me why he wanted to have his head frozen. He had a zit on his nose, and I had to wonder about freezing the zit, too. At the end of the conference we posed for a big group picture. To get the right expression on our faces, we chanted, “Hack, hack, hack, hack…” They all seemed like such contented guys—happy because they actually knew how to do something.

As I write this essay, it’s spring ‘88, and I’m teaching courses in computer graphics, assembly language, and cellular automata. Teaching CAs has been the greatest, and I’ve just finished writing my first disk of programs, nice fast color cellular automata programs that run on DOS computers.

Yesterday I was at another computer meeting, this one mostly chip designers, in Asilomar near Monterey. One of the guys was giving a talk about a great new chip he’s building and someone asks, “How much will it cost?” and he comes back real fast, “Hey, I’d like to give them away.” Another guy had a bottle of liquid nitrogen to show off a superconductor he’d gotten from Edmund Scientific. When we got tired of that he poured a lot of liquid nitrogen into a reflecting pool. The liquid nitrogen froze itself little boats of water that it sat on, boiling, finally leaving one small crystal of dry ice. Another guy took me out to the garage and showed me an electronic lock that he’d designed for his Corvette. There’s a three-position toggle switch by the door, and to unlock the car, you jiggle the switch sixteen times up or down from center. The whole glove compartment was full of chips to make the system work. It was all he could do to keep from telling me the combination. Someone else had robot cars that seek light. Another one had programmed flashing electronic jewelry…and of course I brought my CAM-6.

A lot of play, but beyond that, there’s a real sense here of being engaged in something I’m starting to think of as “The Great Work,” some kind of noble overarching all-encompassing quest. But it’s all high stress, too, in a California kind of way. If you’re not plugged in and working at staying that way, you can slip down real fast. Take Farley.

A couple of months ago I saw Farley’s picture in the paper. It took me a minute to understand what he’d done. He’d gone to a company that had fired him, and had killed seven people because some girl there wouldn’t go out with him. I thought of all the times I’d wanted to tell Farley what an asshole he was. I was glad I hadn’t. And then I was scared—what if he’d fallen in love with someone in the math department and had gone on his rampage there?

Something that really got me was the newspaper descriptions of the seven people who’d died. For four of them, there were no facts available. They were simply additional human computer fodder who’d drifted out here to make some money. No friends, no connections, just a tiny expensive room in a garden apartment complex.

One of my students in the CA course works at the place where Farley shot the people. “We heard the shooting,” he told me, “and we went and hid behind the big computer.” Somehow that’s very heartbreaking to me—the people here can be so fucked and unreliable—and the only place to hide is behind the mainframe.

Note on “Welcome to Silicon Valley”

Written in 1988.

Appeared in
Science Fiction Eye
, August, 1988.

Not long after I wrote “Welcome To Silicon Valley,” I was offered a job at Autodesk, Inc., of Sausalito, CA. Autodesk makes a very popular computer-aided-design product called AutoCAD. My title at Autodesk was Mathenaut, and I worked in their Advanced Technology Division, continuing to teach halftime at San Jose State.

The word “mathenaut” came from Norman Kagan’s classic tale “The Mathenauts.” I liked that word so much that I also used it for the title of my multi-author anthology,
Mathenauts: Tales of Mathematical Wonder
, (Arbor House, 1987).

In my first two years at Autodesk, I wrote a lot of the computer code for two software products. They were
CA Lab: Rudy Rucker’s Cellular Automata Laboratory
(Autodesk, 1989), and
James Gleick’s Chaos: The Software
(Autodesk, 1990). The next Autodesk I got involved with was, oddly enough, cyberspace. William Gibson’s word had caught on to the extent that “cyberspace” was, for a time, a preferred synonym for what is also called artificial reality or virtual reality.

The guys in the Autodesk Advanced Tech Division shipped the “Autodesk Cyberspace Developer’s Kit” early in 1991. The package was a library of computer programs meant to make it easier for programmers to create virtual reality worlds of their own. As it happened, the product was a complete flop. But during the development phase I had fun using our newly created cyberspace tools to look at tumbling hypercubes and to ride around on a chaotic 3D curve known as the Lorenz attractor. It was a good job while it lasted. The catch was that I wasn’t writing much anymore.

Hacking Code

Hacking is like building a scale-model cathedral out of toothpicks, except that if one toothpick is out of place the whole cathedral will disappear. And then you have to feel around for the invisible cathedral, trying to figure out which toothpick is wrong. Debuggers make it a little easier, but not much, since a truly screwed-up cutting-edge program is entirely capable of screwing up the debugger as well, so that then it’s like you’re feeling around for the missing toothpick with a stroke-crippled claw-hand. But, ah, the dark dream beauty of the hacker grind against the hidden wall that only you can see, the wall that only you wail at, you the programmer, with the brand new tools that you make up as you go along, your special new toothpick lathes and jigs and your realtime scrimshaw shaver, you alone in the dark with your wonderful tools. [Rudy Rucker,
The Hacker and the Ants
(William Morrow).]

On a good day, I think of hacking as a tactile experience, like reaching into a tub of clay and kneading and forming the material into the shapes of my desires.

A computer program is a virtual machine that you build by hand. Hacking is like building a car by building all of the parts in the car individually. The good thing is that you have full control, the bad thing is that the process can take so much longer than you expect it to. Are you sure you feel like stamping out a triple-Z O-ring gasket? And synthesizing the plastic from which to make the gasket? The hacker says, “Yaar! Sounds like fun!”

Of course it does get easier as you build more and more. Often as not, you can re-use old pieces of code that you hacked for other projects. A hacker develops a nice virtual garage of “machine parts” that he or she can reuse. As a beginner, you start out using prefab parts made by others, but sooner or later, you’re likely to grit on down to the lowest machine levels to see just how those parts really work.

To be a writer you need something you want to write about; to be a hacker you need something to hack about. You need to have an obsession, a vision that you want to turn into a novel, or into a virtual machine. It’s going to take you so long to finish that you will need a fanatic’s obsession to see a big project through. Essential in either case is the simple act of
not giving up
, of going back into it over and over again.

I think the most interesting things to hack are programs which turn the computer into a window to a different reality. Programs which express true computer nature. Chaos, fractals, Artificial Life, cellular automata, genetic algorithms, Virtual Reality, hyperspace—these are lovely areas that the computer can see into.

I once heard a hacker compare his computer to Leuwenhoek’s microscope, so strong was his feeling that he was peering into new worlds. In an odd way, the most interesting worlds can be found when this new “microscope” looks at itself, perhaps entering a chaotic feedback loop that can close in on some strange attractor.

There are, of course, lame-butts who think hacking is about grubbing scraps of information about war and money. What a joke. Hacking is for delving into the hidden machinery of the universe.

The universe? Didn’t I just say that the coolest hacks are in some sense centered on an investigation of what the computer itself can do? Yes, but the computer is a model of the universe.

Sometimes schizos think the universe is a computer—in a bad kind of way. Like that everything is gray and controlled, and distant numbers are being read off in a monotone, and somewhere a supervisor is tabulating your ever-more-incriminating list of sins.

But in reality, the universe is like a parallel computer, a computer with no master program, a computer filled with self-modifying code and autonomous processes—
a space of computation
, if you will. A good hack can capture this on a simple color monitor. The self-mirroring screen becomes an image of the world at large.
As above, so below.

The correspondence between computers and reality changes the way you understand the world. If you know about fractals, then clouds and plants don’t look the same. Once you’ve seen chaotic vibrations on a screen, you recognize them in the waving of tree branches and in the wandering of the media’s eye. Cellular automata show how social movements can emerge from individual interactions. Virtual reality instructs you in the beauty of a swooping flock of birds. Artificial Life and genetic algorithms show how intelligent processes can self-organize amidst brute thickets of random events. Hyperspace programs let you finally see into the fourth dimension and to recognize that kinky inside-out reversals are part and parcel of your potentially infinite brain.

Hacking teaches that the secret of the universe need not be so very complex, provided that the secret is set down in a big enough space of computation equipped with feedback and parallelism. Feedback means having a program take its last output as its new input. Parallelism means letting the same program run at many different sites. The universe’s physics is the same program running in parallel everywhere, repeatedly updating itself on the basis of its current computation. Your own psychology is a parallel process endlessly revising itself.

Hacking is a yoga, but not an easy one. How do you start? Taking a course on one of the “object-oriented” programming languages Java or C++ the probably the best way to start; or you might independently buy a C++ compiler and work through the manual’s examples. And then find a problem that is your own, something you really want to see, whether it’s chaos or whether it’s just a tic-tac-toe program. And then start trying to make your vision come to life. The computer will help to show you the way, especially if you pay close attention to your error messages, use the help files—and read the fuckin’ manual. It’s a harsh yoga; it’s a path to mastery.

Note on “Hacking Code”

Written 1995.

Appeared in Mark Frauenfelder, Carla Sinclair, and Gareth Branwyn, eds.,
The Happy Mutant Handbook,
Riverhead Books, 1995.

Steven Levy’s 1984 book,
Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution
, had been an inspiration to me before moving to Silicon Valley, and I was proud to become part of the scene. I met Levy in 1986, quite soon after moving to California, at the second of annual “Hackers Conferences” held near San Jose. This was the point in time when the media were just starting to use “hacker” in the negative sense of “computer criminal,” and we were all very annoyed about this.

Mark Frauenfelder was a very pleasant and amusing man whom I’d met soon after moving to California, Carla Sinclair was his wife, and Gareth Branwyn was a hacker friend of theirs. My daughter Georgia was just starting to work as a book designer in 1995, and she did the layout for
The Happy Mutant Handbook
.

Five Flavors of Cyberspace

I’m going to discuss five interrelated strands of cyberspace. First, there is cyberspace in the sense that cyberpunk science fiction writers initially used it. Second, there is cyberspace in the sense of Virtual Reality (VR). Third, there is cyberspace as the locale of the cultural cyberpunk phenomenon. Fourth, there is cyberspace as the worldwide computer network. The fifth flavor circles back to the first—it’s the blended vision of cyberspace that I wrote about in my novel,
The Hacker and the Ants
after working in Silicon Valley for a few years.

The Science Fiction Brain-Plug

One of the characteristic bits of technology in cyberpunk science-fiction is a direct man-to-machine interface, sometimes known as a “brain-plug.” I first read of about being plugged into machines in an SF paperback back in 1961.

“It was an odd room, a short of shapeless, plastic-lined cocoon without furnishings. The thing had floated submerged in the fluid. It lay on the floor now, limbs twisting spasmodically.

“It was male: the long, white beard was proof of that. It was a pitiful thing, a kind of caricature of humanity, a fantastically hairy gnome curled blindly into a fetal position. It was naked; its skin where it showed through the matted hair, was grub-white and wrinkled from the long immersion.

“It had floated in this room in its gently moving nest of hair, nourished by the thick, fleshlike cord trailing from a tap protruding through the wall to where it had been grafted to the navel, dreaming the long, slow, happy, fetal dreams.” [
James Gunn, “Name Your Pleasure,” 1954. Reprinted in his anthology,
The Joy Makers
, (Bantam)
.]