End Time by G.A. Matiasz

Author:G.A. Matiasz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: thriller, scifi, zapatistas, anarchist, near future, underground press, utopian and dystopian, black bloc, oakland commune, punk and cyberpunk
Publisher: G.A. Matiasz

TWENTY-THREE

Excerpted from

“Musings on the Nature of Cybernetic CoEvolution”

Journals XDZ-XX—The California Diaries (2007)

by Hamran Mossoud

Family Archives, released posthumously, 2032

(Electrostraca #: J/AB-911032-384-150-7917)

After Oakland, I had the opportunity to meet Peter Colchis, president and founder of CyberSurveys, one of the most dynamic high-tech firms in San Jose’s Silicon Valley. I was anxious to meet him, having read his book New Directions in Artificial Intelligence, and we discussed his “cybersome” and cyberorganic” models the first day, between lunch and dinner. Peter began by stating that the cyberpunk metaphors of the 1980’s/90’s for the “space” created by computer networking and information exchanges (and perceived by such tools as virtual reality), were inaccurate descriptions in that they employed external analogs. The notion of cyberspace—the digital/electronic universe fashioned by the collective interaction of all of its users—no less than the idea of a net—an information ocean in which reside islands— posed external references, when the only appropriate perspective was internal. And while those science fiction writers who originated these metaphors never understood them as totalizing descriptions, those who adopted these terms behaved as if they described a new orthodoxy. Hence, Peter’s cyberorganic work at the turn of the century.

“Ultimately, the market determined which terminology was viable,” Peter said. “When CyberSurveys released our VR packages based on a ‘cybersome/ cyberorganic’ model, we quickly outsold and replaced ones using a ‘cyberspace’ or ‘information net’ framework. Cyberorganic principles proved more accurate in constructing virtual reality.”

Our conversations were complex and wide-ranging, and I am not certain I can do justice to the scope and intricacy of Peter’s thinking even as I attempt this summary. The term “cybersome,” literally “cybernetic body,” has replaced the notion of “cyberspace.” Originally composited from coral reef, African termite colony, human genome, and human biophysical mathematical models, cybersome has been shortened to ‘some in current usage. First, Peter contended that there is no practical “outside” to cyberorganic reality. Those who create it and function in it are inside of it. They ARE the “body digital.” Cyberorganics postulates that a definite “body digital” exists, and therefore does possess form. An outside exists as well, however it is not possible to step outside of the cyberorganic body, the cybersome, in order to apprehend it. Its out-side shape can be imagined with art or philosophy, but it can not be experienced. Aboriginal peoples, theoretically outside of the “body digital,” have no means to see or otherwise perceive it. An information tissue is rapidly spreading around the world, with only the few remaining aboriginal regions outside of its grasp. Even those who parasitize upon this electronic flesh, or who seek to cause it disease, are inside of it.

I argued that this is a mere quibbling over semantics. After all, everything exists within Einsteinian space-time, space-time having a shape and in theory an outside. According to quantum physics, ours is not the sole universe. And to a cell the body within which it functions is the universe. Yet Peter insisted that the change in metaphor makes an important point. The universe as

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