Both Bob and Kali support the activities of more aggressive monkeywrenchers, but fear keeps them from going on those missions. ''Not everyone's gotta risk their lives,'' Kali explains. "They've gotten chased by guys with bats.''
''But what they're doing is essential,'' Bob adds. "It's a completely natural response. When the body gets sick, it makes more white blood cells. These guys are like that. We're like that, too, to an extent.''
From a cyberian perspective, ecoterrorists are natural generators of negative feedback in the great Gaian organism. Even Brendan O'Regan, the reserved and mild-mannered vice president for research at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, acknowledges the place of ecotage as a valuable meme against the violation of the planet:
''Even if you disagree with the tactic, they're pointing out that industry is generating a kind of anarchy toward the environment. Ecoterrorists generate an anarchy back. There is an extreme that is driving it. Ecotage is sabotage on behalf of the environment. It's done rationalizing that due process of law and ethical concern is not being followed by the owners of the system, so `fuck them.' And a lot of this stuff will be happening in concert with and through technologies like the fax, copiers, the computer network. It's chaos against chaos.''
The systems set in place by the ''establishment,'' as long as we're using blanket terminology, created a new series of feedback loops and iterators to replace or at least make us as aware of the natural ones destroyed by deforestation and environmental tyranny. Large organizations like Greenpeace depend on computer hackers and satellite experts both to set up their own communications networks and to intercept law enforcement communications about planned actions. Illegal television broadcasting vans, which have already been used in Germany, are currently under construction in the Bay Area; they will be capable of substituting scheduled programming with radical propaganda, or even superimposing text over regular transmissions.
Ecoterrorists are never antitechnology. They see high tech as a tool for faster and more effective feedback and iteration. For these and other reasons, the developers of the Gaia hypothesis do not predict doom for our planet – especially from the development of inventions that appear unnatural. They realize the place of technology in the bigger picture, and even its value in regulating the biosphere. As James Lovelock, originator of the Gaia hypothesis, assures us:
''In the end we may achieve a sensible and economic technology and be more in harmony with the rest of Gaia. There can be no voluntary resignation from technology. We are so inextricably part of the technosphere that giving it up is as unrealistic as jumping off a ship in mid-Atlantic to swim the rest of the journey in glorious independence.''
Howard Rheingold, a social theorist, editor of the Whole Earth Review and author of computer culture books including Virtual Reality, also admits: ''It might be correct that technology was the wrong choice a long time ago and that it led to a really fucked up situation. But I don't see a way of getting out of this – without most of the people on Earth dying – without learning how to manage technology.''
The danger here, of course, is in overestimating our potential to see our situation clearly and to implement technology toward the ends necessary. An oversimplification of the issues is as dangerous to our survival and, even more, our liberation, as is the reduction and simplification of our biosphere through the elimination of the millions of species upon which Gaia depends for feedback and iteration.
Chapter 18
May the Best Meme Win
It's by using the technologies and pathways laid down by promoters of control that cyberians believe they must conduct their revolution. The massive television network, for example, whose original purpose was to sell products and – except for a brief period during the Vietnam war – to manufacture public consent for political lunacy, has now been coopted as a feedback mechanism by low-end home video cameramen. Coined ''Video Vigilantes'' on a Newsweek cover, private citizens are bringing reality to the media. When a group of cops use excessive force on a suspect, chances are pretty good that someone with a camcorder will capture the images on tape, and CNN will have broadcast it around the world within a couple of hours. In addition, groups such as Deep Dish TV now use public access cable channels to disseminate convincing video of a reality quite different from the one presented on the network newscasts.
''The gun used to be the great equalizer,'' explains Jack Nachbar, professor of popular culture at Bowling Green University, in reference to camcorders. "You can say this is like the new six gun, in a way. It can really empower ordinary people.'' Police departments now bring their own video cameras to demonstrations by groups like DIVA (Damned Interfering Video Activists) in order to make a recording of their own side of the story. The new war – like Batman's media battle against the Joker – is fought not with conventional weapons but with images in the datasphere. The ultimate weapon in Cyberia is not the sword or even the pen but the media virus.
The media virus is any idea that infiltrates the host organism of modern society. It can be a real thing, like Mark Heley's Smart Bar, which functions on an organic level yet also acts as a potent concept capable of changing the way we feel about drugs, health care, and intelligence. A virus can also be a pure thought or idea, like ''Gaia'' or "morphic resonance,'' which, when spread, changes our model of reality. The term virus itself is a sort of metamedia virus, depicting society as a immunodeficient host organism vulnerable to attack from ''better'' thoughts and messages. A virus contains genetic code, what cyberians call "memes,'' which replicate throughout the system as long as the information or coding is useful or even just attractive. Cyberian activists are marketing experts who launch media campaigns instead of military ones, and wage their battles in the territory of cyberspace. How the computer nets, news, MTV, fashion magazines, and talk show hosts cover a virus will determine how far and wide it spreads.
The public relations game is played openly and directly in Cyberia. As we've seen, people like Jody Radzik, Earth Girl, and Diana see their marketing careers as absolutely compatible with their subversive careers. They are one and the same because the product they market – house culture – is a media virus. ''The fuel that's going to generate the growth of this culture is going to be trendiness and hipness,'' Radzik says. "We're using the cultural marketing thing against itself.'' So, to be hipper and trendier, people buy Radzik's clothing and are exposed to the memes of house culture: fractals, chaos, ecstasy and Ecstasy, shamanism, and acceptance. Making love groovy.
But older, more practical generations cannot be so easily swayed by fashion or hipness. Cyberians who hope to appeal to this market segment use different sorts of viruses – ones that are masked behind traditional values, work ethics, and medical models. Michael Hutchinson, author of The Book of Floating, Megabrain, and Sex and Power, makes his living distributing information about brain machines and other stress-reduction devices. He is a tough and determined New Yorker dressed in local Marin County garb: pastels, khaki, and tennis shoes. Similarly, the cyberian motives behind his ''stress-reduction'' systems are dressed in quite innocent-sounding packaging.