''When we took acid in the sixties, ''Hutchinson admits, "we felt our discovery could change the world. A lot of the spirit at the time was, `Hey, let's dump this stuff in the reservoir and turn on America...the world! We can get everybody high and there won't be any war!'''
But it's hard to get people to drop acid. Getting them to put a set of goggles on their eyes is a whole lot easier and can even be even be justified medically. Numerous studies have demonstrated that the flashing lights and sounds produced by brain machines can relax people, invigorate them, and even relieve them from substance abuse, clinical depression, and anxiety. The machines work by coaxing the brain to relax into lower frequencies, bringing a person into deep meditative states of consciousness. This can feel like a mild psychedelic trip according to Hutchinson, and has many of the same transformational qualities.
''The subconscious material tends to bubble to the surface, but you are so relaxed by the machine that you're able to cope with whatever comes up. Over a period of time, people can release their demons in a very gentle way. If it were as intense as an acid trip, it would scare people away.'' Hutchinson smiles. In a way he is glad to admit that brain machines are really transformational wolves in therapeutic sheep's clothing. "There's something really subversive to what we're working on here. We've convinced businesses to use these devices for stress reduction, schools for better learning curves, doctors for drug rehabilitation. The hidden agenda is that we actually get them into these deep brain states and produce real personality transformation. That's the secret subtext. I think in the long run this machine's going to have a very revolutionary effect. if everybody in the world...''
His sentence trails off as he muses on global brain-machine enlightenment. But the Food and Drug Administration has other plans for these devices. Manufacturers may no longer make medical claims about the machines before they have received FDA approval – a process requiring millions of dollars. Hutchinson is convinced that there are powers behind the suppression of the brain virus machine.
''George Bush once said, `The only enemy we have is unpredictability.' Authoritarian systems depend on their citizens to act with predictability. But anything that enhances states of consciousness is going to increase unpredictability. These machines lead people to new, unpredictable information about themselves. The behaviour that results is unpredictable, and, in that sense, these tools are dangerous. Big Brother is threatened when people take the tools of intelligence into their own hands.''
This is why Hutchinson spends his efforts educating people about brain machines rather than distributing the machines himself. His newsletters detail where to purchase machines, how they work, why they're good, and how to make them. ''Mass education is mass production,'' he says. "Even if the machines are outlawed, the circuit diagrams we've printed will keep the technology accessible.''
Finally, though, the most cyberian element of the brain virus machine is the idea, or meme, that human beings should feel free to intentionally alter their consciousnesses through technology. As the virus gains acceptance, the cyberian ideal of a designer reality moves closer to being actualized.
Meme Factory
For the survival of a virus, what promoters call ''placement'' is everything. An appearance on The Tonight Show might make a radical idea seem too commonplace, but an article in Meditation might associate it with the nauseatingly "new'' age. A meme's placement is as important to a media virus as the protein shell that encases the DNA coding of a biological virus. It provides safe passage and linkage to the target cell, so that the programming within the virus may be injected inside successfully. One such protein shell is R.U. Sirius's Mondo 2000.
Originally birthed as High Frontiers, a `zine about drugs, altered states of consciousness, and associated philosophies, the publication spent a brief incarnation as Reality Hackers, concerning itself with computer issues and activism as Cyberia's interests became decidedly more high tech. Now known to all simply as Mondo, the two or so issues that make their way down from the Berkeley Hills editorial coven each year virtually reinvent the parameters of Cyberia every time they hit the stands. If a virus makes it onto the pages of Mondo, then it has made it onto the map. Cyberia's spotlight, Mondo brings together new philosophy, arts, politics, and technology, defining an aesthetic and an agenda for those who may not yet be fully online. Mondo is the magazine equivalent of a house club. But more than gathering members of a geographical region into a social unit, Mondo gathers members of a more nebulous region into a like-minded battalion of memes. Its readers are its writers are its subjects.
Jas Morgan, a pre-med student in Athens, Georgia, knew there was something more to reality but didn't know where to find it. Like most true cyberians, drugs, music, and media had not made Jas dumb or less motivated – they had only made it imperative for him to break out of the fixed reality in which he had found himself by the end of high school. (He once placed one of his straight-A report cards on his parents' kitchen table next to a small bag of pot and a note saying ''We'll talk.'')
Like many other fledging cyberians around the United States, Jas had few sources of information with which to confirm his suspicions about life. He listened to alternative FM radio late into the night and read all of Timothy Leary's books twice. Jas had been particularly inspired by Leary's repeated advice to the turned-on: ''Find the others.'' When Jas came upon an issue of High Frontiers, he knew he'd found them.
High Frontiers was the first magazine to put a particular selection of memes together in the same place. Ideas that had never been associated with one another before – except in pot-smoke-filled dorm rooms – could now be seen as coexistent or even interdependent. The discontinuous viral strands of an emerging culture found a home. Leary wrote about computers and psychedelics. Terence McKenna wrote about rain-forest preservation and shamanism. Musicians wrote about politics, computer programmers wrote about God, and psychopharmacologists wrote about chaos. This witches' brew of a magazine put a pleasant hex on Jas Morgan, who found himself knocking on the door of publisher/ Domineditrix'' Queen Mu's modest mansion overlooking Berkeley, and, he says, being appointed music editor on the spot. The Mondo House, as it's admiringly called by those who don't live there, is the hilltop castle/kibbutz/home-for-living-memes where the magazine is written, edited, and, for the most part, lived. The writers of Mondo are its participants and its subjects. Dispensing with the formality of an objectified reality, the magazine accepts for publication whichever memes make the most sense at the time. The man who decides what makes sense and what doesn't is R.U. Sirius, aka Ken Goffman, the editor in chief and humanoid mascot.
Jas moved in and quickly became Mondo's jet-setting socialite. His good looks and preppy manner served as an excellent cover for his otherwise ''illicit'' agenda, and he helped get the magazine long-awaited recognition from across the Bay (the city of San Francisco) and the Southland (Los Angeles). But as Jas developed the magazine's cosmopolitan image, R.U. Sirius developed Jas's image of reality. Jas quickly learned to see his long-standing suspicions about consensus reality as truths, and his access to new information, people (Abbie Hoffman's ex-wife became his girlfriend), and chemicals gave him the lingo and database to talk up a storm.
''Every time I want a CD, I have to go out and spend fifteen dollars to get one when it would be really nice just to dial up on the computer, or, better, say something to the computer and get the new release and pay a penny for it. And to not have it take up physical space and to not have all these people in the CD plant physically turning them out to earn money to eat. I want a culture where everybody's equally rich. People will work out of their homes or out of sort of neotribal centers with each other, the way the scientists work together and brainstorm. Everyone worries about motivation. Don't worry – people wouldn't just sit around stoned watching TV.''