"Long before there were computer hackers, there was a generation of hackers of another kind. Call them 'building hackers.' Like their cyberspace descendants, these hackers lived to discover new places; to find their ways into the most hidden nooks and crannies; to learn for themselves how things worked around them, and then manipulate their physical surroundings to do their bidding."
If you're an inquisitive type, inclined to open random doors and disinclined to pay attention to "official access only" signs, you might already have practiced some light building hacking. And if you have wandered down utility corridors, you might find odd notes scrawled in dark corners or hard-to-reach places, like "no toad sexing." Simson L. Garfinkel notes that these are "sign-ins," nerdy graffiti from prior urban explorers, as such city spelunkers now call themselves, referring to building
hacking as UrbEx or UE for short.
But if you haven't started poking around buildings where you aren't technically supposed to be, Garfinkel provides some things to consider before you wander: rooftops are lovely, but generally more well-guarded. Before opening a
door, scan it carefully for wires or other signs of alarm systems. Check the door after you open it as well: Frequently, sensors are "hidden" inside doorjambs. If you trip an alarm, don't panic: just close the door and calmly walk away.
After all, you're not there to make mischief, you're just curious. And if this is your kind of curiosity, there are now more resources than can be squeezed into two pages in the Handbook. A few for starters: Urban Exploration Resource, which offers articles, photo galleries, stories, and an active forum
for the Urban Exploration and Infiltration Community; and Infiltration, maintained in memory of Ninjalicious' groundbreaking and charistmatic work within the field of Urban Exploration (the author of Access All Areas, a user's guide to the art of building hacking).
"Finally, always follow the cardinal rule of hacking: do no harm. Don't break windows, kick in doors, or take a pipewrench to a stubborn lock. Whatever you do, don't steal anything. After all, you're an explorer, not a petty thief." Take only pictures. Leave the lights as you found them. And keep your sign-ins small, if you want to leave your mark at all.
"We don't accept the entertainment that's spoon fed to us through TV and other commercial media," says Cacophony Society member Maxwell Maude. The tall, silver-haired Maude has a perpetual mysterious smile and eyes that twinkle with imminent mischief. "We want to create our own entertainment and our own experiences."
Reading this article in the mid 1990s, I was so intrigued. They were edgy, sometimes dancing on the edge of revolting, depending on your viewpoints. For instance, "a year after the Cacophony
Society held their John Wayne Bobbitt memorial weenie roast, they made hundreds of severed latex penises and packaged them as chew toys for pet dogs, under the 'Laughing Bitch' brand name. They sent the products to all the chapters with instructions for members to smuggle the chew toy penises onto shelves at supermarkets. When shoppers saw them for 'sale,' they were delighted. The bar code printed on the label caused the purchase to show up on the register receipt as 'chicken sausage'."And then there was the G.I. Joe Convention Prank, which ended in other con-goers smashing the Cacophony booth in rage and/or disgust.
The Cacophony Society is not widely known, and appears to be less active in areas than in prior years (or decades?), but has been a source for mischief and mayhem that have grown beyond its origins. For example, Cacophony Society invented Burning Man, and inspired Fight Club.
Unfortunately, in some places, Santacon has become an excuse for people to be drunken assholes in public, at least in New York City.
Jumping back a point or two.... Oh right, the (in)activity of the Cacophony Society. In 1995, there were four chapters: San Francisco (the original), Los Angeles, Portland, and Seattle, with a New York City chapter in the works. Since then, Cacophony spread far and wide, as seen in the list of almost 50 chapters or lodges from the official website. But this central hub for operations was last updated in 2014, for a post about celebrating the closure of another Happy Mutant Handbook organization of interest, the Billboard Liberation Front (more on all that later). Those chapter or lodge links point to a number of defunct sites and services (including Yahoo Groups [2001-2020, sorta—it's now a glorified mailing list], and MySpace [2003-2011, kinda—the site all but died a while back]). It seems like that central site isn't keeping up to date with chapter activities, because most chapters are now organized via Facebook (created in 2004). So the good news is that the Cacophony Society lives on, and is bigger than it was 25 years ago. The bad news is that if you're just reading about them now, that list of lodges is misleadingly long. But the central idea of the cacophony society is to make some joyous noises of your own, so don't let the absence of local sanctioned groups get you down. Make your own thing!
Fun fact and general reminder: don't assume an organization has registered similar domains in other countries. For example, the Cacophony Society's main website is cacophony.org, but cacophony.org.nz is a very different organization,
"What could be more seditious than doing your own work at work? I don't mean leaning out the window to sell hot dogs to the exec in the company on the floor below. I mean maybe developing your own software at work. Or writing a novel—that's what I did, on the extremely rare occasions I held a real job."
John Shirley, an author primarily of fantasy and science fiction, writes on how to do your own work while on the clock at a paying gig, namely writing a novel while sitting in front of a computer. In 1995, you could perhaps even bring in your own computer. "Used to it," you could say. "More efficient on it. Can't learn that other system." That might still fly in some offices, but it's probably not too common.
Instead, you can write your novel in whatever word editor or document space you use for work, and save your documents using some innocuous file name if you're worried someone will look at your saved file history, then move it to a personal USB thumbdrive, email it to yourself, or back it up to a remote file repository. Or don't save files, but copy the text to your personal email account as a draft email, or email yourself. Or download yWriter as a .zip and extract it to a thumbdrive, being sure to take precautions to hide the unique interface (it probably doesn't look like anything you'd use at work, though it may be drab enough to look unthreatening to inquisitive passer-bys.
If you're worried about any of this, you can take pointers from how to slack off at work and not get caught. No one is on-task 100% of the time, so use that downtime for productive time.
What's the difference between a (mean) prank and shenanigans? The former are often "destructive and malicious" while the latter are "lighthearted, good-natured naughtiness." Sounds good to me, Gareth. To cyberspace!
"If you have access to the Internet and USENET newsgroups, you can join a constant twittering prankster's think tank in the alt.shenanigans newsgroup."
But what if you don't, and you only have the Handbook? Branwyn shares some favorite "funny acts of poetic terrorism," from shopping for others (attributed to John Waters), to sending fax maintenance messages, the telemarketer's game (found here in a post dated from 1993, with added goals and points in a follow-up), random acts of randomness on subways or elevators including getting friends to start an impromptu sing-along (less organized than The Liberators international effort, but you get the idea), and lost pet posters.
But looking at some of these now, and even the Telemarkter's Game, there are some practical jokes and gags that seem have more that a little Unhappy Mutant in them. My thinking is this: how would I feel to be on the other end of one of these jokes? No one goes into telemarketing to make other people miserable, so why be a jerk to someone making minimum wage? Or why move an outhouse and have someone literally fall into shit? More lost pigeon posters and glitter traps, less buttering toilet seats and supergluing plates down in a diner.
"The mercurial mind of filmmaker, curator, and ideologue Craig Baldwin
swarms with frenzy. Overload and overwhelm have always been part of his
oeuvre. Baldwin’s modus operandi—in life, art and action—is to refute
blind allegiance to ideological authority, to question beliefs and
belief systems, to talk back to media."
That's my favorite introduction to Craig, from The Miami Rail, besides his own description of how he works: "Rather than apply for the grants or get studio funding, just work form where we are, poor people, but taking advantage of the fat of the land, so to speak, taking advantage of the resources that we already have, in other words, trash, a culture of instant obsolescence. I call it 'surfing the wave of obsolescence'."
As Will Kreith puts it, talking about Baldwin's theater, Artist's Television Access (ATA), "Not only do the seats come from dumpsters, but much of Baldwin's best footage is found in trash cans containing film somebody else threw away."
Since 1995, Craig has made two more films since Sonic Outlaws (full film on Internet Archive), which was commented on by Kreith: Spectres of the Spectrum (1999) and Mock Up on Mu (2008). You can find short descriptions and links to (clips of) these films and his prior works here, and a bit more from UbuWeb.
Ward Parkway designed a set of 28 stickers, labeled The Urban Absurdist Survival Kit™. I searched for these years back and I was pretty sure Ward had a website with these stickers in higher resolution, but now in April 2020, I instead found 1) a Wikipedia page for Ward Parkway, a boulevard in Kansas City, Missouri, United States, near the Kansas-Missouri state line; and 2) copies of the stickers, scanned from the Handbook, included in Swankivy's Shenanigans, a very 1990s website.
Above is my own, hastily cleaned up copy of the first six stickers, digitally clipped out of the Internet Archive copy of HMHB. You can do this, too! Get yourself a free photo editor that can adjust brightness levels and you can clean up those scans right quick. Or just get the pictures from Swankivy and make your mark on the local corporate landscape.
If these images aren't enough, do your own thing with a free vector graphics editor, because it's 2020 and there are a range of free programs that allow you to be the mischief you wish to see in the world, at least when it comes to stickers.
As for the International Press Association pass, the black-and-white card may not cut it now, but luckily there's a whole website dedicated to Microsoft Word ID Card Templates, and specifically press reporter IDs. And if you really want to jazz it up, generate your own QR codes and replace the code the "MobileApp" code included.
"If you're an artist, you use the medium that communicates the best, and what bigger medium than the media?" asks Joey Skaggs, a practitioner of the rare art of media hoaxing.
Andrew Hulktrans covered a range of hoaxes by Skaggs in the four page write-up, starting with his "Cathouse for dogs" from 1976, as you can see above with some of the TV coverage from the period, with follow-up commentary from Scaggs himself. Skaggs archived more on his site, including a reward poster that was taped outside Joey's apartment, sorted into the categories "hook," "line," and "sinker." Andrew recaps this same order of events, noting that "The lingering malodorous smell left behind by a Skaggs hoax reminds us that the media often functions as the propaganda wing of corporate America."
Apparently 10 years is enough to forget the name Joey Skaggs, because the above clip also includes "The Fat Squad," diet-enforcers for hire, which started with his distribution of a press release, and lead to instant coverage. He announced later that it was another hoax, to the brief chagrin of the media.
Joey has presented a number of other hoaxes and pranks over the years, as presented briefly in the clip above, including traveling confessional, the power of roaring like a lion, cockroach hormone cures, Solomon the judicial AI. Some hoaxes are a mirror for the wishes and hopes of the public, and others are calling for action in outlandish ways, but Joey always pushes the limits of credibility, as noted by Andrew. "Skaggs quickly deflates the assumption that reporters are educated by employing bad Kafka references in a roach pill scam," and was pushing scope of how much people would trust technology over the judgement of their peers. The Solomon Project was presented in 1995 and 1996, well before the current era of Big Data and Machine Learning, when we are now struggling with the fact that "all predictive models are shaded by human judgment, which we know falls far short of being error-free," as noted in an article in Forbes in 2019.
Andrew notes that Skaggs was an early adopter of technology. "Since 1990, he has gone high tech
circulating a well-designed brochure for a 'virtual vacation' spa called 'Comacocoon'." 14 years before the birth of Wikileaks, he toyed with leaks as ways to catch media attention with the Brooklyn Bridge Lottery in 1992, and the next year, he promoted the world’s first sexual virtual reality company, Sexonix, but don't look for anything substantial—it's just vaporware. But for some, the greater digital sin was that this was a hoax, carried out on in part on early message boards including the WELL and Fidonet. One WELL user, Journalist Brock Meeks, wrote, “When you’re jacked into Cyberspace, you are who you say you are. No exceptions. And if you try a street scam out here you’re going to be held accountable. F— with the WELL and you’ll feel like you’ve been f—ed with an elephant prick.” I wonder how Meeks feels about the internet meme and adage "on the internet, nobody knows you're a dog."
In the 25 years since the Handbook was published, Joey Skaggs has continued to prank the media, presenting hoaxes as fact and getting the benefit of the doubt, time and time again. Where his elaborate pranks are intended to improve media literacy and encourage critical thinking, unlike other recent hoaxes, like the Balloon Boy hoax of 2009, which had the apparent goal of landing the family a reality TV show.
One would think that one would grow tired of the sport because it no longer looks sporting. More like fishing out of barrel. But each catch is a new adventure and makes a great story. I personally have many trophy fish in my den. And, like all fishermen, I prefer exhibiting the big ones, but I’m proud of everyone that I’ve caught.
I’m just hoping that some day my tales will be more about the one that got away. That mythological, uncompromising, ethical, incorruptible journalist. An unbiased advocate that employs responsible journalistic practices. But for now, I’m going fishing.
His recipe still stands, and is even current enough to reference the value of internet presence. So get out there, hack reality, tweak some noses, and push people to think critically.
Stuart Mangrum paints a picture of being on the Black Rock Desert in northwest Nevada. "Heat waves shimmer off the hardpan alkali flat, and a fine white dust swirls on the wind. Thunderheads gather over the distant mountains that ring the plain, but the sky above you is a deep, cloudless blue. Behind you is your camp, a Rube Goldberg mix of vans, tents, and RVs arranged in a great circle."
In 1995, the playa gathering was only 5 years old, in the first period of the Burn, after its birth as a San Francisco beach gathering in 1986. Here's a documentary of someone's largely uninformed visit in '95, when they planned for a one-night rave, but ended up surviving for a week on the kindness of some of the 4,000 other people there:
By 1996, the event had grown to 8,000 attendees and unrestricted driving on the open playa was becoming a major safety hazard, so the gathering moved slightly, and the organizers added new restrictions and structure to what was first conceived as a dadaist temporary autonomous zone with sculpture to be burned and situationist performance art. But those changes have allowed the grow in size, with the video below of when the gathering surpassed 70,000 attendees.
The organizers help create a whole city that exists for a week, only to erase their presence and leave no trace. (Disregarding the fact that having tens of thousands of people travel to one central location from all over the world means a lot of emissions, effectively doubling the annual average for personal emissions.) Back to the Handbook and 1995:
Burning Man is one of the last places on earth where people from all walks of life, all social strata. and all points of the compass can come together and share an extraordinary experience a very primal experience: surviving as a group in a challenging environment. creating a temporary culture or their own design, and sharing one of the most elemental experiences of our species, the awesome mystery of fire.
Oh yeah and it's also one hell of a party.
How is it decades later? It's a lot easier to know what you're getting into. HMHB included not a website URL, but a phone number to call. Now we can watch videos, read plenty of newbie guides so you know how to prepare.
And it's still a party. But inclusive? Not in the same way. Elon Musk Is Right, Burning Man Is Silicon Valley. The wealthy literally jet in, flying on private aircraft, getting chauffeured to an exclusive cluster in Black Rock City, adjacent to the naked hippies, but in air conditioned tents, eating fresh lobster, instead of communal living in the desert.
The original Burning Man has spun off regional events around the world, so if you want that burner experience with less of the brogrammer nonsense and decrease your emissions, find a local group. Or better yet, make your own event wherever you are.
"It was in 1986 that Los Angelenos first awoke to find an unnattering poster of Ronald Reagan and three cronies staring from hundreds of traffic-light switching boxes at intersections across the city. Bearing the slogan 'Men With No Lips, the poster marked the first of a series of nonsanctioned portraitures that would, over the next decade, mysteriously appear in cities across the country..."
"But this is like graffiti! Illicit messaging in public spaces!" you might say, if you're something of a square who doesn't realize saying public spaces should only be plastered with permitted corporate messaging is undermining the whole idea of "public space." Colin Berry reminds us of the history of this sort of "counter-infotainment" messaging:
"MWNL also reawakened for many the centuries-old art form of political postering, an avenue for editorial comment borne of citizen participation and used historically to reflect political feeling." The need to find new outlets for free speech is all the more apparent in the wake of the 2010 Citizens United decision, giving an increased voice to corporations (and labor unions, who aren't currently in the same fiscal weight class as corporations).
"One of the simplest forms of reality hacking is the good old-fashioned phone prank. Using the telephone can be a very cheap, convenient, and creative way to shake the torpor out of your average drone."
In the years since, there have been plenty of goofy, punny calls by Bart on The Simpsons, but also groups who gather to make or celebrate real calls that are more in the realm of unhappy mutants, making people angry for laffs. You can hide who and where you are with free services like Google Voice, for good and for ill. Make 'em laugh, or tweak some noses, but don't be a jerk about it.
Beatnik World Servicing, a division of ASAP Systems and Shawn Wolfe Associates Inc., have a solution to one of the problems of living in the modern world:
Face it, even the happiest mutants often feel defined not so much by what they think or do, but rather by what brand of product they choose to buy. At one time, brands were used to identify' products, but now it's the consumers who are branded as labels, which have moved from the inside of garments to the outside and ail over the person, literally from head to toe. Trying to "kick" the brand name habit won't help. It only leads to another line of "clear." "lite," or "simple" products, new consumer frontiers for the herd to orbit.
No, the answer isn't avoiding brand names, it's developing your own "personal brand name."
The four-page article promotes a mix of tagging (slapping stickers on things), and branding anything and everything ("mugs, calendars, pencils, fobs, even wristwatches with 'your logo here' are cheaply had"), to using official-looking letterhead and business cards to acquire "free and bizarre catalogs and trade publications you never knew existed" , and even registering "all forms of bizarre complaints and 'leveraged warnings' to corporate thugs and elected officials!"
25 years later, this message is no less accurate, and if anything, the barrier to creating a new brand is even lower. Heck, make an appealing enough brand, and people will pay to spread your message! Slap together something eye-catching, post it on Redbubble or another print-on-demand site, and you might even make a bit of money back when people latch on to your message!
(If you're more keen to eschew the corporate landscape as much as possible, anti-corporate organizations like Adbusters [Wikipedia; official site] might be more your scene.)
And a final note: while you can use personal brand names to reclaim a small swathe of commercial space, be warned that your brand may outlive you, or get you junk mail that's no fun at all. It's a small price to pay for "saving your mutant soul."
On October 14, 2010, "friends of the San Francisco Public Library" uploaded The Happy Mutant Handbook to the Internet Archive for all the world to borrow. See, the Internet Archive's text library is mostly titles that are beyond copyrights, but that's not to say all are. For those newer titles that are added, there's a collection of books available for "controlled digital lending." So those titles work like physical books in a library—only one person can check out the title at a time. Many digital library collections work like that to, which is why you have to wait to see what is basically a fancy webpage.
It's nice to say that information wants to be free, but the creation, collection, and distribution of information costs something to someone, in terms of time to create the thing, or the cost of buying and maintaining servers for digital goods, and the electricity to keep it all powered.
Feedback was mixed, between those (including librarians) who were thankful for this increased access, at a time when millions of physical books were now inaccessible to the public. Others saw this as piracy. (Here's a conversation of this sort, with links to author and agency comments, which also fall on both sides of for and against the NEL).
Really, this is a lengthy way of saying that if you sign up for a free Internet Archive account, you can read all of the Happy Mutant Handbook, without restriction, from the comfort of wherever you are, with a digital device in front of you.
This is a one-page local oddity story that feels so much like an old zine article. "Imagine a smiley-face drawn on a paper plate with a thick black marker. Now imagine seeing hundreds of them plastered on street signs, telephone poles, bus benches, and other city fixtures. The strange smiles greet you every day for weeks, even months. When they are torn down by irritated city workers, they are replaced by fresh ones overnight. A year later you still spot these eerie happy faces staring down at you as you speed along the freeway. Anxiety sets in. Where are these generic smiles coming from? What do they mean? Who's messing with your mind???"
That's it. Someone or some group puts up smiley faces around Los
Angeles, circa 1995. Carla Sinclair and others even reached out to "the Cacophony Society and
other prankmasters, but to no avail. Nobody seems to know where these
devilish smiles are coming from. We are baffled."
When I looked for any local news stories about this years ago, I couldn't find any online reference to
this low-key prank. I still can't find any online reference to smiley faces in Los Angeles in the 1990s.
This isn't "ever dream this man?" spookiness. It's not the cheeky-quirky Hello? Is it me you're looking for? This is basic— roughly drawn smiley faces on paper plates, stuck onto things, in one city.
Which is a lovely little reminder to make a bit of nonsense. Confuse people, but don't annoy them. All you need is paper plates, an inky pen, and some adhesive. You don't have to make the next Andre the Giant has a Posse (which became the Obey [Giant] marketing/ brand*), just make nonsense and share it in your neighborhood.
* The Posse shifted to Obey/ Disobey in 1994/95, according to a member of the original Posse. "When OBEY started, we did it in two stripes. One was OBEY. The other was
DISOBEY. It was the same imagery. But one set said OBEY, and the other
set DISOBEY. Here's why: The message was the medium. Let me put it even
clearer: It didn't mean anything. The apparent message is ironic and
counter-culture. In fact, it's not."
Which brings this back to those paper smiley faces. My take-away? Have fun. Confuse the normals. Be baffling. Let that be enough.
"It's fun sharing information. That's why people publish minicomics, form Internet mailing lists, and produce electronic zines. If there's a way to report something interesting, enterprising folks have figured out how to do it, and do it cheaply."
So far, so good, Jared Pore*. He warns that making your own transmitters is risky, as the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is looking for pirate radio stations. Or not, if you're keeping it small and local and aren't interfering with legal stations.
Enough of the legal warnings**, onto the links for resources! Sadly, within the last 25 years, a few things have changed. So first, I'll note that digital switchover (DSO) or analog switch-off (ASO) has changed the reach of TV transmission, and it's almost 5 years since the effective date of the 2006 Geneva Agreement. That's the bad news. The good news is that FM radio hasn't gone anywhere, and the miniaturization of equipment has allowed reduced power systems (QRP) to flourish. The list of QRP resources for kits, bits, and supplies is lengthy in 2020, more than the three direct points of contact listed in 1995. But where are those now? Ramsey Kits called it quits in 2016, and Panaxis Company was bought by Progressive Concepts in 2007 (PDF). Mycal is still online (and the source of that retro FCC van graphic), but as a snapshot of personal views on FCC and the law, frozen in 1995. I'm not sure if it's an accurate view of current and past Usenet, but Google Groups has a window into alt.radio.pirate and rec.radio, and both look pretty quiet.The two FTPs (dg-rtp.dg.com and crl.com) are long gone. dg.com is now owned by Dollar General, and CRL looks to be owned by Charles River Labs. Archive.org captured some early days of both sites: Data General (1996) and CRL Network Services (1997), but no archives of the FTP contents. Digging around further, you can find archived discussions of the Ramsey archives from Data General, and Radio Free Berkeley. Digging around, you can also find that "The ACE" was The Association of Clandestine (radio) Enthusiasts, mentioned by Gareth Branwyn in a short online article titled "People's Radio." Free Radio Cafe, still rocking the flaming title GIF, notes that ACE lasted from 1982-2005. FRC transitioned to new social networks where ACE did not, though it looks like Free Radio Weekly stopped in early 2018, and the last activity on their forums was in 2019. One bright spot is that Radio Free (Berkeley) is still around and selling kits, but for educational purposes only, of course. And if you can find a VCR (the last one was set to be made in July 2016), you can still turn it into an RF or A/V Transmitter. Or you can distribute your voice and videos world-wide for free, on Soundcloud (founded Aug. 2007), Mixcloud (f. 2008), YouTube (f. Feb. 2005) and Vimeo (f. Nov. 2004). * Jared Pore's work has been buried in modern Search Engine Optimization, but dig far enough, and you'll find traces of the oldweb lurking around. Zine Wiki has a short but positive page on Jared, and has more information than I was able to find anywhere else.
** I shouldn't be flippant. Don't piss off your local authorities.
"Reality hacking—designer lifestyles and pranks that playfully interrupt the scheduled programming of the masses—is a way of life for Happy Mutants."
R. U. Sirius continues from this definition to muse on the history of the term, from his re-branding of his own magazine High Frontiers to Reality Hackers, which was re-branded as Mondo 2000 (you can find digitized copies of all three magazines via Anarchivism). He looks farther back, to cave paintings, which used the "power of symbols [to shape] the viewer's perception of reality. The big shots of the cave clans used symbols not only to change the way their minions perceived the world around them, but also to convince them that imaginary things, like gods and demons, existed." Transmission of signals followed, from smoke signals to television.
R. U. Sirius notes that signal transmission used to require lots of money. "But in the last decade or so, media technology has become so cheap that almost anyone can buy a modem, publish a zine, or set up a pirate radio station and get in on the reality hacking business."
Oh, the 1990s were an idyllic, hopeful time, weren't they? Before national and political disinformation campaigns became the norm, when the power of distributed and decentralized communication was re-claimed by people in power, for a fraction of the price of prior signal transmissions.
But enough of this bleakness, let's look back (and look around) for low-cost, DIY reality hacking adventures!
"There are certain Americans, dead or alive, who are regarded as National Treasures: John Wayne, Katharine Hepburn, Louis Armstrong, Walter Cronkite, Joe Louis, Babe Ruth, and of course, Alfred E. Neuman, this fictional face that launched 35 years of Mad Magazine. You might have thought with all the electronic diversions available to kids today, you would think something like Mad would be, if not already dead, then certainly dying. But nope, Mad is alive and kicking. Kicking at everything sacred. Still the brainchild, if that's the right word, of this man: Bill Gaines." Helluva intro by Morley Safer for 60 Minutes in 1987, opening this clip:
Carla Sinclair notes that William Gaines was the son of Max Gaines, a pioneer in the comics industry. Where his father's company, Education Comics, focused on syndicated funnies, as well as stories of science, history, and the Bible, Bill re-branded EC as Entertainment Comics and turned to horror, suspense, and crime fiction. As Sinclair notes, "EC's grisly tales clutched the imaginations of American youth, and comic book sales boomed at an astounding rate. Unfortunately, the media was already worshiping a name-calling, finger-pointing morphine junkie by the name of Joe McCarthy, who flew into a fanatic rage over these grisly tales."
William pivoted from horror back to funnies, but with a satirical slant, and Mad was born. First as a comic, but then to side-step the Comics Code, Mad became Mad Magazine, giving birth to the satire magazine. Carla credits Gaines' magazine with having a "dramatic impact on American humor [that] influenced bigwigs such as Saturday Night Live, '60s cartoonist Robert Crumb, satirical films like Airplane and Naked Gun, and my own bOING bOING magazine."
Bill Gaines "left this planet in 1992," and in 2019, Mad was also dead ... mostly. Instead of publishing new issues, it would be a re-issue magazine, with sporadic new content specials, as reported via bOING bOING (the website, not the zine).
Dr. Betty Alexandra Toole, credited simply as Betty Toole in the Handbook, has written extensively on Ada Lovelace, the Enchantress of Numbers, as noted in this article on The Well (more on The Well in a later post), and here wrote a brief overview of (one of) the first computer programmers, who saw the promise of Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine, a proto-computer from the early 19th century.
"Erroneously reported by the straight world as having been born on May 22, 1914, as Herman "Sonny" Blount in Birmingham, Alabama, [Sun] Ra was actually born on Saturn "around 5,000 years ago—give or take a few minutes"—as he was quick to point out." Will Kreth is good enough to present the truth of Su Ra as (stellar) gospel.
In 1995, finding Sun Ra's music could have been a bit of
work. Originally, Ra's music was pressed in limited runs, sometimes 75
copies, other times 150. And sorting out the history of the Arkestra's
recordings
was complicated by Sun Ra compiling albums from various recording
sessions, or delaying releases a few years or more after recording. And
many tracks didn't find their way onto official releases until decades
later, after archivists tracked down the history of recording sessions.
But now in 2020, we can enjoy the work of those archivists, and platforms like YouTube and Bandcamp, where you can find not only most, if not all, of Sun Ra's recordings, but also with extensive liner notes. I geeked out about Sun Ra's life and extensive recording history a few years back, linking to official audio as much as possible, and much of it available to buy and stream from Bandcamp (see Sun Ra Music and Sun Ra via Strut).
Sun Ra's work to make this world a better place lives on.
Mark Frauenfelder picked Timothy Leary, high priest of the psychedelic counter culture of the 1960s and 1970s, starting with his trip to Cuernavaca, Mexico sixty years ago, when he consumed psychedelic mushrooms for the first time and drastically altered the course of his life.
Six years later, ESP Disk released his first spoke word album (link to Discogs listing of the CD re-issue with track titles, audio embedded above), using one of his most well-known phrases as the title: Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out. A year after the release of this recording, he wanted to change the phrase to "Drop out. Turn on. Drop in." (audio recording; via Wikipedia), but that first phrase stuck.
Mark also highlighted some of Dr. Leary's bibliography, some of which is available via the Internet Archive, and some of his interest in regeneration and life extension, which only brushes on his late-in-life turn towards futurism. There's also a mention of Leary with stars in his eyes and a computer in his head. Building onto the idea of the human brain being an underutilized biocomputer, his creation of the acronym SMI²LE
is a succinct summary of his pre-transhumanist agenda: SM (Space
Migration) + I² (intelligence increase) + LE (Life extension).
But the brief article didn't mention his 3rd revision of that lasting phrase, which seems like perfect fit for bringing this happy mutant into the home computer age. During his last decade, Leary proclaimed the "PC is the LSD of the 1990s" and tried to make "turn on, boot up, jack in" a new motto, to suggest joining the cyberdelic counterculture. He died before the dot-com bust and everything that has come after, so he didn't see his techno-utopianism get replaced by tech-bro visionaries who may use counterculture-type language of "disrupting" systems, but end up focusing on ways to profit from their systems that seem a lot like the old ways, but with black boxes "improving" connections between people.
The Handbook was published before the good doctor departed this earthly realm, on May 31, 1996. Even in his final days, there was discussion of freezing his head. Instead, he was cremated and some of his ashes went space-ward, along with the ashes of 23 others. Also aloft in the world's first space funeral were fragments of Gene
Roddenberry, who created the ''Star Trek'' television series; Gerard
O'Neill, a space physicist, and scientists and pilots.
If you're an inquisitive type, inclined to open random doors and disinclined to pay attention to "official access only" signs, you might already have practiced some light building hacking. And if you have wandered down utility corridors, you might find odd notes scrawled in dark corners or hard-to-reach places, like "no toad sexing." Simson L. Garfinkel notes that these are "sign-ins," nerdy graffiti from prior urban explorers, as such city spelunkers now call themselves, referring to building 
