Joseph Matheny - Introduction

I couldn't agree more. Back in the day, when I first started disseminating the Incunabula Papers via xerox, BBS, Gopher, FTP and eventually Web, eBook, print and audiobook¹, I was part of a new culture of on-line tricksters, mages, clowns, and poets, known collectively as "culture jammers" (Mark Dery's claim to ownership of the term not withstanding). Ten years later, I was being contacted by representatives of corporate brands to 'do that thing' for their products. Eventually, someone dubbed 'that thing' as viral marketing, which was to morph in a few directions, one of which was Alternate Reality Gaming and a myriad of other 'services' and methods of hawking wares. I give you this thumbnail look at the history of on-line meme tennis for a reason. For a few years, I actually resisted using the power of 'that thing' to push commercial products and quite honestly, I still get a mild case of willies when I think about it (accusations of mind control techniques and black ops notwithstanding), however, lately I think I'm more in Diane's camp. Time to get on to the next thing. The book you hold in your hands represents the budding first wave of the thousand flowers that are about to bloom. Wes and Edward go to the next phase of what I was hacking at with the equivalent of a stone axe when I was working on primitive experiments like the MetaMachine² (circa 1997), in which I attempted to divine the alchemical essences of the cyber-noosphere using cyborganics.

Moving far ahead of such Rube Goldberg attempts, Wes and Edward have drawn up a capable roadmap which leads...where? The good news is they don't know anymore than you or I do. The even better news is they don't pretend to know. Most people hammer your mind with Thesis>Antithesis>Synthesis or as my old friend, the late Robert Anton Wilson, said: "Here's what it is, here's what it isn't, now here's why you need to go tell everyone how smart I am." I can't tell you how much that tired old formula skeeves me. When I do see people brave enough to (god forbid!) put the onus of drawing a conclusion back on the reader (heresy!), I am not only relived (what, me have to think?), my faith in humanity has it's execution stayed another day.

When the late Dr. Hyatt asked me for a pull quote for The Psychopath's Bible I chose to say: "Do not take anything in this book literally! Wait, on second thought, take it all literally!" to which many people said, "hah-hah" or "typical Matheny" but I actually put a lot of thought into that recommendation and came to the conclusion that it was the most accurate advice I could give someone who was about to read that book. Now I am faced with a similar conundrum. What to say? How many pages could I go on about what you're about to read? In the end, why should I? (word count quotas not withstanding). I think we live in a time where we often use too many words to say too little. This is why my old friend Hakim Bey said, in the TAZ Tapes, "Sometimes in bookstores I experience moments of nausea when I think about adding one more word to all that fucking print.³" Therefore'Reductio ad absurdum'I am left with this:

Open your mind. Try not to know too much. Read this book.

Beyond that, what you do with the knowledge, tactics, world views and revelations that it will inevitably open up, is, as it has always been, up to you. The clock is ticking. What are you going to do with the time?

 

Joseph Matheny

04-01-08

Munich, Germany