The data has been made available for reasons that stretch beyond mere scientific curiosity. When Celera’s former CEO Craig Venter pushed his company to finish mapping the human genome before the government-funded, public Human Genome Project (HGP), the move was widely considered an attempt to demonstrate that science is done more efficiently by the private sector. But Celera ended up filing hundreds of patents on discoveries it made while sequencing the genome, and access to the database itself is exorbitantly expensive.

For the scientists working on the Human Genome Project, the data defining who we are is too important to be left to Celera — or any other company. David Haussler, a team leader at the University of California at Santa Cruz who helped Kent and others put the genome online, expresses the credo of a data liberator succinctly: “Information about the human genome is better in public hands than secretly locked up somewhere.”

But it’s not just the research data itself that is at the center of the tug of war between corporations and scientists. When working with data as complex and vast as the human genome, the software tools necessary to manipulate that data are as important as the genetic code itself. A whole new science of “bioinformatics” — a flowering of software and hardware explicitly designed to analyze genomic information at blisteringly fast speeds — has arisen, operating at the intersection of computers and biology.

Life science researchers — even those who work in academic settings — are finding that corporations are just as eager to patent the tools as they are the data, and in many cases, universities are bending over backward to let the private sector have its way. As a result, a growing number of bioinformatics researchers are beginning to look to the free-software and open-source software movements for inspiration in their quest for bio freedom.

In the world of free and open-source software, the underlying code to a software program is made publicly available for anyone to share, copy or modify. For bioinformatics researchers, the idea of being able to share software code and benefit from each other’s research exerts a strong appeal that is synergistically linked with their belief that information about human genetic code should also be freely available.

Free software has historically been a realm inhabited by geeks who sometimes have difficulty making their concerns comprehensible to the general public. In contrast, the worries of life sciences workers come at a time when public awareness over the new possibilities of biotech is surging. When kittens and sheep are being cloned, how long can it be before we have the ability to clone humans?

In addition to scientists, a number of artists and cultural critics — some of whom are now proudly branding themselves as “biopunks” — are also sounding warnings about the importance of giving the public a voice in how their bodies’ genomic information gets used. The Sausalito offices of Genetic Savings and Clone, the company that announced in February the arrival of “Cc” (Carbon Copy), the cloned kitty, even share space with the brand new BioArts Gallery, a space dedicated to biopunk art.

Not every bioinformatics researcher necessarily considers herself to be pursuing the same cause as self-described biopunks, but together, they may represent a movement in the making, one dedicated to the proposition that the information that defines humanity is too precious to be private.

Two years ago, outspoken U.C. San Diego bioinformatics professor Richard Belew told Science, “In an emerging field like computational biology — where it seems likely that we will have the worst of both software and biomedical intellectual property issues — the stakes are enormous. Genomic projects are already generating huge wealth; active academic researchers … will have great influence on how these assets are ultimately distributed.”

For scientists who work with genomes and proteins, possibly the most radical position they can take is that their research is for the public good, and therefore their data should be available in the public domain. The problem is, few members of the general public are well-trained enough to appreciate the value of a software program that, for example, aligns your cDNA sequence to a gene or set of genes. Nor would many care to use their computers to predict the secondary structure of a protein.

Thus, for many scientists, putting data in the public domain means sharing it with other scientists. Doing this might mean placing your newly discovered protein structures in a public database. Or, if you want to publish your findings, it could mean working with Michael Eisen on the Public Library of Science, a free, peer-reviewed scientific publishing project the U.C. Berkeley professor initiated to combat the problem of having to buy hundreds of prohibitively expensive science journals in order to “share” knowledge with his peers. Like many in the life sciences, Eisen dislikes the commercialization — and, for all practical purposes, privatization — that occurs when scientists place their valuable findings in journals that other scientists can’t access because their universities or labs haven’t got a subscription.

It’s this same problem that led European Bioinformatics Institute team leader Ewan Birney to announce emphatically at a recent conference, “I have vowed never to publish in the journal Science.” Birney — whose work is globally renowned — is one of the founders of the Open Bioinformatics Foundation, a nonprofit that advocates open-source software development in genomics and serves as the umbrella organization for several popular projects.

Open-source development — in which software code is by definition made publicly available to all — has become a thorny issue for many scientists whose contracts stipulate that all their intellectual property belongs to the university or company that employs them.

Chris Dagdigian, a life sciences technology consultant in Boston who builds genome data-crunching clusters of computers running Linux-based operating systems, explains that for many researchers, developing open-source tools is crucial because otherwise each piece of software has to “reinvent the wheel” and may cost the developer several days of valuable work when she could be gathering new data. While it’s common to hear that private companies don’t want their employees to “give away” software by working on open-source projects, what most people don’t realize is that the problem is even more pressing in academia.

The Bayh-Dole Act, passed in 1980, allows universities to claim ownership of patents on academic discoveries made using federal funds. What this means is that the university, as well as the government, stands to profit from what researchers discover. As a result, universities have set up technology transfer departments whose sole purpose is to determine which discoveries the university is going to patent and market to industry. In other words, universities have become minicompanies, wanting to keep all their scientists’ research proprietary in case it might turn out to be lucrative.

Licensing issues for software development have long been a focus of conflict between programmers and software companies. But the immense financial bonanzas that many believe will accrue to biotech companies — which by necessity are heavily involved not just in software development but also in research that could affect human health — is making such license issues all the more pressing.

Cynthia Gibas, a bioinformatics professor at Virginia Tech, is very concerned about the way her university and others are using the Bayh-Dole Act to keep her colleagues from contributing to open-source software projects. Although her department allows her to work on open source, she says, “I’m interested in this because we don’t have a uniform policy about this across the university. The university doesn’t train us in intellectual property issues. Many researchers have to deal with labs where they believe that anything that goes out the door is a potential loss of profitability.”

With so many people going into bioinformatics, she notes, it’s going to be difficult for them to develop decent software if they’re not allowed to participate in already-existing open-source projects. Gibas may be “a commie pinko from way back,” as she puts it, but she’s also a pragmatist. “I think universities should be allowed to get some butter from these patents because they’re so underfunded anyway. But I’m worried when the attitude becomes ‘let’s grab everything.’”

One solution that Gibas and many other academics favor right now is creating an open-source contract, which would allow academics (and possibly people in industry, too) to make a formal agreement with their employers that allows them to contribute to open-source projects. A group called Openinformatics.org is trying to organize academics around this issue, proposing a number of different kinds of open-source contracts.

Perhaps the only academic to negotiate a blanket open-source contract with his university so far is computational biologist Steven Brenner at U.C. Berkeley, who says that it took several months and hundreds of dollars in legal fees to come to an agreement with the U.C. technology transfer office.

“I just wanted them to sign a document saying I could modify the copyright [license] on my work and contribute to open source,” he says. Eventually, after a great deal of explaining, the tech transfer office came around. Now Brenner is free to contribute to a project called “bioperl” — which he helped found — as much as he likes.

Open-source contracts may be the most elegant solution for scientists who want to share their work. “I know many people at U.C. Berkeley produce open-source semi-illicitly,” Brenner says. “And I’ve been contacted by many people who want the [open-source contract] arrangement.”

A more radical response to privatization of the genome and bioinformatics software would be to open up the entire scientific process. This is exactly what Jeff Bizzaro, founder of Bioinformatics.org, proposes to do. His site, which has attracted thousands of members from across the globe, hosts several open-source bioinformatics projects. But the site isn’t just about software. It’s also about making the process of scientific discovery public and collaborative. Bizzaro encourages scientists to post their findings on the site so that, for example, two scientists could conduct complementary experiments halfway across the globe from each other.

Bizzaro and his cohorts at Bioinformatics.org believe that the scientific process has become too competitive and proprietary; ultimately we should share data in the same way a political progressive would suggest we share wealth: democratically, openly and with ethical integrity.

But what about the people who care passionately about opening up the scientific process, but who have little access to labs and lack formal scientific educations? For them there is always the way of the biopunk.

The term “biopunk” — an offshoot of “cyberpunk” — originally described a genre of science fiction dealing with biotechnological themes. But as computer and Internet culture took off, the term came also to be associated with the “information-wants-to-be-free” hacker ethos.

Biopunk shares with cyberpunk a spirit of social critique in the sciences, and a commitment to limiting corporate control of data. Like cyberpunk, it’s also a movement that encompasses the work of engineers, scientists, artists and cultural critics. But the biopunk revolution has yet to be codified or legitimized — it’s as ill-defined as the genome itself. While cyberpunk is the familiar stuff of Wired cover stories and desktop computers, biopunk lurks at the corners of bioinformatics conferences and in the late-night lab work of anti-authoritarian university researchers who contribute to open-source software projects on the sly. Cyberpunk finds expression in big-budget Hollywood pictures like “The Matrix”; biopunk animates the bizarre art of people like San Francisco biopunk artist Dale Hoyt, whose cult video “Transgenic Hairshirt” has been passed from hand to hand in the San Francisco art underground.

Biopunk also differs from cyberpunk in that it is associated with the life sciences and medicine, two areas of inquiry that have a long history of ethical debate over the relationship between research and the public good. Biopunks can therefore call on a venerable tradition of philosophical thought when they raise objections to how scientists are gathering and using genomic data. Moreover, biopunks often protest misuses of the human body and its reproductive functions, which makes biopunk a considerably more feminist and queer movement than straight-guy cyberpunk ever was.

But what do biopunks want? It depends on who you ask. Dale Hoyt says it’s all about protesting both “bio-Luddites and apologists for the biotech industry.” He adds that it’s also about questioning current science. “I think the human genome project is a capitalist fable, a fable in which the government works with private industry. The genome race was ridiculous. Celera came up with this shotgun version of the genome, and I think the results are bogus. I think it was just to get more stock options for Celera and more grants for the NIH.” His sentiment, while extreme, is not unfounded: Many scientists have protested the slapdash methods that Celera used to assemble its map of the human genome so quickly. Genomics expert Barry Commoner carefully debunked Celera’s dubious achievement in a widely read article in the February issue of Harper’s.

Hoyt is the founder of the Coalition of Artists and Life Forms (CALF), a think tank that he says operates “with the utopic idea that artists could contribute to the dialogue about biotech and research about biotech.” Hoyt, whose video “Transgenic Hairshirt” is about his relationship with his “ludicrously bred” hairless cat, was excited about the cloned kitty announcement, remarking that “this is as important a step as was the VCR or the first PC since it takes a major technology and brings it into the home in a domesticated version.”

Although Hoyt and his biopunk colleagues in CALF remain committed to art that eschews commercialism, it’s clear that, as Hoyt worries, “Biopunk could become a capitalist tool.” In the meantime, however, he has high hopes for the ways that genomic information, if liberated, could be used. “I want superanimals who turn on their masters and give the world back to the chipmunks who were here first,” he laughs, then adds, “This is with our extinction in mind, of course. I’m all for human extinction.”

While trickster nihilism works fine as art, it’s hardly suitable for scientific inquiry. Perhaps that’s why data liberationists who do science and engineering tend to espouse rather more modest goals than the elimination or modification of our troublesome species.

At a January conference on bioinformatics organized by the computer book publisher O’Reilly & Associates, I chaired a panel called “Open Data Open Source” where data liberationist scientists and code hounds had a chance to debate the value of free software and learn more about their biopunk counterparts in the arts community. Slightly perplexed by stories of biopunk artists who want to wrest control of genomic data from corporations and participate in everything from genetic engineering experiments to protein discovery, Ewan Birney wondered, “Well, we couldn’t have people doing genome gazing in the same way amateurs engage in star gazing, could we?”

Several geeks in the audience were quite taken by his comment about genome gazing. Chris Dagdigian immediately brainstormed an idea for a Web site for amateur genomics enthusiasts called Genome Gazer that would broadcast genetic information in a manner analogous to video or audio streaming.

“Basically, you could make a Web site that just streams human genetic code at you,” he says. “You can get your hands on all sorts of genomes now — they’re just giant text files of alphabet characters. You could pick your favorite chromosome, download it from the government and get one of those stock ticker programs to stream the genome instead of business information.”

Ann Loraine, a staff scientist who studies the human genome at biotech company Affymetrix in Emeryville, Calif., loves the concept. “In 20 years, every high school kid will be surfing the human genome online,” she enthuses. “Now that the genome’s sequenced, and you can get computing power for not much money, you too can investigate genes and this could help you learn how to do it.”

Bring the genome to the people — that’s the biopunk way.

We are somewhere in the bowels of the science fiction convention DragonCon. We are attending the Open Filk — an open mike gathering at which people perform science fiction-themed songs, often set to familiar tunes.

It’s so cheesy that at first my friends and I giggle uncontrollably, covering our mouths and wheezing to hide our too-obvious rudeness. But then the deeper meaning of the song starts to sink in: It’s mournful and sincere, a tale sung by an outcast aching for acceptance. The land where the giants walk is a place where geeks can hold their heads high, a place where difference is respected rather than punished. This filker is singing the deep geek blues.

After listening to several more filkers, I get up to leave, thanking the guy who sang about giants on my way out. His irony-free self-expression might be alien to my more cynical universe, where sentimentality has become a form of mockery. But I’m beginning to wonder if he’s what I’m seeking — the core of truth beneath DragonCon’s veneer of commercial science fiction hype.

Often called the biggest science fiction convention in the United States, DragonCon attracts more than 20,000 people to the Hyatt Regency and Marriott in downtown Atlanta every year for a three-day orgy of SF fandom. Giant exhibition halls are packed with people selling everything from rare 1960s Lois Lane comic books and pirated Japanese anime, to the latest role-playing games (RPGs) from White Wolf. Attendees spend their days at hundreds of panels learning about the finer points of fandom: how to speak Elvish, dress like a Klingon, rediscover old comic book favorites or identify the specialness of each Doctor in Doctor Who.

The main competition for DragonCon on Labor Day weekend is WorldCon, a literary SF convention featuring appearances by “respected editors” and postmodern writer-brainiacs like Samuel Delany and Cecilia Tan. DragonCon, on the other hand, is lowbrow by comparison. The keynote speaker is bad boy Harlan Ellison. The scene? A bunch of “tracks” devoted to “Star Wars,” “Star Trek,” “Xena” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” A special midnight session is dedicated to Internet porn. Gore special effects wizard Tom Savini promises to sign pictures of himself wearing his signature “cock and balls” pistol, featured in the splatterfest movie “From Dusk ‘Til Dawn.”

Of course, I had to go to DragonCon.

Only there, hidden under the slag heap of pop cultural debris, could I find the savage, romantic heart of fannish geekdom: the people who wail out the blues, not the ones who hawk trinkets for cash.

In the oh so science-fictiony year 2001, it’s almost a clichi to point out that SF, despite its progressive, utopian impulses, has for the most part sold out. Heroes are action figures; the quest for social justice is a high-concept Hollywood pitch; loving the alien is a pop song from the 1980s. Looked at from this perspective, DragonCon represents the commodification of every fan’s dreams. Here, speculative worlds are equivalent to the dollars you pay for your fannish T-shirts, comics, swords, buttons, videos, DVDs, CDs, whatever.

All weekend long, I hear people griping about where their money is going. If, like many, you register for the con on-site, the cost is $75 per person for the whole weekend (pre-registration and one-day passes are cheaper). Rumors swirl that some of that money is lining the wrong pockets. “All that money should go to staff!” a con-goer points out to me stridently as we wait in an interminable line to register. Looking at the tired, overworked staff, I have to agree. Are there no unions in Middle Earth?

Each “track” at the conference seems organized around some kind of franchise, complete with a new sales pitch for its latest trinkets. The “Star Trek” track whets con-goer appetites for the new “Enterprise” series; a “Lord of the Rings” track features a panel with scenes from Peter Jackson’s upcoming big-budget flick; the “Star Wars” track has a LucasFilms spokesperson explaining why everything in the series has led up to the inauspiciously titled summer 2002 offering “Attack of the Clones”; a local Atlanta UPN affiliate has a big sign advertising “Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s” resurrection in October; even the gentle Pernies from the Weyrfest are selling books and T-shirts from Anne McCaffrey’s “Dragonriders of Pern” series.

People aren’t here just to swap tales of great RPG campaigns and talk in hushed voices about why they adore Willow from “Buffy.” The hungriest among them are trying to “make connections” and get that elusive book deal with top-level SF publishing house Tor, or write a fantastic new world for White Wolf. Sure, they love SF. But more than that, they love money and fame. They’re here to buy and sell.

But why would SF fans rejoice in the corporate control of fantasies they’ve nursed from childhood? The answer, like so many things at DragonCon, comes to me in the form of a story that unfolds right before my eyes.

When my companion Charles and I arrive Thursday night before the con is in full swing, we settle into the Hyatt bar and spend a few bored minutes watching TV.

Just then, our extremely drunk friend Kelly arrives. She’s wearing a giant Nascar T-shirt on her diminutive frame, and has brought a “Mundane” — a nongeek, nonfan — along with her. He looks shaken.

“Hey, guys,” Mundane says to us in a sweet Georgia twang, “I just met her in a bar and we’ve been having a really weird conversation.” Kelly ignores him and looks me over. Hands on hips, she declares, “I want to kiss you. I want to stick my tongue all the way down your throat.” Mundane starts to get pale, then he manages to stammer out, “I’d pay to see that!”

Some goths behind us grin and light a clove cigarette. When Kelly and I start making out, Mundane hands us each a $20 bill and speeds out of the bar. Settling into some new seats along with a handful of Trek junkies, we exchange perplexed glances. We thought he was just kidding about the money. It’s so hard to understand the strange ways of Mundanes.

“Maybe he thought we were about to do a strip show or something?” Kelly wonders. The Trekkers have seen the whole exchange, and join our conversation.

“People used to say I had the best ass in fandom. I could wear a standard Star Fleet uniform when I was younger,” says Joe, one of the Trekkers. “But now I have to wear the Riker uniform — you know, big shoulder pads to hide my belly.” Joe has been attending SF cons for 30 years.

I stare up at the vaulted ceiling of the Hyatt and wonder how much money Joe has spent on Star Fleet uniforms in his 30 years on the USS Enterprise of the imagination. What’s more tragic? Paying two women to kiss (a recognized Mundane ritual in strip clubs), or paying to live in a fantasy world where spaceships can take you far, far away and women kiss because they want to? Both are equally tragic, I think, but a fan’s willingness to exchange money for fantasies is an understandable method of self-defense against a culture that doesn’t understand her. Money, after all, is power. Science-fiction and fantasy commodification allows (middle-class) fans to escape from the horrors of Mundane life on a regular basis.

Selling out becomes a form of protection. If people will pay to live in your fantasy, that fantasy will survive a little longer.

Behind me at the Hyatt bar, a group of gamers are meeting for the first time.

“This is Jim, who invented the Krathgar universe,” one of them says.

“And this is Kathy, who invented the Swiftriver universe,” replies another. There is general murmuring, and several handshakes.

I decide to devote the next two days to getting the equivalent of a graduate education in fandom. Then, I’ll work on getting laid. I start by looking over my program in the Hyatt bar, where I also have a good vantage point from which to study my DragonConian cohorts.

Klingons abound, and a veritable fleet of storm troopers are following Darth Vader. I spot a Cylon (gearing up, no doubt, for the new “Battlestar Galactica” series), a vampire, various fairies and goths, and a knight in full chain mail sharing a table with Daphne from Scooby Doo and Trinity from “The Matrix.” Strangely, there is even a Hunter Thompson look-alike smoking from a cigarette holder and chatting with somebody wearing an Atlanta Comicon T-shirt. I always knew Thompson was a geek.

There are also massive numbers of my fellow female nerds. Unlike at DefCon,, another geekfest I attended recently, these women are not arm candy. People of all genders, races, sizes and ages are mingling on the Hyatt main floor, wandering from panel to panel, stopping occasionally to hug or talk to old friends. Everyone at DragonCon hugs. It’s one of the few environments where I’ve met strangers who ask me for a hug without a trace of sleaziness or New Age hippie smarm. Already, it’s clear to me that DragonCon is more than a marketplace. It’s a social testing ground, a place where people experiment with new kinds of relationships.

I inaugurate my course of study by attending an afternoon panel about how to bring horror into your favorite RPG. Run by three representatives from Hex Games, the company known for inventing the “quick ass game system” (QAGS), the panel quickly turns into a spirited debate about group gaming psychology.

“Personally, my ideal player is naked and on fire in a strange world!” enthuses Hex president Kevin Butler. He urges us to be imaginative, to become “partners” with our players and to remember that they need small triumphs even if they’re eventually going to be eaten by aliens. A guy with a Cthulhu doll strapped to his chest in a baby carrier raises his hand and intones ponderously, “What players fear more than death is not knowing the rules.”

The discussion turns to live action role playing, or LARPing, where people don’t just sit around and narrate what their character is doing, but act it out. We wonder if sometimes people take their gaming too seriously when they LARP. “I keep hearing about this Scandinavian Web site about sex during LARPing,” laughs Butler, “and there’s this big problem with staying in character while having an orgasm. Worrying about shit like that is going TOO FAR!”

It turns out that dozens of LARPs are going on at DragonCon, and I didn’t even realize it. After the Hex panel is over, I chat with a player in the “Lord of the Rings” LARP, who is trying to entice new players to join in. She has a box full of envelopes with character names on them — you pick one, and can play the character for as long as you want. “There are more popular LARPs here, though,” admits the “Lord of the Rings” rep, “and we have a lot of competition, especially at night.” Now, when I walk around, I stare more carefully at people who are in costume or who look like they’re acting. Are they LARPing? I decide that if anyone creepy approaches me, I have the perfect excuse not to talk to them. I’ll just flash a talk-to-the-hand sign and say disdainfully, “Excuse me, but I’m LARPing right now.”

Later, I attend a Xena panel that features Katherine Fugate, the writer who penned the episode “When Fates Collide,” a fannish favorite in which Xena and Gabrielle learn that no matter how their lives could have turned out, their fates would still have been tied together. It also includes some steamy girl-on-girl kissing. The large room is packed with women, many of them openly snuggling with their girlfriends. I’m smitten by them, moved by all these heartfelt displays of queerness in a Southern state hardly known for tolerance.

Finally, a gray-haired woman stands up and asks the first question. She has a clear Southern twang in her voice, and asks in the politest possible way, “What do you think of scenes between women in Xena?” We all know what she’s really asking: She wants Fugate’s opinion on the infamous “Xena subtext,” the possible sexual relationship between Xena and her friend Gabrielle.

Fugate says simply, “I always thought they were lovers.”

The entire room bursts into cheers and applause. Some women even stand up and stamp their feet.

Filled with elation, I exit the room and cross the hall to watch a roomful of “Buffy” fans putting on vampire makeup. In an environment where vampires, hobbits and dragonriders can roam free, there is tolerance — even enthusiasm — for other kinds of difference as well. If Xena is queer, then why not hundreds of DragonConians? And if two strangers can get it on while LARPing, then surely casual sex is just another form of play.

At DragonCon, all eroticism seems to emanate from the Fantasm group. Fantasm is another Atlanta convention, much smaller, whose organizers are more interested in “speculative sex” than they are in “Star Wars” action figures. I find the Fantasm booth in the expo room with the help of Fred, a longtime con-goer who is an emeritus member of the Secret Masters of Fandom (SMOF), an Illuminati-style group whose covert e-mail list controls the con universe.

The Fantasm folks are selling T-shirts that say things like “Klingons don’t need ribbed condoms,” and pirated videos of Japanese live-action tentacle porn. Charles and I finagle a ticket to Fantasm’s Saturday night party, which will feature Fred auctioning off naked slaves to partiers. “I also hear they’re building a rack,” Fred says conspiratorially.

Saturday night arrives, and Charles is dressed as Wonder Woman. I’m wearing my nicest “Men in Black” suit and tie. After having some drinks with members of Atlanta’s queer SF group, Outworlders, I tangle briefly with some horny teenage boys who want to show me their swords (“They’re really sharp! Can I have a hug?”) and make my way to the Fantasm suite. The naked slaves are lovely; the cute young boy on the rack is turning a nice shade of red under a nerdy goth’s flogger; and a foxy young game designer (why are they all game designers?) named Tony is ready to do whatever I want on the balcony. Some hottie who tells me he owns several comic book stores grabs me and we start kissing. Apparently, he helped organize Atlanta Comicon. So many luscious choices in my quest for sex!

But Charles and our friend Mehitabel decide that they absolutely must fuck a storm trooper in uniform. All weekend, we’ve been drawn by the fetishist outfits of the storm troopers: Swathed in shiny white plastic, their faces hidden behind imperturbable death masks, they make pleasingly mechanical sounds when they walk. They’re like cars, or computers, or giant fascist sex toys. Rumor has it that they make their armor by hand, carefully cutting each piece of plastic out of a certain type of truck shell whose contours are well-suited for storm trooper conversion. The storm troopers’ dedication to their appearance just makes them sexier. Not even Cindy Crawford works this hard to look good.

And so we leave the safe confines of the Fantasm party and run into the midnight hallways of the Hyatt, searching for storm troopers. Somebody at the Fantasm party has stolen one of the storm trooper walkie-talkies (yes, they’re all in radio contact) and vows to help us out. As we begin our pilgrimage, we hear him sounding very official, intoning, “Calling all storm troopers. Report to the Fantasm party in Room 931 at once.”

On the main floor, we see two people in partial storm trooper outfits.

“Could you put your full uniform on for us?” Charles asks. Mehitabel giggles.

“I guess so,” one of the troopers says uncertainly. “Why?”

“Well, we need you for sexual activities,” I explain. “But just oral sex. See, we’re at this party, and everyone really wants to have sex with a storm trooper. But you need to be in full uniform.”

Both storm troopers are looking a little disturbed. “Why don’t you try some of the other guys? They’re downstairs.”

Downstairs, we find more partially outfitted storm troopers. They look far less enticing with only the top half of their armor on. Each time we request sex, they send us to another part of the hotel. All the troopers seem to like the idea of putting on their full uniform for us, but when we bring up sex, they send us on to someone else. Don’t they see the connection between their fetishistic uniforms and kinky sex?

“Storm troopers are all bark and no bite,” a nontrooper tells us helpfully, adjusting her breasts inside a latex dress.

“They can’t have sex in their uniforms because they’re in command,” Mehitabel replies mournfully.

But wonder of wonders, when we return to the Fantasm party for more groping, the walkie-talkie plan has worked. There are three storm troopers waiting for us, looking extremely confused. Unfortunately, they aren’t in full uniform. After a long discussion about storm trooper design, we discover that the uniforms are like overalls — they’re mostly one piece, and once you have them on, it’s hard to lie down or bend over or, um, anything else. Sadly, the one trooper who is interested in debauchery doesn’t have a hinge on his plastic storm trooper crotch guard, so we can’t get access.

“What were you thinking?” I berate him. “How could you make a uniform like this without hinges on the crotch?” I tap the thick white plastic over his underwear and frown.

“I’m sorry,” he says, looking genuinely contrite. “I didn’t have time.” Another trooper proudly shows off his crotch hinge, but declines the oral sex.

“Hasn’t anyone ever wanted to fuck you in uniform?” I ask the third trooper, who doesn’t look very Imperial in his Gap khakis. Apparently not. We have reached the limits of our shared fantasies with these troopers. They’re not going to play by our rules, and we’re not going to play by theirs. I’ve learned another rule of tolerance at DragonCon: All LARPing is consensual, and if you find yourself in a LARP you don’t like you can just go find another one.

Our storm troopers wander off in search of the Empire. Luckily, there are sexy goths, game designers and comic book geeks aplenty at the Fantasm shindig. A slave feeds me some melon and then demands, “Do you think I’m only worth $5? That’s all my master paid for me. And I even showed him my cock!”

And so it comes back to money, finally, the only social fantasy that DragonCon shares with the Mundane world. And yet somehow the science fiction fans who flock to Atlanta every year have managed to change the meaning of money to the point where it is practically unrecognizable. In Mundane life, there are no happy slaves. At DragonCon, every role is alluring because the whole social scene is treated like a game. Somehow, playing at life allows us to break the rules.

Created in the late ’70s and ’80s, ASCII pr0n was the world’s first Internet pornography. It was the kind of sexual expression only a hardcore computer dork could love: ASCII pr0n jokes and pinups provided a common culture for a community of outcasts and misfits whose sex lives were portrayed by the mass media as weird or nonexistent. These ridiculously low-quality nudie picture-cum-text files were popular back in the days when putting photographs online was but a dream. ASCII pr0n was of generally poor quality — so much so that its lameness was an in-group joke among hackers at the time — but it also recalls a beautiful, innocent era in many coders’ lives. Its low-res allure and retro cheese factor provide a cool, inspirational aesthetic for today’s younger hackers.

As an almost forgotten footnote of Net history, ASCII pr0n doesn’t seem to have much relevance to an age begging for 3-D “fully immersive” stimulation. But in a weird display of how what goes around comes around applies even to the vagaries of online evolution, ASCII pr0n is suddenly important again. Or at least it should be, if the latest wave of pornography entrepreneurs is willing to pay attention to its own history.

Get ready for “mobile” porn. Big-league adult content companies are getting into the “m” business. They’re ready to sell pornographic movies, magazines and real-time interactivity on people’s PDAs, cellphones and wireless devices.

But there’s just one problem. The porn sucks.

“The quality is nonexistent right now,” confesses Dave James, co-founder of Vivid Entertainment, one of the major players in the digital adult content market.

In fact, mobile porn sucks so hard that its ubiquity is fueling nostalgia for ASCII pr0n. Porn for today’s cellphones is usually written in WAP (wireless application protocol) format, and generally looks far worse than most ASCII pr0n. And the hazy pictures or text tales available for your porno-enhanced hand-held devices are mind-bogglingly lame. One of the truisms of the modern age is that pornography is often first to exploit new advances in technology. But maybe there should be an amendment: Bad pornography always comes first, out on the cutting edge.

Twenty-year-old Irish hacker Cliff Flood is a self-acknowledged fan of ASCII pr0n, and boasts a small collection of ASCII pinups on his Web site, which is otherwise devoted to electronic music and life as a computer science major at the Institute of Technology in Carlow, Ireland.

Over e-mail, Cliff told me that his interest in ASCII pr0n isn’t really prurient. “Mostly the ASCII material is just interesting because it is a curious novelty,” he wrote. “It’s quite uncommon, and seeing the images that some of the authors can come up with using just a few characters is intriguing. My friends and I are mostly brought together by our love for electronic music, creation and consumption, which sometimes involves ancient equipment and a love for all things retro like Atari [computers] and so on. I guess this is where the interest in ASCII pr0n comes in.” This is pr0n as pop art, not, um, as personal aid.

The average cellphone WAP porn, most of which appears to originate mysteriously from the United Kingdom, looks like a haze of dots accompanied by terse textual suggestions, such as “Oh please, fuck my ass!” Porn for PDAs isn’t much better. Tony O’Neill, president of one of the few adult content sites exclusively for PDAs, PalmStories.com, provides his 400 subscription members with a few hot-synced pictures and text stories every day on an AvantGo adult channel. Even he admits that “nobody knows where it’s going yet.”

But in 1997, a celebrity hacker named Kingpin saw the future of PDA porn. In a crypto-masturbatory moment, Kingpin invented a silly software application called HairyPalm, a hack of the Palm operating system that allowed users to play Apple IIE “porno demos” on their Palm Pilots. The app was basically a tool for viewing ASCII pr0n, but when hundreds of present-day ASCII enthusiasts began implementing HairyPalm, the thing worked so badly that it was rumored to be a Palm OS virus.

Despite HairyPalm’s abysmal reputation, Kingpin did manage to make his point. Porn for hand-helds is about as sophisticated and arousing as the old ASCII pr0n that pre-Web nerds used to play with back in the day. In his readme file for HairyPalm 1.5, Kingpin described it as “taking a step back to the early age of computer pornography … HairyPalm demonstrates the beautiful quality of that era.”

Alexei Shulgin, a Moscow artist and webmaster for the notorious FuckU-FuckMe Web site, designed his ASCII pr0n site with an explicitly artistic goal. “I made the site in 1997-98 after I registered Easylife.org and gathered information about access statistics for artists’ Web sites,” he explained to me via e-mail. “It was really painful — not very many people were interested [in art]. Unlike that, porn seemed to be really popular. So my decision was to make a porn interface to art — a Web site that looks like a normal porn site but if you go deeper in it and follow links you’ll end up at art projects.”

The question is, are today’s graphically challenged, bitmappy and text-heavy bits of mobile porn just as imaginative as yesterday’s pr0n? Will there be cult Web sites devoted to WAP porn in 20 years?

Probably not. Many people look back fondly on ASCII pr0n — which was available only to the small group of techno-literates in the 1970s and ’80s — because it was symbolic of a very specific epoch in hacker culture. The ASCII pr0n era was a time before spam, before dot-coms, before things like AOL chat blotted out the close-knit digital communities of Usenet. ASCII pr0n was by geeks, for geeks, disseminated for free in the (sort of) secret directories of BBSs and campus mainframes. ASCII pr0n isn’t just a format — it’s a piece of hacker lore. No wonder it’s being treated like cult art.

Mobile porn, despite its surface resemblance to ASCII pr0n, is clearly being manufactured by large corporations for the masses. Even if said masses haven’t really arrived yet, the point, as Penthouse.com director Gerard Van der Leun says, is to start attracting them now. Penthouse.com has just started releasing what it calls “Petfolios,” or minimagazines for PDAs that feature a Penthouse pet in a mixture of Windows-compatible text, video clips and pictures. “We’re doing a couple of these for free, just to put them out on the Net in the real world,” Van der Leun says, noting that Penthouse.com visitors can download them from the site.

Vivid is also working the hand-held angle, expecting to launch streaming video content for iPAQ hand-helds by Comdex time. “At the end of 2001, there will be a billion hand-helds out there,” says Vivid’s James. “We only need a small portion of that as a value add in order to make a profit.”

The biggest questions for corporations like Penthouse.com and Vivid aren’t how to work creatively in the WAP and PDA formats available, nor are they about creating porn for techno-geeks. Instead, Van der Leun and his counterparts at Vivid worry about how they’ll prevent your average Joe or Jane from violating copyright laws. Van der Leun says Penthouse.com’s Petfolios are protected from pirating because “in order to share these files, consumers have to disclose the credit card number they used to purchase it.” He believes this disincentive to sharing porn will cut down on piracy. Gary Thompson, Vivid’s V.P. of business development, says his biggest concern in the company’s growing PDA market is “digital rights management.” He adds, “We’ll use something along the lines of a digital encryption code where the files disappear after 24 hours. Part of the reason why we’re delaying release on this stuff is because we want technology in place that will keep people from copying our stuff Napster style.”

Mobile porn will, in the end, be just like today’s Web porn. It will be made by professionals for corporations, which will sell it to the masses. It will have none of ASCII pr0n’s artistic or cultish appeal. Despite all the hype, cellphone porn and PDA porn are nothing new, nor will they be remembered in the glowing terms that ASCII — or, for that matter, Napster — will be.

Perhaps the ASCII pr0n nostalgia trend is a reaction against the always-expanding digital porn empire. Or maybe it’s a way of making fun of how bad today’s allegedly high-tech porn really is. Either way, it’s clear that ASCII pr0n will continue to have a place in hacker history. And mobile porn will be just another notch in some CEO’s titanium PDA case.

Joining Marston in the struggle to make mixed-race people a target market is 21-year-old Art Harrison, whose Mixedrace.com launched as a beta site in September. Like Marston, Harrison’s investment in his Web site is personal as well as financial. A Canadian whose father is African and whose mother is Scottish, Harrison says he’s been interested in mixed-race identity since he launched a joke site two years ago called Biracial World Domination. Since that time, he’s been invited to speak at Harvard’s annual conference on mixed-race issues, and has been studying computer science at Carleton College in Ottawa, Ontario.

Harrison is raising venture capital for Mixedrace.com, hoping to expand it into a comprehensive community site featuring instant messaging, e-mail groups and content subchannels on issues such as interracial dating and culture. Community is the key term for Marston and Harrison, who both decry the lack of cohesiveness among people who come from mixed backgrounds.

The Web, with its focus on interactivity, seemed to offer the perfect solution. They could create the mixed communities they longed for and make some money too. Although the financial future for both sites is still unclear, the CEOs are already dealing with sticky questions about content. Specifically, who counts as a half-Jew or a mixed-race person? “It’s a self-identification thing,” affirmed Harrison. “Mixedrace represents people without the barriers of race, yet these people exist because of those barriers. You have to have whole race people to have mixed race people.” Marston admitted that she’s not sure whether to define half-Jewish identity as racial or not. “Judaism is measured genetically, since you are considered Jewish only if your mother is Jewish, thus proving your parentage,” she mused. “And that sounds like a racial identity to me. But I’m still not sure if I’d be considered mixed-race.”

HalfJew.com and Mixedrace.com will be competing with whole-race sites such as AsianAvenue.com, Black Voices and NetNoir, all of which have been fairly successful in the burgeoning market for ethnic and racial content online. But as the mixed race magazine Mavin pointed out in a recent issue, the numbers of mixed-race people in the U.S. are growing by leaps and bounds. Quoting the U.S. Census Bureau, Mavin reported that by 2050, 30 million U.S. citizens will be of mixed racial backgrounds. “I think it’s a good sign if people want to identify as mixed-race,” Harrison said decisively. “It means that racial barriers are breaking down.” His sentiment might fly with the Census people. But in the dot-com world, all that matters is whether mixed-race people and half-Jews have money to burn online.

You’ve just read the standard plotline from a subgenre of erotica known as “erotic mind control.” Typically found on the Internet in places like the Alt.Sex.Stories Text Repository or the Erotic Mind Control Stories Archive, mind-control erotica isn’t exactly your ordinary smut. Often, it contains no sex at all, and instead is merely a long description of someone being hypnotized. More important, mind-control erotica is, well, in your mind. Most of these sexy stories — whose popularity has grown enormously over the past several years online — portray erotic situations that are physically or technologically impossible. You cannot control someone’s every thought with a pill or a machine or even hypnosis.

Mind control may not be your standard sex-fantasy scenario, but elements of it are as old as Ovid: the idea of losing control, of being seduced against your better judgment. But for fans of erotic mind control — most of whom share their passions and pornography on the Internet — nothing could be more titillating than the idea that somebody might control their thoughts and even give them orgasms without ever touching anything but their (un)conscious minds.

While most fetishists focus on the body — feet, lingerie, breasts — mind-control fetishists are interested in what goes on inside people’s heads. And, of course, they’re turned on by controlling or being controlled mentally. Mind-control erotica therefore shares territory with B&D or S/M. But it’s also connected to more obscure, mind-oriented fetishes, like hypno-fetishism and fetishes that revolve around subduing people with laughing gas, chloroform and other drugs. The idea is that taking over somebody’s mind is hot, whether you do it with hypnosis, drugs or special machines that reprogram the cerebral cortex.

Simon bar Sinister, who has run the Erotic Mind Control Story Archive since 1996, says, “This is a fetish for an abstract idea, basically. A story that is just about being hypnotized is enough to get me aroused. It doesn’t have to have any erotic content.”

RC, one of the better-known writers in this genre of erotica, agrees. “Since I enjoy erotic hypnosis, my emphasis is on the hypnosis part, not whatever comes after it. I’ve been accused of ending my stories too early, before the sex happens.”

A typical mind-control story is “Hypnotic Roommates,” written by an anonymous contributor to Simon’s archive. Andrea, a naughty psychology student, has decided to hypnotize and sexually dominate her nubile roommate Susan with a video of swirly, glowing rings of light. Yet most of the story focuses on Susan’s mental state as she becomes more and more mentally open:

“Susan … felt a strange sensation that she couldn’t place as she stared at the screen … She tried to look up at Andrea and found that her eyes wouldn’t move … A little voice in her head started to warn her, but the rings were glowing and moving so smoothly and prettily that she didn’t pay it any attention.”

What is it about this kind of scenario that gets people off? Simon speculates that mind-control erotica is “like B&D [or] S/M without physical violence.” In other words, you can have your bondage but don’t have to buy any fancy equipment. RC believes that hypnosis is sexy because it’s a kind of alibi: People imagine that being hypnotized will allow them to do taboo things because they’re “not responsible for their actions.” This might explain the preponderance of mind-control stories and images that involve breaking taboos: cross-dressing, stripping for an audience, kinky scenes involving leather or other B&D or S/M accouterments and bisexuality.

Look Deeply, the online alias of a real-life hypnotherapist who enjoys co-authoring stories with RC and being a “hypno-diva” on the Web, says, “It’s about playing with control, but more importantly the appeal comes from our love of trancing out, either with alcohol or movies or computers. We love altered states.”

All of this is made more complicated by the fact that nearly all the mind-control stories and images you find online exist purely in the realm of the imagination. Many stories border on science fiction or horror, including machines that “jack in” to people’s brains, software programs that destroy free will, vampires and even (in one memorable instance) lizard aliens. Text archives like Simon’s will generally contain disclaimers warning readers that you can’t control people’s minds in real life, and that if you try, you are being extremely unethical.

Possibly as a result of this poignantly insulating aspect of mind-control fetishism, the people who enjoy and create mind-control erotica tend to stick together, sharing their stories, pictures and fantasies through the Internet. Simon’s archive boasts a very active, intelligent discussion list, where writers of mind-control erotica recently discussed why they keep doing it. Several authors agreed that part of the appeal was getting inside readers’ minds — in effect, having mind-control sex by disseminating their own work.

One writer, who calls himself EyeOfSerpent, flirted with his fellow mind-control erotica producers: “The printed word has always been my friend. Now it is also one of my lovers. [To all you writers] — Welcome to my bedroom, I’ve had you all many times and plan to continue to ravish you all. Get used to it.”

Other mind-control fetishists contribute to their community by posting helpful guides on how to use Adobe Photoshop to turn ordinary pictures of women into images of sexy, mind controlled women. Exhibitionists post pictures of their playful hypno-adventures. And one truly devoted mind control fan has created an entire Web page devoted to chronicling instances of hypnosis and mind control in the movies.

The vast majority of mind control fetishists never make their fantasies a reality. For them, it’s enough to read and write about it. Indeed, a disclaimer on the Mind Control Story Archive Web site reads, “This site is for fantasy only. The situations described here are at best impossible or at worst highly immoral in real life. Anyone wishing to try this stuff for real should seek psychological help and/or get a life.”

But Look Deeply, the hypnotherapist, revealed that a handful of people — including herself — are taking their mind-control fetish out of the realm of fantasy. These people usually engage in sex play that involves hypnosis, although there are rumors that chloroform and gas fetishists have gotten their hands on the drugs that cloud their minds and get them off too.

It isn’t a problem for people to engage in consensual erotic hypnosis, Look Deeply says, whether that takes place in real life, online or over the phone. (Many hypno-divas offer their services for a fee.)

But she worries that there are many dominant hypnotists out there who can seriously damage fetishists who are easily hypnotized and controlled. Look Deeply thinks an “evil hypnotist” might force clients into sexual situations that they’re not comfortable with, or take their money.

“All hypnosis is self-hypnosis,” Look Deeply notes, “and you won’t be hypnotized unless you want it to happen. But if you’re looking for it, and you put yourself in the hands of a stranger, then you may be in for some trouble. People should always check references on any hypnotist.”

Another hypnotherapist who deals with erotic issues is Wendi Friesen, who offers seminars and sells tapes on how to use hypnosis to improve your sex life and is the author of “Hypnotize Your Lover.” She doesn’t deal with hypnosis as a fetish, but instead treats it as a healing tool that couples can use to enhance trust, increase arousal and even produce orgasms through hypnotic suggestion.

Is it really possible to hypnotize somebody and cause an orgasm with merely a word, just like a fantasy out of a mind-control story? Friesen believes it is. “A man, another hypnotherapist, tried to make me have an orgasm on command. I was about 95 percent there,” she laughed. “But I couldn’t let myself go quite enough, and I didn’t trust him enough. Other people have done it, though. Think about it — if you can have an orgasm in a dream, and it’s a real orgasm, you can certainly use hypnosis to bring you to orgasm.”

Another erotic phenomenon Friesen says she’s heard about a lot is breast and penis enlargement through hypnosis. “The mind knows how to grow more fat and cell tissue, so it makes sense,” she asserts, with a chuckle. “One guy I talked to said he grew two inches and now it’s painful to have sex with his lover.”

But these examples of real-life mind-control sex are few and far between. Most mind-control erotica exists right where it gives fetishists the most pleasure: in their heads. Through the medium of stories and message boards and home-brewed images, these fetishists are touching each other’s minds and arousing each other without ever meeting in the flesh. As RC writes on his erotica Web site, “It’s about the power of your mind. Anything is possible. Isn’t that an intensely thrilling thought?”