Salon.com > R.U. Sirius

Steal this millennium!

Thu, 19 Oct 2000 19:00:00 +0000

Abbie Hoffman passionately wanted a popular film made about his life. He even playfully titled his 1981 autobiography "Soon to Be a Major Motion Picture." Two decades later, the Abbie biopic "Steal This Movie" has come and gone, a relative nonevent. While the flick will live on in cable and video, some may claim that the film's popular failure proves the prankster, lefty countercultural politics that Abbie lived by irrelevant to the present moment.

To examine the relevance, or lack thereof, of yippieness in the year 2000, I sought out one of Abbie's closest friends and yippie compatriots, Stew Albert.

Albert was the vaguely serious one among the lunatics who made up the initial yippie front guard, a cast of characters that included widely known countercultural players such as Allen Ginsberg, Jerry Rubin, Anita Hoffman, Phil Ochs, Ed Sanders, Paul Krassner and eventually John Lennon and Yoko Ono. And he was instrumental in pushing the yippies toward the extreme leftist politics that followed the summer of 1968, negotiating a "Yippie-Panther Pact" with Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver. A slightly mellowed Albert now lives in Portland, Ore., with his wife, fellow yippie graduate Judy Gumbo, where they both remain active in leftist environmental politics.

Gore's hay day

Tue, 15 Feb 2000 17:00:00 +0000

In the late 1960s, Stephen Gaskin made a name for himself teaching a weekly class on the meaning of the psychedelic experience in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury District. At the start of the 70s, he led a hippie exodus to Tennessee, where he created "The Farm," just about the only successful hippie commune still standing. He's written several books about pot and psychedelia, including the "Amazing Dope Tales."

He says he also had a friendly and mutually supportive relationship with a fellow Tennesseean named Al Gore. (Gore could not be reached for comment on the extent of his friendship with Gaskin.)

Now, Gaskin is seeking the Green Party's nomination as its presidential candidate. So far, he's entered that party's primaries in New York and New Mexico and has formed Georgians for Gaskin. He claims that while "a lot of Greens are just going to go for [Ralph Nader] automatically, there is also a bunch who are ready for me to challenge." Given the recent claims of former friend John Warnecke that Gore was an epic stoner in the early 1970s (which Gore denies), could Gaskin's candidacy provoke a media critical mass, forcing Gore to confront his past as a countercultural dilettante?

What does technology want?

Thu, 10 Dec 1998 20:00:00 +0000

Harking at least back to his days as editor of the Whole Earth Review, Kevin Kelly has had a fascination with how human technologies and organizations function in a biological manner. His seminal 1995 book, "Out Of Control," was a fascinating exploration of this terrain. Since Kelly is also the founding and ongoing executive editor of Wired, response to "Out of Control" quickly turned political: Critics, connecting the book with the libertarian tendencies they found in the magazine, read it as advocating a kind of mercilessly Darwinian free enterprise.

Kelly's latest book, "New Rules for the New Economy" (Viking Penguin, 164 pages), will only serve to bolster that perception. Formatted as a business advice manual along the lines of Tom Peters' "Thriving on Chaos," "New Rules" doesn't stop to shed a tear for those left behind as it excitedly delineates the shift from old industrial rules to a dangerous world of "constant flux" and networked, process-oriented business activity -- a marketplace that is truly out of control.

The god of the information age is a trickster

Fri, 30 Oct 1998 20:00:00 +0000

I first noticed Erik Davis in the early '90s when I read a piece he'd written about UFO literature for the Village Voice. It was the first uncynical yet smart piece about this phenomenon I'd encountered since I'd stumbled across Jung's writings on the subject many years before, and his poetic use of language in the expository form was nothing short of exquisite. Since then, Davis has kept his sharp yet expansive intelligence focused on the various flavors of millennial strangeness that permeate our digitized era.

His new book, "TechGnosis," casts a wide net, elucidating both the historical context and the meaning behind digital Gnosticism, technopaganism, William Gibson's voodoo-haunted visions of cyberspace, the Extropians' dreams of disembodied immortality, cyberdelia and most of the other odd phantoms of mind and spirit that seem to turn on the strange tribes at the edges of technoculture. This territory has been explored before by the likes of Douglas Rushkoff and Mark Dery, but it has never been so eloquently explained. Last month I sat down with Davis to talk about his work.