Julian Assange Book, 'Cypherpunks,' Skirts Mainstream

Here's an article from the HuffPost back in December, which is fitting given our tendency towards lateness as a socio-cultural, fashion statement. Enjoy.

Julian Assange Book, 'Cypherpunks,' Skirts Mainstream On Its Way To Market

By Jason Cherkis 

WASHINGTON -- Julian Assange is wasting little time while shut inside Ecuador's embassy in London. The WikiLeaks founder has recently released a book called Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet. The book consists chiefly of the transcript of a conversation between Assange and three others. In a nod to openness, he has chosen not to offer the ebook version on Amazon. Instead, the book is being sold exclusively on reKiosk, a self-described uncensored portal.

In a way, reKiosk is a perfect fit for Assange. The site operates like an open-source version of Amazon. "If amazon.com is like a Walmart, reKiosk is like a covered bazaar," reads a statement on the site, which notes that it's comprised of "a network of user-curated digital storefronts where anyone can sell music, books, and other digital files, of their own designs or of someone else's."

Assange's book, which was released in late November, explores the Internet's possibilities both to expose or enforce corruption, as a tool for more open communication and for government surveillance. In an excerpt posted on Salon, Assange argues "we now have increased communication versus increased surveillance."

Assange would know. He has been holed up at the embassy for months in an attempt to avoid questioning on allegations involving sexual assaults in Sweden. Ecuador hadgranted Assange asylum in August. But law enforcement authorities say he will be arrested if he tries to leave the embassy. Assange fears that if he does leave the embassy, he risks being brought to the U.S to face espionage charges.

His circumstances seem to have influenced his book. In an introduction also available online, Assange wrote, "This book is not a manifesto. There is no time for that. This book is a warning."

Genesis P-Orridge, Hakim Bey and John Perry Barlow in Conversation (1993)

Technoccult dug up an old Mondo 2000 interview from 1993 with both Genesis P-Orridge and Hakim Bey conducted by Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder John Perry Barlow

Barlow's Introduction to the Interview:

1. Zoning Out, Temporarily with Hakim Bey and Genesis P-Orridge
2. by John Perry Barlow, Mondo 2000 No. 9 1993
4. It was Queen Mu who made this happen - her conspiratorial whisper suggesting that I get myself together with Hakim Bey, Genesis P-Orridge, and a MONDO tape recorder. I wasn't too sure what she had in mind.
6. I mean, aside from the fact that all three of us are white, male acid-altered, old enough to know better, and crazy enough to do it anyway... Our resumes just didn't hook up and I wondered if we would.
8. Mr. Orridge, for example, is one singular fellow. He's got hardware dangling all over a body which sports more ritual scars and tattoos than Melville's Queequeg (with whom he shares other characteristics, most notably a nightmarish appearance cloaking a sweet and reasonable mind). He also happens to be the father of modern primitivism, the post-industrial tribes, the Rave Movement, the avant-garde band Psychic TV, and a couple of beautiful young daughters.
10. Orridge has been willfully causing such grave offense to British proprietary for the last twenty years that they've finally seen no alternative but to seize all his works and archives and pass laws which, though tailored to outlaw him, also make it a crime to give any other British subject so much as a hickey. (Or cause any physical harm to oneself or another consenting adult in the pursuit of dark pleasures.)
12. Finally, agents of the Crown have sent him packing into exile in California - a place so much more congenial to abominations that Mr. Orridge is having to scratch around for something to sink his sharpened teeth into.
14. Hakim Bey is another whose deviances have forced him to hide behind another name. Spending much of his life disguised as a mild-mannered comparative religion scholar, he emerges in print as an anarcho-gay drug fiend and Sufi pirate, compared to whom Salmon Rushdie is as orthodox as an ayatollah. Hakim's the guy who put the Temporary Autonomous Zone on the map.
16. However similar they might seem in their jointly unspeakable practices, their unabashedly unnatural acts, Bey and Orridge are quite different. Bey is reclusive and ascetic, a closeted natural philosopher, whereas Orridge is a performer, indeed something of a rock star.
18. And there's my own staid self, known to MONDO readers as a retired cattle rancher, rural gentlemen of such probity that, a couple years ago, I came within one vote of a Republican state senate seat in Wyoming, the most conservative part of the non-Islamic world. I'm a Freemason, a jack-Mormon, and a problem if I've been drinking. In short, just about everything these two are not.
20. And yet...
22. When, by virtue of a couple minor miracles, I was able to horse all three of us into my borrowed apartment in San Francisco's Potero Hill, a curiously complete zone of shared understanding arose between us. It felt as if we'd been opining around the same cracker barrel for years. During the hour and a half this field remained intact, we covered a vast stretch of philosophical country which the hacked and decimated thing below can only hint at.
24. -John Barlow
    
    
    Read Text of Interview...

Salon Interview with WIlliam Gibson

William Ford Gibson (born March 17, 1948) is an American-Canadian speculative fiction novelist who has been called the "noir prophet" of the cyberpunk subgenre.^[16] Gibson coined the term "cyberspace" in his short story "Burning Chrome" (1982) and later popularized the concept in his debut novel, Neuromancer (1984). In envisaging cyberspace, Gibson created an iconography for the information age before the ubiquity of the Internet in the 1990s.^[17] He is also credited with predicting the rise of reality television and with establishing the conceptual foundations for the rapid growth of virtual environments such as video games and the World Wide Web.

Having changed residence frequently with his family as a child, Gibson became a shy, ungainly teenager who often read science fiction. After spending his adolescence at a private boarding school in Arizona, Gibson evaded the draft during the Vietnam War by emigrating to Canada in 1968, where he became immersed in the counterculture and after settling in Vancouver eventually became a full-time writer. He retains dual citizenship.^[18] Gibson's early works are bleak, noir near-future stories about the effect of cybernetics and computer networkson humans—a "combination of lowlife and high tech".^[19] The short stories were published in popular science fiction magazines. The themes, settings and characters developed in these stories culminated in his first novel, Neuromancer, which garnered critical and commercial success, virtually initiating the cyberpunk literary genre.

Although much of Gibson's reputation has remained associated with Neuromancer, his work has continued to evolve. After expanding onNeuromancer with two more novels to complete the dystopic Sprawl trilogy, Gibson became an important author of another science fiction sub-genre—steampunk—with the 1990 alternate history novel The Difference Engine, written with Bruce Sterling. In the 1990s, he composed the Bridge trilogy of novels, which focused on sociological observations of near-future urban environments and late capitalism. His most recent novels—Pattern Recognition (2003), Spook Country (2007) and Zero History (2010)—are set in a contemporary world and have put his work onto mainstream bestseller lists for the first time.

Gibson is one of the best-known North American science fiction writers, fêted by The Guardian in 1999 as "probably the most important novelist of the past two decades". Gibson has written more than twenty short stories and ten critically acclaimed novels (one in collaboration), and has contributed articles to several major publications and collaborated extensively with performance artists, filmmakers and musicians. His thought has been cited as an influence on science fiction authors, design, academia, cyberculture, and technology.