Singularity may already be in the motion of becoming a reality as one thinks about these global relationships further, but another place to realize its evidence is to pay attention to the cyberpunk poetry of Kenji Siratori, particularly his book, Nonexistence. The implications about humanity and technology that come out of this book are endless, because brains that process it in its entirety become assimilated by the language of computer processing. Siratori is not presenting a philosophy on the relationship between the two, but rather he has gripped them both as two sides of the same cybernetic putty wad, and clapped them together. The result? A book that attempts to infect humans with a computer virus. Some argue that it is a literary representation of Dub music, but it is also a groundwork in what might be considered cyber-magic in the way it invades and inverts the reader’s awareness.
As one reads Nonexistence, different methods of eyeball mechanics become useful. The brain starts to naturally toss out a majority of what is written, and the text begins to scroll faster and faster. When processing this, rather than “reading” this, one finds that all of his senses except those that are devoted to reading gain enhanced sensitivity. Sounds, awareness of breathing, subtle movements in peripheral vision and other functions, that would otherwise be disregarded by the mind’s concentration on identifying plot, characters, and themes, take a foreground position in the reader. He is inverted, plugged in, nonexistent, invisible.The poem does contain lines that offer momentous lucidity, which can be picked out and thought over. One such line is,
****hunting for the grotesque WEB of a chemical=anthropoid=brain universe of the terror fear=cytoplasm that jointed to the insanity medium of the hyperreal HIV=scanners DNA=channel of the corpse city murder game (Siratori 24).
This is applicable to real life in that ethnobotanical research has been done which traces the emergence of a rapidly evolving human consciousness back to hominid ancestors:
My contention is that mutation-causing, psychoactive chemical compounds in the early human diet directly influenced the rapid reorganization of the brain’s information-processing capacities. Alkaloids in plants, specifically the hallucinogenic compounds such as psilocybin, dimethyltryptamine (DMT), and harmaline, could be the chemical factors in the protohuman diet that catalyzed the emergence of human self-reflection (McKenna 24).1
Siratori’s selection then accounts for the “brain universe of the terror fear,” which alludes to the shedding of the ego in a process of self-realization and cognitive vertigo that generate fear in those that experience it. Next in the sequence to account for is a fragment that symbolizes the shock (“hyperreal”) of realizing that a disease (“HIV”) can be spread (“cytoplasm that [joins]”) by something as transcendently divine as sex (“insanity medium”). Following this is the intervention of government (“scanners DNA”), and finally a cultural descent into perceiving the city as an Other Plane in which a game is played between government and non-political advocates of the superhuman consciousness (Vernor Vinge’s True Names portrays this relationship clearly). To sum these lines up into one message: "Man found psychoactive plants that scared him into self-realization, which enhanced his understanding of sexuality and existence. Sexuality eventually became something to fear because of the spread of HIV, and governments now monitor its spread and therefore sexuality itself." Messages such as these can be decoded in Nonexistence during the experience that it provides. To sum up Siratori’s successful symbiosis of computer and human is Randy Greif:
Siratori doesn't just describe a chaotic and disturbing future world of man-machine-chaos, he inhabits that world and reports from the front line in that hybrid language. A mesmerizing mantra as well as a technical manual for a possible evolution of our species.2
To conclude this analysis is my assertion that cyberspace and the internet are products of a surging in the flux of human awareness. As mythology has evolved to articulate the goings on of this realm, a new dimension of existence has emerged that previous generations have not had the obligation of tracking and symbolizing. It is just another place to spread discourse of anti-establishment, as well as to house teachings of how one is to approach super-humanity (Singularity), something that international powers don’t necessarily want citizens to have. Death becomes tangible in that it is not to be feared, technology becomes a climaxing of humanity’s urge to interact with concepts that he has never known before. Cyberpunk has slipped a pill to the new generations, potentially granting them the privilege of tripping out on a new way of thinking and inventing reality. Onto the dreams of new readers, Cyberpunk casts its holy Net.
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1. McKenna, Terence. Food of the Gods. Bantam Books: New York. 1992.
2. "Kenji Siratori Homepage." KenjiSiratori.com. March 2009.
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