Demons in the 'Net
Date: Mon, 24 May 1999 10:26:08 -0700 (PDT)
From: Joseph Maxx.555
cc: AutonomatriX e-list
Subject: Re: for thee psybersphere, psychosphere, noosphere, chaosphere (fwd)
Phillip Farber -- late as usual...
The participants in the TIAMAT list created a "psychosphere" working back
in 1994 (two years before the copyright date on this posting.) In fact the
effects were astounding.
The idea was simply to summon and then "banish" whatever Internet "demons"
were in existence. As there was no research on the nature of such demons
available, it was a rather open ended experiment.
It was devised by myself and Ashton (whom some old hands here might
remember) and based on a banishing rite out of Simon's Necronomicon.
Particpants were "stationed" around the globe: western US, Australia,
Greece, England, eastern US and central US as I recall. In this way we
sent an incantation "around" the earth seven times: each "relay station"
forwarded the incantation to the next, adding a line of the spell in the
process. Each station also forwarded each portion to a randomly chosen
Usenet group.
As the spell neared completion, the Internet suffered serious
"breakdowns", including a crash of the main ISP service in Australia and a
massive -- and still unexplained -- power failure in Califronia that
knocked out both the UC Berkeley-based UUCP backbone AND the Netcom ISP.
It also caused my ISP service, who's Sysop happened to monitor what we
were doing one evening, to pull my service account for "abuse of the
service contract." (I got another account and continued the working...)
We theorized that our working "disturbed" the demons of the Internet and
they reacted like any other entity that is being slowly tortured to death
-- violently trying to stop us from what we were doing.
If anyone can find Ashton these days, he archived the postings and a
synopsis of the results.
I suppose I'm somewhat dismissive of Mr. Farber and his published works,
but everything I've read by him has been disappointing. His "Future
Magick" was touted unendingly in Usenet postings and upon reading it it
turns out to be nothing more than that same old Thelemic/Hermetic rituals
and paradigms given a few fancy new labels. Not that the article posted by
Aloas doesn't have a few useful ideas...
...but it's been done!
- J:.M:.555
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