#rudy rucker

My favourite book of 2021 was JUICY GHOSTS by Rudy Rucker. Total gonzo transhumanist bugpunk. A real big fuck you to the right wing chuds invading leftist spaces, UC Berkeley “free speech” protests, corruption of the hacker ethic by tech bro startups, wanting to make money on crypto, nfts, the metaverse, the whole bay area internet of shit scene taking republican/ccp money, gig economy fuckery, the overabundance of toxic men in tech (Rucker worked in the silicon valley for 15 years so I bet he has hard numbers).

The book is about digital immortality in a near-future where we grow all our tech from organic material, communicate telepathically with eachother by putting bugs on our necks that hook into our brains, and we ride around in giant spiders Catbus style. Rucker’s written about this kinda stuff before in his *Ware books but 40 years has given him the perspective that it would actually suck if not done smartly. Everyone was really naive in the 80s about tech, which led us to how commercialised the internet is now (remember how common self-hosted webpages used to be?). Backing up your mind to a server in case you die sounds cool, until these companies eventually get bought out or corrupted and sell your mind to a gig contractor who would force you to fly drones to pay your server time. So biohackers are fighting to open-source and decentralise all this tech (REAL decentralisation, not the crypto kind where there’s still dozens of power players) and let everyone float around like digital ghosts and link themselves into cloned bodies, and not just humans either, but bugs and dogs or whatever you feel like.

Suprisingly uplifting with really fun characters (the majority of which are women (!)). A parable for digital ownership in 2022 that dares us to imagine an idyllic vision of a future internet where we’ll force all the nazis to log off and then we’ll telepathically talk to snakes about erotic asphyxiation!!! Good shit.