Wired on Friday: If you're ever shown the machine in your office that actually does the work, you're told that it runs Linux and your systems administrator is foolish enough to leave you alone with the keyboard for a few minutes, try typing "date" and then covertly hit return.
If the computer is set up the way that millions of others across the planet are, it will reply with a seemingly random reply, such as "Today is Prickle-Prickle, the 19th day of Chaos in the YOLD 3173".
Last week, the chief instigator of such a peculiarly widespread program died. Robert Anton Wilson, the US author of the Illuminatus! trilogy, was not a coder. He was, at various times, a co-editor of Playboy, an engineer, a science fiction author, a Joycean academic living in Dublin and a walk-on bit player in a 10-hour musical adaption of his own work at Britain's National Theatre.
Barely known enough to receive a standard Associated Press obituary and too obscure to appear in any reference but Wikipedia and conspiracy theorist tomes, he was nonetheless gifted with his own day (July 23rd) in the Valley's second city of Santa Cruz and celebrated with small half-jokes and sly references in dozens of pieces of computer code. His death will be mourned by thousands of Valley coders.
The strange counter-culture of geekdom, which counts so many billionaires among its numbers, has always been a fan of fake religions. Bumper stickers on hybrid Priuses here generally boast pro-Darwin parodies of fundamentalist icons, announcing: "We've got the fossils. We win!" or "King Kong Died for Your Sins!"
Wilson was the St Paul of the largest and earliest of these mock religions. In his books, he subtly promoted Discordianism, a faith that believed that God was a crazy woman: Eris, the goddess of confusion who threw the golden apple of Discord into the beauty pageant of Hera. His works, notably the conspiracy-laden Illuminatus! were enthusiastically adopted by the growing worldwide conspiracy of geeks. To programmers, accustomed to the idealism of believing that great works could be created through logic and science and how that dream was constantly thwarted by foolish bugs, human error and the sheer logic-chopping pickiness of their machines, the world was truly run by the prankster.
Wilson did not invent Discordianism, but he did promote it in his humorous, yet somehow earnest tracts. The result is that one of the largest, most mission-critical and most heavily-capitalised industries on the planet is now scattered with his jokes and beliefs.
If you've ever read any of his works, you'd be shocked by how often his imagery re-appears in the computer industry. When Mir, the Soviet space station, was purchased by a US investor (shortly before it crashed into the Earth's atmosphere and burned away), the holding company was Gold & Appel Imports, a reference to a secret front company in his books.
In Andy Hertzfield's memoir of working with Steve Jobs on the Macintosh, Jobs enacts a peculiar Discordian rite, the "Turkey Curse", in which one faces a source of unnecessarily restrictive order and gobbles at them like a turkey until they go away. Jobs performed this ritual in the middle of interviewing candidates for a job at Apple, which must have been slightly disturbing to the interviewee.
Jobs also, at the same event, asked the candidate if they had ever taken LSD: Wilson was a proponent of psychedelic drugs.
As has recently been admitted the creators of the modern home computer were enthusiastic inhabitants of 1960s drug culture. Steve Jobs (who described his LSD experience as "one of the two or three most important things he has done in his life"), Douglas Engelbart, the visionary creator of the computer mouse, Mitch Kapor, the populariser of the spreadsheet, are just a few of the pioneers willing to go on record as having been inspired by psychedelic drugs.
Do, as Stewart Brand once asked in a Time article about the computer revolution, "we owe it all to the the hippies"? Perhaps not - Silicon Valley's success as much emerged from the heavy local military grant-making of the Vietnam and Cold wars.
But if our computers have a personal, lighthearted feel, it's because of the puckish influence of authors like Wilson and the determination by those who read him to humanise the fierce logicality of these powerful devices. His references will live on for decades, hidden away in his fans' greatest works. As he said in his last days: "I don't deserve this. Then again, I have post-polio and I don't deserve that either. So on with the show."
