Biographical note: Virtual Reality was all the rage at Duke at the time, especially in the Philosophy and Critical Theory departments. Fredric Jameson and Rick Roderick were both writing and lecturing about it, as were all academics in media studies, sociology, and cultural anthropology.

What made this film even more exciting for me is that my life had again returned to computing. I had recently (1989) switched from Apple DOS to Mac OS and was transitioning to a new programming environment. First came the joys of ResEdit, then the Inside Macintosh library, and then programming in Symantec C. I designed a piece of software for the Philosophy Department (The Heraclitus Resonator) that won me a trip to Athens to present it at a conference. And I was reading Mondo 2000 (and carefully preserving the issues—I have the first 30 wrapped and in mint condition), which turned the William Gibson aesthetic into an ethic and manifesto—psychedelics and computers will change the human brain more radically than anything in history.

It was a vague idea, but very exciting. You take acid and … experience magick inside the context of programming. You connected to others via BBS and had textual conversations through the keyboard and computer screen. And, one day soon, we will be plugging into this realm of interconnected computers directly—first by virtual reality helmet (and glove), and later by jacking in, by means of wetware.

Merging with the matrix in this way promised the be the greatest leap in the history of humanity. (The “transhumanism” of Kurzweil’s “technological singularity” is just this same idea—VR/wetware plus drugs plus genetic engineering—worked out and elaborated.)